Public Space, Private Rules: The Legal Netherworld of Occupy Wall Street

The New York Police Department's announcement that officers will remove Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park at 7 a.m. tomorrow is a reminder that the movement was lucky to stumble into that location. Had the protest begun almost anywhere else in New York City, it almost certainly would have been shut down far sooner.
The three-plus-week-old protest has allowed New York to make use one of its least effective policies. Zuccotti Park is one of New York’s 500-plus “privately owned public spaces,” but most are so useless and unattractive that no one even thinks of them as parks at all.
The POPS program was creating in 1961 to add much-needed park space to Manhattan’s unrelenting street grid. The city offered a deal to real estate developers: create a public space on your property, and earn the ability to extend the building 20 percent higher. Zuccotti Park—originally known as Liberty Park before it was renamed after the CEO of its corporate owner—was built in 1968 under such an agreement.
Developers were quick to jump on the opportunity to squeeze more space (and thus profit) into Manhattan’s expensive, narrow land plots. Some buildings created two spaces: Zuccotti Park, for example, was built as part of the deal to construct 1 Liberty Plaza, across Liberty Street. That building got its height bonus for putting a typically useless and unattractive “plaza,” ringed with concrete pillars, around the structure itself. But in exchange for further special zoning permits, such as an exemption from a requirement that the building be set back for light and air, the company also built the park across the street.
For many years, the city government imposed no requirements on how the spaces were to be designed and decorated. Unsurprisingly, developers took that as license to do as little as possible. Thus, many POPS are nothing more than an empty swath of concrete in front of an office tower, breaking up an aesthetically consistent row of buildings. For examples of POPS at their worst, check out Park Avenue in Midtown or the building across Broadway from Zuccotti Park. A 2007 study by the New York City Department of City Planning, the Municipal Art Society and Jerold Kayden, a professor of urban planning at Harvard, found that 41 percent of POPS "are of marginal utility." At the other end of the spectrum, only "16 percent of the spaces are actively used as regional destinations or neighborhood gathering spaces..."

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Ben Adler @'GOOD'