The Urban Design Challenge

Homer Russell: Director of Urban Design, Boston Redevelopment Authority

First of all, thank you very much.

It’s a real pleasure and an honor to be here today to talk to you about how you help make Buffalo an exciting, attractive, vibrant city. I want to talk to you a little bit about Boston, but before I do that I want to say how wonderful a city Buffalo is. I think you have some of the most extraordinary pieces of architecture in the country and I have been extremely impressed with your downtown and with your open space system, and most of all, how friendly, warm and gracious all of you are and how much fun I have had at this gathering.

“The city is an endless negotiation and endless construction of the new out of the old.”

This is a quote I found from a cosmologist because I could not find an appropriate one from an urban planner. What it says, in effect, is that no one person makes a city. There is not a city-maker as there is a clock-maker. In other words, generations and generations of people, one after the other, make and remake and remake the city. It’s wonderful that you all are engaged in this process, where you are now, and it should be a fun although sometimes frustrating one.

Thirty-five years ago the city of Boston was a place with only two or three tall buildings — government buildings built in the 1930’s. The rest of the city was as flat as a pancake and very dense with narrow winding streets going through it and looking from the air in a black and white photograph like a giant piece of fudge with knife marks cut through it for the streets.

Twenty, thirty years later, a generation later, there has been a radical transformation of the city. We have a big elevated steel highway coursing through the downtown, chopping off the waterfront from the rest of the city. We have a bunch of high-rise luxury apartment buildings, built from some suburban diagram, where we once had a wonderful old neighborhood that was demolished. We have an expensive windswept government center. But we retain a very compact and dense downtown.

We made a lot of mistakes in the 50’s and 60’s. We learned in the 70’s and the 80’s about how to fix those mistakes and how to go about making Boston look like Boston rather than other cities around America. We’ve been through the time when the mega-city looked the same everywhere. Now we are on to something better.

There’s a long history to this. In the first era after World War II, everybody fled Boston for the suburbs, the way they did in every other American city. They left the merchants and the shopkeepers and the restaurateurs, stores, and movie theater operators wondering what to do. The population had declined and cities were much weaker. In response, the federal government stepped up to the table with a very large pile of money and a very big vision. Unfortunately, when you put the two of these things together you have a sure recipe for cataclysmic failure. At least that’s been our experience in Boston, and I think it has been the experience throughout America.

They designed a six-lane elevated steel highway to cut right through the heart of the downtown and made it easy for the suburbanites to come in and shop. They put seven above-ground parking garages at the end of seven exits, very close together, so that it could be convenient for them to park and to shop, and entertain themselves and enjoy the city. Also, as the city began to grow, that highway became an important access route for people who were living in the suburbs and working downtown to come in, very conveniently, and go to work and leave. But the damage done to the downtown — that is, a sort of evisceration of the downtown — was cataclysmic. Well intentioned, but cataclysmic.

Shortly, thereafter — the artery was built in ‘55 — and sometime around 1960, the city planners drew up a scheme where they decided that Boston was too dense and the neighborhoods were too congested. The planners were undoubtedly white middle class suburban males who walked around the dense Boston neighborhoods and saw laundry hanging out the window, and laundry hanging out the window, of course, is an immediate symbol of a slum, so they identified ten downtown neighborhoods for demolition.

The people who lived in those neighborhoods were typically Irish immigrants, Italian immigrants or Jewish refugees from the war. Very few of them spoke English. Obviously, very few had political connections. So, the vast clearance of the Boston neighborhoods was underway. Mercifully, only one of these neighborhoods was demolished, the West End, a wonderful dense enclave of Italians, Americans and, as I mentioned, Jewish refugees.

But it was cleared. Twenty-five hundred buildings were torn down, and 10,000 residents were scattered to the winds. The plan was done in secret. The land was sold to a private developer and high-rise, high-end-rent luxury apartments were built on this site. It was a big grassy plain with towers sticking out of it, which looks like some alien form parachuted into the old, dense city that Boston is. Mercifully, the money ran out. Also, a number of books were written condemning this massive slum clearance program that was being conducted around the country and it ran to a halt. Boston is very lucky in that it only lost one of the original ten neighborhoods scheduled to be demolished.

Still, an enormous amount of damage was done. The Central Artery carved huge swaths through once-vibrant neighborhoods. There was a wholesale clearance of Boston’s former red-light district. In its place now is a vast government center with state, local, and federal government buildings scattered around a very large and empty plaza. It wasn’t the improvement they were hoping for.

