The 40-year-old Lincoln Center marriage is breaking up: City Opera is hoping to find a new home downtown and the Philharmonic is moving back to Carnegie Hall. And, after months of squabbling over budgets and plans, the chairman of what was to have been a $1.5 billion overhaul of the center's aging buildings has resigned.

Meanwhile, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation is seeking to fill a half-million square feet of space designated for culture at the World Trade Center site. In an open invitation, the agency declared that it is "in search of cultural institutions that will establish and maintain Lower Manhattan as a world class cultural destination full of vitality, energy and diversity." Interested parties are requested to submit preliminary proposals by September.

Just as Robert Moses dreamed up Lincoln Center to revitalize a run-down neighborhood, city and corporate interests believe that culture can be a magnet for development downtown. So, the time is right to ask: what's wrong with Lincoln Center? With the benefit of hindsight, what mistakes can the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation avoid in creating the next-generation cultural center?

Lesson #1: Don't Erect Pedestals

In the late 1950s, Lincoln Center was conceived as a temple to high art, proof that New York could compete with European cities as a cultural destination. It catalyzed the creation of arts complexes in capitals across the nation, helping to redefine the role of cities at a time when businesses and families were fleeing them in droves.

Today, Lincoln Center is trying to reinvent itself -- holding parties in its courtyard, reaching out to younger and more diverse audiences, trying to overcome an aura of elitism or, worse, dullness. As part of the center's more modest plans for renovation, stores, restaurants, and a series of sloping ramps will be created along 65th street to open up the campus.

Judging from architect Daniel Libeskind's plan to restore part of the grid and create parks and other public spaces, the new World Trade Center site will be built on a human, rather than monumental, scale. Yet, the shadow of history at Ground Zero -- sacred ground to many -- will place the cultural institutions built there on a different kind of pedestal. There will be a museum to explore the 1993 and 2001 bombings of the towers, and a memorial to the victims. But, will the art that is mounted at the theaters, galleries, or concert halls be required to match the moral seriousness of the tragedy? Will producers, even unconsciously, avoid politically controversial works out of fear of upsetting the families of the dead?

Lesson #2: Don't Be Afraid of Commercialism

Building Lincoln Center proved enormously expensive -- $159.5 million, more than four times original estimates. The Metropolitan Opera House cost $12,000 a seat, at a time when opera houses were being built elsewhere for a fraction. Once expectations had been raised, production costs skyrocketed: Don Quixote, the City Ballet's lavish tribute to its new home, cost more than any other ballet in history.

Originally, Lincoln Center was to have an office tower to generate rental revenue and defray maintenance expenses. The decision to eliminate the tower, and let the city operate the underground parking lot, deprived the center of important funds that could have made it less dependent on corporate and government largesse.

World Trade Center planners should remember that it is easier to raise money for new buildings than it is to pay for their upkeep. It's unlikely that future cultural groups will join the handful of institutions that have their utility costs picked up by the city, and few private funders will volunteer to pay for air-conditioning. Following a growing trend among nonprofits, the new cultural groups should seek to maximize earned income through ticket sales, investments, rentals, stores, and educational programs. They should also pool resources. To encourage collaboration, the city could offer joint purchasing options for common products and services.

Lesson #3: Listen to the Pros

Lincoln Center's architects had to answer to many constituencies, but in many cases they failed to please the Muses. The Avery Fisher Hall was resurfaced three times in its first seven years in hopes of improving muddy acoustics. The Vivian Beaumont Theater was built with huge backstage areas to accommodate multiple sets from shows playing in repertory -- an outmoded model even then, and one that saddled the theater with unnecessary expenses.

Planning for the World Trade Center site will appropriately involve many different parties, but it is crucial that arts professionals have a prominent place at the table. In the past, public officials have proved more adept at discussing the symbolic value of arts than attending to the practical needs of directors, musicians, actors, or museum workers. Perhaps the most important lesson from Lincoln Center is that, over time, cultural spaces will have to meet many different production and aesthetic demands. To prepare for this, veteran theater architect George Izenour calls for designs that are intrinsically adaptable, with walls that move, seats that disappear beneath the floor, and sound panels that can be tuned for the occasion.

Lesson #4: Don't Think Too Big

The producers at Lincoln Center have to fill huge spaces, including a 3,800-seat opera house, 2,900-seat concert hall, and 2,700-seat theater. To succeed, each organization has to cultivate its own constituency of diehard opera fans, ballet aficionados, or theater junkies.

A new cultural center should include performance and exhibit spaces of varying sizes and work to build bridges between different audiences, taking a cue from smaller venues around the city that house film, theater, live music, and visual art. It should vary curtain times -- post-work concerts, late-night weekend performances, Sunday brunch gallery openings -- and make a commitment to keeping tickets affordable.

During the economic boom, Manhattan was arguably more successful at selling and displaying art than creating new work. The World Trade Center cultural infrastructure should make room for independent artists and cultivate the graphic arts, television, and film industries already based downtown. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation should consider proposals from smaller and less-established arts groups, and the city should offer subsidies and tax incentives to create affordable artists' studios and living space around the cultural center.

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related article:
Remaking Lincoln Center
Lincoln Center finds itself at a turning point. Some of its facilities are outdated and will need costly repairs. The New York Philharmonic is leaving and the New York City Opera might not be far behind. Some are asking whether the concept behind Lincoln Center is still valid - and if it ever was.
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photo by David Lamb related articles: Lessons from Lincoln Center for the Ground Zero Cultural Center At the same time that Lincoln Center is "breaking up," the site of the World Trade Center is trying to become a cultural center. What mistakes made by Lincoln Center can the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation avoid? The Power Broker Revisited The debate over current NYC projects, from the rebuilding of Ground Zero to the bid for the 2012 Olympics, Robert Moses' influence is felt above all others -- a man who has been dead for more than two decades. A Community Plan for Robert Moses' "Highway to Nowhere" Community groups in the Bronx have a plan for Moses' Sheridan Expressway, a 1.25 mile stretch of highway that has been called a "road to nowhere." They want to tear it down. Transcript of Gotham Gazette's Reading NYC Book Club Discussion About The Power Broker On August 20, Gotham Gazette's book club held an in-person discussion about Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker , with guest Tom Angotti, professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College.

Robert Moses never cared all that much for the performing arts, but he sure could put on a show. On May 14, 1959, the master builder brought President Dwight Eisenhower to New York for groundbreaking festivities at the future site of Lincoln Center.

As soon as Ike turned the first spade of earth, Leonard Bernstein, the dashing young music director of the New York Philharmonic, launched the orchestra and a choir from the Juilliard School into Handel's "Hallelujah" chorus.

