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Chatel and her neighbor, Lewis Greenstein, whose three-story clapboard house has been in his family since the 1940s, began collecting oral histories about their properties. They hoped to prove to city officials, who seemed bent on redevelopment, that the whole block had once played an important part in the vast network of safe-houses for escaped slaves known as the underground Railroad. Although much of the physical evidence has gone missing over the years—in particular, two Civil War-era, pot-bellied stoves installed in Greenstein’s basement—the amount and quality of testimony and circumstantial evidence the two neighbors collected was enough to launch a half-million-dollar, three-year investigation by the city. As Greenstein told me—in what might have been his best Donald Rumsfeld imitation—“it’s been a long hard slog.” And the results, finally released this winter by AKRF, a private consulting firm hired by the city, don’t look good for the
two amateur historians.

Though the AKRF report acknowledged that oral traditions are sometimes all the evidence we have left of Underground Railroad activity, the six houses on Duffield Street nevertheless failed to meet the bar for preservation, leaving the city in the clear to demolish them and move ahead with a proposed 60-story office building with service road and parking garage.

It’s probably little consolation to those affected, but in New York these days, battles like the one on Duffield Street are increasingly common. Easily the most infamous controversy concerning the city’s use of eminent domain—essentially, the government’s right to reclaim private property for public use—is the colossal, Frank Gehry-designed Atlantic Yards project less than a mile away from Chatel’s home in Brooklyn. Other acrimonious debates surround Columbia University’s planned
expansion into the industrial neighborhood of Manhattanville and the proposed bulldozing of over 200 businesses in a muddy, highway-enclosed enclave of Queens called Willets Point.

In all these cases, city and state agencies are relying on the power of eminent domain to sanction detailed and expensive new development plans on privately owned property. Land use studies were initiated long before the owners ever found out about them, and once they did—usually by looking carefully at stories in the local newspapers—charged, bureaucratic words like “appropriation,” “condemnation,” “fair warning,” and “the public good” began to take on entirely new meanings.

In the U.S., eminent domain has a long and varied history. It has been used by local and national legislatures in cases where the government retains the property title (to build public schools, hospitals, and highways, for example). It has been used in cases where the government transfers property to a private entity but the general public still has access to the land or services provided on it (for things like railroads, shipping ports, and electrical substations). It has even been used in cases where the property is transferred and the land is kept closed, but where “indispensable public goods” are being created or provided (think mines, dams, and grist mills). None of these cases are particularly controversial, as they are rights given to cities based on traditions of constitutional law dating back to the 18th century.

But there has been tremendous controversy in the New York City cases, mainly because a government body is proposing to take private property from a private citizen (or small group of individuals) and give it to another private institution—not so that the institution can provide indispensable public services like electricity or telephones, but so that it can better pursue its own goals. To be sure, a case has to be made that the institution’s goals overlap with the goals of the larger public, whether that means increasing jobs in a particular area or doing research that might result in a cure for a disease like Alzheimer’s. But in most instances, the public that pays the price for those goals is not the same public that will benefit from the promised payoffs.

In summer 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court—in the now famously incendiary case, Kelo v. New London—revisited the meaning of the so-called takings clause of the Fifth Amendment, which describes the sovereign’s power of eminent domain. The down-and-out city of New London, Connecticut, intended to seize private property, including resident Susette Kelo’s home on the Thames River, as part of a massive redevelopment plan that would include building a hotel, conference center, and state park. Kelo and nine others refused to sell to the city, which condemned the properties, so the owners sued, claiming New London had abused its right of eminent domain. The Supreme Court upheld the city’s action. Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority, concluded that a “broad latitude” should be afforded to local governments “in determining what public needs justify the use of the takings power.” In other words, local governments can take one person’s property and hand it over—even to a private entity—as long as there is some plausible “public benefit.”

