The Municipal Art Society of New York

As New York City’s sole organization dedicated to championing your quality of life, the Municipal Art Society safeguards the city’s past while embracing and promoting the best city-building ideas for its future. Since we were founded in 1893, we have put a lasting mark on the history of our great city’s urban design and development – for you and for all New Yorkers.

Thanks to the support of our members and many generous donors, we have just completed a remarkably productive twelve months of furthering our preservation, planning, advocacy and public-education mission. Notably, last month, we held our second annual MAS Summit for New York City. Scheduled at the start of our new fiscal year, the two-day Summit is both a culmination of our work over the past year and helps set the agenda for our work going forward. It’s at the Summit that New Yorkers like you join city leaders, urban design professionals and civic activists to debate the issues having the greatest impact on New York City’s livability.

I hope you’ll enjoy reading this report of our past year’s accomplishments and understand that our work is driven by one goal: ensuring the future livability and sustainability of New York City. Among the highlights, MAS:

• Successfully urged the City’s leadership to include historic preservation as a goal for achieving the city’s future sustainability
• Issued a pioneering in-depth report that offers concrete recommendations for the future health of the city’s garment industry
• Hosted a design charrette to develop a vision for a new East Side Waterfront Park
• Provided essential know-how to community activists planning for more livable neighborhoods in every borough
• Launched a funding campaign to ensure the future of the 9/11 memorial Tribute in Light

In addition, this year MAS embarked on strategy to include a critical missing piece – arts and culture – into our work enhancing the livability of communities throughout the city.

As we head into the new year, we ask you to help MAS continue our role as the independent voice advocating for the public good on development and quality-of-life issues. With your support, we will continue to bring fresh thinking to the challenges facing New York City now and in the years to come.

Groundbreaking Work in Preservation and Climate Change

As champion of the country’s first Landmarks Law in 1965, MAS has remained at the forefront of national preservation issues. Today, our ambitious Preservation and Climate Change initiative is seeking to make policy-makers and the public aware of the environmental and economic value of retaining and improving older buildings.

Through this multi-faceted program, MAS is making a compelling case that the retrofit of an old building can significantly reduce its energy consumption and carbon footprint – potentially leading to the greening of countless buildings, to fewer demolitions of the city’s aging structures, and to the preservation of much of the landmark-quality architecture that gives character to our neighborhoods.

Led by Lisa Kersavage, MAS senior director for preservation and sustainability, our Preservation and Climate Change Campaign was publicly launched at a seminal conference at Columbia University in October 2010 at which an audience of about 200 architects, planners, and environmental academics looked at examples of high-performance retrofits and examined how other cities have encouraged retrofits in their sustainability policies. And, last spring, MAS achieved a major campaign victory when Mayor Bloomberg released his newly revised PlaNYC 2030, which acknowledges for the first time a meaningful role for preservation in meeting the City’s sustainability goals.

To build upon this success, MAS, with support from the J.M. Kaplan Fund, is working with the Pratt Center and a team of pro bono architects and engineers to improve the efficiency of the Henry Street Settlement’s landmarked headquarters, built in the 1830s. We anticipate that a modest investment at the outset will lead to a 15- to 25-percent annual energy savings; what the Settlement will save in energy costs can then fund the programs that advance its mission.

Based on the lessons learned from the demonstration project, MAS is producing Greening New York City’s Landmarks: A Guide for Property Owners. We are proud to produce this valuable guide in partnership with the City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.

The Future of the Garment District

The Garment District is an essential part of the cultural and economic life of New York City. According to the New York City Economic Development Corporation, the fashion industry employs approximately 165,000 people, accounting for 5.5% of New York City’s workforce. Over 900 fashion companies headquartered here generate $9 billion in total wages with tax revenues of $1.7 billion for New York City.

Every year, the leading design schools—FIT, Parsons and Pratt—turnout thousands of educated designers looking for employment. New York City is also the nerve center of fashion marketing and journalism, with Vogue and Women’s Wear Daily as well as new media outlets such as The Business of Fashion, Refinery29, The Sartorialist and StyleCaster based here.

