The Carnegie Library in Washington, D.C. is now home to the world’s newest Apple Store following an expensive rehabilitation funded by the retailer. Originally built as a public library in 1903, it reopened its doors to the public on May 11, 2019 following decades of disuse, neglect, and a slew of failed attempts to repurpose the building as a museum. While some are fretting that a historic building owned by the city has been turned over to commercial use, we can rest assured that the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., the current leaseholder to the building, made the right decision.

More than fifteen years ago, Niskanen Center founder Jerry Taylor and his then-colleague at the Cato Institute, Peter Van Doren, had a novel proposal to solve an intractable political dispute about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), a wilderness area in northeast Alaska that is home to large populations of wildlife and vast, untapped petroleum deposits.

In the early 2000s, the Bush Administration proposed opening the refuge to oil drilling in the wake of rising crude oil prices. Naturally, the usual suspects came out in favor or against the proposal.

Environmentalist detractors worried that a pristine wildlife area could be ruined by any drilling and the possibility of leaky pipelines. Advocates, on the other hand, claimed only a tiny sliver of land was needed to extract billions of dollars of oil and the refuge would remain largely untouched. The benefits of oil drilling, proponents argued, would be widely shared because oil is used in so many parts of economy.

Taylor and Van Doren’s proposal was simple: the federal government should give ANWR, in its entirety, to the Sierra Club or some other environmentalist group, including full rights to use or transfer the land as they see fit. While the Sierra Club lobbied for zero drilling when the issue was decided through the political process, assigning the group transferable property rights to ANWR might have led them to reconsider.

Since they would receive most of the revenue generated by oil drilling in ANWR, the Sierra Club would be in a position to carefully weigh the potential costs of drilling against the billions of dollars of oil revenue they could use to support environmental causes worldwide. To boot, they would also have the ability to personally oversee oil production to ensure that it would be handled in an environmentally sensitive manner. Drilling might have some environmental costs, but would they really allow none whatsoever?

The economic issue at stake in the ANWR debate was whether or not the oil was made available to the market. In terms of efficiency, it didn’t really matter who profited from the oil, just that it was made available for sale in global markets. By assigning ownership to a group concerned with protecting ANWR and who also had global environmental interests, the federal government could be assured that the right decision would be made.

Congress unwittingly tried out a version of Taylor and Van Doren’s proposal with the Carnegie Library when, in 1999, it appropriated $2 million to create the City Museum of Washington, conditioned on the District of Columbia leasing the building to the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. for 99 years for $1 per year. While the money Congress authorized was tied directly to creating a specific museum, the Society was essentially given the historic building for at zero price and, eventually, free to use it as they saw fit.

The Historical Society was never able to successfully convert the library into a functional museum open to the general public despite multiple attempts and tens millions of dollars spent. Their efforts never attracted nearly enough visitors to support a budget sufficient to maintain the large and expensive building, and, for most of the past two decades, the building has primarily been empty save for a few private events and the Society’s offices. Despite operating rent-free from the library, the Society itself has been hemorrhaging cash in the last few years.

In the wake of their continued difficulties, the Society decided to partner with a business to revive the building and fund their educational mission. Apple agreed to spend more than $30 million to refurbish the building and signed a lease for the first floor that will provide the Society with $7 million of revenue over the next ten years. The basement and second floor of the library are now home to historical exhibits, and the building will receive hundreds of thousands of visitors per year.

This outcome is almost certainly better than any feasible alternative. Even if the local government found a way to fund the rehabilitation and operations of a museum centered on Washington’s history, the Society knows that, despite their best efforts, they could only expect a handful of visitors. Given their long tenure in the building, their strong interest in promoting education, and their multiple attempts to open a museum on the site, the Society is in a unique position to determine whether the public is best served by devoting the entire building to historical exhibits.

By partnering with Apple, the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. was able to successfully leverage the first floor of their building in a way that will allow a much larger share of the public to use one of the city’s great buildings and simultaneously increase the number of patrons that will be able to enjoy their collection of artifacts and photographs. Historical buildings need not be cleansed of all commercial activity to be great, and the Carnegie Library is a prime example.

The post The Carnegie Library Apple Store is Fine appeared first on Market Urbanism.

Worth saving?

From the front lines of the New York City preservation wars, one landlord is trying to convince the Landmarks Preservation Commission to allow him to demolish two of his landmarked buildings on the Upper East Side – something the commission has only approved 11 times for the 27,000 landmarks it oversees. The only circumstance in which the commission allows buildings to be torn down is if they are losing money, and the landlord claims to be losing $1 million a year on the buildings, whose apartments have an average rent controlled/stabilized price of $600/mo. He’s offering to move all the current tenants into other units (I assume at the same price), and also redo the interiors of 13 other buildings, but the tenants are putting up a fight.

Architecturally the buildings are completely unremarkable, and in fact the façades were ruined by the landlord right before the buildings were landmarked in a futile attempt to stop it – an unfortunate but legal and unavoidable side effect of the current preservation process. The reason that the buildings are landmarked, though, is actually quite interesting and ironic:

Those buildings along York Avenue in the East 60s, part of a complex of 15 walk-ups built between 1898 and 1915, were designated landmarks in 2006 because they were examples of a Progressive Era effort to improve tenement design for low-wage earners. The tan brick buildings offered snug apartments that overlooked courtyards and let in more air and light than a typical tenement’s railroad flat.

The irony here is that the buildings were models for buildings that were supposed to be built in place of the “tenements” in neighborhoods like the Lower East Side – which back then were dark and dingy, but nowadays have had their interiors refurbished and are far more desirable than the buildings in question. That is to say, the tenements, many of which are now themselves landmarked, were intended to be torn down and replaced with these sorts of buildings, which let in more light and air. Of course now, a century later, skyscrapers with floor-to-ceiling windows soar above other buildings, and even in the most crowded parts of Midtown they let in far more light and air than these six-story walk-ups.

