CHOICES

Joseph Tiraco

This great city is about to undergo a complete zoning revision, actuated by an esurient self-aggrandizement of the ruling clique at the expense of their charges, all wrapped in the thinnest of political pretext. Megastore developers, unfailingly exasperated by communities rejecting their grand designs as if the shopping malls they planned were the spires of Pandemonium, covet large tracts of land now off-limits to them, and shamelessly shower favors upon politicians. They make known their desire to erase the current laws that balance private greed and community self determination; toss handfuls of greenbacks at the mayor and city council members who suddenly realize in feinted horror that we are suffering a dangerous "Mall Gap" and are falling painfully behind that dreaded enemy, Long Island. ("I sing the song of him whose bread I eat.") And now, New York's communities are asked to sacrifice their sacred rights on the alter of "City Patriotism", even though Long Island's communities, thoroughly fed up with mall-mongers, have gone to court and received injunctions to stop the constructions brought about by odious political double-dealing.

In Forest Hills, the megastore proposals are grossly inappropriate, and the political methods being employed to impose this anathema will bring about environmental disaster. The megastores would be built in a residential area. The infrastructure to support the stores does not exist. There is no mass-transit system in the area. Thirty acres of megastores, which is what we are talking about in Forest Hills, will draw, from twenty-five to sixty thousand people a day - depending on the season - which is more then ten million people a year. The mountains of merchandise to stock the stores will require a never-ending chain of trucks that will have to compete with increased traffic amounting to thousands of cars daily and a continuous stream of city busses transporting millions of people annually to the site; all jammed onto city streets which are right now - even by the developers own self-serving measurements - over saturated. This is like trying to force a hundred times more pressure into a boiler then it's designed to hold. The result is not hard to figure out: D I S A S T E R ! And like any disaster, people will flee the area. When politicians of both political persuasions jump into bed with fat-cat speculators, it's the public that usually gets screwed.

The sudden availability of a thirty acre land parcel bordering a major city park in a prime neighborhood like Forest Hills is an extremely rare occurrence, and holds an infinite capacity for blessing or bane. A godsend is usually worth what you make of it. City parks are the perfect place to establish cultural institutions: the Brooklyn Museum at Prospect Park with its magnificent Egyptology collection; the New York Botanical Garden and the Zoological Society at Bronx Park; the Metropolitan Museum and twenty-eight other world class cultural satellites orbiting Central Park in Manhattan; and none - zero - at Forest Park in Queens. Forest Hills, itself a rare treasure designed by artist Friedrich Olmsted as America's first major planned community and built with funds provided by the Russell Sage Foundation, has many unique qualifications that would make it the perfect host for a major cultural institution - including thirty prime acres of private property on which to plan boldly, mold magnificently, innovate excitingly, and build to stun the world; a pastorale unfolding against a backdrop of great natural beauty - Forest Park's five hundred and thirty six wooded acres; a "poem without words" that could be ready in plenty of time for the next New York World's Fair. Because it is private property, unrestricted expansion can occur without the in commodity of bureaucratic interference;

Tourists are an extremely desirable group of customers and nations, states, cities, communities and individual establishments ferociously vie for their business. Art is a potent magnet, drawing well educated, well behaved, well dressed tourists like moths to a flame. There's nothing new in art and tourism. The Athenians of 500 BC kept Theseus' ship (the one he supposedly sailed to Crete to slay King Minos' Minotaur) in a museum and built a tomb for his bones which they gathered up from abroad. Tourists came from every corner of the world to view them. Art and tourism are now- as they have been from the beginning of recorded history -honorable and profitable pursuits for communities to engage in.

