On July 7, the morning of the London transit bombings, I flipped on the television and caught New York City police commissioner Ray Kelly talking about the homemade bombs that exploded outside of the British Consulate back in May. The bombs, Kelly said, were planted by a bicyclist.

Bicyclist as terrorist -- the moment I heard the chief say it, something clicked. For months I've been trying to understand the logic behind the NYPD's draconian crackdown on Critical Mass. So much about it doesn't make sense. To break up the monthly bike ride, the NYPD deploys helicopters, blimps, mobile command centers, high-tech surveillance equipment, hundreds of overtime officers, and who knows what else. Though the police won't say how much it costs, the crackdown obviously is incredibly expensive. The overwhelming police action creates far more trouble than just letting the ride go. The cops insist that Critical Mass is a threat to public safety. Yet, back when the police facilitated the ride, cyclists rolled through town quickly and uneventfully.

The crackdown didn't make sense -- until I heard Kelly talking about his bicycle terrorist.

If the police believe that cyclists are potential terrorists the crackdown suddenly makes a certain kind of sense. The NYPD's "Broken Windows" school of policing posits that serious crime is reduced by coming down hard on minor crimes. Viewed through this lens, Critical Mass looks to the cops like a mild form of urban terrorism (along the lines of a disruptive WTO protest, not so much an Al Qaeda attack). To the cops, the monthly ride must be a minor disruption that could set the stage for more serious crimes, like the amateur bombing of the British Consulate, or worse.

Still We Ride, a new documentary film about the epic Critical Mass before last year’s Republican National Convention, provides evidence to back up this theory. The filmmakers' long-range microphone catches police officers chatting about how the monthly ride was never a problem until "anarchists" took it over. The filmmakers also got a hold of infrared surveillance footage shot by a police helicopter hovering over the East Village. The cops' high-tech camera was focused not on cyclists but on a hot'n'heavy make-out session on a nearby rooftop. The heat-sensitive camera is so powerful that you can actually see glowing footprints trailing behind the couple as they walk around barefoot. Without question, the Critical Mass crackdown has become an opportunity for the police to test out its latest anti-terrorism gadgetry and put Homeland Security resources to work against ordinary New Yorkers.

Unfortunately, the NYPD's view and treatment of New York City bicyclists as terrorists could not be more backwards. In the post-9/11 environment (and even more so post-7/7) cyclists are not the problem. If anything, they’re the solution. A more bike-friendly New York City is a safer, saner and more secure city.

Let's not even get into the fact that urban bike commuters don't burn oil or require a vast U.S. military presence in the Middle East to keep their vehicles rolling. The security benefits of a bike-oriented city are immediate and tangible. During major crises cars and transit are useless. The bicycle is the ultimate escape pod for New Yorkers who, unlike Mayor Bloomberg, don’t own a helicopter or boat. During, and for days after the September 11 attacks and the August 2003 blackout, the only effective way to get in and out of Manhattan was by bike. In London, since the July 7 bombings the number of bicycle commuters has increased dramatically. Fortunately for Londoners, their city’s bike infrastructure is far more developed than New York's and they have a viable way to keep the city moving in a time of crisis. New York should have this too.

The next time you find the NYPD riffling through your bags as you wait to board the subway use the moment to consider that private motor vehicles are allowed to travel through the city's vulnerable central business districts with near total unaccountability. This is somewhat incredible considering the fact that New York City's nightmare scenario is not so much a subway explosion but a small truck filled with radiological or biological material exploding in midtown at lunch hour. That's the kind of attack that kills thousands and turns the city into a ghost town for months, maybe years.

There are two obvious things the city can do to help prevent or, at least, limit the damage from such an attack. First, create more car-free spaces, 42nd Street being the obvious place to start. Second, reduce automobile traffic and monitor it more effectively by automatically tolling motorists who wish to drive through the city’s most congested, transit-rich districts, just as London is now doing with great success. Congestion-pricing is smart security.