The Garment District is also one of the few remaining manufacturing and design arenas where entrepreneurs and ambitious individuals alike can launch companies and ascend the economic ladder.

Following a successful push to urge the City to withdraw a controversial plan to rezone the Garment District, MAS began researching global fashion capitals and manufacturing networks to better understand the intricacies of the industry and the inner workings of Midtown’s fashion hub. We conducted case studies, interviewed dozens of experts, gathered new data, and continued our partnership with other civic organizations such as the Design Trust for Public Space.

At the 2011 Summit, we released the report Fashioning the Future: NYC’s Garment District. The study provides two sets of recommendations. The first set focuses on growing the industry: using Garment District streets as runways during fashion shows, hosting trade shows to bring in revenue to support the industry, reducing tariffs on textiles, launching a citywide “buy local” marketing campaign, and supporting vocational training opportunities for fashion-related jobs. The second set of recommendations focuses on providing a stable home for manufacturing and identifying the incentives and mechanisms for securing this vital space. The report outlines some concrete approaches to build on the very real strengths of the industry to ensure that New York remains a center of innovation and entrepreneurship.

The report Fashioning the Future is available on the MAS website.

Leadership on an East Side Waterfront Park

New York has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build a new park on the East Side waterfront, and MAS is partnering with City officials and community groups in a campaign to reclaim an old pier for a park between East 38th and 41st streets for this purpose. The project would give New Yorkers access to the East River, create new open space in a neighborhood that desperately needs it, fill a gap in the evolving East River Greenway, and put in place one portion of a park that would extend from East 34th Street to East 60th Street.

A number of recent developments have brought this vision of much-needed open space on the East River closer to reality. The City has hired consultants to study the potential greenway between East 38th and 60th streets; East River ferry service was launched this year at East 34th Street; and Con Edison turned over the old pier to the City (a parking lot once occupied this prime waterfront space).

On July 26, Ronda Wist, MAS senior vice president for policy and advocacy, and her team hosted an all-day design charrette, co-sponsored by local elected officials and Community Board 6, to devise ideas for the transformation of the pier into a park. Charrette participants included representatives from the City’s Department of Parks & Recreation, Economic Development Corporation, Manhattan Community Board 6, the United Nations Development Corporation, New York University, and residents of the surrounding neighborhood. MAS, in conjunction with Barbara Wilks and her firm W Architecture, synthesized the ideas in a report to be released in December.

Laying the Groundwork for Zoning Reform

The zoning resolution of the City of New York turned 50 this year. The resolution, more than any other document, represents a plan for New York. It describes where people can live and where they can work; it defines how large buildings can be and what shape they can take, and it predicts which neighborhoods will grow and develop.

But the foundation of this document is built on the thinking of an earlier era, when manufacturing uses were problematic, towers surrounded by vast open space architecturally innovative, and incorporating the automobile was a pressing challenge.

New York City has changed a great deal over the last 50 years as has the zoning resolution. More than 900 pages have been added. But by building on an outdated understanding of the city we have created a conflicted, confusing document. As a result, the discussion of what the city of the future should look like is often restricted to those with the expertise to understand the zoning resolution, not those who are most affected by it.

In 2011, we have new challenges that need to be recognized and confronted: How do we develop communities in an environmentally-sensitive manner? How do we guarantee that affordable housing is not simply the result of a lottery process? How do we retain vital industries? Include the public in decisions about their communities? How can we ensure that as residents move into a neighborhood, services such as schools are there to support them?

Zoning alone cannot provide all the solutions but it does need to be overhauled to keep up with the demands of a new era.

Just as MAS did when we advocated for the 1916 Zoning Resolution, for the 1965 Landmarks Law and, more recently, for the 2002 establishment of a Waterfront Committee of the City Council, we are preparing to take the lead on this reform effort and build a coalition of civic organizations and real estate interests to support our work.