The city of Florence, Italy has recently announced, it will no longer accept visitors unless they have official permission to enter. From now on, they shall accept only 150 bus loads of tourists a day. Everyone else? Well, they'll have to strive harder to succeed. The rest of the world is competing like hungry sharks for the tourist trade, and Florence is turning them away in droves. How did they get into the amazing position of being able to demand to see your balance sheet and income statement, resume and family genealogy table before they allow your humble feet to tread their hollowed streets? Six hundred years ago, a family patriarch named Cosimo de' Medici rose to prominence in the banking business. He loved his family, Florence, philosophy, and his gardens, in that order. He burned candles to a painting of the Madonna and a bust of Plato, making no distinction between the two. Cosimo, in his personal life lived simply, in his public life spent lavishly, mostly to adorn his beloved Florence, and hid his charity, like his power, in gracious anonymity. Other wealthy men of his time collected holy relics, Cosimo collected ancient Greek manuscripts and statuary. On his deathbed, they read passages to him from the Old testament and Plato's Death Of Socrates. His grandson, Lorenzo, inherited not only Cosimo's wealth and power, but also his frugality and love of the arts. Lorenzo always wore black, very expensive garments, but always black. After dinner, he enjoyed playing the lute and singing, though usually in an empty room because his singing voice was atrocious and his lute playing wasn't much better. He tried his hand at painting, sculpting, composing, and a dozen other arts. But his real skill laid in making money, and his true genius, in spending it. Like his grandfather, he collected manuscripts and statuary, but added to them live artists. He founded schools for their education, paid their apprentice fees, offered them commissions as they developed and waited patiently for them to flower - and flower they did. Florence became their gallery, the church of Rome, their spirit, and the delicate beauty they wrought settled in the human soul. Florence, City of Flowers, became the garland of civilization.

Since the past fades into shadows that are sometimes recast in far away places, the New World with its dazzling lights and reflective society reminisced a most unusual transmutation of Florentine radiance, where the world in wonder would flock with joy into the deepest recesses of a congealed artist's fantasias.

American business leader, Bank of America founder, and philanthropist Armando Peter Giannini lent money to film makers when no one else would. He financed young Walt Disney and helped him produce the world's first full length animated feature, Snow White, which contained an astonishing two million hand drawn cells. Walt ran into severe financial difficulties when his most enduring masterpiece, Fantasia, failed at the box office. It was released just days after Pearl Harbor and the public was in no mood for cartoons. Called before the Bank of America's board of directors to explain why he could no longer meet his financial obligations, the long faced and dejected Disney laid his studio's keys on the table, fully expecting that everything he owned would be repossessed. Instead, Giannini told the inconsolable Walt, the Bank of America would refinance his company and in addition, they would lend him the money to build his wild eyed dream, a theme park called Disneyland. Stunned and tearful, Walt picked up his keys from the table and walked silently out of the room. Giannini had offered to pay, out of his own pocket any losses the bank might sustain from transactions with Disney. When asked why, he simply said, "I like his work."

The world is essentially a good place and life is forever sweet. The power of light cannot long be denied the darkest places. Choose not the easiest, but the most difficult and weary not of doing right.

Forest Hills, this hamlet nestled in gently rolling hill country, by the very nature of its landmark designation, its proximity to Forest Park's wooded acres, and its status among the city's communities has always attracted the elite who have built their mansions here. Even now, it has attracted wealthy developers who feel the place's desirability is transferable to their drab box stores and that the community's prestige will elevate their common shopping malls into fashion statements. They plan to use our well kept gardens, tree lined streets, and years of assiduous striving to make Forest Hills an outstanding community, in order to lure customers who will think their box stores "exclusive" since they are in Forest Hills. The megastore developers are unscrupulous opportunists, that is how they got rich. It takes cold-hearted business logic to harvest a community's years of hard work, their orderly nature and civic pride, to pluck them like roadside wild flowers, to drain the milk and suck them dry until there's nothing left but another run down city neighborhood.

All this and more they will do to us without hesitation if we cannot choose and support an alternative use for the property in question. So let's dissect the problem using the same business logic our adversaries apply, only this time, it must be warm-hearted logic, for it is our community we are talking about. Keep in mind that while we are staring a barghest in the eye, an opportunity to change our community for the better is also at hand, an opportunity that will not present itself again in our lifetimes.

