LEED vs Green

By Peter Kincl

What, exactly, does it mean to be Green? And why does it matter? Consider these statistics: buildings consume about 40% of all energy in the United States. Of that, 84% is used in heating, cooling, hot water, electricity, lighting, etc. Only 12% is embedded in construction. 16% if you add maintenance and renovation. That’s it, 16%, which includes manufacturing all the materials used and then transporting them to the building site. Now I’m not claiming this 16% is an insignificant number – it isn’t. But compared to the 84%, it is. If we want to make a significant reduction in energy use, we need to tackle the 84%.

For the foreseeable future energy conservation will be the single most important aspect of being Green. Water conservation is important, but water shortage problems, although serious in some parts of the west, are, right now, not as potentially devastating as the economic and political disruptions that could be precipitated by declining oil and global warming. Besides, buildings account for only 11% of all water usage, so the potential to make a significant difference is small. Similarly, recycling, renewable resources and conservation matter, but energy shortage and carbon dioxide emissions are much more pressing problems.

Which brings me to LEED and why I believe that in some ways it is more a problem, in terms of making a real Green difference, than a solution. Too many LEED buildings either save no energy or actually use more. This, although maybe on the face of it astonishing, should come as no surprise. It is entirely possible for a building to acquire enough points to become LEED certified without doing anything to limit energy use. LEED is a collection of points which a project accumulates for satisfying certain conditions, and the vast majority of these are unrelated to energy use.

For example, I am amazed that an all glass building can even qualify for LEED certification, let alone actually get it. A basic knowledge of thermal conductivity, thermal bridging and solar heat gain is sufficient to understand why an all glass building can never be energy efficient. And yet it seems quite clear (given how many of these things keep going up) that this is not common knowledge, not even, it seems, amongst building professionals. Either that, or it is knowledge being willfully ignored for the sake of marketing and/or aesthetics. Either way, it is the equivalent of building big gas guzzling SUVs. There is no way to call an all glass building Green. And yet the USGBC doesn’t seem to mind. The certificates keep coming.

There are alternatives to LEED, real alternatives that actually make a real difference. All of them have one important thing in common: a metric. In other words, they have a goal that can be measured. The measuring can be done in Btus used or carbon emissions or whatever units, but the goal has to be measurable and verifiable. Put simply, what, at the end of the day, is the utility bill?

One such alternative is the Passive House concept. The point of Passive House is to construct a building that uses only 4.7 kBtu/sq.ft./yr. for heating and cooling, and it keeps primary energy use equal to or less than 38 kBtu/sq.ft./yr. To one unfamiliar with the jargon, these numbers mean absolutely nothing. But the numbers are important because they are numbers, and because, if one is familiar with such numbers, they are incredibly low (up to ten times more efficient than an average building). To achieve such an ultra-low energy performance is admittedly not simple, but it is very much doable. There is an up-front price premium (which can be offset in the long run with savings on energy consumption). But as we build more and more super-efficient buildings, the industry will become familiar with the construction methods required, and products, such as super insulated windows, will hopefully be made in the USA and their price will come down (the windows, and pretty much all high efficiency Passive House components, are currently German).

I would suggest that being Green means a credible and quantifiable drop in energy use. It means a real reduction in carbon emissions. It means, in the building industry, dealing in a serious way with the 84%. It does not mean papering over inaction by awarding relatively inconsequential points. Olympic inspired ratings don’t mean anything. A significant carbon footprint reduction does.

Light At Grade

The current show of the photographs by Robert Frank at the Metropolitan in New York is provocative on many levels. One is how dark and dreary New York and most other cities looked at the sidewalk level in the 1950s and 60s. Recent viewings of The French Connection (1972) and Seven Ups (1973), with its 13 minute car chase through the streets of Manhattan and past my subway stop, show an equally dim first story. Admittedly, Frank had a somber viewpoint (no one smiles) and the cop movies were celebrating gritty. Still the 9th Avenue and West 96th Streets shown in the Seven Ups is not even remotely like the ones we have today.

Personally, I remember those streets. In the early seventies I used to marvel at how old and closed in the shops on upper Broadway were. Some actually sold lace. Others, I don’t know what they sold. Shop windows were often very fly blown. There was retail but not much selling. Naturally the midtown shopping avenues were glittering but outside those relatively limited areas the retail bulb dimmed way down. Retail and commerce on cross town streets were even more withdrawn, even mysterious, to the outsider.