Aside from pointing out this historical irony, it’s worth emphasizing that of the fifteen original buildings, the landlord is only asking to tear down two. In keeping with the complete lack of perspective that characterizes the LPC (which, to be fair, has not yet denied the application), one tenant said five years ago that tearing down two of the buildings would be “akin to designating the Statue of Liberty, but not its torch.”

The post The irony of preserving that which was intended to destroy appeared first on Market Urbanism.

2. The TLC has been cracking down on illegal livery cab street hails as the Bloomberg administration considers allowing the black cars to pick people up off the street in the outer boroughs (and maybe Manhattan above 96th St.). Other than when Bloomberg first proposed it in his 10th State of the City, though, I haven’t seen any progress on that initiative.

3. The LPC is considering a proposal for a new East Village historic district “containing nearly 300 buildings,” and according to my quick Google Map’ing, a few completely non-historic post-war buildings and a gigantic parking lot.

4. More on the California redevelopment agencies that Jerry Brown is trying to kill.

5. The blog ArlingtonGOP chides county Democrats’ “failure to require adequate parking at new development projects,” which I guess means they are not in favor of free markets in off-street parking. I’ve emailed the Arlington GOP for clarification and further comment and will post it if I receive it.

The post Links appeared first on Market Urbanism.

Welp, Curbed NY (your number 1 source for real estate porn) has heard your cry and presented me with a perfect example of how fucked up New York City’s historical preservation districts are: Meet the Gansevoort Market Historic District, in the heart of the Meatpacking District in Lower Manhattan

The image you see here is a rendering of a design that was actually rejected as being, among other things, too tall for the Landmarks Preservation Commission, despite it being very similar in height to buildings that were there about a hundred years ago. (And then, of course, there’s the Standard Hotel, a much taller building, right across the street!) So the architect lobbed off two stories (bringing it down to six total, which makes it less than half the height of lot of buildings in my suburban Philadelphia hometown), but still no go. The architect is going to go back for a round three at some point, but time is money, and these delays are only going to make the project more expensive.

Now, in general I think that additions should be allowed to nearly all historical buildings. If you can cram an 80-story skyscraper through the middle of the Dakota, I say go for it! I understand, however, that this is a minority viewpoint, but the case for preserving the “skyline” of a two-story factory with no architectural merit (there’s not even a friggin’ cornice!!) seems to me to be especially weak. This design looks very nice to me, even taking into account that renderings are always a bit nicer than the actual thing and it’ll look a little different once people close their blinds.

…in fact, I’d go so far as to say that it would actually be nicer without that totally non-historical warehouse that it has to be built on top of.

The post Another historic preservation district fail appeared first on Market Urbanism.

It is always difficult and costly. Think of a few months delay. There is also the uncertainty. With zoning, you can build “as of right.” So, as long as you follow the law, you can spend vast amounts of time and money and care planning your project. With [the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission], there is no certainty. That’s another ball game. Architects always ask, when you speak to them about your project, with a haggard look in their eyes, if the property is landmarked. It’s like having a high strung and unpredictable spouse who could blow up your project at any point, for any reason, and for none.

The post From the comments: “Architects always ask, with a haggard look in their eyes…” appeared first on Market Urbanism.

…in order to build this:

The post Historical landmark districts in two pictures appeared first on Market Urbanism.

Maybe if the developer was allowed more than two stories, they'd spend more than 10 minutes designing the roof...

1. Hamburg’s newly-revitalized port could get a completely privately-funded cable car line, if the city allows it.

2. Quincy, Mass., a few T stops away from downtown Boston, is getting a new downtown from a private developer, replete with infrastructure and dense development. It’s unique, however, in that the city supposedly isn’t giving the developer huge tax breaks and infrastructure subsidies (more here). Here is an article about a previous project by the same developer, Street-Works. Environmentalists, predictably, are perturbed. In any case, the project sounds promising, though I guess the devil’s in the details. Anyone know anything more about it?

3. In Brooklyn, near a bridge, almost 150 years old, doesn’t have a roof! – adaptive reuse opportunities like Dumbo’s Tobacco Warehouse don’t come along too often, even in New York, so it’s unfortunate that developers are only being allowed to build to two stories (if they’re allowed to build at all).

4. Other cities seem to have plenty of people willing to do it for free, but Berkeley’s City Council actually subsidizes its BRT-hating NIMBYs to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars under the guise of the “Community Environmental Advisory Committee.” It’s a shame that every metro area doesn’t have a transit critic like the Drunk Engineer, who I think is the best transit commentator in the blogosphere.

5. Randal O’Toole on TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, and its mismanagement.

6. “A Requiem for ‘High-Speed Rail’,” from New Geography.

The post Links: A private cable car line for Hamburg, a private downtown for Quincy, Mass., and no adaptive reuse for Brooklyn appeared first on Market Urbanism.

2. The NYT Magazine has a profile of a physicist who claims to have mastered the mathematics of the city. Hmm, where have I heard that before? He’s got some positive things to say about cities over suburbs and Joel Kotkin seems to disagree with him (always a plus in my book), but at the end of the day there’s something about him and his context-free pronouncement about “cities” writ large that really rubs me the wrong way.

3. A preservation vs. development story in the NYT about Seoul’s traditional “hanok” houses, with the chief preservationist being a white foreigner who doesn’t approve of interior redesigns or added basements or second stories. Something tells me he proably wouldn’t be a huge fan of my “development as preservation” theory.

The post More weekend links appeared first on Market Urbanism.