“We’re living with ghosts,” says Paula Segal, executive and legal director at 596 Acres. She’s talking about many of New York’s currently vacant lots. Originally cleared as part of “urban renewal” plans–demolition of neighborhoods deemed “slums” across the country from 1949 to 1974–the idea was to make them open spaces, but many were never developed. Rather, they were left as open wounds (most behind fences), concentrated in areas like the South Bronx, East Harlem and East New York: neighborhoods that, as Segal put it, “we know with our hearts are full of holes. But then you realize; those holes are part of a plan.”
Today, there is a clear correlation you can see as Segal toggles between two maps: Urban renewal plans can predict with a sad accuracy the locations of the city’s current empty lots. Too many currently empty lots are “the scabs of urban renewal: places that were cleared for the New City that never arrived.”
Segal showed the maps on Urban Reviewer, a new online tool for viewing the history of urban renewal plans in New York City, which 596 Acres recently created in collaboration with Partner and Partners and supported by Smart Sign.
596 Acres is a grassroots community land access nonprofit. They represent the exact antidote to urban renewal-style top-down urban planning. 596 Acres helps neighborhoods organize to transform vacant lots into community gardens, play lots, and spaces where people can “co-create.” And now they are also helping to expose how and exactly where we are still waiting for the promise of top-down planning to deliver.
They first discovered two vacant lots that were publicly owned, planned-but-never-developed open spaces when “a gentleman about to retire” from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD)–the government agency that was once responsible for deeming neighborhoods blighted slums to be destroyed–tipped them off. “No one’s ever going to work on these,” he told them.
Later, 596 found a similar lot in the Rockaways. So they started to search urban renewal plans for others. They soon realized they needed to look through all of the plans, without an efficient way to do so. So they began development of this tool, which would eventually become the Urban Reviewer. In the process, Segal discovered the “shocking amount” of publicly owned vacant scab-lots in the city.
596 and a team of volunteers undertook the massive task of first accessing and then gathering the data from all of the City’s urban renewal plans since 1949 (there are over 150) and converting them into an interactive map. They used a law that requires government agencies–in this case HPD–to make their documents available for inspection. “Initially they were reluctant,” Segal said, “because they thought the plans didn’t matter. We had to go back and forth with them about whether we were allowed to inspect the documents. But once they started to see [the project] come alive they were incredibly cooperative and helpful.”