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Historic preservation is a better business model.

The work stoppage at Halo tower construction site points to why we need a different model of economic development.

As also published by the local paper TAPinto

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Jersey Digs and TAPinto reported last week that amid lawsuits and protests, work had stopped on the 38-floor Halo skyscraper in Newark. The developers claimed that their lender was unable to make good on the $90 million construction loan. If the developer is unable to get their funds in order, that tower will become another rusting and unfinished shell like Harry Grant’s proposal to build the world’s tallest skyscraper in Newark. Until it was demolished to build Prudential Center, Grant’s unfinished Renaissance Mall abandoned mid-construction was a visual eyesore on Broad Street for decades.
At 38 floors with 297 units, the per unit cost of construction of Halo will be just over $300,000. This is one of the more expensive towers downtown. By comparison with another recently completed project, at 21 floors with 264 units, the per unit construction cost was $240,000 at Walker House. (source) Halo tower is all new construction. Walker House is adaptive reuse of an existing historic building. Based on industry data, adaptive reuse of old buildings costs 16 percent less than ground-up construction, and it reduces construction schedules by 18 percent. (source)
For many new projects, the cost of using all new materials, steel structural frames, and concrete floors will increase the cost of construction. Instead of building from scratch like at Halo, downtown Newark still has no shortage of vacant and century-old office skyscrapers that could have been converted to residential use. Newark has no shortage of vacancies: the 16-story Firemen’s Insurance Company Building, the 12-story Kinney Building, the 10-story Chamber of Commerce Building, the 20-story IDT building, the 15-story Griffith Building, as well as dozens of other smaller-scale vacant buildings near Broad and Market. The adaptive reuse of these older structures is also eligible for significant Historic Preservation Tax Credits that can cover up to 20 percent of all construction costs. This is a more sustainable business model.
In addition, the Downtown Newark BID reported that in 2023, about one sixth of all downtown office space was vacant (source). This figure does not include the above vacant office towers that have been off the market for decades and are not currently available to rent. At the intersection of Broad and Market, the ground floors of most buildings are occupied. But the upper floors are entirely vacant – many for decades. Factoring in all buildings in downtown Newark, the actual vacancy rate is a good deal higher and approaches thirty percent by my estimate.
To insist on all new construction when the vacancy rate is so high in older existing structures does not make good economic sense. The priority should be to solve the existing vacancy rate before embarking on ambitious new construction, particularly in our city’s historic districts.
Despite tax breaks and state subsidies for downtown Newark that total more than a billion dollars in the past thirty years (source), the downtown property market remains fragile. My concern is that putting up many new luxury towers in a time of soft market demand will not address either the vacancy problem or the need for long-term and permanent affordable housing.
Beyond high-rise skyscrapers, there is another (and more sustainable) development model we should be encouraging: the incremental construction of mid-rise infill buildings in existing neighborhoods. Instead of a skyscraper like Halo perched on a five-story car garage at street level, downtown developers need to focus on filling in the gaps in our urban fabric. Downtown Newark has at least 200 acres of surface parking. (source) The priority should be filling this land to create complete streetscapes and an uninterrupted row of occupied buildings on a walkable sidewalk.
The developers and lawyer behind Halo and copy-cat projects of near-identical design at 577 Broad Street say that we have a housing shortage, and building more luxury towers will solve that shortage. The historical record does not support this claim. Manhattan had a population 40 percent larger in the 1910s, and Newark had a population 40 percent larger in the 1950s. Both cities accomplished this feat of downtown population density entirely through mid-rise construction during a time before skyscrapers. The results were neighborhoods of small buildings, instead of a complex of super tall buildings – isolated from the street and cut off from the city like Newark Gateway Center. Today, as in history, the past provides examples of successful and unsuccessful urbanism. Let us learn from history.