The ceremony was a grand prelude to an even greater spectacle - the wholesale remaking of the Upper West Side. By the late 1960s, Moses would utterly transform a rundown neighborhood into a cultural hub, obliterating the very streets and lots, ironically, that Bernstein had brought to life on stage in "West Side Story" just a decade earlier.

Lincoln Center's creation marked the first time that a city attempted to use the arts as a catalyst for urban renewal and economic development on such a vast scale. It was the project that, as Moses biographer Robert Caro wrote, "best revealed the vast breadth of Moses'creative, city-shaping imagination." Over the years, Moses' vision would be adopted by cities across the country seeking a way to attract people and investment to their moribund downtowns.

Today, though, 44 years after Eisenhower stuck his shovel into the ground near the bustling intersection of Broadway and Columbus Avenue, Lincoln Center finds itself at a turning point. Some of its facilities are outdated and will need costly repairs. The New York Philharmonic has given up altogether on acoustically challenged Avery Fisher Hall and plans to return to Carnegie Hall, which it left in 1962. The New York City Opera might also bolt in a few years for a new house, either at Ground Zero or some other location.

The strains have led many to ask whether the concept behind Lincoln Center is still valid - and if it ever was. New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger recently wrote that rather than serving as a hub of activity for the West Side, Lincoln Center has become the "hole in the middle of the doughnut."

"The idea of a cultural campus set apart from the city never made much sense, even though Lincoln Center did, to be fair, promote the urban-renewal effect that Robert Moses intended," Goldberger wrote. "The neighborhood would probably have been gentrified without Lincoln Center, of course, but hardly in the same way, or on the same timetable."

Goldberger's complaints are chiefly with Lincoln Center's architecture and its relationship to the cityscape. But as Lincoln Center embarks on a major renovation program, it also finds itself answering questions about its artistic and economic viability. Does the concept of a cultural campus still make sense? Would dispersing its component companies promote growth elsewhere? What kind of future does Lincoln Center have if one or perhaps two of its major constituents leave?

GALVANIZING EFFECT

Moses was far less interested in helping artists and musicians than he was in using them as a magnet for development. On 15 acres that had been largely filled with boarding hotels and sagging tenements, Moses assembled a university, two opera houses, a concert hall, a library, a music school, several theaters, a public plaza, a park with a band shell and an underground parking garage. The construction displaced thousands of families. But Moses certainly succeeded in attracting builders.

From his office, Reynold Levy, the president of Lincoln Center, can see highrises almost everywhere. Across the street from his window, cranes mark the site of a new apartment tower opposite Avery Fisher Hall. To the south, the twin-towered AOL Time Warner Center, which will include the new home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, nears completion.

"I don't know of anyone who doesn't credit Lincoln Center for helping to galvanize this extraordinary amount of economic development around it, from its beginning to this day," Levy says.

According to Lincoln Center officials, taxable property in the Lincoln Square neighborhood appreciated 1,724 percent from 1963 to 1999, compared to 309 percent growth for Manhattan as a whole. The additional growth represents an extra $154 million in property tax revenues for the city each year.

Overall, Lincoln Center officials attribute $675 million a year in direct and indirect economic activity within the city to their complex. While some of that activity would have been generated by arts groups whether Lincoln Center existed or not, Levy says that clustering these organizations creates a sort of multiplier effect that draws business and activity.

STILL A MAGNET

Indeed, these days, big retailers and book and record superstores call the Lincoln Center area home, attracted by the crowds that are regularly drawn to New York's cultural megastore. And it's not just concert- and opera-goers who fill the streets around Lincoln Center. Business leaders say the performing arts center has brought residents back from the suburbs and kept others from moving out of the city.

"It's still crucial to the economic viability of this neighborhood," says Monica Blum, president of the Lincoln Square Business Improvement District. "Five new buildings are going up in the neighborhood or have just been completed and there's been a 13 percent increase in population just since the last census. People want to eat here and want to shop here. In many instances, it's the Lincoln Center patrons who want to live here."

Bringing arts organizations together also stimulates creativity, Lincoln Center officials say. True, it's impossible to attend more than one performance at a time, but performers and administrators can benefit from proximity. The result can be programs that cross disciplines, examining an idea or an art form both on stage and, say, on screen through the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

That kind of collaboration will become more prevalent in the future, Lincoln Center promises, as it develops programs to fill Avery Fisher Hall once the Philharmonic leaves. Levy suggests that Lincoln Center's diversity could, for instance, attract visiting orchestras for extended residencies by offering symphony musicians a chance to perform at the Met and giving visiting conductors opportunities to work with young musicians at Juilliard.

Economic and artistic opportunities have driven a number of cities to emulate Lincoln Center's example, even as the original has come in for criticism at home. Cities ranging from Newark to Philadelphia to Dayton, Ohio to Kansas City have recently completed or begun their own performing arts centers modeled on the idea that the arts can spur an urban renaissance.

FADED GLORY

Still, even Lincoln Center's supporters acknowledge that changes are needed. "I think it's lost its luster," says Blum. "It needs polishing."

The plaza, with its famous fountain in the center, looks great on postcards and comes alive when events such as Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors are scheduled, but it can be a cold and forbidding place at other times. The travertine stone that covers most of the buildings is flaking off, a victim of wear and pollution. Most critically, just about every group needs more space and nearly all the facilities will have to be modernized if they are to live up to their reputation as being world-class.

At one time, a $1.5 billion proposal was on the table that would have included a thorough renovation of Lincoln Center, including the rebuilding or replacement of Avery Fisher Hall for the Philharmonic. Also floated was the idea of placing the entire plaza under a glass canopy designed by celebrity architect Frank Gehry.

Economic realities, however, forced Lincoln Center to proceed more modestly. The organization has hired the architects Elizabeth Dillard and Richard Scofidio to help knit Lincoln Center into the fabric of the West Side by removing the barriers to street life that were part of Moses' original suburbanizing impulse.

STREET-LEVEL SHOWCASE

West 65th Street, which now resembles a dark tunnel, will be narrowed and turned into a street-level showcase. The bridge over the street will be removed and screening rooms and glass-fronted studios will give passersby a view of artists at work, creating a new attraction much like the Today show's transparent studio at Rockefeller Center. Also planned for the northern end of Lincoln Center are an eatery, a bookstore, a boutique and a TKTS booth that will make it easier to attend a performance on a whim.

Levy says 65th Street would serve as a lively counterpart to Lincoln Center's other open spaces, which many people consider a refuge from the city streets.

"Our aim is to achieve the best of both worlds, to retain the serenity, the peace and the openness that Lincoln Center now affords . . . and at the same time to infuse some vitality and bring energy off of Broadway into 65th street," he says.

