Just imagine the yam fufu!

Parks: what's there not to dislike?

A group of parks activists in Queens have been pushing "QueensWay," a linear park that would be built atop the old Rockaway Beach Branch of the Long Island Rail Road in the central and southern parts of the borough. As New York Times opinion writer Eleanor Randolph put it in her pro-QueensWay piece, it "has no celebrity patrons, no Diane von Furstenberg, no Barry Diller, no big-name donors to give enough seed money to turn the park into a fashion statement."

But with a High Line-like makeover, she wrote, "QueensWay would offer both a walkway and a bike path. There could be small shops or stands featuring cheese guava buns, dim sum dumplings, pani puri or yam fufu."

Despite the lack of sweet socialite dough, QueensWay does have a few supporters in high places: Andrew Cuomo's administration gave the Trust for Public Land—now headed by former parks commissioner Adrian Benepe—half a million dollars to study the plan.

But it also has quite a few detractors.

Chief among them are transit advocates, who argue that the abandoned rail line could eventually be restored to active use—something that would be a lot harder if it meant taking away a park from Queens residents.

Reacting to the Times opinion piece, New York State Assemblyman Phil Goldfeder, whose district stretches from Ozone Park to the Rockaways, tweeted, "Sandy has destroyed our transportation, but who cares when you can have good food options." (The title of the Times piece played up its tweeness: "A High Line in Queens: Just Think of the Food.")

One former transit manager wants to see the R train run along the old Rockaway Beach Branch line.

And it's not just grandstanding politicians who are opposed to the plan. "Many people have argued that the line should be reactivated as a branch of the Long Island Rail Road," wrote one anonymous retired New York City Transit Authority manager over at Cap'n Transit's blog. "This would be better than a greenway, but not as good as a connection to the Queens Boulevard subway line."

And aside from the route's transit potential, there are reasons to be skeptical that QueensWay could ever approach the success of the High Line.

The best argument came from the pages of The New York Times itself. Back in May 2011, urban theorist Witold Rybczynski gave the linear park trend a reality check: "Advocates would like to see the High Line model take off nationwide in the same way Central Park was copied in the 19th century. But that’s a tougher proposition than they think, and it probably won’t be worth the effort."

The High Line, he wrote, "courses through the meatpacking district and Chelsea, heavily populated, high-energy residential neighborhoods." In other words, it's not just the celebrity wattage that QueensWay lacks—it's also the demand.

As Jane Jacobs wrote in her urbanist classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, "Greatly loved neighborhood parks benefit from a certain rarity value."

The High Line provides a rare bit of greenery and open space in a dense neighborhood. QueensWay, on the other hand, would cut right through a large existing park—Forest Park—and traverse neighborhoods where, true to the "Park" in their names, many residents have green space right in their own backyards. Rego Park and Ozone Park are beautiful places, but they are rather suburban as New York City neighborhoods go, and have nowhere near the density or vibrancy—in other words, the potential park patronage—of the neighborhoods around the High Line.

Still, the QueensWay train chugs on. On March 13 the Trust for Public Land issued a request for proposal, and the plan has begun to take on an air of inevitability.

Projected to cost $75-100 million, QueensWay would be much cheaper than putting trains back on the Rockaway Beach Branch. With the MTA struggling to fund much more important projects in the outer boroughs, it's hard to see a new rail line getting funding any time soon. And the longer the Long Island Rail Road lets the viaduct grow dense with weeds, the louder the calls to turn it into a proper park will become.

The Commercial Observer: With 2011 officially closed, let’s review the biggest issue the Real Estate Board of New York, and the industry at-large, tackled in 2011.
Mr. Spinola: Well, clearly, the first issue would be that the state was in a major downfall with serious budget problems, and Albany pushed to raise taxes and to decrease spending by $10 billion to $13 billion. And so one of the first things that we got involved in was the question of obviously holding the line on spending in the State of New York .

