How an Architect Redesigns NYC Streets

[Claire] In 2016, this was a very confusing place to be.

Designing streets is a little bit like being a detective.

If you look hard enough, you can see the traces

of all the decisions people made before.

[Narrator] Claire is the principal in charge of WXY

an architecture firm with a focus on urban design,

planning and community based architecture.

I'm gonna walk you through three street redesigns

that WXY has done in New York city.

[soft music]

Sometimes you hear the term bad street.

There's no vegetation, there's nothing to look at,

there's nothing to visit.

Generally people will go, Oh my God, that's not a street

I wanna walk down.

And therefore, it's not a great street.

And the opportunity as an architect or landscape architect

or urban designer, is to kind of see what's happening

really listen and observe

because there needs to be design solutions to the problems

that people are experiencing on their streets.

Let's, let's talk about Cooper Union.

[Narrator] Cooper union is an intersection in New York

where Bowery splits off into Cooper Square.

[Claire] The original street only did this.

[Narrator] The Bowery was widen,

and there were too many lanes for cars

and not enough crosswalks for pedestrians.

It's really interesting is that departments

of transportation were actually departments of cars

for a long time.

And mostly they would describe streets

by the number of lanes.

[Narrator] The street ultimately expanded

to four lanes of traffic

which resulted in a very confusing intersection.

[Claire] We're seeing everything being two ways,

two moving lanes in every direction,

but confusion in the middle, and here's our sidewalk.

That is a lot of road bed,

because if I was looking at just doting in, you know,

what a street would be, right?

I'm left with a kind of no-man zone here.

[Narrator] For pedestrians,

there's no clear way to cross the intersection.

So the way people have tried to deal with it

is where you see all sorts of painted medians

all over the place,

to try and kind of tell people what they should be doing.

[Narrator] And it was completely car focused

which didn't add much to the character of the street.

[Claire] The bigger you make roads,

the more it attracts traffic.

But it doesn't really attract things like business,

more cyclists, more walking.

In a lot of ways it's an kind of a human behavior issue.

[Narrator] The solution, reduce the number of lanes,

add pedestrian crosswalks,

and limit the direction of traffic.

Instead of a bunch of streets,

you have a very straightforward way for cars even

which they could not do before,

to drive up this street which is now one way,

and what's that's done, is it's made more sidewalks

and that's really fundamentally

what you're seeing with street design,

is a way to make streets still serve cars efficiently

but also make it easier for people on buses, people biking,

all of these kinds of lanes

can kind of shift priorities and give new spaces.

[Narrator] Now let's head to Brooklyn

to take a look at Albee Square.

Albee Square is an intersection in downtown Brooklyn

where Fleet, Fulton Street,

Albee Square West and Bond Street, all meet up.

[Claire] But many of the subways are sort of

off to the corner on very narrow sidewalks.

[Narrator] This area has a lot of pedestrian traffic,

but not a lot of space to maneuver

especially since these are small historical streets.

[Claire] When you have historic streets,

they're not always as wide as connector streets

that got cleared out because people but wanted more lanes.

So, a lot of the planning that's happening

around Albee Square in these remnants

of different grids that make up downtown Brooklyn

and all the new buildings, is to create more room.

What do we see on the right hand side?

Well, all of a sudden this street right here

isn't there anymore.

But now this street meets,

we have a much larger public space.

Instead of an island surrounded by streets,

we have an island that's now attached

to the sidewalk for a beautiful bank building

and a new mall called Albee Square Mall,

that's full of activity.

[Narrator] Next up is Astor Place.

We're at pretty well known destination in New York

called Astor place.

[Narrator] Astor place is an intersection

where Lafayette, Eighth Street, Fourth Avenue

and Cooper square, all converge.

These are streets that are doing a lot of work.

In 2016, this was a very confusing place to be.

Wide streets, narrow streets,

there's a lot of buses hanging out waiting.

So, people just walked in the street.

That's the subway.

And there's a number of kind of geometries of streets,

all cutting through it.

That is called the Alamo

that people of nicknamed The Cube.

You see people hang out underneath it.

The cube is kind of sitting on also

kind of a floating concrete median,

and then we have a street here known as Lafayette Street

that is going uptown.

[Narrator] In addition to these main streets,

Astor Place has a number of a historical streets,

all feeding into the traffic flow.

This where I'm drawing this dotted line

is one of the oldest streets in New York.

And it got renamed Stuyvesant Street.

This street must have started as a dirt path.

And in fact, a lot of streets in New York,

Center Street, Lafayette, Broadway were actually just rails.

And then they got widened, they got paved.

[Narrator] These multifunctional streets,

home to art installation, subway stops

and historical remnants of old New York

are prone to the wear and tear of high traffic areas.

[Claire] This is not a low space,

but there's a lot of flooding that happens

if rain comes really really quickly.

What you see now today, not only is there more trees

but there's actually bioswales and green infrastructure,

there's more bike racks, there's bigger sidewalks,

you have a huge number of additional green spaces and trees.

There's something called the curb line.

And the art I think of street making

is figuring out where the curb goes

so that all the buildings look and feel even better.

If you put the curb too close to a building

or in the wrong alignment, the whole street feels off.

So it's sort of like a great room or how clothes fit,

where the curb is, is kind of like the tailoring of streets.

We can start thinking about streets,

kind of like air and water as the thing that we share.

There are private streets,

but in general successful important streets

are shared by just a multiplicity of players, right?

And even by walking.

So streets in a sense are the design problem of today

to accommodate getting more out of them

and making them attractive to people,

but they're also the design problem of the near for future.

[soft music]