The Essential MAS Program: Livable Neighborhoods

In 2006, it became clear to the planners at MAS that the individuals serving on the city’s 59 community boards – each intended to review planning issues in communities with populations of between 150,000 and 200,000 – were insufficiently trained for their jobs. Thus was born one of those MAS programs that truly fills a void in our city – Livable Neighborhoods.

Livable Neighborhoods annually trains nearly 200 community board representatives and other civic-minded New Yorkers in just about every aspect of the planning process in New York City, from affordable housing and economic development to ULURP and zoning. People come from all five boroughs on a Saturday in the spring to attend a full day of workshops at Hunter College. Over time MAS has expanded the program to offer training that is specific to activists in target neighborhoods.

In February, by invitation of, and in partnership with, the office of Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr., MAS expanded Livable Neighborhoods into that borough. MAS was pleased to provide the training sessions to about 150 Bronx community board members. Held in the Bronx County Building Rotunda, the sessions included: Zoning, Using Maps and Data, the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, and Environmental Impact Statements.

On September 24, MAS and Pratt Institute hosted a Livable Neighborhoods session tailored for community activists from Brooklyn areas such as Brownsville, Flatbush, and Sunset Park. They, along with Pratt graduate students in sustainable planning and design, learned how to be better advocates for their communities and neighborhoods.

Ensuring the Future of Tribute in Light

A decade of Tribute in Light has now drawn to a close. The twin beams of light, visible within a 60-mile radius on a clear night, have become an icon of 9/11 remembrance for New York City. This summer MAS launched a campaign for support of our vision for a permanent site with the financial base that this powerful and healing work of public art requires.

Around the world, people assume that the installation of the lights has been permanently fixed already. That, unfortunately, is not the case. The reality is that MAS has been covering many of the expenses for Tribute in Light each year from its general operating fund. The dedicated partial funding that has been available to sustain the project lasted through this year’s illumination, but no further.

In 2001, recognizing the power of concerned citizens, the importance of public art, and the contribution that both make to civic life, MAS and Creative Time jointly created Tribute in Light in the space of just six months. Since then, New Yorkers and the rest of the world have counted on the lights being there. Our Campaign for Tribute in Light will be ongoing to ensure that these commemorative lights remain an annual feature of New York City’s skyline.

Restoration of the City Hall Council Chamber Mural

This year, the MAS Adopt-a-Mural Program, in partnership with the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York, raised $275,000 toward the $650,000 conservation of the elaborate ceiling mural in the City Council Chamber. Completed in 1903, the mural, New York Receiving the Tributes of the Nations, by Tabor Sears, comprises a large central oval and four octagonal panels painted in oil on canvas and mounted directly on the plaster ceiling.

MAS added the mural to the Adopt program in 2002 after it received emergency stabilization after water leaks damaged the Chamber’s plaster ceiling. Beginning in 1904, before assuming presidency of MAS, from 1924 to 1926, Sears served on a number of MAS committees, making the current restoration all the more appropriate. The murals, removed by conservators in February and extensively restored in their studios, were reinstalled in August and now splendidly grace City Hall again.

Enlightening New Yorkers Through Public Programs

Besides the major MAS advocacy and planning initiatives described above, our year included some wonderful public programs. Among the highlights are the following:

April Is Streets Month offered two very topical programs: Shared Streets: Making it Work, on April 4, was a look at the Bloomberg administration’s recent changes to the city’s streets. We were delighted that DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan agreed to participate. The second, Big Streets: Using and Reusing City Thoroughfares, on April 12, was a look at the “repurposing” or outright removal of roads such as the Sheridan Expressway.

In May, MAS co-presented, with the New York Landmarks Conservancy, a program on the evolving skyline. In view of plans for two major buildings – 15 Penn Plaza and Tower Verre – we explored how new tall buildings will affect the skyline and whether certain views should be preserved.

We celebrated the 50th Anniversary of the publication of Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities. On May 7 and 8, MAS sponsored Jane’s Walk – free tours aimed at getting people to explore their neighborhoods and meet their neighbors.

Here’s to a joyous and productive 2012!