How did REBNY react?
We got involved in lobbying and working with the Committee to Save New York to, I think, accomplish what was not thought to be accomplishable, which is to hold the line on that $10 billion shortfall without raising taxes. More importantly, the business community was able to articulate a common voice on important issues, which included, on a statewide basis, a cap on taxes. It doesn’t affect New York City , but the cap on real estate taxes, as well as holding the line on spending and not going crazy on raising taxes.

As you said yourself, that was one of those issues people thought couldn’t get done, and it got done, but I imagine it wasn’t without major lobbying and publicizing your stance.
Yeah. I think we not only made our points, but we also raised some serious money to be able to address those points and get them on TV. We demonstrated that we can work well with others and we were able to support what I thought was significant leadership on behalf of the governor, taking a lot of shots and yet demonstrating what can happen when the chief executive officer actually gets his hands dirty and gets involved in the discussions and the negotiations and advocates a position.

Generally speaking, Governor Cuomo has a reputation for being easy to work with. Is that how you view the governor and is that how the real estate industry sees him?
The answer is he’s easy to work with because he’s willing to work when you raise an issue with him, or when he cares about an issue. And there’s no holding back as to what his feeling is or his position is or what he thinks can be done. With some other people, who we won’t mention, they may not have wanted to stick their neck out. Well, nobody could accuse Andrew Cuomo of not sticking his neck out.

I assume that at the beginning of each year you gather all the committees together to lay out the important issues and decide which deserve to be addressed. In 2011, were any of those plans disrupted by unexpected events?
I mean, this past year, we had to get 421A extended. We did. But part of that issue was there was a push to require prevailing wages for anybody who got 421A. Well, that would have hurt, we believe, a lot of low-income housing that was going to be built, and it would have guaranteed that Course of Construction would have stayed at a much higher level, and we need to bring down Course. So without breaking our relationship with the construction trades, we fought that off. They’re going to continue to fight for it. It’s an issue that’s going to come up again, but we’re building that relationship. We continue to work on that relationship and articulate the reasons we can’t do it.

The other thing that came up was a serious push for sick-leave requirements in the City Council that put forward that sick leave be given for any employees who were in some way in a building that was getting some kind of a benefit. We fought that. The good news was that Speaker [Christine] Quinn came out and opposed it. And that was a battle that we joined in with the chambers of commerce in all five boroughs and the issue was basically laid aside. Right now, there’s a push, again, to require a living wage.
The Real Estate Board of New York has also taken umbrage at what it believes to be a liberal stance on landmarking by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. Will the board continue to take on that issue in 2012?
It’s not that the city shouldn’t be identifying individual buildings and saying these are wonderful buildings for whatever reasons—the architecture, the historic nature. Let’s landmark those buildings. Nobody is questioning that. We may have a legitimate debate as to whether or not they’re wonderful buildings. But the main concern is that there’s been this aggressive attempt to create districts, huge districts. Districts used to be unique small areas around the city that you want to preserve for a reason, but not districts that basically encompass a collection of different types of architecture, or hundreds of buildings. What’s unique when we’re all of a sudden landmarking hundreds of buildings?

The Real Estate Board of New York is one of the most powerful lobbying arms in the city, but the Landmarks Preservation Department seems to be getting the upper hand here.
There’s no question that we have lost more of those battles than we have won. We think the city is landmarking away its economic future, and during the middle of this year we started to rev up some of our efforts on this. And we’re going to clearly look at 2012 as a year in which we’re going to try to make our case even stronger.

Would you consider yourself David or Goliath in that particular fight?
We’re always David. This is a battle with the City of New York and the Landmarks Commission that seems to want to respond to the landmark advocates who would landmark every building in the City of New York. There are a lot of people who don’t want to see new buildings built. I don’t know if I have an answer as to where we’re going to put the additional million people that are supposed to come and live in the city of New York by 2030. But they don’t want it in their neighborhood, and so they want to landmark buildings. We’ve opposed districts that included empty lots and old gas stations that were determined to be worthy of being included in a landmark district.

