One feature of the HPD s reign during the 1970s was a program in which housing courts would appoint

W ith its quiet residential streets, grand apartment buildings, cool air sweeping over the Hudson River, and waterfront candy factory tours in california esplanades lined with cherry blossoms, New York s Upper West Side, where I was born and raised, has never looked better. candy factory tours in california It s easy to forget that, starting in the 1970s, the neighborhood descended into chaos as a coalition of politically connected developers, nonprofits, labor unions, and government agencies did its utmost to turn the area into a dispensary for social services. Under the cover of compassionate rhetoric, the groups used public candy factory tours in california funds to convert the Upper West Side s private residential buildings into welfare hotels, homeless shelters, halfway candy factory tours in california houses, and methadone clinics, inundating the neighborhood with crime, homelessness, candy factory tours in california and drug abuse.
candy factory tours in california The Upper West Side may be known for its affection for leftist causes and Great Society paternalism, but its citizens, seeing the destructive consequences of the policies that resulted, valiantly battled this government-sponsored assault on their community. Their fight began in earnest with the cooperative revolution, which transformed rental tenants into owners with the power to reclaim their broken neighborhoods. These residents through their co-op boards, self-started nonprofits, and free associations, and with some help from city hall, after Rudy Giuliani s election have worked tirelessly to restore the beauty of the Upper West Side. Block by block, tree by tree, they have turned this neighborhood from a forsaken wreck into one of the most tranquil and desirable in the city.
The battle has continued candy factory tours in california to rage, though. On one side is gentrification, propelled by the new ownership society; on the other is institutionalization, pushed by an agenda that depends candy factory tours in california on devaluing the neighborhood s housing stock, the better to convert it into social-services facilities. The balance has tilted toward gentrification, but several recent reversals show that the gains can t be taken for granted.
T hanks to its rocky terrain, the Upper West Side was first developed a generation later than its Upper East Side counterpart. Starting candy factory tours in california in the 1860s, city planner Andrew Haswell Green commissioned two new parks for the area from Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who had already designed candy factory tours in california the adjacent Central Park. Olmsted and Vaux designed Riverside Park and Morningside Park in a way that departed from the street grid, followed the curves of the natural landscape, and incorporated monuments, footpaths, and promenades. At the same time, Broadway was extended north through the Upper West Side as a grand boulevard roughly following the old Bloomingdale Road, cutting on a bias from 59th Street. With its asphalt rather than cobblestone surface, the street became a popular destination for recreational cyclists during the city s first biking craze, in the 1890s.
The neighborhood, liberally candy factory tours in california adorned with green space, became arguably the most beautifully laid out in the city. Following candy factory tours in california the initial wave of single-family mansions and townhouses, developers commissioned the best architects of the Gilded Age to design apartment buildings along Riverside Drive, Broadway, and Central Park West. Highlights of the period include what are still regarded as the area s most beautiful buildings: candy factory tours in california the Dakota, crafted in a German Renaissance style by Henry J. Hardenbergh in 1880; the Ansonia Hotel, designed in the beaux-arts style by Paul E. M. Duboy in 1899; the Apthorp, a full-block Renaissance Revival palazzo designed by Clinton and Russell in 1906; and the Paterno and the Coliseum, two gracefully curving buildings at Riverside Drive and 116th Street designed candy factory tours in california by Schwartz and Gross in 1908 and 1910. These and the other grand buildings that went up before World War I were even more deluxe than many of the prewar (that is, pre World War II) apartments that, built a generation later, now define the Upper East Side.
Yet despite candy factory tours in california the presence of wealthy residents like William Randolph Hearst, who occupied several floors of an apartment building on 86th Street and Riverside Drive, the area never caught on as Manhattan s most desirable location. By the 1930s, candy factory tours in california landlords had subdivided many of the neighborhood s most spacious apartments into more affordable rentals (the concept of apartment ownership remained far off). Townhouse and brownstone owners broke up their single-family homes and took in lodgers. My building, which Schwartz and Gross designed in 1909, went from three apartments candy factory tours in california per floor to eight, with maid s rooms converted candy factory tours in california into separate residences and the servants passage converted into a public hallway. Later divisions turned some floors into nine- and ten-unit layouts, with a communal kitchen candy factory tours in california down the hall.