Whatever people think of Lincoln Center, one thing is certain - it is here to stay. And while some of the ideas that led to its birth are now out of favor among planners, Lincoln Center's legacy is undeniable.

As Hilary Ballon, a Columbia University professor of art and architecture, wrote in a recent New York Times article, "Moses is now widely regarded as the antihero of modern planning, but his approach to urban renewal at Lincoln Center was bold and influential. Lincoln Center embodies the proposition that the arts are an indispensable element of good urbanism. From the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris to the Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao, Spain, it has proven a valid and enduring idea."

The Community Reinvestment Act died prematurely this month, at the age of 26. The federal legislation was intended to force financial institutions that operate in neighborhoods of low and moderate income to address the credit needs of people in those communities.

If I were writing its obituary, I would say that, in 1999, CRA (as it was commonly known) fell into a coma and was placed on life support after being struck by the disease known as the Financial Modernization Act, a lethal form of federal legislation which allowed for the merging of the banking, securities and insurance industries. A complication rising from chronic deregulation, acute obsolescence and rising levels of corporate power was cited as the cause of death.

The Community Reinvestment Act was widely regarded as landmark legislation which helped found the modern community reinvestment movement in New York and nationwide. It represented one of the first federal acknowledgements that the discriminatory banking practice known as "redlining" was common among financial institutions.

By creating regulatory criteria and standards for how banks conducted business in poor areas, and by providing public access to this information, the law established the basis for a bank's accountability to low-income areas. In doing so, it almost single handedly created the idea that banks have financial responsibilities, if not moral obligations, in poor neighborhoods.

The legislation thus in effect sparked the entire movement known as community banking. It prompted more than an estimated trillion dollars in loans in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods and billions of dollars in community development grants and donations throughout the country. Arguably, the Community Reinvestment Act shaped every retail bank community relations, community development and philanthropic division in the country.

In New York alone, an entire generation of community development professionals - including those who provide alternative financial services, attempt to build wealth, promote "financial literacy" about the banking industry and advocate for discrimination-free financial services in poor communities in New York - had taken its cue from CRA.

At the peak of its prominence, the law became an important, if not blunt, instrument, for community-based groups who monitor bank community reinvestment track records and the CRA performance ratings that are assigned to depository institutions by regulatory agencies. Because a bank's CRA performance was considered when it applied for regulatory approval for an action such as a merger with another institution, community advocates would sometimes seize this modest window of opportunity to challenge a bank's application and "encourage" banks to become better corporate citizens. And while the vast majority of such challenges were rejected, they at least led to rare meetings of the minds between bankers and community groups.

But the law had powerful enemies, particularly in the form of the banking lobby who blamed it for hampering banks with unnecessary compliance burdens and red tape. By the mid 1990s, the law came under repeated attack. Senator Phil Gramm, the prime sponsor of the 1999 Financial Modernization Act, once accused community organizations of being "extortionists" because they used CRA challenges to win concessions and services from banks.

As its detractors gained ground and the banking industry underwent a dramatic transformation, the law's original provisions were diluted and its influence waned. Perhaps most importantly, with the merging of the banking, insurance and securities industries and an explosion in the growth of high-cost, non-depository consumer credit institutions that are not regulated by CRA, the lion's share of lending and financial activity in low-income neighborhoods is no longer subject to CRA scrutiny, even as complaints of lending discrimination and abuse have skyrocketed.

CRA is survived by the federal Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and by the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, which was enacted by Congress in 1975 and requires lending institutions to report public loan data.

Technically, CRA is still on the books and banks still have CRA compliance departments. But as far as the financial services industry is concerned, it has effectively swatted away a regulatory irritant and has never looked back.

As for those who consider themselves community reinvestment watchdogs, I suspect they are neither anxious to concede defeat nor have the luxury to complain about the genie that has already escaped the bottle. Just as the financial services industry has been “modernized”, so, too, will activists have to create new, modern tools that will allow customers and lay people to compel banks to put a little something back into the areas where they have taken so much.

Mark Winston Griffith, a writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Essence and Spin, is also founder of the non-profit Central Brooklyn Partnership, which organizes people to build economic power.

New York started with a single island. That first island was not Manhattan, but "Nut" Island, now called Governors Island. But the colonists soon expanded to Manhattan and then to Brooklyn. For more than three centuries, the focal point of life in New York City was the bountiful triangle of water, bounded by Brooklyn, Governors Island, and Manhattan. What was once the heart of the city now offers an extraordinary opportunity once again - if we take it.

Governors Island

The first European colonists in our area only took Manhattan after they had a secure foothold on Governors Island. Now, the roles are reversed. Earlier this year the state and city announced the formation of the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation. As part of the deal with the federal government which allowed the return of the island to state control, some type of educational facility is planned. A family entertainment center and artisan workspaces also seem to be on the list. Just last month, the new preservation corporation opened the gate to the island for public tours which are available to both individuals and groups. Wildly popular, (with long waiting lists each week) the collaboration between the preservation corporation, the National Park Service, and the handful of civics involved in organizing the tours (now extended through October) bodes well for the creative problem solving that the island demands. But will the novelty wear off?

Redevelopment of the island is hamstrung by two factors. The first is that nobody uses it now; it is not part of modern New York. Then, the island is accessible only by a ferry from Lower Manhattan and the price of this centuries-old disconnect grows higher. One way to cultivate visitation might be to link with other harbor attractions now. If art and craftsmanship is part of the future of the island then perhaps links to the gallery districts in Chelsea or DUMBO could be created. If tourism is anticipated to become a driving force then the 3+ million annual visitors to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island may want to come learn about New York's colonial history as well.

Brooklyn

Brooklyn is close by, with a silent fleet of barges, lighters and container ships passing through Buttermilk Channel daily. Just last year, the state, city, and Port Authority took an important step in creating Brooklyn Bridge Park by consolidating Fulton Ferry Park with a patchwork of city and Port Authority controlled piers (numbered one to five) and other properties between the Manhattan Bridge and south almost to Atlantic Avenue. Now a second phase of planning has been initiated to the south along Piers six to 12 extending down around Atlantic Basin and into Red Hook.

Before any new structures have been built, concerns about commercial development versus open space are growing loud. The Church of Latter Day Saints, for example, has expressed its intent to sell its building on Furman Street, and this prime waterfront property could tie together two currently separated areas of the waterfront (Piers one to five, and Piers six to 12).

