"The public realm comes mostly in the form of the street in America because we don't have the thousand year-old cathedral plazas and market squares of older cultures. And your ability to define space and create spaces that are worth caring about all comes from a body of culture that we call the culture of civic design. This is body of knowledge, method, skill, and principle that we threw in the garbage after World War II and decided "We don't need that anymore. We're not gonna use it.". And consequently, we can see the result all around us.
"The public realm has to inform us not only where we are geographically, but it has to inform us where we are in our culture: where we've come from, what kind of people we are, and by doing that it needs to afford us a glimpse to where we're going in order to allow us to dwell in a hopeful present. And if there is one great catastrophe about the places that we've built, the human environments that we've made for ourselves in the last 50 years, is that it's deprived us of the ability of live in a hopeful present."
- James Howard Kunstler
From the TED: Ideas Worth Spreading conference in 2004 in Monterey, CA
Loosely paraphrased, what this means is each place should have a proper function, design, and conscience in order to fully engage the public space and the people who interact with it.
I feel like Syracuse's Clinton Square works fairly well in defining public space - despite it having been remodeled a number of times throughout history. It's organized, it defines the area very well, and easily says what it is: a central public gathering place that emphasizes the city's culture and history while showcasing a taste of its beautiful architecture.
There is, however, one building in this civic arena that stands out and fails to encompass the public realm very little, in some cases poorly, and that's the Post Standard building; a low-standing, massive, and concrete structure just directly north of the city's epicentre. The building's designations (both the building itself and its private parking lot) are between north of Genesee St, east of Clinton St, south of Herald Pl, and west of N Salina St.
Two downtown city blocks are designated to this one commercial business and its private parking lot (two distinctions that make it a bit more obtrusive and maybe even a bit more arrogant than the Atrium, a hotel and office convention center built in 1972, that stands at the opposite side of the square). It would be one thing if the Post Standard building took up this amount of space and played into the public realm correctly, but it fails to do so in many regards.
First, here's some bits of history...
The site facing Clinton Square here originally had 3 buildings during the early part of the 20th century: the Third Onondaga Courthouse, the Electric Terminal Railroad Station, and the Empire House.
The Courthouse, pictured above, was completed in 1857 and designed by Horatio Nelson White (who also designed The Gridley Building near Hanover Square among other buildings). It was used for naturalization from 1857 to 1907 and housed various businesses before being torn down in 1967. Fortunately, the building's beautiful interior and exterior design drawings are available online for free thanks to the Library of Congress and as of 2001, some of the building's original pieces and hand-carved limestone blocks can be found on city owned property at Hancock Airport.
The Electric Terminal and the Empire House stood to the east of the Courthouse. The terminal housed a waiting room and ticket office on the ground floor and operated the city's 24 separate trolley lines during the 1920's. The Empire House, a large hotel constructed in the mid 1800's, was destroyed by a fire in 1942 resulting in a vacant site until 1950.
The Atlantic Building, pictured above, was a two-story art moderne commercial structure and located at the spot from 1950 to 1968. It housed an oil company on its upper floors and a Waldorf Cafeteria, Army-Navy outlet, and Daw's Drugs on its lower level.
In 1971, the three Syracuse newspapers: the Post Standard (the morning paper), the Herald-Journal (the evening paper), and the Sunday Herald American moved into a new $8 million plant at this location (or roughly $42.6 million in today's standards). The Herald Journal folded in 2001, and the building now houses the Post Standard newspaper.
Here's the building as it looks today and along with some observations...
Eastern face of the southeast corner.
A blank facade reveling very little personality.
Quite honestly, much of the building isn't much to look at. This is some kind of access door and a spot that could be perfect for public urination.
Pictured below is the building's 3-foot high concrete, open area on its southeast corner. The picture doesn't show it, but it's in bad shape and sinking in various spots. Is this space even needed when it's so close to Clinton Square?
The eastern side, or wall, creates an impersonal atmosphere and there's no interaction or communication whatsoever between the public and private aspects of the street. If you look close, it looks like the building originally had larger windows that eventually got "bricked" over.
Pictured above is The International Order of Good Templars plaque displayed on the building's eastern side. One of the few things that you want to stop and look at.
