“We don’t trust this process!” chanted dozens of protesters as they interrupted a September 16, 2019, community meeting at Aviation High School in Queens. The subject of this public meeting was the potential decking over and development of Sunnyside Yard, a 180-acre rail yard in Queens that is roughly six times larger than Hudson Yards. Previous development proposals for the site, in the 1960s and 1980s, stalled. But the site, relatively close to Manhattan, continues to fuel development dreams. In 2018, the New York City’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC) commissioned a master plan from New York firm Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU), led by Vishaan Chakrabarti. Responding to public feedback, PAU has refined the plan, allowing the MTA and Amtrak to continue using the yard, while better integrating the potential development with the surrounding neighborhoods.
PAU’s plan envisions a megadevelopment organized around the needs and desires of ordinary people, not corporations and tourists. Attendees ambled by dozens of easel-mounted boards, which showed ideas for transit improvements, public spaces, housing, pedestrian-friendly streets, varying densities, social infrastructure, and respect for existing communities. In the center of the room there was an impressive scale model, plus boxes of free pupusas from a local Salvadoran restaurant.
But EDC has a credibility problem. Some opponents are not even bothering to weigh in on the plan itself. As part of the intervention, urban planning professors Tom Angotti of Hunter College and James DeFilippis of Rutgers University stood on a table and unspooled a critique of EDC and its predecessors’ role in urban development since the late 1960s. They see the whole exercise in public review, complete with Q&A sessions and sticky notes, as an elaborate charade to advance the interests of for-profit developers. They are hardly the first to notice that promises of public space and affordable housing are not always honored when projects are finally built, despite the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) and 197-a planning process, and that the fruits of development are too often inaccessible to longtime residents.
Megadevelopment and megaproject are not technical terms, but they refer to projects that are mega (huge) as measured by cost (over $1 billion), duration (often a decade or more to plan and construct), area (often more than a million square feet, or 23 acres, in new or refurbished space), and/or complexity (multiple legal stakeholders). Among the megaprojects transforming New York today are Industry City (35 acres), Hunter’s Point South (30 acres), Hudson Yards (28 acres), Willets Point (23 acres), Pacific Park (formerly Atlantic Yards, 22 acres), Greenpoint Landing (22 acres), the World Trade Center (16 acres), Cornell Tech (12 acres), the Domino Sugar Refinery site (11 acres), and Essex Crossing (6 acres). Vast pleasure landscapes at Freshkills Park on Staten Island (2,200 acres), Governors Island (172 acres), and Brooklyn Bridge Park (85 acres) are gradually opening up. Don’t forget LaGuardia Airport and its AirTrain, and perhaps a system of flood barriers.
New Yorkers are debating the merits and flaws of these large-scale developments. At least two megaproject-themed panel events took place last fall, one hosted by NYU’s Urban Democracy Lab and another by the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY). The key question is not whether large-scale planning and development is inherently good or bad, said Lizabeth Cohen, a Harvard historian who participated in the MCNY panel, but “Who’s making the rules and who’s setting the agenda?” As federal funding for urban renewal faltered in the 1960s, megadevelopments relied on state funding and especially private capital—which led to private developers “sitting in the driver’s seat,” Cohen said. As a consequence, the city is stuck trying to squeeze affordable housing and infrastructure out of for-profit development, often via “incredibly baroque” tax instruments, said Samuel Zipp, another panelist and historian of urban renewal.
New York’s first megaprojects, conceptually speaking, were nineteenth-century public works like Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge, said architectural critic Paul Goldberger, who moderated the MCNY panel. In the early twentieth century, private companies and institutions transformed large areas like Terminal City (over the tracks north of Grand Central Terminal), Columbia University’s Morningside Heights campus, and Rockefeller Center. Midcentury megaprojects include affordable and cooperative housing developments such as Queensbridge Houses, Stuyvesant Town, and Co-Op City, as well as cultural meccas like the United Nations Headquarters and Lincoln Center. Protestors quashed Robert Moses’s proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway in the 1960s. The World Trade Center and Roosevelt Island were developed in the ’70s; Battery Park City came to fruition in the ’80s. But there were dozens more.
In 1987, New York Times real estate columnist Alan S. Oser counted 21 “megaprojects” underway in the city, based on data from the Public Development Corporation, a predecessor to EDC. The biggest development battle of the era unfolded on the Upper West Side, where dozens of residents, including Betty Friedan and Robert Caro, joined forces to try to stop Donald Trump from developing a 76-acre former rail yard along the Hudson River into a clump of supertall towers, one of which would be the world’s tallest. Goldberger, then writing for the Times, called the proposed ensemble “an outlandishly simplistic exercise in urban gigantism.” In 1987, NBC backed out of the fantasy development, known as Television City, and Trump renamed it Trump City. But the city declined Trump’s request for a large tax abatement, and Trump was left “squealing like a stuck pig,” Mayor Ed Koch said. Trump masked his failure by adopting his opponents’ less overbearing plan, dubbed Riverside South, which broke ground in the 1990s.
Today, the preliminary vision for Sunnyside Yard looks promising. As architects are brought in to imagine a better city, it’s worth recalling that a megaproject, at best, is a machine for creating a better environment for a lot of people at once. But, as experience has shown, a megaproject can also be a land grab, a boondoggle, or a vehicle for those in power to extract value from the city. The outcome depends as much on developers, policymakers, and activists as architects.