Thursday, June 24, 2021 – TAKE A BLANK SLATE AND DESIGN A COMMUNITY

By admin

FROM THE ARCHIVES

THE 398TH ISSUE

JOHNSON AND BURGEE

PLAN FOR

WELFARE ISLAND

STEPHEN BLANK

Johnson Burgee master plan
Stephen Blank

The Cornell Graduate Hotel has opened. Who would have believed we would have a glam university campus, conference center and hotel? An impossible dream! Many dreams have been bruited about over the years on what this 147 acre bit of land in the East River might become. I wrote about several earlier, but today I’ll dig more deeply into one of the most important plans for the Island, the Johnson Burgee Master Plan.

First of all, what and when.

In 1966 Mayor Lindsay announced the city’s intention to develop Welfare Island. He also announced the creation of The Welfare Island Planning and Development Committee—a group of influential and interested New Yorkers, including Ralph Bunche, Mrs. Vincent Astor, the architect Philip Johnson and various city officials. The committee’s plan, financed by money it raised itself, was incorporated into the General Development Plan produced by Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s newly formed New York State Urban Development Corporation (UDC), the agency responsible for building subsidized low-and moderate income housing throughout New York State, headed by Ed Logue. In 1969, the UDC issued a report reviewing the options for Welfare Island – and then the city told the UDC to carry out the committee’s recommendations to create a new community on the island. The UDC tasked Philip Johnson and his partner John Burgee with developing a master plan. Their plan was unveiled in October 1969, in a Met Museum exhibition “The Island Nobody Knows”.

Who?

Philip Johnson (1906–2005) was a key figure in modern architecture. Influenced by Mies van der Rohe, Johnson became a proselytizer for the new architecture and was a key figure behind the landmark 1932 MOMA show “The International Style: Architecture Since 1922”. In 1930, he founded MOMA’s Department of Architecture and Design and later, as a trustee, was awarded an American Institute of Architects Gold Medal and the first Pritzker Architecture Prize. John Burgee (1933-) is an American architect noted for his contributions to Postmodern architecture. Burgee and Johnson established Johnson/Burgee in Manhattan in 1968, with Burgee as CEO. Burgee eased Johnson out of the firm in 1991, and it subsequently went bankrupt.

Their Master Plan

There would be no private cars. One main street would wind through the sections of the new island community. Two distinct “towns” would be separated by parkland: Northtown, a dense zone of horseshoe shaped apartment buildings, 4 to 12 stories tall, with numerous views of the water; next an area of park around the Blackwell farmhouse; and finally Southtown, with a town center of shops, offices, hotel and arcade extending across the island from a harbor to the subway stop. With the two towns both clustered tightly, a third of the island could be open space. The island’s remarkable buildings were to be preserved as “important landmarks”.  The master plan underlined protecting the island’s grand vistas. A network of waterfront promenades and paths would serve pedestrians and cyclists. It laid out impressive ideas for “docks and harbors for water buses and taxis of the sort that have long and efficiently served Venice… and two glass-tower elevators for pedestrian access from the 59^th St Bridge.” 

Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s master plan for Roosevelt Island. From The Island that Nobody Knows, New York State Urban Development Corporation, 1969.

The roughly 5,000 units of housing for some 20,000 people would be well spread among the poor, the old, the moderate and middle incomed, and the well‐to‐do, with schools, library, daycare and community centers, churches and sports facilities of many kinds. There was to be accommodation for patients well enough to live outside of hospital and for hospital staff. The response was largely positive. To some, the plan seemed “to project a believable and appealing image of medium density urbanism, comparable to that of prewar Forest Hills or Kew Gardens…”

The masterplan was approved in October 1969 and the UDC immediately leapt into action, hiring architects for the housing, garage, commercial facilities, infrastructure, and parks.

The first phase of construction commenced in the summer of 1971 with 2,138 units of housing for 5,000 residents in four apartment buildings, along with streets, sewers and commercial space and a parking garage with a firehouse, post office, full-sized supermarket and retail. Rivercross Apartments and Island House, designed by John Johansen with Ashok Bhavnani were completed in 1975. Sert, Jackson & Associates designed Eastwood and Westview Apartments, completed a year after Rivercross and Island House.

With much reduced federal financing for housing under President Nixon, building plans had to be revised. Most significantly, the towers grew taller, and courtyards were cut off from the East River. Johnson’s master plan sought to maintain a human scale, with buildings not more than 10 stories. But the UDC analysis found buildings would have to reach up to 22 stories to meet the required density. Sert and Johansen’s buildings were able to retain Johnson’s human scale by gradually stepping the 22 story east-west sections back from the river, preserving the water views and capping the longer north-south portions that followed Main Street to seven stories. But Main Street seemed more of a canyon between higher buildings with few vistas of the water. Ada Louise Huxtable who had praised the original design now said that the “plan’s most felicitous features, the side views through to the water from the central north-south main street were lost, with the street turned into an almost solid wall of the highest buildings.”