South of Atlantic Avenue along Buttermilk Channel, the wave of waterfront redevelopment seems to be crashing up against the bulkhead of Brooklyn maritime activity on Piers six to 12. At this confluence of the Channel, the East River, and the harbor the ecology within the water is almost as complicated as the political ecology on the land. The crux of the issue seems to be whether maritime and port land use still makes sense in this area (a report is expected in late September). Divergent visions for this area defined by Atlantic Avenue to the north and Atlantic Basin to the south range from a new Carnival Cruise Terminal, a beverage distribution center, or a southward extension of Brooklyn Bridge Park. A recent planning exercise by the New Amsterdam Development Corporation showed how low-scale housing might look where containers are now stacked four and six high.

The undeniable physical reality is that on an island home to more than seven million people, maritime trade and transit has to make sense somewhere. In a city where traffic congestion approaches lunacy levels on a near-daily basis, we have to cultivate and stabilize water- based alternatives not just for people but for goods as well.

East River Piers

Across from the Brooklyn Piers are the East River Piers of Manhattan. The canal on Broad Street that brought trade right to the door of today's Stock Exchange has long been filled in, and the river segregated from the prime office district of Lower Manhattan by a highway that is simply too big for its place in the city. Recently the Bloomberg administration convened an advisory committee to ponder new plans for the area that emphasize housing. A consultant is being sought to help think through the challenge of appending this waterfront to the body of Lower Manhattan. While housing needs are pressing, we can't forget what brought us to this spot on the island nearly 400 years ago: transportation.

Yes, Lower Manhattan is important for the commercial, cultural and corporate identities that are all embedded in the words "New York City." But this stretch of Lower Manhattan is even more significant because it's the one place in the city where the water and land transportation systems come together -- where the subway comes right to the water's edge.

Between the Staten Island Ferry Terminal and the Pier 11/ Wall Street Ferry pier lie probably the most underutilized stretch of waterfront in any part of New York City. This area was the commercial and transportation heart of New Amsterdam, largely because it was where the East, the Hudson, and the Harbor converged. Today, the Staten Island Ferry, the Battery Maritime Building (terminal for the Governors Island Ferry), the Port Authority heliport, and the Pier 11 Ferry Terminal at Wall Street make for a linear transit district that could be the basis for tremendous growth if they can be better connected, and possibly bolstered with new transportation uses.

What the Dutch knew and we seem to have forgotten, is that the value of waterfront lies not just in the return on investment, but how the water itself is used. From the founding of New Amsterdam on Governors Island to the creation of the first regularly scheduled ferry service between the shores of Brooklyn and Manhattan in 1642, the connections that were made between these areas over a just a quarter century fueled the growth and enabled a prosperity that lasted over 300 years. We have an opportunity to bring this area to prominence once again.

Carter Craft, an urban planner, is program director of the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance.

 

Robert Moses, the “master builder,” constructed 627 miles of highways in and around New York City during a roughly 40-year period. Many of his projects divided close-knit neighborhoods, demolished viable housing, relocated the poorest New Yorkers to the city’s edge and promoted flight to the suburbs. Now the Sheridan Expressway, a 1.25-mile Bronx segment of his legacy, is slated for a $245 million reconstruction by the New York State Department of Transportation, and locals are fighting back with a plan of their own.

Their plan includes tearing the highway down, and would add the Bronx to a growing list of communities worldwide that are removing roads in the name of urban revitalization, open space, and waterfront access.

Over the past five years an effort by community groups, residents, and regional planning organizations has pressed the New York State Department of Transportation to study an alternative plan for the roadway – one that would remove it altogether in favor of riverfront open space and other possible uses.

The "Community Plan" for the Sheridan Expressway

The proposal, crafted by the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance, was recently accepted by the Department of Transportation as one alternative in the Environmental Impact Statement for the project. “Decommissioning the Sheridan would bring the Moses effect full circle,” said Alexie Torres-Fleming, Executive Director of the Bronx community group Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice. “We’re looking for a major project that reconnects neighborhoods, uncovers the area’s natural resources, and addresses one of its biggest transportation problems.”

Sheridan History

Some of the South Bronx’ most distinguishing elements are its highways – miles and miles built during the 1950s and 60s. The Cross Bronx began construction in 1948, the Major Deegan in 1950, the Bruckner in 1957. The last of the South Bronx expressways, the Sheridan, was begun in 1958.

These roads evicted many long-time residents, cut through vibrant districts and created corridors of blight that walled off neighborhoods. At the same time, numerous high-rise public housing projects were developed and the South Bronx was rapidly transformed into one of the city’s poorest areas. “The South Bronx became a dumping ground for the city’s environmental burdens. The land is overrun with power plants, waste transfer stations and toxic industry and is bisected by highways,” said Christina Hemphill of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance.

As Moses’ power waned, neighborhoods and institutions north of the Cross-Bronx Expressway were able to stop construction of the Sheridan’s second phase. The four-mile extension would have brought the highway through Bronx Park to connect with I-95. Governor Nelson Rockefeller officially killed the project in 1971.

The short section of the Sheridan that was built runs for only a mile and a quarter between the Bruckner and Cross Bronx Expressways. Its four lanes carry 40,000 vehicles per day, approximately one-fifth the volume of traffic on other nearby highways. The New York Post has called the short strip of road a “highway to nowhere.”

The Sheridan Neighborhood

The Sheridan Expressway cuts through largely Hispanic and African American neighborhoods, separating them from each other and the Bronx River. The area has significantly lower than average household income and car ownership rates. It also has some of the highest asthma rates in the entire state. South Bronx neighborhoods have twice the average asthma hospitalization rate of New York City, and 10 times the state rate. Sheridan area neighborhoods are also sorely lacking in open space, with less than 1/2 acre per 1,000 residents – approximately 10 percent of the national average.

Yet the South Bronx also features an impressive density of competent and highly committed community activists. Groups like Sustainable South Bronx, Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice, Mothers on the Move, Nos Quedamos/We Stay and The Point have demanded and begun to win better housing, traffic safety measures, and greenway projects. They are also mobilizing local residents around the community plan for the Sheridan.

“Before public hearings this March, we collected over 700 petition signatures from Hunts Point residents alone against reconstructing the Sheridan,” said Manuela Arciniegas of Sustainable South Bronx. “Our plan serves the business community and the permanent residents of our area. It creates opportunities for positive development.”

The Transportation Department’s Plan

In 1997, the Department of Transportation unveiled plans for a $245 million reconstruction of the connection between the Bruckner and Sheridan expressways, including the construction of new ramps to bring trucks that drive on the Sheridan closer to the Hunts Point Market, a 60-acre wholesale food market that distributes food to grocery stores in New York and New Jersey. The department also said that the project would improve safety and alleviate congestion.