Do you ever worry that overdevelopment could threaten the character of New York City ?
Well, the answer to that is I do—there’s always the potential that if every developer decided to start a new office building tomorrow, then I’d be very worried about it. But the truth of the matter is that we have an aging stock of office space. The average age is somewhere over 71 years old for office buildings. That is very different than around the world, where office buildings are much more recent, and clearly more modern.

Just to play devil’s advocate, from the few issues you and I just discussed, most are at odds with the average New Yorker who’s not in real estate. Does that concern you at all?
Well, of course it’s a concern. I think we win our argument if we have an opportunity to lay out our arguments. With landmarking, everybody says, “Oh, isn’t it wonderful?” And then, we ask them to take a look at these buildings: “Do you believe these are worthy of landmarking?” And we usually get a different response if people actually spend the time.

In terms of development, the quick answer for people who say they don’t want development is, well, then where should your children’s jobs be created? Should they be created here, or should they be created somewhere else? Because that’s what we’re talking about. If we don’t have development, we don’t have the companies here that bring the jobs, that pay the salaries, that pay the taxes, that pay for the services that the city of New York desperately needs.
Let’s shift topics. Would you rather have a drink with Robert Moses or Jane Jacobs?
Oh, I don’t know. I don’t drink.

“I don’t drink”? That’s a nonanswer.
I mean, Moses clearly is someone that anybody who’s been in government, as I have been, would like to have a drink with.

Do you think that you and Jane Jacobs would see eye-to-eye on much?
I don’t know.

Despite the fact that you oversee an organization that boasts more than 12,000 members, many of them brokers, you’ve never worked as a broker yourself. Has that ever hampered your ability to understand their particular needs?
No. I mean, when I was with the city, I did economic development, and so, you know, was I functioning as a broker? I don’t think I was functioning as a broker. But when I came here I had the talent of brokers and owners to support me, and I’ve had a tremendous learning experience from the best people in the world in terms of doing real estate, everywhere from brokers to owners, financial institutions, residential, commercial.

So I’ve been to school. And I think I understand a lot of what’s needed to pull deals together, which is what brokers are so great at. I don’t think I’d be a bad broker, but I’ve never gone for a license. I didn’t want to get into potential conflict-of-interest issues.

Governor Pataki appointed you to the New York State Real Estate Board in 1996. What’s more influential: that or the Real Estate Board of New York?
They’re two different organizations. The state board of real estate is really an advisory group that makes recommendations on real estate policy to the governor. I was also then appointed by Joe Bruno when my term was up with Pataki, and I served for 10 years. And one of the things I’m very proud of is that I chaired the education committee on that board and we revamped the curriculum for continuing education for people with licenses.

REBNY is very different from that. We’re a lobby organization, and so, in terms of who’s more influential in getting to the governor? It might be his own state board of real estate. Who’s more influential in terms of dealing with the legislature, the city council and the governor? I’m betting that it probably is REBNY.

Speaking of betting, early on in your career you worked for the New York City Off Track Betting Corporation. Do you ever go out to Belmont to make a bet?
No. I never was a race fan. I’ve been to Belmont once, and I’ve been to a dog track once, and it’s not something that I enjoy. I mean, a horse is a beautiful animal, but it’s not something that I enjoy. Now, I haven’t been to Aqueduct yet either—for the gambling.

When’s the last time you took a vacation?
Well, I haven’t really taken a vacation. I normally take off between Christmas and New Year’s, and I’ll take days here and there, and I take long weekends in the summer. And other than that, we really haven’t gone away. I used to go away. Actually, let me take it back. Easter week we went skiing for a week out in Vail.

Do you ski?
I mean, you’re spoiled when you ski there. I mean, there are other wonderful—especially out West—other wonderful places. I’ve been to Jackson Hole, but we’re just so used to Vail, and we’ve done spring skiing there. I’m not a big cold person, and the weather is usually perfect out there, and you ski the top half of the mountain. And it’s ideal.

