Bed-Stuy: Do or Die

The Marcy Houses. I live down the street from them, and for a year and a half, I have walked or ridden by them on a daily basis, yet, I know very little about them. I can list about four facts. They were built in 1949 and thank everyone who serves our city. They were home to Memphis Bleak, who used his upbringing for inspiration: I went from Marcy to Hollywood/& back again & back again, That’s how we do it in LA from Marcy to Crenshaw. They’re bounded on the north by Flushing Avenue, on the south by Myrtle Avenue, on the east by Nostrand Avenue, and on the west by, of course, Marcy Avenue. The Department of City Planning identifies them as a “mixed-use” development, though I am convinced they are entirely residential. I am, at once, fascinated by them and intimidated by them.

And, until this weekend, I have never been inside of them.

The Marcy Houses are clearly delineated from the rest of the streetscape, as if warning passersby that they’re entering The Projects. Like most 1950s “urban renewal” projects, the buildings are built on superblocks. Superblocks are much larger than traditional city blocks; usually smaller cross streets are eliminated to create a larger lot on which to build massive complexes. Four cross streets in my neighborhood dead end at the Marcy Houses, which only have one through street running east west through them. Essentially, the City created two blocks out of what were originally six.

Moreover, they are not just identifiable by the interruption of the gridiron pattern.

The houses were built in a Le Corbusian “tower-in-the-park” style. The buildings are set back from the street surrounded by “green open space,” and face inward, turning their backs on the surrounding city blocks, “[striving] to free [themselves] from a subordinate role to the street” (Jackson 246). By rejecting a traditional relationship with the street, the buildings assert themselves as an autonomous environment. The undulating façade interrupts the rhythm of the sidewalk, which Richard Plunz describes: “the unsymmetrical, sawtooth type of effect on the street fronts is neither inviting or informal… [The façade] emphasizes rather than detracts from the institutional character of the whole group” (216). The “lawns” are fenced in at the sidewalk, clearly not meant for recreation use by either residents or the neighborhood.

Though the design was inspired by Le Corbusian visions, it is clear that their utilitarian brick walls were chosen for economic benefits, not aesthetic considerations. Inside of the apartments, the same cost-cutting measures were undertaken in all public housing erected after 1935. In the nearby Red Hook Houses, cost-controls led to “a reduction of the gross floor area per room from 221 square feet to 172 square feet, justified as an elimination of ‘waste space’… One closet with a door; curtains were installed on the remaining closets… Elevators [that skipped service] on the second, fourth and sixth floors” (Plunz 237).

The side of the Marcy Houses I am most intimately familiar with is further removed from the surrounding cityscape because of the use patterns on the south side of Flushing Avenue (see land use map by lot in slideshow). My factory-building-illegal-conversion loft and the Marcy Houses are the only residential uses (designated by oranges and yellows) for an eleven-block stretch, between Spencer Street and Tomkins Avenue, and my building barely counts. Though industry in New York has been waning for decades, the Marcy Houses lie within one of the only remaining manufacturing zones (designated by purple) still active in north Brooklyn.

Though not as infamous as St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe Houses, the physical landscape of the Marcy Houses removes them from the surrounding neighborhood and furthers the social stigma attached to them.

Entering from the north, I’m immediately struck by two things: the emptiness, and the garbage. Though the complex is home to more than 5,000 people, I can count the number of people I see on two hands. Bright red park benches stand alone, the only animation sprinkled throughout the landscape. The winding pedestrian paths make it difficult to keep a sense of direction and obscure your ability to see other walkers, furthering this sense of isolation. The clack of my healed shoes echo off the buildings, making the sound of the Kukulcan. It doesn’t come as a surprise that the rent collected from New York City Housing Authority residents do not cover the maintenance costs, but the difference in maintenance between the spaces one can see from the street, and the interior spaces, are vast. The “open green spaces” are strewn with litter, collecting along the fence edges, underneath the benches, and in the corners of the L-shaped buildings. The leaf-less trees and dead grass, posing as park space, only amplify the sense of desolation. Gusts of wind whip between the structures; though architects oriented the buildings arbitrarily, it seems that they’re at just the right angle for wind tunnels. It is just as depressing as you think it is—probably more so.