Meanwhile, Olmsted s parks were taking a beating, as Hoovervilles candy factory tours in california went up at 72nd Street and Riverside Park and on the Great Lawn of Central Park during the Great Depression. It didn t help that the New York Central rail line, with meatpacking trains burning oil and coal, ran uncovered along the Hudson River for the length of Riverside Park, depositing a layer of ash over the area. In the 1930s, Robert candy factory tours in california Moses, who looked out on the tracks from his Riverside Drive apartment, commissioned candy factory tours in california what would be the last great public works improvement for the neighborhood, dramatically enhancing the beauty of Olmsted s original plan. For twice the cost of the Hoover Dam $100 million he covered the tracks from 72nd to 120th Streets, extended Riverside Park farther out into the Hudson, and wrapped the new Henry Hudson Parkway through the addition in a way that opened candy factory tours in california the waterfront to foot traffic.
T he improvements could do little, however, to maintain a neighborhood that was becoming a hostage to rent control. During the 1940s, the federal government froze prices, including rents, nationwide. Most of those price controls eventually expired, but in 1950, New York State decided to turn a temporary wartime act into a permanent provision by capping the rent on 2.5 million units 85 percent of them in New York City that had been built prior to 1947. Some years later, the state enacted rent stabilization, which regulated how quickly landlords could increase rents, for units built between 1947 and 1974.
These laws were born from a fear of the free market, but they wound up showing how much more destructive government-manipulated pricing was. For one thing, they artificially limited the size of the market for uncontrolled rental units and thus raised the rental rates in new construction. Average, honest renters in rent-controlled apartments found themselves unable to afford to move to unregulated ones, even if their buildings were collapsing or if their housing needs were shifting say, because of changing family size. At the same time, the wealthy could maintain candy factory tours in california multiple residences while keeping their sprawling and underused rent-controlled apartments off the market. The corrupt learned to file phony complaints with the Department of Buildings and to launch bogus diminution of services lawsuits, tying up rate increases in litigation (the practice remains commonplace today).
A still more destructive effect was that the state-sanctioned rent increases were too small to let owners operate and maintain their aging buildings. In the 1970s, small landlords all over the city were squeezed further as the price of fuel oil rose; many couldn t pay their property taxes, candy factory tours in california and their buildings became unprofitable to own and worthless to sell. In New York City, wrote economist Thomas Sowell, many buildings have been abandoned after their owners found it impossible to collect enough rent to cover the costs of the services candy factory tours in california that they are required by law to provide, such as heat and hot water. Landlords defaulted or walked away from their buildings, rending the neighborhood.
A mong the many consequences of this real-estate collapse was a major government candy factory tours in california intrusion into the city s housing market. As housing expert William Tucker wrote in these pages in 1990, the city government seized thousands candy factory tours in california of buildings over back taxes in the 1970s and 1980s. Rather than quickly returning its acquisitions to the private sector, as most American cities did, New York held on to them. An agency today called the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) set about managing seized properties and also creating vast new developments underwritten by government subsidies. (This agency is separate from the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA, which operates low-income subsidized housing.) By 1984, HPD held title to 8,000 buildings containing 108,000 apartments 62,000 occupied and 46,000 vacant, Tucker calculated. By the time he was writing, the HPD and NYCHA together controlled a staggering 16 percent of the rental market. The city had become both New York s largest landlord and its largest developer.
One feature candy factory tours in california of the HPD s reign during the 1970s was a program in which housing courts would appoint administrators for buildings whose owners had proved incapable of handling them, Tucker wrote. Such an administrator was not obligated to pay mortgage installments, insurance premiums, or property taxes items that normally account for 60 to 80 percent of a landlord s expenses ; those obligations remained with the building s owner, while the administrator got the rent money. It was an exceedingly attractive arrangement for the administrator, candy factory tours in california and appointments quickly fell to tenant activists, community-organization leaders, and friends of housing court Judges.
The ready supply of housing stock also enabled candy factory tours in california a rising political class to funnel money from Great Society agencies, such as the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, through their local political mills to revitalize properties as government housing. Historic buildings were leveled, too, to make way for superblocks of new subsidized developments. In contrast with the uplifting designs of the neighborhood s original Gilded Age construction, the new build