The Tri-State Transportation Campaign, a transportation agency watchdog group where I work as a planner, has questioned the the utility of a multi-million reconstruction of the roadway since the Department of Transportation first released its plans. As one small highway within an overbuilt South Bronx road network, few vehicles use the Sheridan and it is generally considered redundant. The Cross-Bronx, the Major Deegan, and the Bruckner already meet at two other points, and are also connected by the Bronx River Parkway.

In addition, building new ramps to bring trucks closer to the market would further isolate the neighborhood of Hunts Point from the rest of the Bronx, and cast shadows on a nearby park that is under construction.

The Community Plan

In a major victory for Bronx residents, the Department of Transportation has recently agreed to study the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance’s “Community Plan” alongside their original plans for the roadway. The "Community Plan" would instead use the 1.25-mile, 28-acre highway for open space as part of the Bronx River Greenway, a bike/pedestrian pathway and park planned for the entire 23-mile length of the Bronx River. “We live in the community 24 hours a day. DOT doesn’t live here, the engineers don’t live here,” explained Francisco Perez of Mothers on the Move. “But because we are black, Hispanic and poor, other people make decisions for us. It’s time for us to make our own decisions.”

The plan also would make it easier for trucks to access the Hunts Point Market, with new entrance and exit ramps off the Bruckner Expressway at Leggett Avenue. Few trucks are even using the Sheridan to get to the market, said Joan Byron of the Pratt Institute, another member of the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance. “Eighty percent of truckers to Hunts Point already use the Bruckner for part of their trip to or from the market. And a largely industrial route from the Leggett exit to the market is available and preferable to present routes.” A Department of Transportation survey of truckers found that only 15 percent use the Sheridan to access the market, and only 5 percent used it to exit.

A third component would elevate the Bruckner Expressway over the Bronx River. Currently drivers on the elevated Bruckner Expressway must merge with Bruckner Boulevard (running beneath the expressway) to take a single bridge over the river -- a frequent source of bottlenecks. Elevating the express lanes would create space for bike and pedestrian lanes and allow the reopening of cross streets east and west of the river that are now blocked by the expressway.

If the "Community Plan" were implemented, safety and congestion problems at the Bruckner/Sheridan interchange would disappear along with the interchange itself. If the Sheridan were eliminated, it would also get rid of a frequent source of congestion along the Cross-Bronx. The new Bruckner exit at Leggett Avenue would improve access to the Hunt’s Point Market and keep truck traffic off of from residential blocks.

Other Highway Removal Projects

If the Sheridan is dug up, it will join a growing list of highways being removed by major cities. Waterfront highways have already been eliminated in San Francisco, Portland and Toronto. A similar project was just approved in Seoul, South Korea and Milwaukee, Wisconsin will soon finish its demolition of a downtown freeway.

Milwaukee’s Park East Freeway will give way to parkland, an entertainment complex and new office, retail and residential construction. It shares remarkable similarities with the Sheridan. Community groups stopped the construction of the Park East in the mid-1970s, and the road only stretches one mile long. The road was underutilized and a blight to the community, and when the area around the highway stump began to revitalize in the 1990s, community leaders agreed to remove the highway and help spur the neighborhood’s continued growth. That agreement was reached in 1999, and the $50 million demolition began in 2002.

Next Steps

These examples prove that road removal is viable in major urban areas, but will the Department of Transportation follow suit? The State Department of Transportation recently began its environmental impact study for the Sheridan. It will examine the impacts of the department’s original ideas for a rebuilt interchange, as well as decommissioning the Sheridan.

While the draft environmental impact statement won’t be published for two years, the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance still has hurdles ahead. One challenge includes convincing companies at Hunts Point Market that the community's plan will make transportation better for them rather than more difficult. Government officials will need similar convincing. The Department of Transportation will be reluctant to give up highway capacity and as in so many areas, the ultimate decision makers are the governor and the mayor. Winning their attention, with the help of local elected leaders, may be the biggest challenge of all. “There are few things New York politicians fear more than being blamed for making traffic worse,” said the Tri-State Transportation Campaign’s Jon Orcutt.

“If the community alternative for the Sheridan seems radical, it’s because for fifty years, we have allowed highway engineers to be the primary shapers of huge parts of our cities, and allowed the movement of vehicles to trump all other considerations of urban design, public health and safety, and environmental quality,” said Byron.

Danielle Burger is the New York City planner at Tri-State Transportation Campaign, an alliance of regional transportation experts, planning organizations and environmental groups working to improve transportation throughout the metropolitan region. Tri-State is also a member of the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance.

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RELATED ARTICLE: The Power Broker Revisited

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 When the blackout occurred, I had plenty of water, a working landline, two cell phones that never lost power, 24-hour Internet access, a fully-operating electric stove, and cable TV. That is because I was in Tokyo.

The only New Yorkers I could bond with, though, were the CNN anchors on my TV as they beamed me images of Avenue A and gave accounts of the bonfire in Tompkins Square Park just steps from my apartment.

It was somehow instructive to be on another continent, another culture -- a place where, on June 22, there had been a "voluntary blackout." It was called Candle Night, and its purpose was to get people thinking about energy conservation, among other things. (It is sponsored by an environmental organization called the Sloth Club) As part of this event, major tourist sites such as Tokyo Tower and Himeji Castle were left in the dark, on purpose.

Over the summer in Tokyo, amid earthquakes and typhoons, there were also fears of power failure, especially, according to the Japan Times, because of safety inspections that required the closure of 17 nuclear power generators.

But, following the blackout in New York on August 14th, Japanese utility companies were quick to reassure Tokyoites that a major power failure would never happen in Japan. This, the newspaper Asahi Shimbun told their readers, is due to differences in Japanese power grids and rerouting capabilities. Not everybody in Japan is so confident, though, especially one of the major train companies, which operates at full capacity every day.

Calling New York, But Not Getting an Answer

Despite all of my technology, it was impossible to contact anyone in New York. Landlines rang and rang with no answer due to overloaded telecom networks, despite Verizon's extensive back-up systems which insure that hospitals, essential services and 911 are operating during emergencies. Payphones continued to work for those patient enough to stand in line (scroll down to the fourth photo).

Most of us prefer the convenience of cordless phones ("Can I call you back? I'm in the shower right now.") forgetting that they won't work without electricity. Some have even abandoned landlines all together preferring to pay only one bill, for their cell phone. But, for the most part, cell phones from the top six carriers were unreliable through Friday morning. Verizon Wireless reported getting four times their usual traffic. Cell phone towers require electricity and have only three to six hours of back-up batteries.