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A Different Model for Urbanism

A better model is possible: The Vermella Project at Broad Street Station, the new construction next to the PATH train in Harrison, and the Teachers Village project across the street from Halo represent a different and more sustainable development model. They are each a series of smaller buildings with separate entrances around courtyards with public space. Had financing been interrupted midway through, the developers of each would have still had two or three completed and market-ready structures in a larger complex.
The famous architect and city planner Daniel Burnham is known to have remarked in the 1870s: “Make no little plans.” Following his belief, the problem in Newark is that we have made too many “big plans.” This hubris includes skyscrapers of the scale there are not funds to complete, like Halo and Harry Grant’s ego towers. This hubris includes structures so large they require either long-term construction loans or significant taxpayer subsidies, like Prudential Center that is unlikely to ever make good on the $200 million in public funds we gave them. This hubris includes the seven billion dollars we promised the Amazon Corporation in our attempt to bring their global headquarters to Newark.
In an unpredictable market with high interest rates, now is not the time for skyscrapers aiming to be the tallest in the region, metaphorical Towers of Babel. Now is the time for a human-scale urbanism of walk-up townhouses, infill buildings, and mid-rise structures of less than 10 stories on smaller lots. This makes more financial sense. This makes more urban sense. And this makes more sense for what Newark needs most: a human-scale urbanism of the kind we once had before mid-century urban renewal.
As the City of Newark considers continued upzoning the Ironbound and more megastructures, now is the time to learn from the best of history with the tools of historic preservation.

Harry Grant’s tower: A history of moonshot development in Newark

Envisioning Seneca Village

A project by Gergely Baics, Meredith Linn, Leah Meisterlin, Myles Zhang

In collaboration with the Central Park Conservancy and the Institute for the Exploration of Seneca Village History

Email project authors here if you have questions.

 

As featured in the magazine of Barnard College at Columbia University
As featured by the Central Park Conservancy, the park’s official website

 

Envisioning Seneca Village is a project depicting what this significant nineteenth-century village might have looked like in the summer of 1855, about two years before it was destroyed by the City of New York to build Central Park. It features an interactive 3D model, a non-interactive tour through the 3D model (A Tour through Seneca Village), and supplementary materials. The project is anchored in extensive scholarship and aims to make the village’s history visible to a wide audience. The project is also a work in progress with updates, additions, and new features planned soon.
Seneca Village was a community established by African Americans in 1825, two years before emancipation was completed in New York State. By the mid-nineteenth century, the village was the home of at least 50 families—about ⅔ Black and ⅓ white, mostly Irish. It was situated on an approximately four-block area east of present-day Central Park West between 82nd and 86th Streets, which was then a few miles north of the city’s urban core and between the villages of Bloomingdale to the west and Yorkville to the east. This location offered a safer, freer environment to live than downtown. Villagers built a thriving, complex, and heterogeneous community with core institutions including three churches and a school. Seneca Village’s destruction by the City in 1857 abruptly ended 30 years of successful efforts to nurture families, sustain livelihoods, and create community. It was also the first instance in a long history of the City’s abuse of eminent domain to sacrifice Black neighborhoods for urban development projects—in this case, to build a world-famous park.

 

3D Model References and Methodology. See also: Tips for Navigating the Model.

As residents scattered to different parts of New York and the Northeast, the Park construction crew buried building debris, covering it with landscaped lawns, hills, and paths. The community’s memory faded for a century and a half. Yet the lives the villagers made there left both an archival paper trail and extensive material traces underground. Since the 1990s historians, archeologists, educators, descendants, and artists have mined the fragmentary sources, excavated the site, and sought new ways to recover the village’s history and memory.
Despite all of the information that researchers have unearthed, there is a lot that is still unknown about the village and its community members. It is hard to imagine what it was like to live there. No photos or drawings survive, the present-day Central Park site is devoid of above-ground traces of Seneca Village’s built environment, and this region of New York City was quite different in the nineteenth century than today. Envisioning Seneca Village addresses these blindspots by creating a visual interpretation of the village that integrates social historical, archival, and archeological evidence into digital cartographic and architectural reconstruction. Through this model we seek to amplify existing scholarship, help visitors to learn more about the village’s history, catalyze new research with the questions the model raises, and above all, keep the memory and spirit of this past community alive in the present.
Further Reading on Seneca Village
Envisioning Seneca Village is a collaborative project between Gergely Baics, Meredith Linn, Leah Meisterlin, and Myles Zhang that integrates our expertise in archaeology, social history, historical geographic information systems (GIS), and digital architectural reconstruction. The project has been aided by research assistants, additional support from the Central Park Conservancy, and generous guidance from a diverse group of Seneca Village advisors and stakeholders. Learn more about the project and team.
Project Table of Contents (site map)