Something changed and it probably happened in the 1980s. Retail activity south of 96th Street started to grow in intensity. A local avenue like Columbus suddenly became hot. Rents increased, old shops disappeared and new ones took over. The change was so abrupt that many feared for the city. Commercial rent control was proposed by the Borough President. It never went anywhere. Protecting mom and pop lace shops in the mid-80s didn’t seem convincing.

With the greater retail vigor came expanded shop windows and more lighting. Stores were reaching out to the passersby. The parochial shops of the closed neighborhoods were replaced by stores that would take anybody’s money. Yes, the mallification of Manhattan was worrisome but it seemed that New York suddenly had more neighborhoods of interest to explore.

Today the avenues and retail cross streets teem with life and light. Retail has been hard hit by the recession but it is finding its way to struggle back. Some stores are empty but they come back surprisingly fast. So what happened? An explosion in U.S. consumer spending that began in the 80s is partly the answer. The other is New York’s expanding population. Increased density and sheer numbers supported more stores, restaurants and entertainment. Competition spurred the hard sell and, often, excitement and light in the street.

Robert Frank and the cop films saw a low energy city outside its famed core. That was then this is now. Try to get through the evening crowds on Ninth Avenue today.

Greenwich South — A Neighborhood Rejoins the City

This month the Downtown Alliance revealed a conceptual plan for reestablishing Greenwich Street in the World Trade Center site, thus reconnecting Battery Park and the West Side up to the Meat Packing District. The twin towers plaza interrupted Greenwich Street for over thirty years, isolating the blocks south of it. The focus of the study is on those blocks which they call Greenwich South. (The Alliance’s excellent web site http://www.downtownny.com/greenwichsouth packs a lot of history and urban planning ideas into a well organized package.)

The basic notion is that Greenwich Street string together the Meat Packing District, the West Village, Hudson Square, Tribeca, Greenwich South and Battery Park into a continuous Lower West Side. Moreover, new east/west connections would bring Battery Park City into the 24/7 life of a revitalized Greenwich South. By facilitating easy connections between areas of urban vitality and Downtown, normal incremental development should spread in underused areas . This is not a bold construction proposal but rather a simple planning move that lets the process that succeeded so well north of the WTC site flow to the south. Architecture Research Office, which organized the study, did propose some stunning structures but it is the simple street restoration that makes the planning work.

While the agonizingly slow return of the WTC site has been a trial, there are benefits to getting perspective on how west side development is unfolding. In 2001 the nature of the Meat Packing District and the fate of the High Line were not at all clear. Indeed, Tribeca was viewed with doom and gloom. Most of the planning impulses then were in response to the destruction and not on how to use the Lower West Side as leverage to enliven Downtown.

These last eight years have shown that almost all neighborhoods in Manhattan are experiencing more intense use and more energy. Most of this change has been block by block advancement of mixed uses. Greenwich South’s attachment to the Lower West Side will promote similar development. It has taken a long time, but a piece of the city is being fit back into place.

Coney Island Story

Coney Island’s high tide was in the first half of the 20^th Century. By the 1960’s, like so much in New York, disinvestment and demographic change accompanied the decline of the amusement district. See the movie “The Warriors” for a 1970’s image of its fall.

Fast forward to 2005. The area was weak but not dead. The minor league baseball Keyspan Park was drawing good crowds but they didn’t linger after the games. A fraction of the amusements held on but the boardwalk itself was in good shape. And the big beach was still there.

Enter Joe Sitt. He is from the neighborhood and people call him Joey. He has made millions buying derelict urban property and building inner city malls. His company, Thor Equities, has millions of feet in property throughout the country. Over a number of years he bought up most of the amusement district between Surf Avenue and the boardwalk. Sitt’s 2005 concept, he said, was to build a Vegas style, Bellagio complex from Keyspan to the Wonder Wheel on about 12 acres. There would be a hotel, shops, an indoor water park (swimming in February), megaplexes, and a giant merry-go-round. Complete glitz. 

Initially the City was supportive but Joey never seemed to pull the trigger and move the project along. He has the local council member on his side but the community was divided. The small time operators, the people who make this New York’s Coney Island, were afraid the indoor mall aspect would drive them out. There is a housing component of 4,500 units of housing, 35% affordable according to Sitt, at the west end of the project. While the affordable and market housing is a far cry from the low income units that went up in the 1960s, there is a great deal of neighborhood resistance to more demographic change. 