This is the second time that cell phone networks have faltered in the face of an emergency. The first was during 9/11 when the Internet became the most reliable communication network. Unlike 9/11 however, the Internet was of no use in the blackout because most people couldn't connect to it without a computer. However, BlackBerry e-mail pagers did work because they rely on an older type of network technology.

If there was any time to be low-tech, it was during the Blackout of 2003. New Yorkers quickly learned the value of having at least one battery-operated radio, flashlight, plug-in phone.

Blackout Blogs

Many New York blogs covered the blackout with photos. Some of these include Gothamist, CamWorld, Capn Design, Satan's Laundromat, and those by John Wehr, Andrew Raff, Jesse Chan-Norris, Adam Fields, and Robert Spychala's SnapLog. The Fray, and many other blogs, are collecting stories Blackout 2003 from their readers.

To follow up on the bonding theme, online community Craigslist New York received almost thirty postings about "missed connections" during the blackout - personal ads resulting from the many close encounters in the dark. But are you sure you want to meet someone you only saw in the dim beam of your flashlight???

Another Plea for .NYC

The city has only until August 25 to file comments that could result in ownership of the Internet domain name .NYC. If secured, this new name could replace .COM, .GOV or .ORG in New York City-related organizations and businesses. For a brief background on this issue as of March 2002 see "The Battle for .NYC."

Proponents of this plan argue that the city could gain marketing power, increase revenue and improve the quality of life in New York if the .NYC name were secured. Queens Community Board 3 has been backing this issue since April 2001 when it passed an Internet Empowerment Resolution requesting that the city obtain .NYC. However, those opposed disagree with the concept that a city government should be able profit from the licensing of Internet domain names such as hotels.nyc or restaurants.nyc.

In order to make .NYC a reality, lawmakers need to file comments with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Further attention and support from Mayor Bloomberg, Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications Chief Gino Menchini, City Council Technology in Government Committee Chair Gale Brewer and Commission on Public Information and Communication Chair Betsy Gotbaum and others is needed.

Laura Forlano is a doctoral student studying communication technology policy at Columbia University.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s five-year plan (In pdf format) to increase affordable housing in New York City, officially began July 1, the first day of the new fiscal year. The administration’s strategy, unveiled last December, was to preserve 38,000 units of affordable housing, and build 27,000 others, with a total of $3 billion. In May, Bloomberg offered the New York State Affordable Housing Conference an updateon the plan, reporting that things were shaping up well.

“We’re already moving forward on virtually every single element of The New Housing Marketplace plan,” he said. “Since last December we’ve put the rehabilitation and production of approximately 8,000 housing units into the pipeline. We’ve assembled city-owned tracts for creating hundreds more. We’re developing regulatory reforms that will speed private housing construction. And we’re targeting residential rezoning that will catalyze construction and rehabilitation throughout the city.”

While the city’s budget woes haven’t made the mayor’s goals any easier, he has remained staunch in his housing commitment. “It’s true that we won’t see some of the dividends from our housing plan for years to come,” he said. “Given the city’s current budget problems, some people may think that’s a luxury we can’t afford now. That’s exactly wrong. Building for the future is a responsibility we can’t shirk – especially now.”

LESS THAN PROMISED

Recently, Housing First!, a coalition of community, business, civic, labor, and religious organizations promoting affordable housing, released a report(in pdf format) on the mayor’s plan that compared it to their own proposed solution to the city’s affordable housing crisis. The coalition has called for a 10-year, $10 billion dollar plan that would produce 100,000 new homes and preserve at least 85,000 more. Their report suggests that the mayor’s plan moves in the right direction, though not far enough.

“ The mayor has made an important new commitment and that is a critical step forward,” said Joe Weisbord, staff director of Housing First!. “But, at the same time, the city’s housing situation continues to deteriorate. We need to look to the future when the economy and budget situation will improve. We see the plan that our coalition came up with as a good benchmark for the level of effort that’s going to be necessary in the long term.”

Most distressing to Housing First! is the drop in the city’s 10-year capital strategy commitment to housing. “ If you compare it to the strategy that was issued two years ago,” Weisbord pointed out, “city capital funds declined over a billion dollars for a ten-year time frame. That’s a product of these across-the-board cuts that the city has been making, but that means we continue to fall behind.”

While the city’s billion dollar capital cut is offset in part by an influx of funds from the Housing Development Corporation and from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the capital inflow for housing over the next ten years is still more than three-quarters of a billion dollars less than what was planned two years ago.

DISAPPOINTMENT IN DOWNTOWN

Another unhappy surprise for affordable housing advocates has been the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation’s plans for housing near the former site of the World Trade Center. Overall, the federal tax-free Liberty Bond program (In pdf format) allocates up to $1.6 billion for residential rental development, but so far, only $50 million will go toward apartments that are affordable to those learning less than Wall Street wages. The amount is very far from the $293 million proposed by Mayor Bloomberg last December, in his “21st Century Vision for Lower Manhattan.”

So as it now stands, thousands of apartments will soon go up in lower Manhattan, and only 300 will be affordable to moderate income families, those earning between $50,000 and $85,000 a year. And so far, there has been no Liberty Bond commitment to housing for New Yorkers earning less than $50,000 per year.

Affordable housing advocates still have faith in the Bloomberg administration’s commitment to improve the city’s housing situation. But there is disappointing news.. Homeless statistics are at a record high, vacancy rates painfully low. A new study(in pdf format) out from the Citizen’s Housing and Planning Council estimates that well over 100,000 households counted in the 2000 Census were illegal additions to existing housing structures, attesting to the city’s dire need for additional housing, and one black market solution.

“ That’s a measure of how poorly we’re serving the population with our existing level of commitment to housing,” said Weisbord. “And an indication of how serious the situation is.”

From all outward appearances, Mayor Bloomberg seems determined to do something about it. “We are not going to push our problems, or our responsibilities, off on our children,” he told the New York State Affordable Housing Conference. “New York City has been down that road before -- during the fiscal crisis of the 1970s -- and we know exactly where it leads. We’re still paying the price for that mistake. We won’t make it again.”

Rebecca Webber is a journalist who has covered housing issues for Gotham Gazette since July 2000.

The Department of City Planning recently released a proposal to rezone large sections of Greenpoint and Williamsburg in Brooklyn’s Community District 1. Most of the area to be rezoned is on and near the waterfront. Large sections of the waterfront, now zoned for heavy manufacturing (labeled M3), have been vacant for many years or occupied by industries such as waste transfer facilities strongly opposed by the surrounding community. Williamsburg activists are currently fighting the state’s plan to locate a 1,100 megawatt power plant on a waterfront site the city and community have proposed for a park. (For more information go to Stop The Power Plant).