I’m so used to talking to real estate professionals who, when you ask about hobbies, they usually just talk about golf.
Well, I do play golf, but I didn’t play much this year. My handicap went way up, and, in part, I just couldn’t get out.

Hopefully, you’ll get a chance.
Believe me, nobody’s crying for me. But I’m not asking for that. But four weeks ago, I came down with pneumonia, so that actually had me out of the office for a few days.

But you’re back in action now?
I’m back.

Jsederstrom@Observer.com

City Planning spokewoman Rachaele Raynoff stood up for the city's work and pointed out that some of the problems would have been addressed by the forthcoming rezoning of the Gowanus -- though that has been put on hold after the area was designated a Superfund site:

Creating inviting and engaging streetscapes has been a key part of City Planning's work, and indeed, active ground floor uses on streets within the Gowanus rezoning, including on Fourth Avenue, were an important part of the City's framework. However, a requirement for ground floor retail or community facilities would not have been appropriate in 2003 when the Park Slope rezoning was adopted by the City Council, nor was this issue raised during the public review process. Absent a market for the retail space on a newly developing corridor, such a requirement at that time could have discouraged development altogether by making it financially infeasible.

The Brownstoner Jonathan Butler agrees with City Planning that street life is important, but he disagrees with the rationale for forestalling it until now:

Obviously the main problem is the failure of all those new buildings to include retail.

Ron Shiffman, founder of the Pratt Center and a former member of the City Planning Commission, also thinks more should have been done from the start. But putting that aside, Shiffman said the issue the area's industrial legacy:

Part of the problem is that this is still a heavily automotive and industrial area, unlike Park Avenue, which was always residential and office when it was built. And unlike Park Avenue, you don't have all the truck traffic that you do on Fourth. Park Avenue is in the middle of a major residential and office neighborhood whereas Fourth Avenue is at the edge of a neighborhood. [...]  There are things other than urban design. Add inclusionary housing, so gentrification is less of an issue, and overtime, the character of the neighborhood would change.

Eric Safyan, an architect whose offices are located just off Fourth Avenue on President Street, reiterated the importance of retail and greenspace, but he thought a radical transformation of the street could have its advantages:

There should be a lot more landscaping, like you see on Park Avenue. Just taking out a car lane or two would help, slowing down traffic and creating more space for pedestrians and bikes. Right now, there's no bike lane on Fourth, but you see a lot of bikes. It's pretty dangerous.

Going back to the original Journal article that set off this debate, perhaps people are thinking about Fourth Avenue in the wrong way. Maybe it's not that the area has been slow to develop but that the other neighborhoods that were rezoned in its wake and against which it has subsequently been judged, places like Williamsburg and Downtown Brooklyn, perhaps they are the ones out of whack, growing too fast to reasonably control or grapple with.

As the Journal and our panel of experts suggest, things have been getting better along the stretch, largely in an organic way. Maybe this is how development is supposed to happen in New York City. Though a nice little infrastructure boost, say a bike lane and some trees, wouldn't hurt either.

mchaban [at] observer.com / @mc_nyo

When Jane Jacobs died in 2006, the Silverleaf Tavern on Park Avenue named a drink in her honor. A Jane Jacobs, which costs $14, consists of Hendrick’s gin, elderflower syrup, orange bitters and sparkling wine.

Elderflower syrup: This is not an ingredient you would associate with the White Horse Tavern, a Hudson Street bar where Jacobs was famously photographed holding a beer and a cigarette. Near the apartment where she wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the White Horse was home to the kind of democratic shoulder-rubbing that Jacobs idealized. 

The problem, of course, is when you do too good a job of convincing people that democratic neighborhoods are great, the neighborhoods tend to get less democratic. Aficionados of elderflower syrup supplant working-class beer drinkers, and rents rise accordingly. The aficionados, fans of Jacobs all, change the neighborhoods, just not in the way she would have wanted.   