The Court’s decision was, from a legal standpoint, unsurprising—Stevens’ opinion cited a long history of such plans being approved by the high court, from the government giving a mining company the right to transport ore over another’s land in 1890s Utah to a large-scale urban renewal plan in Washington, D.C. in the 1950s. Still, it refocused political attention on the issues, and critics on both the right and left have been deriding the ruling ever since. Many of them object to giving government the right to transfer property from one person to another, simply because the new owner will make more productive, or profitable, use of it—a Ritz Carlton in place of a Motel 6, or a shopping mall in place of a home, to paraphrase Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s dissent. Others think outright bans on economic development takings would have unintended negative consequences on healthy urban development and have argued that a better way to protect private property rights is to have eminent domain proceedings go through a genuine public planning process. Thomas Merrill, an administrative law professor at Columbia University who testified before Congress about eminent domain reform in 2005, suggested states adopt a statute requiring local governments and agencies “to consider a range of options to the proposed project, make available background information to the affected community, allow for public comment and hold public hearings”—a process the federal Environmental Protection Agency already regularly conducts.

Whatever your views of the Supreme Court’s ruling, one thing is hard to deny: the Kelo case continues to shine a light on city government and the agencies that act on its behalf. In New York, it’s often said—half facetiously, half seriously—that real estate is the city’s most profitable industry. But to some, its recent, aggressive use of eminent domain, often involving ambitious, developer-driven “revitalization” projects, casts more than a little doubt on who the city’s real constituents are.

 

As knowledge grows, it needs more space

ne evening in early 2004, after years of administrative rumblings about the lack of space at its present location, Columbia, an Ivy League university in upper Manhattan, presented a plan. The celebrated Italian architect Renzo Piano showed a few preliminary sketches to a northern Manhattan community board for a projected new campus in their neighborhood. On a seventeen-acre sliver of land next to the Hudson River, just ten blocks north of the current main campus, Piano’s renderings depicted towering glass structures with deep public plazas and densely peopled streetscapes. The towers—some rising to 25 stories—were to house medical research facilities and studio spaces for the Graduate School of Art. But in contrast to the main campus, where common areas are blocked off to the public, Piano stressed the need for “urbanity” and “openness”; he explained that the lower floors were to be kept transparent and, on major thoroughfares, they would house restaurants, shops, and art galleries.

Even worse, Piano’s vision didn’t include many of the old warehouses—the 19th century milk-pasteurization plants and horse stables—that are there now. And the university was adamant about controlling the whole site, but only owned 67.5 percent of it. Although Columbia was sure to advertise the project’s expected benefits to the community, including 7,000 new jobs over the next 25 to 30 years, local community leaders and property owners balked…loudly. Some didn’t like it that privately controlled land would stand between Riverside Park and the rest of the community.

According to Brad Lander, president of the Pratt Center for Community Development, a non-profit that has been giving planning advice to the local community board, the university has been exceptionally ham-handed in dealing with residents. Anne Whitman, owner of Hudson North American, an art transportation business at the corner of Broadway and 130th Street, said in a phone interview that university representatives made aggressive offers on her property as early as 2003. “[Columbia reps] went door to door, saying ‘You can deal with me now or deal with the state later,” she says. “And sometime around then, I got a letter on Columbia stationery, on Columbia letterhead, notifying me that my property was eligible for eminent domain.”

Other residents didn’t even get that much: Louisa Enrique, for instance, never received an official condemnation notice or an offer to buy, but she’s as just as worried about losing a building she’s lived in for nearly 30 years. Hers is one of 59 households in the targeted expansion area taking part in a city-sponsored program that transfers city-owned, often dilapidated,
property to responsible tenants. Observers say the university assumed it could swing a deal for the land directly with Housing Preservation and Development, which runs the program. But the tenants gain ownership officially in 2009, well before Columbia breaks ground. And anyway, to Ms. Enrique, it’s already a done deal. She helps with repairs on her building, pays the bills, and cleans as if the place were already hers. The 30 other tenants in her building feel the same way, she says.

The impasse between Columbia and the Manhattan residents has resulted in two separate visions of the future campus. The community board wants an integrated plan, in which many existing warehouses and tenement buildings are left untouched, while university president Lee Bollinger keeps sweetening the deal with incidental benefits, such as teen education and job placement programs.

For Mr. Bollinger’s part, he’s convinced the public has misunderstood his institution’s motives. “We are not a profit-making institution looking out for our own advantage,” he told the New York Times. “We are trying to do things that help the world more broadly. The community is not everything.” And in a recent interview with the New York Obser er, he stated even more matter-of-factly: “In my view, it would be irresponsible to take eminent domain off the table. I don’t know if we’ll ask for it—I hope not—but certainly I think that, when there is an economic interest standing in the way of a public purpose, like major work on the brain that may cure diseases like Alzheimer’s, I think we should be in a position to use it or call for its use.”