But now we are starting to try to repair the well-intentioned but catastrophically misguided changes that were made over the last 35 years. We are in the process right now of redesigning that government plaza, of adding buildings and creating edges to give it more definition, and trying to program it adequately so it won’t be so empty and windswept. Many other repairs are also in the works.

As most of you know, we are in the middle of putting the elevated highway underground: “The Big Dig.” It was initially expected to cost four billion dollars and is now up to $15 billion. It is a huge project. They are building a tunnel underneath the elevated highway. After they open the tunnel to traffic, they will then tear down the Central Artery. On the surface, where the elevated highway will be removed, they are planning for the creation of new parks, museums, and playgrounds. It will be a wonderful public resource. And rather than have the highway as a barrier between the downtown and the harbor, it will be an important public connection between the two.

There was a cartoon published in The New Yorker during the time we were making all these mistakes. It showed a couple of women sitting on the train, and one is saying to the other, “I feel I should warn you they’re taking down most of Boston and they are putting up something else.” That was really true. But as we moved through the 1970s we began to come to our senses.

In the mid-1980’s, we started looking around the city and started to realize that Boston was becoming an important tourist destination. It became clear that the reason people wanted to visit here, not only from other cities in the United States, but from around the world, was because Boston really had, aside from where all the demolition had been done, a wonderful old historic fine grain. It had a fine scale pedestrian environment with old buildings, narrow streets, lots of shops and a beautiful park system designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who also did your open space system in Buffalo.

We started thinking about a kind of re-imaging of Boston. We started thinking that maybe our planning and urban design efforts should focus more on trying to identify those attributes that were specifically unique to Boston and work to emphasize them. We thought about how, from now on, we could construct new buildings and neighborhoods that would blend in with the existing fabric of the city. We thought about how to fill empty lots with buildings that respected the character of Boston rather than trying to stand dramatically apart from it.

One of our most important projects was the redevelopment of our Quincy Market. Quincy Market was built 175 years ago as a public market. It is on a major landfill at the harbor’s edge. It was a long public market flanked by a couple of other buildings on either side. It became, around the turn of century, a wholesale market district where all the meat and produce and fish were brought in for sale to restaurants and hotels. At some point in the early 70’s, the market folks who had rented the space from the city decided that Boston was getting far too congested. So they built a modern one-storied facility out on the highway outside of Boston and left the city hanging with this funny kind of property that we didn’t know what to do with.

We advertised it as a development opportunity, and, very fortunately, James Rouse from Baltimore stepped up to the plate and proposed to make it a festival marketplace. Of course, nobody had ever heard that phrase before, but it was a bunch of tiny little shops and tiny little places to eat, and very congested, very busy, very dense with street entertainment and a wonderful program. When it was opened in 1976 it was an instant success.

People flocked in from the suburbs. People flocked in and visitors came from all around the country and the world. It was jammed, it was busy, it was active, and it was dense. It was a small-scale project, but it was a huge success. It wasn’t a project like the massive highway projects or neighborhood clearance projects or huge government centers. This was a small, manageable, Boston-sized project. I think this was the very first project that we tackled. And it was the beginning of our lesson about how you fix the city – one small incremental piece at a time.

At the turn of the century the market was a busy, working place. Now it is still busy, but also festive, lit up at night. The cars have been removed and the narrow streets now have benches and plantings. It is a wonderful place, active all-year long, from early in the morning until late at night, and it is a great connection between the downtown and the city waterfront. It is a short, ten-minute walk out the door of City Hall, across the street through the market, underneath the elevated highway — which will soon come down — directly to a park at the water’s edge.

The City of Boston keeps a huge model showing what it will look like when the elevated artery comes down. The highway will be replaced by a series of parks and institutional uses like museums and recreational facilities, and visitor centers. And the project will create a wonderful pedestrian scale public realm that will help reconnect Boston to its now-highly-animated waterfront.

Thirty years ago the waterfront was completely moribund. The fishing fleet had vanished, shipping had all but disappeared, and the pier was rotted. Now, we have got our tourist business. There must be somewhere between 20 and 30 tour boats for Boston harbor, as well as high-speed commuter boats that bring people from the north shore and south shore. They don’t have to drive into Boston. They can park their cars outside of Boston, hop on the high-speed ferry, and be downtown and at their jobs in a short period of time.

