Reshaping New York. The Bloomberg years
New York City experienced a major transformation during Michael R. Bloomberg’s three terms as mayor: public spaces and infrastructures, new housing complexes, with a large growth, more than any other city, and an increase in liveability and walkability, transforming bicycling from a recreational activity into a real alternative to cars.
The New York Times explores Bloomberg urban actions, through digital interactive maps, comparing pictures from different periods. Enjoy this amazing tour inside the city!
Iinteractive maps are available on The New York Times.
See also comparison between pictures in "Before and After Bloomberg", NYT, August 16, 2013.
A Boom in New Housing
In spite of a recession and foreclosure crisis, the mayor presided over a boom in residential construction, encompassing everything from new aeries for the rich in Manhattan to disappearing vacant lots in the South Bronx. New York has added 40,000 new buildings since he took office, and the census counted an additional 170,000 housing units in 2010, up from 10 years earlier, more than any other city. Neighborhoods with the most growth: post-9/11 downtown; the West Side from Chelsea to Lincoln Square and Central Harlem in Manhattan; the Rockaways, Long Island City and Flushing, Queens; Williamsburg, Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn; the South Bronx.
A Third of the City Rezoned
Mr. Bloomberg and Amanda M. Burden, director of the Department of City Planning, rezoned 37 percent of the city and claimed credit for creating opportunities for high-density growth along subway corridors while preserving low-density neighborhoods. Critics said that this simply cleared the way for gentrification and that the city fell behind on building affordable housing for lower-income New Yorkers. An often-cited example is the dilapidated industrial waterfront in Williamsburg, now the city’s nascent fifth skyline. Whether the luxury high-rises of Williamsburg are good or bad for the city is a matter of continuing debate among city politicians and residents, and is even a plot line in the HBO series “Girls.”
Turf War Over Asphalt
The mayor fought a war of attrition with the automobile. He sought to transform bicycling from a recreational activity into a real alternative to cars. By 2013, the city had added about 450 miles of bike lanes carved mostly from the city's roadways. Some curbs and medians were installed to separate pedalers from cars, but many of the lanes were demarcated simply with painted asphalt, much as blue paint divided automobiles from pedestrians along sections of Times Square and Broadway. Mr. Bloomberg lost his most ambitious offensive against cars when the State Legislature defeated his plan for “congestion pricing” in 2008, but he doubled down on biking with a popular bike-sharing system this year.
Transforming Neighborhoods
Whites and the college-educated moved into neighborhoods, like Harlem, that had been home to minorities and those with lower incomes. Rezoning encouraged inclusion of affordable units, but the poor were pushed out as housing prices rose. In the Melrose neighborhood of the Bronx, a host of developments drew enough new residents to drop the poverty rate in one census tract by 20 percentage points. But in some nearby tracts, poverty ranks swelled. In Queens, the city rezoned Hunters Point in Long Island City, a residential and commercial area behind an industrial waterfront, in 2004. Now, it has a high-rise skyline and a dozen new luxury medium-rise buildings scattered nearby. Population is up 2,000, but 600 poor people have left.
A Preference for Building
“We have beaten the odds and the obstructionists over and over again,” the mayor triumphantly declared in his State of the City address in March. He chose an appropriate venue: the Barclays Center, the new home of the Brooklyn Nets, which was a lightning rod for his all-out development policy. A vigorous opposition was beaten in the courts and the City Council in much the same way he often steamrolled opposition to his comprehensive rethinking of development. His 120 rezoning proposals were approved by the Council. The city arranged cheap public-backed financing for developers at a rate that dwarfed that of his predecessor, including bonds that helped build Barclays, as well as new stadiums for the Yankees and the Mets.
Celebrating the Waterfront
Mr. Bloomberg took as a primary goal transforming the city’s waterfront, which was littered with decaying reminders of New York's fin-de-siècle surrender to decline and pessimism. He leveraged public and private money to create parks and new buildings: The dramatic greenery under the Brooklyn Bridge; an esplanade along the East River; luxury waterline development up and down the shores of Queens and Brooklyn; a plan for a giant park atop the garbage dump at Fresh Kills on Staten Island; new ferries; and, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, an ambitious plan of riparian fortification to keep the city dry as the oceans rise.
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