Project Map Launch

Juneteenth 2024 in Central Park, at the site that was once Seneca Village

 

Project Workflow

Setting Up Sex Offenders for Failure

How the intersection of law and city planning exposes sex offenders to longer prison sentences

Published to the AGORA: Issue 18, 2023-24
The Urban Planning and Design Journal at the University of Michigan

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Abstract:

Our nation’s laws for sex offenders, although designed to protect the public, often have the opposite effect: increasing the chance sex offenders will be re-arrested and re-convicted for new crimes. The core of the problem is not that public safety rules, like Megan’s Law, are too weak. The problem is that these laws are written too strongly and too powerfully that they have the reverse effect: increasing the chances that sex offenders will commit new crimes. There are many problems with sex offender laws: too weak in areas they should be stronger; too strong in areas where they should be more flexible. But today I will examine just one aspect of the sex offender registry (the home address requirement) and how it affects one place (New York City). This analysis of New York City points to concrete and better ways to protect public safety than the current system: ways that reforming Megan’s Law will increase public safety.

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Article:

Download article as PDF / open in new window >

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Acknowledgements:

Thank you to dissertation advisers Dan O’Flaherty for his research on homelessness and Mary Gallagher for her advice on case law. This essay was originally written for Heather Ann Thompson’s fall 2023 PhD seminar on The American Carceral State. Most of all, thank you to editor Jessie Williams for her patient and insightful line edits.

Homeownership and the Racial Wealth Gap

Presented March 5, 2024 at the Newark Public Library

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The world’s largest concentration of wealth is in the New York City metropolitan area, yet the region contains many under-resourced cities, including Newark. What historical factors created this division between low-income Newark and its wealthy neighbors along lines of race, housing, income and social class?
The agents of change are more complex and nuanced than a simple narrative of redlining and white flight following the 1967 uprising. From discriminatory actions by the Federal Housing Administration and highways that carved through the urban fabric, to suburbs that pulled middle-class families away from Newark and factories that relocated outside of the city, contemporary poverty in Newark was more than a century in the making.
Drawing from the archives of the Newark Public Library, this presentation examines the range of challenges Newark faces and how the city overcomes. This is a Newark History Society program, co-sponsored by NJPAC and the Newark Public Library. Light refreshments will be served.
The presenter is Myles Zhang, urban historian and doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
This presentation will evolve into my dissertation entitled:
“An island of poverty in a vast ocean of material prosperity”:
Homeownerhip and the Racial Wealth Gap in Newark

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1959 Map of “Blighted” Areas by Newark Central Planning Board

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View event on NJPAC website

Jersey City: Urban Planning in Historical Perspective

This project in two parts is a brief history of city planning in Jersey City
and a building-level interactive map of the entire city in 1873, 1919, and today.

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Read / download book as PDF

Download opens in new window

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Jersey City: Urban Planning in Historical Perspective
A booklet about the history of the master plan

Over its four-century history, the evolution of Jersey City mirrors the larger history of the New York region. Each generation of Jersey City residents and political leaders have faced different urban challenges, from affordable housing, to clean water, to air pollution, and income inequality. Each generation has responded through the tools of city planning and the master plan.
Jersey City’s six master plans – dated 1912, 1920, 1951, 1966, 1982, and 2000 – capture the city at six historical moments. Reading these plans and comparing them to each other is a lens to understand urban history, and American history more broadly.