Don’t get me wrong. Making New York City less car-oriented and more bike-friendly isn't necessarily going to stop determined, well-organized maniacs from blowing things up. But it will provide very real security benefits. And it provides these benefits while enhancing New Yorkers' health, economy and quality of life. Yes, these ideas would limit individuals liberty to drive wherever, whenever they want for free. But for every New Yorker not in a car, those who wish to walk the streets, ride bikes and simply breathe clean air, these security measures enhance individual freedom. In the last few months we've seen what happens when civil affairs become security issues. When police take over urban design you get the desolate, fortress-like streetscape of the "Freedom Tower." When police take over transportation policy you get the expensive, disruptive and abusive crackdown on cyclists. The result is not a more secure city. It's a police state.

9:50 PM | Link | (4) comments   

Are there more big hurricanes forming in the Atlantic than there used to be? If so, is it because of global warming? What are the odds of a major hurricane hitting New York City?

For the answers to these questions and more, check out my cover story in this week's New York Press: The Big One.

"Try to tell someone in Sheepshead Bay that they have to evacuate immediately because within the next 24 hours they'll have 30 feet of storm surge on their neighborhood. They'll laugh at you—absolutely laugh at you. I mean, I barely even believe it."

-- Mike Lee, Director of Watch Command, New York City Office of Emergency Management

6:34 PM | Link | (5) comments   

The recent spike in cyclist fatalities combined with the year-long crackdown on Critical Mass, gives many New York City cyclists the feeling that their community is under siege. One of the more interesting forms of activism to emerge from this comes from a group called Visual Resistance. They have installed haunting, white, "ghost bike" memorials at the scenes of the four most recent cyclist fatalities. Above is the ghost bike memorial for Andrew Morgan, the 25-year-old man who was run over by a delivery truck on Houston and Elizabeth Streets while biking to work last month. Apparently, even ghost bikes are dangerous to ride in this town. No doubt, if the NYPD investigates this crash scene they will find “cyclist error” as the “primary contributing factor” for this cabbie running up on the sidewalk. You know how agressive those crazy ghost bikers are.

Photo by Carter Booth copied from the Downtown Express.

12:04 PM | Link | (1) comments   

Suddenly, momentum is shifting in the Atlantic Yards debate. For months now, Bruce Ratner’s plan to build 17 high-rise towers and a luxury sports arena in Brooklyn has steamed ahead, resistance seemingly futile. Three events, in quick succession, have changed the game and put the politically connected developer on the defensive.

First, on Tuesday, the New York Times splashed Frank Gehry’s latest designs for Atlantic Yards across the front page. Ratner has long been criticized for the cheap, fortress-like architecture of his other Brooklyn projects. Gehry, the celebrity architect renowned for designing buildings that look like crumpled balls of tinfoil, was brought aboard to neutralize that critique and provide the developer with aesthetic cover. Yet, Gehry’s designs did what months of petitioning, protesting and public meetings couldn’t. They got “sensible,” well-heeled, politically connected Brooklynites pissed off, paying attention and preparing to fight. For neighborhood advocates who have been working diligently to get an apathetic public to pay attention to the travesty underway at Atlantic Yards, Gehry’s architectural models were a gift.

Then, on Wednesday, London won the 2012 Olympics bid. Suddenly, it is no longer unpatriotic to suggest that a 19,000-seat arena at the traffic-choked intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic might be a bad idea. With the Olympics bid and Manhattan stadium debate finally out of the way, New Yorkers are finally examining Ratner’s Atlantic Yards proposal on its own merits. They’re seeing that the project has little to do with the genuine needs of the communities and city around it. Real estate industry insider Peter Slatin reports that the Atlantic Yards project “is being driven not by the requirements of the district nor by a compelling urban vision, but rather by the high price,” the $300 million, Ratner paid for the New Jersey Nets basketball franchise. According to Slatin, “The project ballooned in size under pressure from Ratner’s co-investors on the Nets, who are increasingly concerned that their investment pay off.”

