by: Gregory Haley AIA AICP LEED AP
Event: Quasi-Public: Paul Goldberger & Danny Meyer in Conversation — The Second Annual Design Trust Council Event
Location: The New Museum of Art, 02.26.08
Speakers: Paul Goldberger, Hon. AIA — Architecture Critic, The New Yorker; Danny Meyer — President, Union Square Hospitality Group
Introduction: Deborah Berke, FAIA — Co-Chair, Design Trust for Public Space
Organizers: The Design Trust for Public Space
Rent hikes are responsible, for better or worse, for Starbucks and national banks taking over city street corners.
Gregory Haley
In the face of cries that NYC is losing its soul, Union Square Hospitality Group president Danny Meyer is upbeat. “The real character of my New York,” he explains, “comes from the human beings who choose to live here.” Paul Goldberger, Hon. AIA, architecture critic for The New Yorker, is not as positive, viewing the city’s ongoing transformation as a homogenization of the public realm, a “spreading of the qualities associated with Midtown throughout the rest of Manhattan.” While acknowledging the promise of the city’s rebuilding over the last decades — it is a safer and more vibrant place — both Goldberger and Meyer believe that this growth has come at certain costs.
Meyer fears that ever-increasing rents prohibit small local businesses with “a point of view” from opening shop, as he did with the Union Square Café in 1985. Instead, banks and chain stores that can afford the rent have proliferated. Yet, he sees emerging new retail models that provide space to hook up with the public realm, such as his Shake Shack in Madison Square Park or even Starbucks. Describing these businesses as “ventures into the real in a virtual world,” Goldberger credits their success to a rising desire for “face-to-face interaction.”
New Yorkers “believe change is in our DNA,” claims Goldberger, but they also want to “keep things the way they are.” A vibrant public realm thrives on diversity of use and place. In the face of current real estate pressures, however, sustaining this diversity requires a balance between change and preservation. City dwellers must act to ensure that what once happened naturally in Manhattan will continue, states Goldberger. If NYC were to stabilize, he warns, it would “be the equivalent of death”.
Gregory Haley, AIA, AICP, LEED AP, is a project architect and urban designer at Studio V Architecture, and has taught architectural design studios at NYIT School of Architecture.