The city and local community agree that changes have to be made on the waterfront. The current M3 zoning would not allow for the kinds of changes all agree are needed. But is zoning the right tool at this time to make these changes? Zoning is but one among many tools the city has at its disposal. Other tools include housing incentives and subsidies, infrastructure improvements (streets, sidewalks, utilities), industrial and business incentives, and city services (schools, community centers, and parks).

If zoning is changed without doing anything else, however, zoning can actually distort the way development occurs, leading to unwanted results. It can undermine the plan. How can that be?

Zoning Based on Detailed Planning and Programs

Zoning is basically a system for regulating the way land is used. The main “uses” set out in the city’s Zoning Resolution are residential, commercial and industrial. Within each of these uses, zoning sets up a maximum amount of building floor area that can be erected. But how do you know what the right mixture of uses and the right amount of building area should be? You know because you’ve planned the way you want the community to look, not in the abstract but on the ground, block by block. That is, the zoning is based on a detailed plan to develop and preserve the community.

Now, Greenpoint and Williamsburg do have officially approved plans, known as 197-a plans. The plans were made after years of community meetings involving a broad array of groups. Community Board 1 sent the plans to the City Planning Commission which, after numerous changes, approved the plans in 2001.

But these plans outline general principles that include waterfront revitalization, maintaining the mixture of residential and industrial uses, public access to the waterfront, and development of affordable housing. They do not say what uses should prevail on each block, or how much should be built on each block. That takes detailed block-by-block planning, by city agencies, property owners and community organizations working together to achieve the general vision set out in the community plan. It takes a detailed program and budget. Unfortunately, when the City Planning Commission looks at community plans it discourages them from putting in a lot of detail. The approved plans are completely disconnected from the city budget, so ideas mentioned in the plan don’t necessarily find their way into the programs or projects of city agencies. In other words, city agencies can easily file the plans away on a shelf and ignore them. It is then left to community activists to keep struggling so the city will honor them.

In Greenpoint and Williamsburg, the city has not done the detailed planning for redevelopment that should follow the general principles laid out in the approved plans. As a result, many community activists in Greenpoint and Williamsburg look at the zoning proposals and see them as potentially undermining the plan’s principles. Also, the rezoning is moving faster than the planning process, and will make any detailed planning, including design issues, moot.

Where’s The Affordable Housing?

For example, there’s plenty of room for new housing in the zoning proposal, but there’s no whiff of affordable housing, a cornerstone of the community plans. According to the Department of City Planning, making housing affordable isn’t their job. The department rejected proposals for inclusionary zoning in the recently approved Park Slope rezoning in Brooklyn. By rezoning without a plan for affordable housing the city will guarantee that the millions of square feet of new housing to be built on and near the waterfront will be “market-rate”–and out of the reach of most current residents. City planners points to the mayor’s housing plan, a city-wide plan that targets waterfront communities and promises over 65,000 units of affordable housing. But this is a city-wide proposal and there is no guarantee that any of those affordable units will end up in Greenpoint or Williamsburg. So for affordable housing there is no detailed plan. For market-rate housing, there is a detailed “plan”--the city’s rezoning proposal.

A committee of the Rezoning Task Force, a community-based group in Williamsburg, put together a vision statement for affordable housing that gets to the bottom of the issue. The committee states that “the city must guarantee that affordable housing will be integrated into each redevelopment site. Such a guarantee is possible through the implementation of present and any future tools such as: designating the use of ‘inclusionary zoning’ or an ‘affordable housing bonus’ zone, a Tax Increment Financing district, utilization of existing tax abatement programs.”

If we look more closely, the Department of City Planning rezoning plan explicitly negates the principles laid out in the officially approved Williamsburg Plan. That plan states that the city should capitalize on the availability of large underutilized waterfront sites to develop affordable housing and maintain income diversity.

Where’s the Mixed Use?

The Department of City Planning proposal also includes the establishment of mixed use zones (labeled MX), which theoretically would allow both industry and housing to coexist. But there is no detailed block-by-block plan or industry-by-industry plan that will guarantee the retention and development of industry. As a result, many of these blocks that are now zoned exclusively for industry will attract new market-rate investment for housing, pushing out whatever industry that’s left. Again, for market-rate housing there is a detailed plan--the city’s rezoning proposal. For industry, there is nothing—no incentives to grow, controls on rents, or assistance in making them better neighbors and eliminating conflicts with nearby residents. It is easy for planners to sit in their Brooklyn offices and draw lines on a map rezoning large areas of

Greenpoint and Williamsburg for mixed use, but unless something is done proactively to protect industry the net result will be a complete transformation of these areas from mixed use to upscale residential. It will be a “back-door” residential rezoning. (See the last two Land Use articles, about “as-of-right development" and “zoning to kill manufacturing" ). And that runs directly against the community plans approved by Community Board 1, the City Planning Commission and the City Council.

Tom Angotti is Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College, City University of NY, editor of Planners Network Magazine, and a member of the Task Force on Community-based Planning.

When I graduated from college armed with little more than a liberal arts degree and a penchant for fomenting campus protests, I moved back home to Central Brooklyn with visions of homespun revolution dancing through my head. My latest incarnation is that of a journalist, but the array of public identities I’ve traveled over the past 18 years – from political activist, to financial service provider, to economic justice advocate, to self-proclaimed community “organizer” – has always in some way been a pursuit of the idea that black-led social change can be professionalized.

Of course I’m not alone. Across the city there is a small cadre of black people running scrappy, non-profit, community organizing groups rooted in Harlem, the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant and other black and Latino neighborhoods, organizations that are trying to sustain modest institutional challenges against targets like slumlords, predatory corporations and government agencies. In most cases these black-led efforts to build social justice institutions under the banner of community organizing, are struggling to meet payroll, find qualified glack organizers or have their phone calls returned by potential funders.

In a city with the largest concentrations of black people in the country, there are literally hundreds of relatively successful black-led organizations that are building housing, providing social services and fulfilling economic development needs. But when you identify the most well-funded and high profile neighborhood-based organizing bodies that operate in black (and Latino) neighborhoods, arguably none are black-led. An obvious question is, why?

Generally speaking, the term “community organizing” has itself proved problematic, if not exclusionary, in the way it is used. It has become a part of a jargon spoken by political activists, foundation program officers and other industry insiders to define a particular kind of social movement strategy. It is not that the concept of building a base of local leaders and using direct confrontation to address local problems and shift power does not have resonance among lay people. It is just that the assumptions made by many community organizers when they use the term – including myself – are not necessarily shared by the average person they are trying to organize. This is ironic, considering how populist the field of community organizing fancies itself to be.