Ms. Whitman, the art business owner, is unconvinced. “They say anyone who isn’t selling is just trying to get more money,” she says, “but all I want is to pass my business on to my three boys.”

Truesdell’s Ghost

Across the East River in Brooklyn, Lewis Greenstein, the owner of the house on Duffield Street, also has something he wants to pass on to another generation. He explained the whole story recently on a grand tour of his building’s historic subbasement. During some recent excavation in front of 225 Duffield Street, workers opened up the sidewalk and found a tunnel. “I saw the tunnel, I saw them dropping a big oil tank into it. They never knew what they found. But some time later Joy comes out and tells me ‘my husband always said there was an open room in front of our basement’—and then it hit me: Carl was right,” Lew says. “This is an Underground Railroad site.”

As Greenstein tells it, Carl Smith was a former Black Panther who, in the 1970’s, did time with Sonny Carson (of The Education of Sonny Carson fame). His mother was a well-know Brooklyn activist, Georgia Warre, who, along with James Cuffee, taught Carl and other neighborhood kids about the need to own property in the African American community. “If you’re worth your salt,” Greenstein says, “then you’ll find a significant property that has to do with our history and you’ll hold on to it.”

Although Carl never got his hands on enough money to buy, for years he ran a jewelry shop out of the garden apartment of Greenstein’s house. And because local tradition had it that Duffield Street was a hotbed of abolitionist activity, he began digging around in the building’s subbasement, looking for a clue to the story it might tell.

Almost immediately, he found the two copper-plated, pot-bellied stoves and a sealed-up well in the basement floor. A little later, after doing repair work on the front-facing wall, he broke through to find a gaping hole on the other side, and, just beyond that, a secret passageway. What he thought he found was a tunnel under the sidewalk of Duffield Street, stretching all the way from 233, where his jewelry shop was, to 225, on the other side of Chatel’s house. Clearly, underneath the jewelry shop was an old kitchen. Escaped slaves may have used the tunnel to move from basement to basement, where they would receive food and lodging before heading on to New England and Nova Scotia, or so the young Carl reasoned.

According to Ms. Chatel, it was Sonny Carson who later found the historical documents to prove a pivotal piece of background information. Searching through early 19th century census records, he found that Thomas Truesdell—a well-known agent of the Underground Railroad and friend of William Lloyd Garrison—had owned and lived in Joy’s house for nearly a decade. Since two famous abolitionist churches, one connected to Henry Ward Beecher, were but a stone’s throw away, everybody thought they had enough to clinch a fullscale archeological dig.

What they got instead was a veritable army of archivists and oral historians. And because Sonny Carson and Carl Smith were, by that time, both dead and the two stoves long-since filched, the study they produced turned up the frayed ends of a few promising leads—but little more. Greenstein, meanwhile, with balding head and a closely cropped grey beard, looks awfully tired. He’s given that tour more times than he can count. He still has one more city council meeting to attend but realizes the house’s fate is all but sealed.

To fully understand what the city has at stake in this fight, you have to consider that directly behind Greenstein’s house—literally, 100 feet away—is the garish, low-rise Albee Square Mall, and next to it, on Fulton Street, a bizarre if vibrant mix of dollar stores and jewelry shops. Two blocks north, by contrast, stands 16-acres of peach and brown, brick-clad office towers. Built during the 1990s, the area, appropriately named MetroTech Center, looks and feels like a suburban-style office park. Security guards stand at lobby entrances. Park benches are empty after sundown. Employees from J.P. Morgan Chase and Forest City Ratner eat at the local restaurants.

The Bloomberg administration, hoping to stanch the flow of high-paying office jobs across the Hudson, has made no secret of its desire to capitalize on MetroTech’s success. So, in 2004, it up-zoned the neighborhood to make way for 4.5 million square feet of additional, class-A office space. Though there’s been very little building since then, the rezoning has already had a big effect. Thor Equities, a Manhattan-based private developer, bought the Albee Square Mall in 2001 for a relatively paltry $25 million. They sold it last February without lifting a finger for $125 million.