The Ratner plan suffered its third and most signficant blow on Wednesday when a rival real estate developer submitted a surprise bid for the railyards, just under the MTA’s deadline. The Extell Corporation’s bid adheres to most of the urban design recommendations put forward in the Unity Plan, a development proposal generated through community-based design workshops. Unlike the Ratner plan, Extell’s has no arena, it makes a genuine effort to knit together and fit in to the low-rise neighborhoods around it, and, most important, it requires no eminent domain. Extell isn’t asking the government to seize people’s homes and workplaces.

Granted, the odds of the MTA accepting the Extell bid are slim. You’d think the cash-strapped agency would have put real effort into marketing its valuable property. Yet, from the beginning, the MTA treated the bidding process as a mere formality. The Extell offer materialized only because neighborhood advocates took it upon themselves to send out the MTA’s requests for proposal to scores of developers. Regardless of how the MTA treats it, Extell’s bid is a big win for the community. The competing bid legitimizes the Unity Plan by putting real money behind it, the competition keeps the Atlantic Yards story in the news, and that ensures light will shine on the sweetheart dealings, lack of democratic process and disregard for community input that have defined the project up to now.

But let’s get back to Gehry’s gift to the Atlantic Yards opposition, the architectural model and sketches he showed Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff. The designs are so bad they’re almost funny. Gehry calls the 70-story skyscraper at the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush “Miss Brooklyn,” as in, “We’ll sure miss Brooklyn if this crap gets built.” The arena itself is barely visible beneath Gehry’s torqued pile of boxes. For Ratner and his political supporters, the arena's invisibility is a problem. They’d much rather you focus on the return of professional sports to Brooklyn than pay attention to the 21-acre land grab and mountainous landscape of new skyscrapers. To solve that problem Gehry has wrapped an entire city block with a 10-story tall, glowing Nets billboard, complete with, what I believe is a massive Jason Kidd head looming over Flatbush Avenue. Easter Island’s got nothing on the New Brooklyn, yo.

Ouroussoff unwittingly does more damage to Ratner's cause when he writes, "As you arrived by car along Flatbush Avenue your eye would travel up a delirious pileup of forms, which become a visual counterpoint to the horizontal thrust of the avenue." Though it's difficult for a mere layman such as myself to understand what this high priest of architecture is talking about and why it has any inherent value to actual human beings, the idea of thousands of Nets fans arriving at the arena by car is, of course, an absolute nightmare. If Gehry and Ratner are thinking of their typical Atlantic Yards "user" as someone who gets there with a car, Brooklyn is in a lot more trouble than even the harshest critics of this plan thought.

But it would not be at all suprising if Gehry and Ratner are, in fact, thinking of making Atlantic Yards an automobile-oriented development. At the one city council hearing that has taken place on the project, Ratner spokesman Jim Stuckey was asked Forest City Ratner would allay the community's traffic congestions concerns. Stuckey told city councilmember David Yassky not to worry: Ratner would include plenty of parking and would widen the avenue to accomodate greater traffic flow. For progressive urban planners, these are fighting words. Even not-so-progressive planners know that the single best way to encourage automobile traffic is to provide copious parking and wider thoroughfares. Stuckey's solution wouldn't solve the area's traffic problems, it would exacerbate them.

With skyscrapers jutting up at odd angles, Gehry’s design gives an overall impression of towers simply bursting out of the earth like giant crystal formations. Ouroussoff explains to us little people that the design reflects the energy and vitality of today’s Brooklyn. Not surprisingly, the master planners and architectural theorists completely ignore the fact that a city's energy, vitality and creativity is generated on its streets and in its neighborhoods, not by “a skyline fraught with visual tension.” Over the last decade Brooklyn has become the place to be in New York City, in equal measure to the corporate deadening and commercial take-over of Manhattan. There is no more creative space on that side of the East River. Cataclysmic money has squeezed it out.

Ultimately, what we see in Gehry's designs is an attempt to create an energetic urban metropolis from scratch. What we end up with is a cartoon version of a real city. The closest architectural analogy to Gehry's plan isn't anything in New York City. It's the New York New York Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.

Photographs courtesy of NoLandGrab.org

10:04 PM | Link | (11) comments