Anthony Flint’s Wrestling With Moses (Random House) focuses on just a handful of Jacobs’ clashes with the legendary urban planner Robert Moses; and, at 195 pages, it’s far shorter than either Jacobs’ Death and Life (458 pages) or Robert Caro’s Moses account, The Power Broker (at 1,344 pages, a notorious bruiser). It’s practically an urban-planning beach read, so perhaps it’s not surprising that their legacies get short shrift. 

We get tantalizing hints of the ideological tangles involved in the Jacobs/Moses showdown: Starry-eyed liberals love Jacobs, but so do the conservatives who see Moses’ projects as expensive government meddling. Mr. Flint gives us a Jacobs who’s aware that her position is a delicate one, but who doesn’t seem particularly fazed by this. The West Village was transforming even as Jacobs and her ilk took up residence. She is wary of placing neighborhoods “under a kind of museum glass” through historic preservation, but what about placing them under the shadow of glass condo towers? 

The places that Jacobs valued and protected—Washington Square Park, Soho, the West Village—might have been teetering on the brink of decrepitude in her time, but now they’re breathtakingly affluent. “Parks are for people,” went one of her early slogans—and it’s a good thing, because parks are free and apartments aren’t. 

Mr. Flint treats gentrification as evidence for Jacobs’ prescience. After recounting her successful crusade to protect Washington Square Park, he points out that today the surrounding neighborhood offers townhouses to “rival those on Fifth Avenue as desirable real estate,” and “hotspots in the city’s restaurant scene, like Mario Batali’s Babbo.” 

Babbo is one thing, but the scenes of cheery baking and gardening that pepper the book are more interesting: They suggest an unexpected comparison, one that Mr. Flint seems to circle in his epilogue. The rise of sustainable food, he says, goes hand in hand with the triumph of Jane Jacobs.

“The value of local businesses and local economy, a bedrock theme in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is … at a premium. The local food movement emphasizes the availability of locally produced food,” Mr. Flint writes, noting that “Locavore” was the New Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year in 2007. 

Maybe Jacobs’ spiritual sister is evangelical foodie Alice Waters. Both indisputably admirable in their intentions, they’re easily co-opted wrongly by fans—for Jacobs, the earnestly New Urban residents of neighborhoods like the West Village, who can afford to reap the benefits of organic neighborhood growth, no matter that the gentrification this often brings creates socio-economically homogenous areas. Whole Foods is to Alice Waters as Greenwich Village is to Jane Jacobs.

Mixed-use neighborhoods, like sustainable nectarines, are hard to grow for the masses.

mfischer@observer.com

The West Village was Jacobs’ muse: She wrote of the “sidewalk ballet” of daily life outside her 555 Hudson Street (currently on the market for $3.5 million), inadvertently etching the Rosetta Stone for arguments, into the present, over gentrification, what she aptly termed “oversucces.”

Last week, the city named a Hudson block in her honor. Next week, Random House will publish Anthony Flint’s Wrestling With Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City. This week, we consider buying real estate in Jacobs’ former neighborhood.

One Hundred Bank Street, about a block from Jane Jacobs Way, was built in 1956—five years before Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Prudential Douglas Elliman was showing two one-bedroom apartments in the C line, and both looked out over Bank at a row of low-rises, including a small white building once home to Yoko Ono and John Lennon before they split uptown for the Dakota.

Apartment 3C offered plenty of space but not much storage, just one closet off the bedroom. Oddly, the low refrigerator and freezer were situated side by side beneath the kitchen counter, and there was “no particular dishwasher,” according to broker Charles Hughes—although he said that most of the potential buyers would go out to eat anyway.

He had only seen one group of visitors Sunday, but said that the apartment averaged 10 weekly. Still, there haven’t been any offers, although the price (now $669,000) had been lowered several times. Mr. Hughes said he suspected that buyers were looking to spend under $600,000.

Downstairs, 2C was asking $699,000. It had the same basic layout, but with some judicious renovations: The addition of a closet between the living room and bedroom broke up the ample space nicely, as well as provided storage.

Broker Ian Wolf called his visitors “typical West Village”—20s, 30s, “professionals, obviously.”