By spring 2009, the City was actively hostile to Joey. They have been offering $110,000,000 to buy him out and he won’t sell. (He bought the property, according to the City, for $93,000,000.) The City is calling him a speculator, not a developer, and he is saying the City is trying to steal his land. It’s a stand off. Sitt can’t do too much in this financial climate without a zoning change permitting his mixed usages. The City can’t do much either without the land. 

At the end of July the City Council approved the zoning changes needed to execute the City’s, i.e. the Mayor’s, concept for the property. It turns out that the mayor wants hotels, restaurants and amusement park rides too. On the same 12 acres. Even the housing is there in the same place. 

Like so many of Mayor Bloomberg’s planning efforts, he is trying to develop land he doesn’t control. This happened with the Jets Stadium, the West Yards and Willets Point.

An eminent domain struggle with Thor would be very messy. Joey may be gaming the City but he is a real developer elsewhere. 

Given the similar approaches that Sitt and the City are taking to the site, it is not clear why the City wants to buy the site. Why doesn’t the City come to an agreement about what Sitt includes in the project and approve that agreement as the zoning change? Is Joey too unstable to be a partner in such a project? Time will tell. Nevertheless this is shaping up as yet another grand New York development that sinks beneath the waves. 

Building Green

By Peter Kincl and Charles Lauster

It may have a shiny plaque at the entrance signifying LEED[1] Gold status, but the Seattle City Hall is an energy hog. According to The Seattle Post-Intelligencer[2] it uses up to 50% more power than the older, larger building it replaced. London’s City Hall, a futuristic glass egg designed by Foster and Partners, advertises itself as a “virtually non-polluting public building”, but it, too, guzzles energy. In fact recent data suggests that LEED certified buildings use 29% more energy than similar, non-LEED certified, buildings[3]. What is going on here? 

This conundrum makes sense if one accepts that there are two ways of looking at a  “green” building: energy efficiency and carbon footprint. The two approaches have different implications for how we build and how we evaluate successful building performance. Both are of the highest importance to humankind’s future but they are not the same thing.

Energy efficiency, as it applies to a building, is a relatively simple concept: it is a measure of energy used per square foot of area. A monthly utility bill divided by the size of a house equals the house’s energy efficiency. It is straightforward, clear, and, importantly, verifiable because it is a physical test that it is done after a building is up and running.

Determining the carbon footprint of a building is a much more complex issue. It is more a holistic concept than a technical one. It can be organized as series of calculations, some of which are neither simple nor clear. The carbon footprint of a building takes into account all the energy from various sources that goes into making the materials used in its construction, moving those materials to the site, constructing the building and then operating it. The calculations can include such wide-ranging environmental variables as climate, water management and transportation modes of the occupants. They can involve the chemical behavior of materials, pollution from the manufacturing of construction components or the use of endangered species. It is a modeling of the total environmental impact of a building project.

How are these two ways of defining a ”green” building reflected in the business of constructing them? What are the real world implications of each?

Energy efficiency in buildings is like car mileage standards — it is not only a simple idea, it is also doable. It requires an air-tight, well insulated building envelope coupled with a sophisticated ventilation system and heat exchangers. For example, the German Passiv Haus concept is basically a recipe of solar orientation, window placement, architectural details and mechanical system specifications that will produce a building that needs virtually no heating. Such buildings have been erected in Germany and several other European countries and they work. 

Until recently, the United States had cheap energy and consequently few building codes addressed energy performance. Current US codes mostly require a total value for thermal resistance. This value is computed based on the published resistance values of the various materials and assemblies used in the building. The catch is that there is no way of factoring for the details used in construction. Yet the details are everything. Poor detailing allows heat to move through walls even if they are insulated; this is what is known as thermal bridging. If the best materials are installed with poor detailing, thermal bridges will destroy the building’s performance. Current codes for energy are thus meaningless. They do not address how buildings are put together.

To be effective building codes should mandate energy efficiency. A key element here is the disclosure of a building’s energy use — in other words the utility bill — in order to make the necessary efficiency calculations. We have no idea how efficient or inefficient most buildings are because owners are not required to divulge their energy usage. In a green context this makes no sense. Would we take car manufacturers’ claims of fuel efficiency seriously if they weren’t by law required to divulge their vehicle fuel economy ratings? Disclosure of energy use would also allow for databases to be built which would unambiguously show which building strategies, materials and details work best.

