Good morning. It’s Tuesday. We’ll look at Via Verde, which was planned as a model of beautiful, sustainable subsidized housing in the South Bronx, through the eyes of The New York Times’s architecture critic.
When it opened in 2011, the Via Verde development in the South Bronx stood out as handsome and dignified, an attempt at better architecture and sustainable design that promised value to match the cost. Michael Kimmelman, The Times’s architecture critic, wrote at the time that Via Verde came with an ambitious goal: to reimagine subsidized housing. The development had features that were unusual for public housing, like a rooftop gym and a community garden where residents could grow fruits and vegetables, in a neighborhood that’s still short on options for fresh food.
I spoke with Michael, who has just taken a fresh look at Via Verde, about how it has fared.
You’ve kept up with residents there, who moved in 12 years ago. How do they feel about living there?
The residents tell me that they appreciate the fact that it is a very safe place, and the safety comes partly from the fact that it is, in effect, gated — the entrance is monitored by a concierge, a doorman behind a desk. That provides the place with a measure of security, because there’s someone to monitor who goes in and out, which a lot of housing developments didn’t include.
Why not?
Partly for economic reasons, but also because in the 1960s and 1970s, housing projects were designed to have porous, open campuses that were full of entrances and exits and often had interlinked hallways. It was very difficult to police those spaces.
The fact that you have a doorman at Via Verde creates more of a sense of a residential community. The people who live there are known. The minor trade-off in privacy is offset by the benefits of having someone who’s watching and also doing things like collecting packages.
It doesn’t take much to provide a certain level of security. Jane Jacobs famously talked about eyes on the street, which was about the fact that people don’t do things they shouldn’t be doing if they feel they’re being watched. There is collective power in simply having people watching. They don’t have to be armed. They don’t have to be aggressive. They’re just there.
How different was the design from other housing projects? How unusual was the look, and why did that matter?
The ambition for Via Verde was to show that just because a project was built for 100 percent affordability and some of its residents were formerly homeless, it didn’t have to go without visual or aesthetic qualities.
It’s important to remember that under the Bloomberg administration, there was a real emphasis on design quality for public buildings. Via Verde and other buildings and parks that were designed under Bloomberg were supposed to raise the level of public design, in the spirit of the New Deal and all the extraordinary public buildings that New York had built in the 20th century.
So it was aspirational, and it worked.
Right. Via Verde was about showing what might be. The blowback against it was always that it was expensive, it was exceptional and it got a lot of political support, but back here on planet Earth, it was not how buildings actually get built.
Via Verde proved above all the importance of bringing all agencies together and using everything the government has available to it to make projects like this possible in the shortest period of time. Our biggest problem is not that we don’t know what good design could be or that we don’t understand what sustainable design is; it’s that we have created a system with so many impediments, so many ways for a project to be delayed or compromised.
When Via Verde came along, we also needed to change the conversation around architecture and subsidized housing. Architecture had come to be too focused on very high-end projects for museums and elite institutions and the wealthy, whereas it could play a more fundamental role in public welfare and equity.
You quoted someone who said that Via Verde cost $99 million and turned out to be “the least expensive most expensive project.”
That was Adam Weinstein, who runs the nonprofit that manages the building. According to him, the building has been far less expensive to maintain than similar buildings of the same vintage that were not built the way Via Verde was.
There was a premium paid for the architecture and some of the sustainable elements in Via Verde, which are now standard but weren’t at the time. The expense was ultimately justified, because at the heart of Via Verde was an argument that smart, sustainable, dignified architecture has both an economic and a social benefit. The building showed respect for the residents, and residents in turn respected the building. There is an argument that if you treat people with dignity, they will treat you and the community with dignity. If you tell people they are worthless, then what do you expect their reaction to be?
This is not to say that Via Verde did not have its share of mishaps. The bamboo cabinetry was intended to be forward-thinking, but it turned out they fell apart and had to be replaced.
You have a personal interest in Via Verdi. It was what you wrote about when you first became The Times’s architecture critic.
Architecture is often written about before the buildings are used. It’s like writing about a restaurant before anybody eats there. I promised in that first article to follow up once people moved in. Buildings are not sculpture; they’re lived experience.
I also think it’s important to follow up on things that we tell the public about. I’m glad that Via Verde has worked out for the people who lived there, but I would have been interested if it hadn’t. We owe it to the public to say if something fails, and why.
Weather
There could be sledding, snowballs and snowmen in Central Park by midafternoon.
The city is preparing for its largest snowfall in two years, with the National Weather Service saying that a powerful storm could blanket parts of the city, Long Island and northeastern New Jersey with four to eight inches of snow. A winter storm warning took effect at 4 a.m.
The storm will be intense while it lasts, with some areas expected to get up to two inches an hour, but will taper off by midafternoon. Expect temperatures in the high 30s, with wind chills between 20 and 30. At night, temperatures drop into the high 20s.
New York City public schools will hold classes remotely today, and public libraries across the city will be closed.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect today. Suspended tomorrow (Ash Wednesday).
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Bronx Tony
Dear Diary:
I was visiting New York City with a friend some years ago. We hailed a cab outside our hotel and headed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
We were thrilled. The cab was a Checker, and at the wheel was who seemed to us an authentic New York cabby: heavy Bronx accent, unlit cigar, driver’s cap.
Hearing that we were from Fort Worth, Texas, he regaled us with stories about the Bronx and advised us on where to get the best Italian food in the city. His name was Tony.
When we got to the museum, we paid the fare, said our goodbyes and got out. We were just entering the museum when we heard someone calling our names.
