Walking New York City with Owen Hatherley

Arriving in New York City from London in 2014, Owen Hatherley braves dismal John F. Kennedy Airport, then heads to the subway for the Upper West Side. But even before he shows his passport, he has begun to record for future readers the social and spatial experiences that account for New York City: both the surly Customs and Border Protection officer and the brutalist Sutphin Boulevard train station in Queens appear in his book Walking the Streets, Walking the Projects. Thereafter, flaneur-like and true to the title, Hatherley mostly walks. Evoking postpunk as much as rap, no less critical of sociologists who romanticize Times Square pornography than of media moguls who subvert the rules for third mayoral terms, and armed with a digital camera that seems not yet equipped with the iPhone tricks that make everything look promotional, Hatherley has managed to produce a book that can teach even inveterate New Yorkers what it means to gaze at their own city — not as an “alienated” viewer, but as a well-informed, articulate and highly analytical “smart arse.”

The book is subdivided into seven numbered “walks,” prefaced by an introduction to what the author calls “The New York Ideology” and interrupted by a day trip to Washington, DC, during which he reflects on the US train system, capital city brutalism, and the stark juxtaposition between the Washington Metro and New York’s Subway: one gracious and civic, the other blessedly efficient. The seven walks represent two separate trips to New York, those from 2014 dedicated to a more conventional Manhattan focus: a walk the length of Broadway, from around Lincoln Center to the Wall Street area; and consideration of “Maps and Conduits,” which include the subway system, the High Line, and the Brooklyn Bridge. The second trip, made in 2022, pursues a far less typical interest in the history of the city’s affordable housing — really affordable, not the contemporary formula for affordability that remains out of reach for most. That history, intertwined with what in 2022 seemed like a resurgent American Socialist Party in the wake of Bernie Sanders’ campaigns and Black Lives Matter, results in walks through parts of the city’s boroughs that few denizens, much less tourists, visit. Much of what Hatherley considers is omitted from standard histories of New York architecture. This makes his selective footnotes and excellent references even more valuable.

No less important for the structure of the book than these walks is the strategic recurrence of the hypothesis encapsulated in the title: that there is inherent tension between the virtues of city streets and the expedience of urban planning projects. This tension is what Hatherley calls “The New York Ideology.” On the one side are Jane Jacobs and her acolytes: Marshall Berman, Samuel Delaney, and to some extent Michael Sorkin. On the other side are Robert Moses, the Rockefeller family, and, although motivated by other values, those who built the bulk of New York City’s public housing, still the largest concentration of public housing in the United States. In Walk 3, through Mott Haven and along Grand Concourse in The Bronx, Hatherley remarks on Bronx-raised Marshall Berman’s sense of confusion as the streets he loved were destroyed: “Moses was destroying our world, yet he seemed to be working in the name of values that we ourselves embraced.” This contradiction recurs throughout the book: between the bottom-up Left-identifying resistance to wholesale tabula rasa city planning and the top-down efforts that actually realized affordable housing in a city that otherwise “envisages housing becoming affordable through some sort of economic or natural disaster emptying the buildings so that you can squat them.” Hatherley, unencumbered by the American urban usage of the word, extends “project” beyond housing. Lincoln Center, Rockefeller Center, the High Line, Hudson Yards, the Times Square redevelopment: these are all projects. By teasing out these nuances and contradictions, he offers an excellent diagnosis of the quandary faced by the American “Left” even before November 2024.

One of the book’s real services is to locate, research, and collate information on multifamily social housing built between the mid-1920s through the 1980s across the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan. Some of these projects were union-built, others by church or philanthropic charities, still others through the federal/state agency partnerships that created low-cost construction loans and mortgages using Harry S. Truman’s American Housing Act of 1949 and New York State’s Mitchell-Lama Act in 1955, and, finally, those still belonging to the New York City Housing Authority. Hatherley is as interested in architectural expression as he is in planning principles, social patterns, policy and finance. His range of research is broad. He is relentless in his interrogation of why things look the way they do, another benefit of thinking outside standard American expectations. The answer, which he finds written into the 1937 Wagner-Steagall Act that provided subsidies for low-income housing, seems uniquely American in the least desirable sense: subsidized housing should always be inferior, so as not to compete with the so-called market.

New York in the 1980s — the Bronx in flames and Alphabet City oft-compared in film and literature to post-air war Europe — hosted a range of musical invention that Hatherley name-drops throughout his walks: a building on Wall Street reminds him of the Ramones; Queensbridge Housing prompts him to rewatch the video of “Roxanne’s Revenge,” which looks as though it were filmed in front of a kitchen pass-through in one of the apartments, the turntables on the ledge where the dinner plates had been. To make it in the New Wave scene, he notes, young people strove to come to New York; had they not been living in “The Projects,” many of the earliest rap artists might not have made their records at all. Both creative practices arose from failure in both the streets and the projects — bottom-up and top-down. America, Hatherley writes on the book’s concluding pages, is “a poor country whose stats are artificially lifted by the immense wealth of a local plutocracy. […] Wondering idly about a greater America ignores that what the rest of the world needs is a lesser America.” It is not clear whether he’s talking about music, architecture, housing, planning, or theory, but at present, in January 2025, it does seem clear that the world is about to find out whether or not he is correct.