On-site look at NYC's tough problems offers lessons for CU students

By Linda Myers

Fifty-five Cornell graduate students in city and regional planning were in New York City Oct. 14 -16. There to learn problem-solving skills they'll use on the job after they graduate next May, they were briefed on the city's most pressing problems by top officials and community groups, toured the hardest-hit areas, from Ground Zero to Greenpoint, and saw success stories in action throughout the city.

Cornell Historic Preservation Planning alumna Sylvia Augustus, left, Abyssinian Development Corp. senior project manager, pauses in front of the new Thurgood Marshall High School site during a tour of Harlem for Cornell Department of City and Regional Planning graduate students, Oct. 15. Roberta Robles

The students' interests range from city and regional planning to historic preservation to regional science and real estate. Their visit, during which they explored and analyzed planning issues in lower Manhattan, Harlem, Brooklyn and Queens, was part of this year's Planning and Preservation Practice field trip. The annual study trip to an urban center is run by the Department of City and Regional Planning (CRP) in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning.

The trip was led by Associate Professor Michael Tomlan, who heads the college's Historic Preservation Planning program, and Professor Kenneth Reardon, who runs the Urban Scholars Program. Other CRP faculty included Associate Professor Barbara Lynch and assistant professors Neema Kudva and Mildred Warner. Student organizers were Wyeth Friday, a master's in regional planning candidate, and Sigrid Bergland, a historic preservation graduate student.

"One of the most important aspects of our trip was seeing the many work environments planners encounter and the many community and social issues they handle," said Friday. "It really hit home how valuable planners are to the health of our social and physical environment after we heard practicing planners talk about large issues like the World Trade Center disaster rebuilding effort and share their experiences working with community and business development groups and city budget offices."

On the first day's agenda were visits to Sunnyside community gardens in Queens, Greenpoint redevelopment project in Brooklyn and a social history walking tour of Manhattan's Lower East Side, led by Reardon, a former New York City resident. Reardon also arranged to take the group to the city's best low-cost restaurants, including Sylvia's, famous for its down-home cooking, and the Tibetan Kitchen, said to have the hottest chili sauce in town.

On day two, students toured Ground Zero, then met in the office of Amanda Burden, head of the city's planning department, for a special session on the World Trade Center rebuilding process. Burden and her staff spoke about New York's plans to reconstruct lower Manhattan a year after the terrorist attacks and discussed how the city collected and synthesized ideas from residents.

The inclusiveness of the planning process was especially interesting to Bergland. "One group did over 200 workshops in all of the city's boroughs and got 19,000 ideas, which then were distilled into 49 different themes," she noted.

And while the city's many layers of bureaucracy seemed a substantial challenge to Friday, he was impressed that "the World Trade Center disaster has spurred many different agencies and levels of government to work more closely together in the aftermath."

Day two also included a tour of Harlem with Abyssinian Development Corp. senior project manager Sylvia Augustus, a CRP alumna in historic preservation. She showed the group some of the new businesses that the faith-based community-driven organization had spurred, among them a Marshall's department store, the only one in Manhattan, and a Pathmark supermarket, a coup for the neighborhood. No grocery chain wanted to open a unit in Harlem until the development group persuaded Pathmark to do so, Bergland said. "Now it's the chain's top grossing store in the entire country."

On the final day, students attended a session on the building of affordable housing at the Office of Management and Budget of the City of New York and visited the city's Downtown Alliance Business Improvement District, where they joined top city officials and leaders of a rent stabilization group in a spirited discussion on the merits of rent control and the challenge of providing affordable housing in Manhattan.

The day ended with talks with officials and staff members at the United Nations on such third-world economic and social development issues as affordable housing and the role women can play in economic growth.

The experience helped the group "face these kinds issues head on and see first-hand the planning world we will enter next year," said Bergland.