Our Theater District is another important part of the city, a very dense, congested, and vibrant part of Boston. Nineteenth century buildings are important. Boston is made up largely of 19th century buildings and we have a very aggressive preservation program now. That was a response to all the demolition that was done, and during the 1980’s, extensive landmark districts were created. Very strict urban design regulations were created throughout the entire city to which developers and their architects had to adhere. Our idea was that we wanted to make Boston a coherent place, an imageable place, and a legible place that people could enjoy walking around in.

We developed a funny little concept for downtown called the doorknob study. We created a map of downtown simply showing red dots to represent each doorknob. It provides a very clear indicator of where there is activity along the major shopping streets. But our doorknob study also showed there are vast areas where there are only a tiny number of doorknobs, like the government center area where the tall buildings are, where they will only have one or two doorknobs. You can really tell the difference between places that function well and those that don’t. Where there are lots of doorknobs, the streets are active and full of people. Where there are few doorknobs, the streets are empty at five o’clock. They are depressing to be in — the new cleared modern parts — as opposed to the traditional parts, which have hundreds of doorknobs with people coming in and out all day long.

There is a whole amalgamation of architectural styles in the downtown, including a series of two or three styles from the 19th century, early middle and late, along with a couple of styles from this century, including modern and postmodern, and with high-rise and low-rise all mixed together. It is quite remarkable in that all these different styles and sizes of buildings seem to work quite happily together, which I think is great good fortune. It’s a combination of luck plus our diligence at insisting on capable architects and strong urban design and architectural guidelines.

Rowe’s Wharf was another key step in the process of repairing the fabric of our city. The project was completed in 1990 on some waterfront land we owned as a part of urban renewal. This was the first mixed-use project we did. Up until that that time all the projects we did were single use projects like office buildings here, housing there, and commercial there. It was a very dramatic experiment to put Rowe’s Wharf, as a mixed-use project, on a prime piece of waterfront property.

We told them it was a competition and we said that you have to have ground level retail, that you have to have hotel use, housing, and offices. You have to have apartments, all mixed together and — oh, by the way — we also are now requiring that every inch of Boston’s waterfront be open to the public. So you have to have a public walkway around all the piers so that everyone who wants to visit your place can also get to the water. The project was an overnight success.

It was another example of a smaller project, not a vast citywide project, but a small compact project with very specific objectives and specific rules. Very talented developers and architects put together quite an extraordinarily successful project, which also was an overnight success and also set a stage for our harbor work. The concept is that every linear foot of harbor in Boston — with the obvious exception of dry docks where freighters come in where there is a public safety issue — every single linear foot must be open to the public and a public walkway must be provided.

The third example of a tiny project, but a hugely successful one, was a parking garage of two or three stories above ground left over from artery days, a hideous concrete parking garage that was built in the 50’s. A developer came forward and said: we have an idea. We would like to buy the garage, tear it down, and put five levels of parking underground to serve the financial district. But on the top we wanted to make a compact, wonderful park because in the whole financial district, there is no center, there is no place to gather, no place to sit outside and eat lunch.

So, with the help of Craig Harrison, an extraordinary landscape architect, a local Boston architect, and Norman Levanthal, a wonderful benefactor, and also the developer of Rowe’s Wharf, we built this wonderful tiny two acre park that was an instant success, the way Quincy Market was. We planted full-grown trees from Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum and it has a little cafe, has newspapers, has grass areas, and has hard surface areas. It is a wonderful oasis in the middle of a cluster of high rise office buildings, where office workers come from mid-spring when it warms up, all the way to late fall, when it starts getting cold. Even on warm winter days it is busy in the morning and certainly at lunchtime, but even well into the evening.

It’s very popular because it is tiny, compact, well defined, and sits in the middle of a highly populous area. This is the third example of the lessons we learned. Rather than vast, sweeping, expensive, parachuted-in projects, these smaller ones are beautifully crafted, beautifully designed, beautifully well done. So my advice to you in all of this is to make no large plans and think small. If you do that, Buffalo will be an enormous success in all its efforts all along its waterfront.

Even though the Central Artery project is a very big project, indeed, we’re thinking of the planning for redevelopment of the reclaimed land on the surface in terms of a lot of little projects. It is hard to knit the city back together again with a series of parks and open spaces but we are working on it diligently. There will be new parks, new museums, and other facilities in alternating fashion. But they will all be smaller buildings, the same size and same bulk as the smaller buildings along its edge. The old and the new need to blend together.