There are thirty prime acres that must be made useful. Presently, the mayor, and city are forcefully intent on the construction of megastores. There is no doubt that the megastore option means the demise of Forest Hills as we know it. We can talk forever about why this is so; let it suffice to simply say, megastores are inappropriate on Metropolitan Ave.

"We could try to attract new tenants for the existing factories, and then things can remain the same, nothing will change." This is the tired old argument of warn out thinkers. Nothing ever stays the same. The day of these factories is gone. Everything evolves or becomes extinct. Forest Hills, while still handsome, is eighty years old. It has had eighty good years, but it will soon need a source of rejuvenation, like a battery recharge so it can have eighty more good years. The crux of our problem is to wrest the thirty prime acres - an enormous tract of property within the pale of any community - from the megastore builders and their planned impropriety, and install a lasting enterprise that will utilize this property as the nucleus of a revitalization program. Any proposal that would keep things the same or let this property slip away would also forestall or altogether unsettle this revitalization process.

"Perhaps the mayor will rezone this property making it residential as he did for Mill Basin, Brooklyn." Thirty acres of housing - and more then likely, high density, hi-rise housing - would have to be a self contained community with its own schools, police, fire and other public services or they would have to share our now strained facilities. This thirty acre community - perhaps consisting of a dozen or so hi-rise buildings - would interpose itself between us and the Park. More housing added to Forest Hills would just pack our density tighter and not supply the stimulus or the rejuvenating effect that our revitalization program must have. Housing is preferable to megastores, but not by much.

Someone suggested that the property be bought by the local churches and made into cemetery space. This is not a bad idea. Cemeteries are quiet, and aesthetically pleasing green belts. This is far more preferable to megamalls or housing projects, however, a cemetery does not provide the rejuvenation process we are seeking. And how sad that we must hide behind the dearly departed in order to save our community.

We have looked at a few options somewhat in detail, but have not mentioned the cultural facility or the physical constraints associated with the property. The premise of the cultural facility would be to flow Forest Park out to Metropolitan Avenue. The property in question abuts the park at Union Turnpike. "Why not just have the park space and forget going through all the trouble of building a facility?" Because adding this property to Forest Park would increase the Park's total area by around 5% or an amount too small in terms of more trees to be worth the expense of the addition. A well run facility could pay off any mortgage needed to actually buy the property. The facility will probably be a mixture of buildings, exercise and recreational facilities, gardens, trails, and water courses. Exactly what it will look like is impossible to say right now. The physical details will be revealed when a designer is determined. This can be accomplished in the same way that Central Park came into being. A great contest was held, and a prize offered for the winning design. Of course, young Friedrich Olmsted was the winner. After Central Park was built, he went on to become the world's foremost landscape designer. Mature Olmsted was offered the commission to design Forest Hills. If you don't know how that turned out, walk through Forest Hills Gardens on any sparkling spring day and judge for yourself. Once the property is safely in our grasp, the task is an extremely pleasant one, like newlyweds planning to build their dream house, providing excitement and pleasure not only for our community, but for many others that will closely follow events.

What happens after the facility is built? What's the difference in being inundated by megamall shoppers or inundated by art lovers and tourists? Before we can give an answer, a very important point has to be made. Look at what six centuries of public art and tourism has done for Florence: it is more beautiful then ever, more vibrant then ever, property values are astronomical, it citizens live the good life and no community has more civic pride. As a revitalization program, the wealth provided by public art and tourism is an astounding success. In our case, megastores will provide private wealth with an occasional bone thrown to the community. Neighboring property values will plummet, and the community drained until it is a mere shadow of its former self. The cultural facility will generate public wealth. Because art and beauty attract the tourists that provide the wealth, resources will be plowed back into the community to provide more art and more beauty and consequently, more wealth, until an advantageous equilibrium is reached. Since art never wears out, this process can go on forever. What are we talking about when we say art? Fine art, visual art, performance art, multimedia art, film art, video art, computer art, the highest attainments of any discipline is art. and that is what we should commission, collect, archive, and display.

Now let's try to answer the question about being inundated by tourists. Before attempting to formulate the answer, let's first see how to turn a defect into an asset.