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Classroom Discussion Questions

1. How has the built environment of Jersey City evolved in the past century?
2. Who has the right to plan a city?
3. Who has the right to shape a city’s future?
4. Do you feel you have power over the plan of your city?

Read More

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Mapping Manhattan Chinatown’s Public Realm

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Created with architect and urbanist Stephen Fan for City as Living Lab
Funded by the University of Michigan’s Rackham Program in Public Scholarship

Inspired by reading the book Manhattan’s Public Spaces:
Production, Revitalization, Commodification
by Ana Morcillo Pallarés

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View full size image.

Chinatown’s Public Realm

Along Mott Street, boxes of fruits and vegetables from the US, Latin America, and China flow from the private open storefronts and onto the public sidewalks and curbs. Forklifts navigate around crates and delivery trucks as vendors, residents, tourists, and shoppers–from regional Asian restaurant owners to West-African immigrants–animate the narrow walkways. After business hours, private produce stands become public places to sit, chat, people-watch, or nap as a sidewalk masseuse sets up two chairs on the public sidewalk to provide his private services.
Away from the commercial corridors, teenagers sit in circles sipping on bubble tea on the Pace High School track while senior citizens slap playing cards on a makeshift table along the track perimeter. Inside the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, teachers begin their Chinese language class while protesters in Columbus Park call for ending violence against Asian Americans.
In creating this map, we hope to stimulate conversations about how public space can be better used, designed, managed, and reimagined: to inspire action in shaping a more resilient and inclusive public realm.

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Read the map in English and Chinese PDF. 阅读简体中文版

2,500+ copies printed and distributed

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Credits and Collaborators:

In alphabetical order

Stephen Fan – co-author

Lulu Barry – map docent
Kari Conte – CALL staff
Liza Cucco – program manager
Olivia Georgia – executive director of CALL
Shane Keaney – graphic designer
Rebecca Lucher – programs and operations
Mary Miss – founder and artistic director of CALL
Calla Flood Tardino – CALL staff
Chloe Zhang – map docent

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Process

This map illustrates the public/private uses/spaces of Manhattan Chinatown’s pedestrian life. The map is divided into two sections: the upper depicts public spaces, and the lower section private spaces. From left to right are a spectrum of private to public uses.
In consultation with Chinatown residents and based on a series of walking tours and community forums, we developed the themes and activities shown on this map. We were inspired from reading Jane Jacobs and Michael Sorkin’s descriptions of street life and the delicate balance of public vs. private uses that play out on the city sidewalks. We hope this map will be a classroom and community resource to equip the public with a language and questions to interrogate their own built environments.
Below are scenes from a community event we held in summer 2021. Chinatown residents were invited to annotate an early draft of our map with their experiences and memories of the community.
In addition, over spring and summer 2024, City as Living Lab commissioned two students as map docents – Lulu Barry and Chloe Zhang – to sit in front of the map each Friday and Sunday afternoon. They engaged in conversation at their table with passing Chinatown residents and tourists, sharing insights from the map and eliciting community responses to this project. Thanks to their work, this project now has a larger audience and copies of the map are distributed across dozens of Chinatown community partners.

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Walking Tours and Community Meetings

From summer 2024

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Chinese music: Feng Yang (The Flower Drum)

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Reflections on my experience as PhD student, halfway through the program

As a third year student, I am more than halfway through the PhD program. So I thought now is as good a time as any to reflect.
In the same spirit of making public my undergraduate application to study at Columbia and my PhD application to study at Michigan, I am sharing the exam essays I wrote as a PhD student. When applying to Columbia, Oxford, Cambridge, and now Michigan, I struggled to find online example essays and statements that had worked for other applicants. In my case, I was fortunate to have academic parents to read my application statements and college professors to mentor me on how they saw admissions from the other side of the table. But I also realize that most applicants do not have these kinds of advantages in their social networks and must rely more on the internet for advice.
After 40 credits of coursework to be completed in no more than two years, I am expected to take a series of exams that qualify me to write the dissertation. When applying to PhD programs, I had no idea there were prelim exams or what the requirements were. Each prelim exam is different, unique to the student and my relationship with the faculty committee members on my dissertation. The exams consist of four things:

1. A Prelim Reading List: books assigned to me by committee members Robert Fishman, Ana Morcillo Pallarés, and Matthew Lassiter.
This list is the basis for their two questions.