We are halfway through the project. We’ve been working four years. It has another four years to run. None of the surface is open yet. The artery is still standing. Underneath the surface, in the tunnel under construction, it looks like a whole city out of steel being built underground. And there will be enormous bridges, too, to pick up the traffic as it leaves the tunnel at the other end. A great deal of progress has been made.

All of this, of course, was just a preparation for work on our waterfront. We were very fortunate to have the experience of the last fifteen, twenty years, of getting our ideas together and really understanding what Boston is like, so that when we finally have the opportunity to plan our seaport we do it right.

The area includes about a thousand acres of largely vacant and abandoned rail yards. It is mostly now parking lots. Overall, the port is stable. We still have a port that employs about 10,000 people. We are talking about taking just the 300 acres of the seaport closest to the financial district, which is within walking distance, and looking at that as a way to extend our downtown economy into this area. We hired a terrific firm, Cooper Robertson from New York, who had done a number of seaport plans around the world, and they are very helpful. They did a terrific plan. We worked with them and collaboratively put together a terrific plan for the seaport.

The first step was to locate a major convention center two blocks from the water’s edge. Boston is a very popular convention city largely because there are lots of other things to do for spouses, partners and children who come with the person going to the convention center. There are places to visit, things to see, and trips to take. Very active efforts are being made to entertain people when they are not conventioneering. That convention center is under construction now. It’s an $800 million project. It will be finished in a couple of years, as a sort of first major effort on this water’s edge that will activate this area.

We have also have taken our cue on this 300 acres from that mixed use project that I discussed earlier, Rowe’s Wharf, where instead of doing offices in one part and housing in another and a shopping center in the third place, we did them together. There are four major developers and four major owners of these 300 acres. Each of the pieces looks relatively easy to work and each one of them has to provide a mixture of these uses together. So, it really will be busy, a 24-hour district, where people will work during the day and sleep there at night and be entertained there. It will not be a radical, new, visionary scheme parachuted into this tract, but rather a process of adding compatible new development to the existing warehouse buildings that are already used as studios, apartments, and office space.

We have to extend the fine-grained street grid and make this new part of Boston very familiar to Bostonians. The architecture may be more contemporary, but the character of it will certainly reflect Boston’s unique narrow street pattern and its dense, busy, lively streets. This mixture of uses will guarantee that the parks and the water’s edge will be busy and active except on the coldest days of the year.

We are very excited about these prospects. But if we had been handed this project twenty years ago, I’m not sure we would have done it right. We’ve gained a whole new level of sophistication over the past twenty years. We’ve learned a lot of important lessons, and we’re much better off for it.

I’m not suggesting that Buffalo should copy Boston. But I think we can learn some things that are applicable from city to city. I’m suggesting that you should identify those special attributes Buffalo possesses – which are considerable – and work to preserve and repair them. This is a wonderful city. Like other cities, there have been some mistakes made, probably during that same time period. The question is: how do you patch up these mistakes? How do you repair them? How do you move on with your Canal project and other projects in a way that can complement a wonderful existing city, instead of trying radical new concepts that will, in all likelihood, not work?

Go with the tried and the true and the tested, being cautious and wary of the experimental. We expect that our first 300 acres of development will take about 30 or 40 years to complete. At that time, we will assess the status of the waterfront. If the waterfront is active, and if it is working and growing, we will stop at that point. If the stamina of waterfront activity, the shipping and manufacturing, has dwindled and jobs have declined, obviously we will consider expanding the city further.

In the last ten years, our financial district has miraculously, all by itself, and almost overnight, gone from being a single use area of offices empty at five o’clock to being a lively mixed use area. There are a bunch of small 19th century buildings down there that simply do not meet modern office needs and have been converted to boutique hotels. What those boutique hotels do is provide live, warm bodies there after five o’clock, which, in turn, produces the need for restaurants and taverns and some entertainment. So, all by itself without any push from the planning agency, or without any effort on our part, it’s starting to turn into a vibrant place and the trick is that there is more than a single use. I know that I am hammering on that a lot, but that’s really the key of my whole presentation today.

But we also hope to do this on purpose. One day soon we hope that the vast, vacant parking lots out toward the seaport will be filled with a vibrant, mixed-use neighborhood. There will be a spectacular new convention center with 600,000 square feet of exhibition space. But there will also be an extension of the existing small street grid from where the warehouse buildings are all the way to the water’s edge. The block sizes are small and familiar like Boston’s.