Young Michelangelo had very little money and the only piece of marble he could afford had a large crack in the middle. Every day, he passed the junk pile that the marble was heaped on and stared at it. He stared and stared until one day an idea came to him. He bought the marble with a few coins and dragged it home, sculpting a youth with a thin waistline that stood in an unnatural position that forced an even thinner trunk section Michelangelo made to look quite natural. This enabled him to cut away the cracked marble's midsection and the weakness became an asset. He called the statue, David, and today it's publicly and proudly on display in Florence, with millions and millions of copies resting on uncountable mantlepieces throughout the world.

We have pointed to the lack of any mass transit system in the area as detrimental to the community should the megastores be built. Megastore shoppers would have to be conveyed by bus or automobile, their numbers would be unbelievably large, and vary with merchandise sales days and the seasons. Their volume and routes through the community would be uncontrollable, the traffic flow, impossible to regulate. On nice days, the pedestrian traffic would resemble a multitude of ants wandering every corner of the community.

Should the cultural facility be built instead of megastores, the lack of mass transit could be a tremendous plus for the community. First, art does not need to be restocked, so at one stroke all the trucks vanish from the equation (and the community). Next, there are right now a number of cultural facilities in Queens and not one draws anywhere near the amount of foot, bus or automobile traffic that a single megastore would produce, never mind the enormous volume of traffic that the dozen or so megastores planned for our area would generate. So where's all that wealth we were talking about going to come from? The art lovers will have to arrive in the area by express bus. The largest single pool of art lovers in the city - and probably the western world - can be found, in any season, on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. This is where we will harvest our crop. Express busses that would stop in front of all the Fifth Avenue museums could then come directly into forest Hills, making no further stops along the way. A second express bus line would make stops in front of the major hotels and then, like the former, come directly into Forest Hills nonstop. The trick is to get the tourists to fill up the busses. This could be accomplished by the site itself - thirty acres of innovative facilities designed by an extremely talented artist comparable to Olmsted - ( and of course, there is Forest Hills which was designed by Olmsted himself) and, the collection amassed within the facility. It is important to traffic control that the facility not house a spectacular collection. For instance, if the pope decided to lend us a Michelangelo statue or a few Titians we should graciously decline his (or perhaps someday, her) generous offer. Should we accept, a situation could develop similar to when the pope brought the Pieta to the World's Fair and the wait was several hours long to get into the Vatican Pavilion. If the draw is too strong, (say, like Disneyland) art lovers will endure any hardship to achieve their objective and our community gets overrun. As long as the tourists are bussed in, they add nothing to the local parking or vehicular traffic problem. So there's such a thing as too good. By controlling the bus traffic, we can control the number of tourists on our streets. When the busses start to overflow, its time to raise prices or if that don't work, thin out the collection.

As to foot traffic, by adding the simple expediency of a guided tour and confining the bulk of curious tourists to a tour bus or tram, they would get to see the local sights, get to OOOO and AHHHH as they passed interesting places, but rarely leave the conveyance. Unlike the randomness of megamall shoppers, our tourists come neatly packaged and easy to handle.

We have roughly devised a plan to avoid the tabetic pejoration of the megastores, yet convert public wealth into our own programs, and are now equipped to evaluate the thirty acres in question, to note the proximity of both Olmsted's Forest Hills and the vastness of Forest Park, the property's central placement bounded by Metropolitan Avenue, Union Turnpike and Woodhaven Blvd.; to gage its value by estimating the amplification of pure joy that would be amalgamated into Forest Park, a leisure time facility much larger then Olmsted's other exquisite vision, Central Park, and to include the salubrious benefits incurred from introducing intellectual delights like art gazing and cultural absorption along side the physical joys of golf, tennis, jogging, and sun absorption; to judge on balance the value of this property not only to Forest Hills but to society at large in relation to the increase of sheer enjoyment attached to an ordinary park experience, the awe and inspiration it might stimulate in young minds, and to factor in the ethereal enthrallment it can add to just being alive. We can conclude from all of this, our cultural institution is well worth the effort.

July 4, 1996