John Johansen later wrote: “The urban plan by Philip Johnson proposed an angled central street with buildings as fingers reaching and stepping down toward both banks of the river. As his proposal did not deal with a realistic density, it was not literally a master plan, and the team’s studies resulted in building heights not 10 stories, as he intended, but 18 stories. Johnson was insulted and said, ‘That is no longer my Island.’”

Buildings were not only higher, but materials changed as well. Johansen continued, “At first we were encouraged to be highly innovative in our design and use of building technology. Later, as the corporation became fearful of construction costs and anticipated market resistance to anything other than conventional housing, we were advised to modify our designs. Rossant and Giurgola refused and they were fired. Sert and I somehow held course and, as good friends, coordinated our separate designs rather well. Later, with Adam Yarmolinski as director, we were advised that, for security reasons,
courtyards of the upper income apartments must be barricaded against the potentially threatening lower income people across the street. As this contradicted Ed Logue’s central idea of an open neighborhood, I resigned as architect until this directive was finally withdrawn.”

Still, the impressions were not bad. In 1974, in the midst of construction, Anthony Bailey of the NYTimes, wrote “What the Johnson‐Burgee concept did was combine many of the desired elements—housing, parks, historic buildings—in a plan that honored the exhilarating island site, while letting itself be shaped by what was there: the river, the narrowness of the island, the Queensboro Bridge winging across it and the constraints of the two hospitals, which were too recent and too expensive to replace elsewhere.” And Johnson himself seemed OK with what was working out. Bailey quotes him, “I think they’re all doing very well. Force of events, money and the actual conditions have caused them to make changes in my master plan, but they’re following it as well as they can. Ed Logue’s got fine architects working on the job, and Logue’s a genius. He’s the only person who could get this done.”

So? Many years later.

Certainly – my view – what we got is not what the Johnson Burgee Master Plan depicted. Most important, Main Street became a deep canyon with very limited views of the water. The water front described in the Master Plan never materialized. But perhaps the essence of the Master Plan was preserved.

Looking in context, one critic (David Turturo) writes that “the re-imagination of Roosevelt Island, at the time, manifested an awakening of activist-architect-urbanists. New York’s new island town became a symbol of the nascent urban design (UD) movement, led by Sert himself. He established the first UD program at Harvard while GSD dean there in 1960…So Roosevelt Island was the perfect test site. In a city shaken by the civil rights movement, white flight, and an unpopular war, the site’s master planners Johnson and Burgee reached outside the box to build real change. They reconciled diverse concrete structures with historic landmarks to help create a real, vibrantly modern place. The result was striking and collaborative: refined, interwoven, and cumulative—a cross-disciplinary exemplar of urban design.”

And the island itself – notwithstanding the “what might have beens” – was viewed as a remarkable achievement. Robin Herman, in the Times, writes, “Just three and a minutes from Bloomingdale’s by way of the Tinker Toy colored tram, it is yet a world apart from the heat and bustle of Dry Dock country…” Of course, not everyone loved being a world apart.

This was a bit longer than usual. I’m sorry, and thanks for sticking it out.

Stephen Blank

THURSDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
SEND YOUR ANSWER TO ROOSEVELTISLANDHISTORY@GMAIL.COM

WEDNESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY

The former USS Growler first opened at the Intrepid Museum in 1989 and is the only American guided missile submarine open to the public. Growler offers museum visitors a firsthand look at life aboard a submarine and a close-up inspection of the once “top-secret” missile command center.

ED LITCHER AND MITCH HAMMER
GOT IT RIGHT

P.S. FIORELLO LA GUARDIA WIVES:

La Guardia married twice. His first wife was Thea Almerigotti, an Istrian immigrant, whom he married on March 8, 1919.

In 1929, La Guardia remarried to Marie Fisher (1895–1984) who had been his secretary while in Congress. They adopted two children.

Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Melanie Colter  and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c)

Sources

STEPHEN BLANK

Stephen Blank
RIHS
June 6, 2021

https://www.nycurbanism.com/brutalnyc/2017/2/15/eastwood

https://www.partinandcheeklaw.com/article.php?id=32188

https://www.metropolismag.com/cities/top-cities/roosevelt-islands-concretetopia-is-new-yorks-twilight-zone/ https://www.metropolismag.com/cities/roosevelt-island-bends-market-pressure/ https://www.johnmjohansen.com/Roosevelt-Island.html https://www.nytimes.com/1974/12/01/archives/manhattans-other-island-roosevelt-island-a-case-study-in-how-to.html

Chapter 8 Roosevelt Island, in Robert Stern, Thomas Mellins, David Fishman, New York 1960 (Monacelli Press, 1995)

Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Melanie Colter  and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c)

FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD

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