Richard Plunz, who discusses the pathology of public housing in his book A History of Housing in New York City, calls the open space unaccountable. “There were no criteria for structure or use, beyond creation of the parklike settings” (270). Deserted streets are “apt to be unsafe” (Jacobs 34) because they do not have public surveillance, or as she calls it, “eyes on the street.” Moreover, streets must have boast attractions for people to venture there—a shop or a restaurant, for example—and the parklike setting of the paths does not provide incentives for people to use them. (While the City, it turns out, is technically correct in labeling the complex mixed-use because it has office space for the management company, it is effectively a residential development.)

In a way, Kunstler’s attack on the suburbs as sterile and depressing is the counterpoint to my experience in the Marcy Houses, also sterile and depressing. Both the projects and the suburbs are based on “rational” planning, which separates land use patterns and creates districts—residential, commercial, manufacturing—unrelated to one another. In the suburbs, this separation fueled car-dependency; while in the inner-city it stranded residents or forced them to rely on the worst subway lines (Marcy Houses are served by the elusive G train). Both discouraged meaningful interactions with neighbors: the suburbs are devoid of public spaces and are left with “shopping plazas, the supermarkets and the malls” (Kunstler 119); the projects boast “open space” but it is so ill-designed that instead of fostering community, the spaces had a “tendency to increase crime… The scale of the towers prevented normal exercise of family territoriality. The removal of large numbers of units from visual contact with open space prevented proper public surveillance [of the open space]” (Plunz, 272).

Additionally, the Federal Housing Regulations that produced Suburban America also produced the inner city public housing schemes like the Marcy Houses. In his chapter Joyride, Kunstler explores the federal mandates of the 1930s. For the first time, many Americans could afford to purchase their own home with government-backed guaranteed mortgages. In an effort to ensure that the properties they insured did not lose value, the FHA created “residential security maps” that indicated the level of security of their real estate investments by neighborhood. Whole sections of Brooklyn, particularly northern Brooklyn, were redlined as poor investments. Though “white-flight” suggests an exodus based on race, most middle-class white Americans were chasing government-funded subsidies that were only available in the newly constructed suburbs.

As sections of New York were virtually abandoned by the middle class, housing prices, as the government predicted, plummeted—a self-fulfilling prophecy. Lower-income minorities moved in, creating the “slum” conditions that merited urban “renewal” and public housing projects. “The cites, of course, went completely to hell,” writes Kunstler. The superhighways built to service the suburbs also served to fence in and isolate the city from the outlying lands. “Those left behind inside the wall would develop, in their physical isolation from the suburban economy, a pathological ghetto culture” (107).

Looking more closely, however, I observe subtleties hinting that some Marcy House residents are more invested in their space than one might initially think. One seemingly abandoned plot of park space has a simple wooden sign—The Flushing Neighborhood Garden + Vegetables: love, peace, happiness. Though not boasting any crops, it does have plastic tubs that allude to a community garden—perhaps unused in the winter or a relic, leftover from past residents. Straining my ears, I hear the sound of faraway chatting over the wind’s whistle. The buildings’ L-shape causes the paths to never approach the entrances directly; each building has its own cul-de-sac like walkway diverging from the main paths. I peer down a path and see residents sitting on the steps outside their apartment lobby, preferring their version of a stoop to the cold metal benches. The moment is interrupted, however, when one of them shouts “damn girl, you lookin’ good!” and I remember I should probably keep walking.

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Random House: New York, 1961. (I used the actual book, but linked to a summary of her main arguments.)
Plunz, Richard. A History of Housing in New York City. Columbia University Press: New York, 1999. 207-279.

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