Last year Britain passed a law mandating that the energy consumption of public buildings be made available. The result has been quite interesting. Many brand new buildings have been shown to be energy wasteful, including highly acclaimed projects like Daniel Libeskind’s Imperial War Museum in Manchester and London’s brand new City Hall by Foster & Partners. As Matt Bell, director of public affairs at the UK government’s architecture watchdog agency, put it, “We hear a lot of greenwash. The knowledge that from now on this performance will be objectively measured should mark the end of that.”

However, the simplicity of the efficiency calculation is a weakness in one respect: it misses many of the dimensions that affect the environment. This is what the carbon footprint calculations reveal. Yet these calculations aren’t easily adapted into building codes. First, there are nearly endless formulas for all the different types of energies available, how they are generated and how they are used. It is not obvious how many calculations can be incorporated into codes. Secondly, beyond energy, there are sustainability and even social concerns that can and should be considered. These issues are not easily quantified. Finally, there is a moral dimension in this analysis. Even among people of good faith, morality is complicated and not an easy fit in a building code. 

LEED attempts to simplify this environmental thicket by creating specific performance targets. For instance, a project gets points for using sustainable products; if a certain number of points is achieved the design is certified as a LEED project. Because the LEED process occurs during design, it is a measure of intent. How the building ultimately performs in operation is not part of the certification. The inevitable downside is that LEED rating can become a formal exercise based on filling out forms and doing computer simulations. Theory often does not pan out in reality and once a building has been declared LEED compliant, its certification stands, regardless of its energy consumption, which is the one thing that can be measured.

Looked at from a different point of view, LEED can be an effective method of evaluation during design to maintain awareness of environmental consequences in the decision making process. With its numerically weighted ratings, it is a good checklist for environmental thinking. This sort of design approach coupled with post-construction energy efficiency audits would constitute a real energy saving and carbon limiting construction process. 

In a world of diminishing energy reserves, getting more output from less oil and gas is critical. Structures account for approximately 38% of the nation’s energy use. How we build, heat, cool, light and use our buildings requires more energy than transportation. Building design, even more than transportation design, can dramatically alter energy consumption. Energy conservation should be a paramount goal of a green building. This is why a verifiable energy efficiency code is critical.

Being aware of a building’s carbon footprint is also important because the world is heating up from excessive production of CO2. But because this is such a complex concept it is not something that is easily codified by local governments and it probably shouldn’t be. Thinking through the carbon footprint is an obligation. LEED status should be an honor. Then post the utility bill in the lobby. That should be a requirement.

 

Copyright 2009   Peter Kincl and Charles Lauster are architects at Charles Lauster Architect, PC in New York City.

  

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[1] LEED stands for Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design, a program to encourage green buildings developed and promoted by the US Green Building Council.

[2] “Energy Audit of City Hall Sought”, August 2, 2005

[3] See A Better Way to Rate Green Buildings by Henry Guifford (available at henryguifford.com) for a statistical analysis of energy use by LEED versus non LEED buildings. Another good discussion of this issue is Prioritizing Green: It’s The Energy Stupid by Joseph Lstiburek. It can be found at the Building Science website (buildingscience.com).

At the WTC the PA May be Right

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Speaker Sheldon Silver are complaining about the apparent intention of the Port Authority to scale back the World Trade Center project. They charge that the P.A. wants to go forward only with 1 WTC, formerly the Freedom Tower, and postpone the other four towers. In this dispute they are backing Lawrence Silverstein in his desire to get back all the square footage he lost on 9/11 as fast as possible.

The Port Authority might be right this time. The situation has changed a great deal since the destruction of the original World Trade Center. The Great Recession has transformed the financial sector; the giant equity firms have either disappeared or turned into banks. 19,000 finance jobs have been lost since August 2008 and companies that have been too big to fail have failed, think Lehman Brothers.

When the financial sector bounces back, it may look very different. Instead of being dominated by a few enormous entities, much smaller equity firms may provide the majority of jobs. The current regulatory drive to restrict dangerous accumulations of  scale and risk will promote smaller companies whose failure will not bring down the whole economy.  These smaller firms will not need the 40,000 square foot floor plates the older generation required.  The changes in the industry may mean that building designs that addressed the needs of ten years ago may not meet the needs of five years from now.