Ground level retail is required everywhere. We are looking forward to the Pritchard family, who are major hoteliers in Chicago, building three housing developments on this site, two major hotels and three office buildings along with very commodious open space. It is commodious in the sense that it’s compact and urban in quality and not suburban, with a wonderful tidal pool park along the harbor’s edge and a public marina in the cove that it surrounds.

The buildings are quite a bit lower, smaller, and less dense than the financial district buildings, but they are still at a density and a height that we feel is necessary to make it lively and interesting. I hope that as you think about your waterfront you consider active mixed-use development, but also give it some density. Make sure that there are people down there at all hours in the day and into the late evening and that it is part of the rest of the city.

Not all of the good examples are from Boston. Battery Park City in New York has a wonderful series of open spaces designed by some extremely capable landscape architects. In the summer you find all the people sitting along the water’s edge. In the wintertime there is a combination of city-like shapes, but also a lot of trees and big boulders and rocks. It is a very exciting concept for landscape design.

It is important to make sure there is activity on the waterfront, on the water as well as the land. Boston has a wonderful ensemble of tall ships. There are so many masts and all the rigging, so many ships, all compact together, wonderful and successful. The idea of having as many public events as you possibly can on your waterfront, large and small, is an important part of this whole waterfront revival effort. You need to draw attention towards your waterfront and to get people used to being down there and having a good time down there, sitting around outside, eating and enjoying themselves.

Seattle’s waterfront is absolutely packed with people. The wonderful aspect of Seattle’s waterfront is that it is a local working waterfront and simultaneously a public waterfront. People come down and there are places to buy fish, and sort of comingle with the maritime activities. It is very highly regarded.

Activity is also the key on Boston’s major shopping street downtown. At lunchtime, thousands of people in the sunlight are enjoying themselves in their short sleeves. At noontime it is packed to the gills. If you could see the doorknobs in that picture there would probably be fifty of them. It’s very vibrant and very busy. We certainly hope that our seaport one day looks exactly the same way.

Let me close with the ten principles for a successful downtown. These are general in nature. Allow each downtown to try and solve these problems and approach them in its own unique way. These are not in anyway meant to be specific beyond a kind of intent as a policy matter. The specifics are up to you, to figure out how to achieve these in your way, in Buffalo’s way, not anybody else’s way. The first one is largely a repeat of what I have been taking about.

1. Be wary of the novel, bold, sweeping vision, backed by large piles of money. The best cities will incrementally replicate familiar parts of themselves.

2. Identify attributes unique to your city and capitalize on them.

3. Promote and reward historic preservation.

4. Try to correct the past mistakes and embark on rehabilitation and new developments at the same time.

5. Prohibit above and below-grade walkways. Pedestrian activity belongs outside at street level. Cars come second. I cannot tell you how strongly I stress that. As soon as Boston realized the value of the pedestrian and the damage that automobiles did, we really started to do things right. Obviously, you have to provide for cars, but that should really take the back seat.

6. Build dense mixed-use developments right up to the sidewalk with parking underground, which is preferred, or structured parking with ground level retail entered from the street. Shopping malls belong in suburbs, not in cities, and I can’t stress that enough as well.

7. Build small-to-moderate sized parks with strongly defined active street edges. Avoid plazas attached to buildings and at all costs avoid large windswept plazas that have no activity around them to give them life.

8. Require via design guidelines and zones that new buildings be compatible with, but not necessarily imitate, the existing ones. Highly competent architects, landscape architects, urban designers and developers should be hired. You and your children will have to look at their work for a long, long time. This part also, I cannot stress strongly enough. Really, these things that we build are going to be around for a century at least. So, you have to really take care to get it right.

9. Hold as many local and regional outdoor festivals as possible.

10. If your downtown is on the water, the edge must be active and dedicated to the public and defined by Buffalonian mixed-use 24-hour development.

That pretty much wraps it up and I will be happy at this point to take any questions that you might have regarding the material you have just seen or on any subject that you think is worth discussing.

Thank you very much. I have enjoyed it. I have had a great time and I hope to come back one day when your waterfront is finished and see the enormous success that I know that it will be.

Mr. Russell’s talk was recreated for these proceedings, taped, transcribed and printed here.