A neighbor strolled in, drinking an Odwalla, to look around and chat. He lived in a studio and liked the building, noting that it was just far enough from the meatpacking district that the “douchiness” did not become oppressive. Sidewalk ballet, indeed.

AT 295 WEST 11TH STREET, across Jane Jacobs Way, #1JKL was asking $1,495,000—the seller, a young family, was moving to Rye, leaving behind the impressive tree murals in the children’s bedrooms in favor of actual trees. The apartment had been converted from three units for a total of three bedrooms and three baths. The master bedroom was a little cramped, but the living spaces felt open and inviting. A small moat separated the ground-floor apartment from Bleecker Playground.

“My son used to play in that park!” Judith Salavetz said.

“Judith’s kids have gone to every school in New York; she’s lived on every block in New York,” Ned Davis, her husband, later explained.

Mr. Davis and Ms. Salavetz were one of three boomer couples passing through toward the end of Sunday’s open house. He is a principal at North River Capital; she does book design (her most recent: Art of the Modern Movie Poster). They have an apartment near Carnegie Hall they’re pleased with, but Ms. Salavetz had lived in the Village and wanted to come back.

“I’m a Village girl,” she said. She described her ideal living situation as the parlor floor of a Village townhouse.

It was the only neighborhood where they’d consider buying; and while their collection of children and stepchildren were college age and older, they were only looking at places with two or more bedrooms.

Mr. Davis wore his bike helmet. Ms. Salavetz had a list of open houses yet to be visited, but he was leaving after this one. He called 295 11th Street “by far the nicest” of the places they’d seen; still, he was not without reservations.

“If I were younger, I’d really be digging this,” he said. But the times, they are a-changin’. Now, he said, “I’m doorman-oriented.”

mfischer@observer.com

Although it sounds like a contradiction in terms, Michael Sorkin has long been the bad boy of architectural criticism. As the house critic for The Village Voice in the 1980s, Sorkin mounted an unrelenting war on all things postmodern, wielding a brutal—and brutally fun—pen against Philip Johnson’s AT&T Headquarters (“The Seagram Building with ears” ), Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House (“What Tom Wolfe doesn’t know about architecture could fill a book. And indeed it has”), and then-New York Times critic Paul Goldberger (“the embodiment of the aesthetics of Yuppification”).

Many of Sorkin’s barbs were more ad hominem than ad aedificium, at least during his Voice days, but his writing has never been without moral content. He disdained postmodernism not on aesthetic grounds, but because he thought its obsession with style denied modernism’s instinct for human progress.

Sorkin left The Voice in 1989 to focus on teaching and his architectural practice, but he has never given up writing. Through columns and books he has taken controversial, often radical positions on everything from West Bank settlements to the Ground Zero rebuilding process (spoiler: He rails on both). Along the way he has developed, in fits and starts, an extended critique of the contemporary city, starting with his beloved New York, a critique he brings fully to bear in Twenty Minutes in Manhattan.

The book is a take-down disguised as a mash note. Twelve years in the making, Twenty Minutes in Manhattan follows Sorkin’s daily footborne commute from his Greenwich Village apartment to his Varick Street studio, with each chapter organized around a phase in his walk, from stairs to stoop to Washington Square and beyond. But the bulk of each chapter is loosely tethered—one minute Sorkin is discoursing on New York stoop culture; two paragraphs later he’s deep in the sands of Fire Island and the artificial perfection of Disneyland.

The Magic Kingdom is a recurring subject in Sorkin’s writing, his metaphor of choice for everything wrong with modern city living. As urban life becomes more and more a function of private development, he says, its uneven edges get sanded down; cities undergo “a narrowing of range, a flattening out in order to commodify the phenomenon” of urban life. “Times Square becomes a theme park meant to evoke—not New York—but ‘New York,’ a promoter’s fantasy bearing only the most marginal relationship to the history of the town.” Chelsea Piers replaces the neighborhood park, SoHo becomes a plein air mall. And like a theme park, full access to such quasi-public amenities is no longer a function of citizenship but wealth.