Another aspect of the out of date nature of the current WTC plan is energy efficiency. A very large floor plate is air conditioned year round. The energy demands of the buildings being built downtown are tremendous. The United States is finally waking up to the need to take energy use seriously and hence new energy codes will be part of the future of the construction industry. If Germany is an indicator, floor plate size as it relates to energy consumption will be one subject of those codes.

In terms of function and energy performance, the plan being pushed by the Mayor and the Speaker may be exactly what the Financial District doesn’t need. The original World Trade Center was always a bit of a white elephant. This scheme has the same pallor. It may well be a bet on a very large amount of square footage of a sort that the market won’t need. That would be a disaster for downtown.

The P.A. does not have unlimited money. Getting the rail connection from JFK to downtown and building the new rail tunnel to New Jersey are P.A. projects that are much more critical to New York’s future than office towers. Infrastructure is where its money should be going.

Building 1 WTC, the Path Station and WTC Memorial will have a huge impact on the area. Hedging its bets by not building the other towers today allows the PA to invest in New York’s tomorrow.

State of the far Westside

Today the state of the far Westside appears in disarray. Five years ago the conventional wisdom was that the area had a coherent plan and it was on the brink of implementation. Today there is no conventional wisdom, only questions. The city, however, may be the better for this thrashing about. 

What, exactly, happened to get us to this point? A good place to start is in 2000 when Senator Chuck Schumer led a study of how New York City could add another 30 million square feet of commercial office space over the next 25 years, just as it had in the last 25 years. The Westside was a prime target. With Mayor Bloomberg in 2002 the planning effort became a high priority. 

Meanwhile, the Jets football team negotiated with the city to build a new football stadium immediately south of the Javits Convention Center. An expanded and modernized Javits would use the stadium as part of its increased convention space. The new Deputy Mayor for Economic Development, Daniel L. Doctoroff, had been New York’s 2012 Olympic Committee chair and had designated the Jets stadium as the main 2012 Olympic venue. 

The City Planning Commission embraced the stadium and the Olympic bid in projecting for development. Instead of the usual east/west orientation for development, the planners elected to develop north/south along a new Hudson Boulevard between 10^th and 11^th Avenues. This strategy would allow for large commercial buildings in proximity to the convention center and new hotels serving both. The city even reached an understanding with the MTA to expand the #7 subway line to 11^th avenue and down to 34^th Street to handle the thousands of new workers on Hudson Boulevard. Everything seemed in alignment. Then everything fell apart. 

The death of the Olympics and the stadium came in May and June 2005. The International Olympic Committee selected London as the 2012 Olympic city. Part of reason was the controversy over the Jets stadium. The stadium itself was stopped a month later when the three members of the New York State Public Authority Board voted on the use of state property for the stadium. The Board must vote unanimously and one member, Speaker of the Assembly Sheldon Silver, voted no. 

The collapse was not over.  With the stadium gone, the Convention Center had to recast its expansion. This was made more difficult because of the post 9/11 security screening that has to be done for the trucks marshalling for shows. There is simply not enough room to make the marshalling work efficiently. The Pataki administration, in its last year, tried to keep the big expansion alive but even the talents of architect Richard Rogers could not overcome the mounting costs and the inadequate space. Late last year Governor Spitzer indicated that the expansion will be minimal and most of the work will be to stabilize the leaking building. 

Lastly, the #7 expansion is in doubt. Rising costs may necessitate eliminating one of the two stations, the north station at 11^th Avenue and 41^st Street. The expansion is to be paid for by the city, not the MTA, and the city says it cannot afford the station. This loss would be a severe blow to the many new residents on far West 42^nd Street and the eventual workers and residents on the west side. 

So, how bad is it? Maybe not so bad at all. The fiasco with the Jets stadium alerted the MTA to the spectacular value of its property. The MTA would have made a fraction from the Jets of what it can command now. In fact, the MTA needs to determine if leasing is a better approach than selling development rights. A growing income stream for ninety-nine years may be far richer than the sales value today. 

The stadium itself would have been a nightmare on game days and the Jets got a much cheaper stadium in New Jersey. The fact that the Giants and Jets share the stadium is a welcome efficiency. While Governor Spitzer has not revealed his ultimate plans, there is the hope that a new, more affordable and much larger convention center could be built outside of Manhattan, in Queens or even in New Jersey. In recent years New York has crossed a threshold. The metropolitan area is the critical zone, not the island of Manhattan. Today people do come to New York to visit Queens and Brooklyn. The Boroughs and northwest New Jersey are great assets for those uses that are too big for Manhattan. Better transportation is the key to making the metropolitan area thrive. 

