Greenbelt, Maryland, a New Deal-era development twelve miles outside of Washington, DC, faces the need to modernize. Built in the 1930’s, Greenbelt was modeled on the “garden city” concept, which was pioneered by utopian thinker Ebenezer Howard back at the beginning of the twentieth century. Two other similar settlements exist outside Cincinnati and Milwaukee. Greenbelt was designed as a self-contained community separated from existing development by a green space buffer. Its architects advocated, and executed, a mixed-use environment whereby residents could live, work and play within a compact community. For the most part, the settlement has survived the pressures of creeping development. Nonetheless, the stream of traffic generated by the Beltway loop highway flows near the site, sucking the area into the orbit of sprawl. However, two new developments, if built, would reshape the town into a place with double the people. As one of the developers describes it, “You can live, work and shop there. . . . We’re basically building a new town.”
But are they really? Sure, they’ll be new stuff there, including thousands more residential units and oodles of square feet of commercial space. The existing Metro train station located next to one of the planned developments will no doubt receive a welcome facelift. There are some obvious benefits to the new. But in the end, it’s the same product stuffed into new packaging. Instead of “garden city,” we can call the new improvements to Greenbelt an example of “New Urbanism,” the current movement among a certain percentage of design professionals. But the two approaches, although separated by a century, resemble the same mixed-use, compact development, public-transit oriented principles to land use planning. What has worked before can work again, goes the mantra. And why shouldn’t it? Despite the revolutionary changes to daily life over the last century, people fundamentally want to have easy access to their work places, a safe neighborhood, and maybe even have a few things to do within close proximity. People, if given the option, would probably even walk more than most do. As a recent transplant to Brooklyn, I’m already finding that having ten restaurants within a block’s walk (for the delivery guy, too) is very good thing.
But aside from the polishing of the garden city concept in Greenbelt, another revision to long-held views appears to be developing up the coast here in New York. This week, there will be three exhibits around the city taking another look at the man who could fairly be called the Creator of Modern New York, the Power Broker himself, Robert Moses. Having control over the city’s parks department and the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, Moses constructed much of the current infrastructure that the region’s cars use as parking lots, and sometimes as highways. He also orchestrated the construction of such public jewels as Lincoln Center and the United Nations. Parks and housing he constructed still survive and thrive. He also displaced hundreds of thousands of people, ruined neighborhoods and exercised exclusionary tactics towards minorities. The new exhibits choose to take the long view, blurring the ugliness and highlight from afar the ballet-like qualities of traffic moving across his parkways, and the architectural accents of his structures. Just as Moses himself saw “the city” as a skyline rather than the people that stand dwarfed at street level, the new approach harkens back to the time when urban renewal wasn’t a bad word. Hopefully the exhibit organizers remember a bit from the lessons of the past.
Let enough time pass, and the old becomes new again. But like a pair of Jordache jeans from the ‘80’s, just because they’re back in style doesn’t mean you should pull that old pair back out and wear them with your favorite top from the era. The old is only new again if it changes with the times.
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