A little more upsetting than any of the building's architecture, is how it actually invades the public space by interfering with the sidewalk. Here you almost walk on more grating than sidewalk.
Some fancy lighting.
Western side along Clinton Street. The building acts as if it's scared to interact with the street.
Eastern side again. It's almost impossible not to feel empty or hopeless by walking by the building on this side of the street.
Below is the northern side, which acts a bit like a mirror facing the 690 and 81 overpasses.
It's a nice view to the interior and the goings-on of the business, but does the public really need to look at giant printing turbines? Also, the building almost acts like it's facing the wrong way by letting in so much space on this side. Directly in front of this and north up until "Herald Place" is a surface parking lot; an area which I like to pinpoint as the mecca of Syracuse's surface parking lot obsession. Within 200 feet from here, or let's say between ~10 and ~120 seconds of walking, are elevated highways and 7 different surface parking lots. Yes. 7. Mind you, we're still talking about Downtown Syracuse, a place that's supposed to be the cultural epicenter and lifeblood of the entire city. And more specifically, an area that's supposed to link you to the Northside and into the North Salina business district.
The facade along Clinton Square isn't really terrible, but still has plenty wrong with it.
The planted trees along the left are good and serve a real purpose: spatially denoting the pedestrian realm, protecting the pedestrians from the vehicles and the street, they filter sunlight and shield rain, they soften the hardscape of the buildings, and they create a vaulted ceiling around the street (at least, as they grow older). On the other hand, the bushes on the right, act more like a faux band-aid. It's like the designers knew unconsciously that the building wasn't that attractive and had to cover up some of the mess with some nature instead.
Also on the right you'll notice a handicap entrance. This also faces Clinton Square. I have nothing against handicaps, but if the idea was to create a handicap access, then why was the building's entrance propped up several feet to begin with? Why not have it closer to the street with an entrance at its ground level? It's just my opinion, but I feel like stairs in the urban setting only work on truly dignified buildings (libraries, churches, town halls, courthouses, etc...).
There's also a whole other side to the building that I didn't get around to taking pictures of. The nortwestern side on along Clinton Street is essentially a blank wall with service vehicle entrances where employees typically hang out and smoke during the day. The opposite side of the street houses several tiny restaurants, apartments, and businesses and is a rare example of one side of a street functioning very well and the other not at all.
So, am I picking on the Post Standard building? Yes. But does it deserve it? Yes. What are the messages, vocabularies, and grammars that this building is saying and what does it tell us about who we are? To me it says that it values the idea of a sole business over the actual physical relationship that it has with the street and its people. Syracuse lost other structures in this plot of land during this building's construction and it's actually very sad that no thought whatsoever went into the surrounding neighborhood and what kind of effect it would have on pedestrian life. Although the northern edge of Downtown can lay claim to an excellent barbecue joint, it has much less architecture that's civically rewarding to be apart of than it did before the 1950's, 60's, and 70's. Equally as bad is the fact that the building's face at Clinton Square comes nowhere close to the ingenuity, design, and artistry that went into some of the other square's facades that were built in the late 19th century and early part of the 20th century.
My hope? My hope is that we learn from our mistakes, emphasize the public realm better than we've done in the past, and create livable, enjoyable, and rewarding places to be a part of. If we don't do that, we're stuck with these kinds of things most likely longer than the actual businesses that are in them.
Another nice post, especially those regarding the wasteland of surface parking that effectively kills any integration of downtown and Little Italy.
ReplyDeleteTwo additional points:
The Genesee Street set-back is beyond excessive, and the extra lane for pick-ups and drop-offs is inappropriate for an urban setting.
The devotion of so much land to this building, as you touched on, was an awful choice. The city shouldn't have abandoned a block of West Willow Street for construction of this building. There's no reason that the Post Standard building could not have been completely contained within the Genesee/Clinton/Willow/Salina block, with the office space stacked above the loading and manufacturing space as a four- or five-story building with the same square footage as the current sprawling facility has. Constructing the lobby and retail operation at ground level and without the huge set-back would have solved the square-side dead space problem, too.
Superblocks should not exist in urban settings; our previous mayor and council apparently did not know this, as further street abandonment and expansion of the St. Joseph's superblock was approved under his administration. I hope we've seen the last of that dated, anti-urban trend.