2. A Minor Essay on Metropolitan History: written in 48 hours timed environment

3. A Major Essay on 20th-c. Urban History: written in 96 hours

4. A 90-minute exam with full committee to grill me on knowledge of reading list and topics not covered in the essays

I am posting them online, not as a “model” for what the ideal exam should look like and more as an inflection point and sample of the document that the members on your committee could expect you to write some day. In full disclosure, I am also sharing the draft of what will become my PhD proposal and the rough draft of three chapters completed. Maybe this reduces the cultural capital required to succeed at elite institutions. At the least, it is the kind of document I wish I could have had and known about when I was applying to PhD programs.

Read More

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PhD Dissertation Project (draft in progress)

Creating the Divided Metropolis:
How Newark came to be a poor city in a wealthy region

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Architecture

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Project Brief

“Wherever American cities are going, Newark will get there first” Mayor Kenneth Gibson declared in 1970, as the first black mayor of any major city in what is now the American Northeast and the Rust Belt. The history of Newark’s urban decline is specific to Newark and unique to the details of this city. And yet, Newark’s story is national in its implications, and mirrored in hundreds of other American cities large and small that also experienced decline.
From the 1950s through 1970s, Newark embarked on one of the most extensive programs of state-funded urban renewal in the nation, less costly only than those of New York City (20 times Newark’s population); Chicago (eight times larger); Philadelphia (five times larger), and Boston (twice as large). Newark’s program was certainly among the most ambitious: to clear out the areas called slums, to construct highways, to build public housing, to stimulate the urban economy, and – in the end – to stop urban decline. And yet for all the billions spent and an estimated 70,000 out of Newark’s 400,000 people displaced, the program failed to reverse urban economic and population decline. What mixture of actors and institutions – city planners, politicians, realtors, developers, and banks – caused Newark’s program to fail?
This project describes how two national programs impacted Newark: urban renewal (a program that invested in keeping the city stable) and redlining (a program that deprived investment to make the city unstable). The two programs – both initiated by local, regional, and federal governments and designed to profit real estate developers – coexisted and undermined each other in a decade of flaws and contradictions. Redlining usually refers to the practice when banks choose to not invest in a certain neighborhood or city because of the race of who lives there. Redlining is racial and economic discrimination. More importantly, although rarely framed in such terms, redlining describes the practice more broadly of choosing not to invest in a place because it is a city and considered a less profitable investment. Banks, developers, realtors, businesses, department stores, and the fabric of social institutions vital for urban life all migrated from the city to the suburbs. These other institutions all redlined Newark independently of the real estate lobby. More than anti-black, redlining is anti-urban.
This project frames Newark’s story in national terms. Each chapter examines one form of redlining in Newark, and then frames this form of localized redlining in the national picture of urban abandonment. There are five frames: transportation, finance, housing, welfare, and employment. This range of actors across areas – public and private, local and national – did not collaborate in a conspiracy to deprive Newark and the American city of wealth. But their actions overlapped and mutually reinforced each other to leave the American city behind and ensure that attempts to save the city through state-funded urban renewal would fail. Through anti-urban redlining practices in each of these five areas – transportation, finance, housing, welfare, and employment – urban decline was the inevitable result. The history of all places is told through one place, and the history of one place is told through all places.

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Drafts of Chapters in Progress

Interstate Highways in Newark

Public Housing in Newark

How an infrastructure project ruined a racially integrated neighborhood
How public housing was designed to fail black families

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Committee Members

Robert Fishman, planning history
Ana Morcillo Pallarés, built environment
Matthew Lassiter, urban/suburban history

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See all my urban history publications about this place

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See all my artwork about urban decline and urban decay

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