With the Javits moved, the five blocks it now occupies could be opened to residential uses and access to the riverfront. This means that the neighborhood of Hells Kitchen South could survive. Commercial development on Hudson Boulevard would have eventually expanded back toward Ninth Avenue squeezing the residential uses out.

In fact, he hoped for commercial development is happening, but not on Hudson Boulevard. Five developers are competing to develop the West and East Hudson Yards. Interestingly, all of the schemes are oriented east/west along 34th Street. Hudson Boulevard is now a remnant of dashed schemes. The development over the yards is the engine pulling development forward, in the classic New York east/west mode. The money saved by abandoning Hudson Boulevard acquisitions could go toward the #7 extension. It could save the station, without which the expansion is useless. In fact, the #7 could extend down to 14th Street, serving the west side of Chelsea and connecting with young workers coming to work on the westside from Williamsburg and east.

After decades during which the city’s planning skills atrophied, New York is entering a new era of exciting, large-scale developments. The Hells Kitchen experience was no Westway. That 1980’s disaster left the city divided and fearful of change. Today community groups, developers and city officials are learning how to work together and get something done. The High Line is a great example. The Jets, Javits and Hudson Boulevard taught the city a great deal. No harm was done. Now it is time to get it right.

Piazza Times Square

NEW YORK TIMES Op-Ed Submission

The tussle over where to put a statue of Frank Sinatra illustrates a quandary in the planning triumph that is the new Times Square — there is no square there. In what is now one of New York’s greatest public spaces, increasing numbers of people are jammed onto the same sidewalks that were crowded when the area was a blight. Pedestrians are too congested to even get a decent view of the area’s famous digital displays. This overcrowded mix of cars and pedestrians is frustrating and dangerous. Rather than a square or a great piazza, the Cross Roads of the World feels more like the entry ramp to a busy highway.

Times Square is what planners call a “bow tie,” so called because of the space that results when Broadway diagonally slices through one of New York’s avenues. The two streets carve up the land between them into the triangular islands that pedestrians hop between in getting across two streams of traffic. Significantly, bow ties occur at major cross-town streets, such as 14th, 23rd, and 66th Streets, and thus set the stage for major urban spectacles, Union Square, Madison Square and Lincoln Center, for instance. The announcement last week of a plan to give more space to pedestrians in a reconfigured Herald Square recognizes that bow tie’s dangerous level of congestion.

Times Square has been a major spectacle for a century. Its bow tie, from 42nd Street to 47th Street, was the center of New York theater, movies, entertainment and illuminated advertising. Today it is all those things and more. Besides entertainment, it is now a center for finance, publishing and broadcasting. This metamorphosis is due, in part, to planning concepts that embraced the jazzy spirit of Times Square as epitomized in its wonderful illuminated signage. From morning to late at night, the mix of family entertainment and vastly expanded commercial uses has brought together the city’s densest concentration of tourists, workers and New Yorkers bent on a good time.

To realize its greatness, Times Square should be a genuine square, not a roadway. The focus of a square is on pedestrians and their appreciation of the urban room around them. Creating a square would require the closing off of all or at least some of the north/south traffic from 47th Street to 42nd Street. The east/west streets could remain open.

It is true that this change would have a big impact on traffic. While vehicular movement is crucial to the life of the city, cites were not invented simply to move traffic. Rethinking north/south traffic is not too much to achieve the full potential of Times Square. Consider that most uptown traffic is moving south on Broadway; Seventh Avenue only begins at 59th Street and its contribution to the crush is less. If the closing of both Broadway and Seventh Avenue is too disruptive, southbound traffic entering on Broadway and exiting on Seventh could be maintained. The conversion of the closed roadway and the capture of the islands would still represent a tremendous change towards a true Times Square.

The cost of this grand square would not be much. No buildings are needed. No property would have to be bought. Traffic would be rerouted and the roadways turned into sidewalks. After all the millions of dollars that went into the rebirth of Times Square, the crowning achievement would be cheap.

New York needs a room for the city’s people to come together. That is what the Piazza San Marco did in Venice; it was the space for the people of the Republic. Times Square, central in Manhattan, central in the myth of New York and central in the work and play of New Yorkers today, is where the room for the people should be. The walls have been decorated with the most fantastic of electronic displays; everything is ready. Simply close off some traffic and the Piazza Times Square will be open.