A Ballpark’s Long Shadow

In my conversation with Brad Lander, president of the Pratt Center, he used a phrase that has stuck with me: “values calculus.” “Bloomberg and [Deputy Mayor Dan] Doctoroff,” he says, “see themselves as converting an outmoded industrial city into another kind of city”—the values calculus being to turn manufacturing land wherever and whenever possible into commercial and luxury condo space. Nowhere is this more true than in Willets Point, a long-neglected neighborhood in the unglamorous borough of Queens.

Seventy-five acres in all, the area is home to over 200 autoparts stores, junkyards, car repair shops and at least one major steel plant. On my visit there last spring, Joe Ardizonne, who has lived in Willets Point for 74 years, told me that city-owned streets had been closed off in places to make way for corrugated metal shanties and fenced-in driveways. Other streets were so pock-marked with potholes that cars swerving too far to the side had to pass each other on the right. “The place is a humming place,” says Ardizonne. “If you come here in the morning, you see the tractor trailers and everything, you can’t believe it, you can hardly move. But to the people up in city hall it’s non-functional. It’s a disgrace to the city of New York.”

In fact, the Bloomberg administration has already declared the district “an urban renewal area.” And for the fifth time since 1964, when Robert Moses sought to include it in the World’s Fair but was defeated in court by a young Mario Cuomo, the city hopes to reclaim it—this time, to make way for “a first class retail, recreation, and entertainment destination.” Last summer, just as the New York Mets were unveiling plans for a new baseball park across the street, the city’s economic development agency accepted bids from private developers for a proposed hotel with up to 700 rooms, 5.5 million square feet of residential space, and a convention center. And, though it hasn’t released more details, the agency is now preparing an environmental impact statement that some say will pave the way for a strategic rezoning.

According to Councilmember Hiram Monserrate, an outspoken critic of the city’s plan, the rezoning is not only necessary for the proposed commercial and residential space, it may be a tactic for lowering the value of the land in the eyes of those who now use it.

“If they rezone, it’s a real problem,” Danny Sambucci, the owner of the area’s largest junkyard, explains. “You can’t sell. You can’t do renovations. They pretty much put a freeze on the area, so now, even if they don’t take it, you’re stuck. You can’t do anything.”

Sambucci says he and his family have been building a customer base in Willets Point for almost 50 years, so relocation would be “economic suicide.” But if the city can get the other repair and autobody shops to sell—and rezoning may be just the way to do that—they’ll gain more leverage, as much of the area’s present success depends on a delicate symbiosis between the businesses. Mechanics, glass specialists, and collision repair experts from just around the corner come to Sambucci for old parts—he has hundreds of used radiators, head gaskets, and windshields all carefully organized and catalogued according to year and model. The more the others move out, the less business he’ll get in the future, he says.

What really gets under the skin of business owners here is the city’s complete lack of interest in what’s working in the area now, what’s good about it. True, it lacks sanitary sewers; and, according to the city, motor oil, antifreeze, transmission fluid, and even human waste have been leaking into the nearby Flushing Creek for years. Still, according to urbanist and city planner Tom Angotti, who conducted a land survey with his Hunter College students last year, “[Willets Point] is the kind of bustling business district that economic development experts across the country keep trying to re-create in giant development schemes, often with little success.”

Yet the fact remains: city officials have a vision, and at least one important New York establishment—namely, the New York Mets—stands to benefit. As Ardizonne and Sambucci stood outside and talked, it was hard to ignore a cluster of tall, willowy cranes across the street, ramming steel beams into the Flushing Meadows muck. “How much are they going to get for that?” Ardizonne asked, pointing to what in 2009 will be Citi Field, the Mets’ future home. “This whole process of eminent domain is ridiculous,” says Sambucci. “It’s for the good of the people,’ they say. What people? A certain amount of builders, because you’re going to give this property to some developer? It’s not good for me, it’s not good for him, I don’t know if it’s going to do anything for you.”

“It’s good for the politicians, period,” says Ardizonne. Sambucci adds:“It’s good for them because then they can associate their name with a new stadium or convention center. But meanwhile they put him out of work, they put me out of work—it’s ridiculous.”

Similar to the Columbia case, the city may have grossly underestimated the degree to which residents feel loyal to the buildings and people around them. Brad Lander says most Manhattanville residents are open to having Columbia as a neighbor, even eager about the jobs and energy the university can bring. “It just has to be [Columbia working] as a part of Manhattanville, not the other way around,” he says.

 

This article appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!