What Sorkin wants instead is a city built around the “spectacle of equity” founded on “access to both its places and possibilities.” He pours his loathing on Mike Bloomberg, actor-cum-King-of-Tribeca Robert DeNiro, and even Hollywood film sets, emblems of private possession overtaking public participation, while he praises volunteer cleanup programs and Jane Jacobs. Sorkin’s vision is refreshingly social-democratic; I imagine his heaven looks something like Amsterdam.

None of this is new, of course: Frederic Jameson, Marshall Berman, and dorms full of cultural studies majors have said much the same. But it bears repeating, particularly by Sorkin. Regardless of what you think of his ideas, it is hard not to like Sorkin’s writing—on trash day he leaves his house to find “a nearly continuous Jura of plastic sacks of garbage.”

The real problem with Twenty Minutes in Manhattan is that while Sorkin knows what he doesn’t like, it’s not clear what he would replace it with. He calls for “radical greening,” like rowhouse-top gardens connected via bridges, a la Old City Tunis, but then turns around and blasts the High Line—similar in design, and much more public—as a catalyst for high-end development that “will only further accelerate the departure of the remaining middle-class and poor populations.”

Sorkin presents a vague idea of a perfectly equitable city, but he is only occasionally aware that the very things that constitute a better, more engaged community—fewer cars, bigger trees, friendlier neighbors—are too often the things that drive up rents and narrow diversity. It is no coincidence that Sorkin’s beloved West Village is both exceedingly attractive socially and exceedingly prohibitive economically.

This contradiction may well explain the displaced viciousness with which Sorkin attacks the residents of Soho, Tribeca, and anywhere else he deems excessively riche or insufficiently engagé. Greenwich Village may feel bohemian in contrast to SoHo and Tribeca. But try telling that to the folks in East Harlem. After so many years of vitriol, Sorkin owes it to New York to show how to be a better city.

A combination of a closed storefront and a two-story house above, it can be sold either domestically, commercially or both domestically and commercially. But the townhouse cannot be split into apartments, according to owner Kathleen Murphy.

When one walks into the side door, a set of narrow wood stairs leads up to a wide living room—Jane Jacobs’ former bedroom—which, like the rest of the interior, is freshly painted white. A white couch and two lounge chairs line the windows, which overlook a tree, a sushi restaurant, a nail boutique, and apartment complexes. Adjacent to the living room are a white bathroom and kitchen, where the counter is lined with white marble.

Up the stairs, a hallway leads to three more rooms: a children’s bedroom, a white marble bathroom and a spacious master bedroom. To the right of the stairs is an entrance to the patio, overlooking the gardens below.

An extra 1,600 square feet can be added to the 2,080-square-foot townhouse—both by adding to the top of the townhouse and expanding into the garden. (The townhouse was built in 1800; Jacobs, who died in 2006, lived there in the late 1950s and 1960s.)

In the 1990s, the owner, Ms. Murphy, owned a children’s bookstore named Tootsie’s, which was run almost entirely by local mothers, on the ground floor of the townhouse—the location of the famed candy store when Jacobs and her husband bought the building.

WHILE HUDSON STREET HAS retained some of its historic charm—the White Horse Tavern, where Jacobs poses on the original cover of Death and Life, still teems with young people nightly—it also has several deserted storefronts whose businesses have been driven out by astronomical retail rents. According to Ms. Murphy, the Gottlieb family, which owns most of these abandoned storefronts, refuses to give any potential businesses leases, so businesses must pay the rent with uncertainty month-to-month.

The small, dimly lit cafe next to the Jacobs townhouse, Panino Mucho Gusto—a hangout for both senior citizens and young writers—pays $11,000 per month to the Gottliebs. (The landlord could not be reached for comment.)

Ms. Murphy, who has lived in the West Village for over 30 years, said that all her friends who used to own stores and restaurants in the West Village have been pushed out by the rising costs. “There’s nobody left,” she said. “When [Marc Jacobs] can buy the space for $20,000 to $30,000 per month, and the previous person paid $3,000, how can you stay in business?”