In black neighborhood settings there is an even greater cultural disconnect when you use the term, especially if you invest it with the values and directives that hold sway among many professional community organizers, particularly those who have received formal training in the field. The problem starts with the idea of an organizer as an outside agitator, a benign progressive soul whose contribution to a community is to identify and train locally embedded leadership and help residents realize their own power. The fact that this model is fraught with paternalistic impulses and often carries with it a white middle-class man’s burden does not mean that organizers of color, particularly college-educated ones, are not susceptible to this view of community organizing themselves.

It’s been my experience that predominately black neighborhoods and organizations are steeped in a different activist tradition and sensibility, one that puts a premium on organizers not only living in, but actually having deep roots in and a personal connection to neighborhoods in which they organize. Consequently, black organizations often see “organizers” and “leaders” as being as one and the same.

Monifa Akinwole-Bandele, the co-executive director of the New York Chapter of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM), a racial justice organization that focuses on freeing political prisoners and fighting police brutality, observes that the dominant view of community organizing stresses the process and means of social change, as opposed to the end. In other words, some feel that the act of people exercising collective power is more socially transformative than the very cause they have taken up.

In Akinwole-Bandele’s view, this is not only a misguided, but disingenuous notion. The benign outsider-organizer paradigm, she says, claims “that the organizer is objective and that the organizer doesn’t come in with an agenda... But, someone’s agenda is always going to be pushed and just coming together for the sake of coming together does not mean the right road will be taken.”

MXGM occasionally finds itself at philosophical odds with others in community organizing circles, mainly because MXGM is upfront about having a political agenda, one that includes a particular historical perspective, takes a sharply defined ideological position and puts forth a social vision. As Akinwole-Bandele sees it, “To not push an agenda is to keep the status quo.”

Roz Lee, the executive director of the New York Organizing Support Center, an organization that provides training and technical assistance to community organizing groups in New York, echoed Akinwole-Bandele’s sentiments. Although the center itself espouses a fairly specific view of organizing, Lee maintains that community organizing opinion makers in New York often do not give enough attention or respect to things that fall outside a certain formula. “I don’t think that there is enough room given to political education and the healing from wounds from the past, wounds from hundreds of years of being degraded.”

Lee, herself African-American, believes that “black-led community organizing contributes to a different style of organizing where consciousness-raising is valuable and necessary…The times our organizing efforts have faltered are the moments we stopped doing consciousness raising.” If you are a black-led group in a black community, Lee observes, “you are probably doing [political education], particularly in the early stages of organizing, and it’s easy to dismiss this as ‘not organizing’.”

The existence of a dominant model of community organizing is important to recognize if only because it affects the degree to which foundations support black-led community organizing work, a level of support that most people I have talked to feel is unsteady, unpredictable and luke warm at best. What “undergirds” this lack of support, is an “unintended racism”, observes Nia Mason, executive director of the Harlem-based Action for Community Empowerment. Foundation program officers like to support “people who know the same people as they do and speak the same language. They work with people who make them feel more comfortable with their investments.” Mason feels black-led community organizing groups are not aggressive enough in self promotion and that it’s “all in the marketing. Funders judge you on how much press you get. They fund who they’ve heard about. It’s a rare funder who will stick their neck out to fund an unknown”.

Alvin Starks, a black program officer with the Open Society Institute is one of the few funding agents in New York City who many black community organizers feel is sympathetic to their plight. Although Starks contends that funding for community organizing is hard to come by for everyone right now in New York, regardless of race, he acknowledges that black-led groups work at a disadvantage, in part because the socio-economic challenges for black neighborhoods are so multi-dimensional that groups often feel as though they don’t have the luxury to focus exclusively on community organizing as a neighborhood development strategy.

Starks addresses this by taking a broader and more ecumenical view of black-led social change work. Rather than getting caught up in defining community organizing, he said he is more interested in investing in “new voices who have strong community ties, have been nurtured by community ties and operate under some level of community accountability”. His guiding philosophy is to promote in disenfranchised neighborhoods “ social capital”, which he defines as public influence, power, access, and the ability to leverage resources.

The very idea of arming aggressive black community-organizing efforts is an unsettling notion, even to the presumed progressives in the funding world. Who can deny that a black-led protest or campaign, especially one that explicitly challenges what it perceives to be racism, has different political implications than the actions of a non black-led group? The specter of a rising “militant” black organization conjures up a singular kind of fear in the American imagination – even among black people themselves.

If you talk to those who care about the viability of community organizing strategies in black neighborhoods, they will concede that some of the most vexing challenges are closer to home. The social activism of the 1960s and 1970s in black New York gave way to a non-profit, civil society that emphasizes electoral activism, different forms of self-help and services like housing or daycare. Direct confrontation seems to be only popular in times of perceived crisis, such as when neighbors storm the local precinct after an act of police brutality or a community board stops a homeless shelter from opening.

Mason, who moved to New York in 1994, says her organizing work is not always understood, much less embraced in Harlem. “Most black people I meet think this work is too strident. They don’t think it’s the most effective way to get the resources that are needed in the community.”

When we look at the organizations that most shape the popular view of black-led social justice organizing – SCLC, SNCC, the Nation of Islam, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the Black Panthers – the image that people are left with is a handful of charismatic figures – mostly men - who courageously lead the masses. The result is that unless there are personalities who commandeer the headlines, the perception is that there is a lack of social change leadership in black communities.

Historically, Lee observes, there is in black communities, a prevailing “ one voice, one leader, one people” paradigm: “There is a reliance on the kind of large scale leadership represented by people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and it gives the impression that there is a homogenous group of black people standing behind these figures and that this is the only activity going on. It’s hard to see other activity under the radar screen.” Even Akinwole-Bandele admits that her organization’s approach to leadership development, which eschews the cult of personality and promotes “platforms, not people” often goes against the expectations of most people in a neighborhood like Bedford-Stuyvesant, the area MXGM considers to be its base.

One way or the other, for real ass-kicking, black-led, professional community organizing to flourish in New York City, black organizations will certainly have to craft a model of organizing that resonates even deeper with its constituency and establishes a more mutually supportive relationship with this base. Because at the end of day, if you want to find what is truly driving the agenda of any organization, follow the money.

In that respect, maybe the current foundation climate is as much a time for hope and opportunity as it is a time of hardship. Akinwole-Bandele found that the difficult time she has had in attracting foundation support forced her organization to engage its membership more and raise a greater share of its budget through fundraising events and grassroots fundraising campaigns. “We have become more isolated” with regard to foundations, she says, “but it’s going to make us stronger”.

Mark Winston Griffith, a writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Essence and Spin, is also founder of the non-profit Central Brooklyn Partnership, which organizes people to build economic power.