Five Marc Jacobs stores and four Ralph Laurens now inhabit a few blocks of Bleecker Street alone (a block from Hudson Street), in addition to a host of other brand names and upscale restaurants. As early as 10 years ago, at least a dozen antiques shops lined Bleecker Street, according to West Village residents.

“Bleecker Street is a mall now,” said Ned Kell, 76, an owner of Treasures and Trifles, one of three antiques shops left on Bleecker. “They’ve ruined the Village, as far as I’m concerned.”

Bleecker’s few remaining antique shops are also doomed to close. Les Pierre Antiques co-owner Isabelle Pilate-Drufin said that the landlord will inevitably force them out after the lease expires in a few years—most likely to replace them with a designer store. Mr. Kell of Treasures and Trifles—which was also founded in 1967—said that when he and his co-owner retire, the store will also retire.

“We are the last of the Mohicans,” both Mr. Kell and Ms. Pilate-Drufin said in separate interviews.

What would Jane Jacobs think?

Well, as she told The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik in 2004, upon a visit from her adopted home since 1968 in Toronto: “Whenever I’m here, I go back to look at our house, 555 Hudson Street, and I know that I could never afford it now.”

Last year's winners were Barry Benepe, pioneer of New York City's Greenmarkets program, and Omar Freilla, founder of Greenworker Cooperatives in the Bronx.

There's more about the award here.

The tool seems to be a technique increasingly favored by developers of controversial projects, who negotiate with members of the community, agreeing to include in the CBAs provisions for things such as affordable housing and local jobs.

Panelists at the forum, which was organized by the Municipal Art Society and the Rockefeller Foundation and moderated by The Observer’s Matthew Schuerman, directed their harshest words about CBAs toward the process currently going on in West Harlem, where a board of elected officials and community members are hashing out a CBA with Columbia University. With Columbia exclusively talking with the board, known as the West Harlem Local Development Corporation, the debate has been essentially closed to the rest of the community, the panelists argued.

“It was removed from full control of the community, by people from the political sector getting involved,” said Ron Shiffman, a onetime city planning commissioner and former director of the Pratt Center for Community Development. "It was tantamount to zoning for sale,”

Reverend Butts joined in the criticism, saying he had met with Columbia about forming a CBA, only to have the university close the door on him in order to talk exclusively with the Local Development Corporation.

“We sent a plan that we thought covered all of the areas that you would want to cover, and immediately after that meeting—this is one of the real issues that I have—the representatives of Columbia cut off all communication. Not a word,” Mr. Butts said. “When the political establishment got involved, it polluted it.”

The solution, at least according to Messrs. Shiffman and Butts: have the city or state create policies around issues such as the inclusion of affordable housing and similar matters, taking them off the negotiating table for each individual development.

Last week, the Columbia CBA hit a bit of a bump in the road, as three members of the Local Development Corporation resigned in protest, saying they were being kept out of negotiations with the university.

Douglas Durst, co-president of The Durst Organization, declared that congestion was significantly adding to construction costs by delaying deliveries and complicating logistics. (Just you try to get that concrete to its destination before it hardens.) Greg O’Connell, the Red Hook developer, complained—if it could be called complaining—that his buildings were fully rented and he could no longer accommodate his retail or industrial tenants when they want to expand. At one point, New York Times reporter Charles Bagli, who was moderating, squirmed in his seat while recounting a lengthy trip through the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush avenues in Brooklyn on a Saturday afternoon. (“What an idiot I was…. And then driving back, we were like lemmings: We went back through!”)

Perhaps it says something that the one participant who seemed most gung-ho about the success of New York City spends a lot of time outside of the five boroughs: Eugenie Birch, a former New York City planning commissioner and current head of the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. “Go to Philadelphia," she said. "It’s a wonderful city, but they would die to have the problems that we have.”

Um, we did try to go there once, but you know, as W.C. Fields said, it was closed.