In the Nike Store Basement, A Vision

There are only a few reasons to visit the Nike Store on Fifth Avenue on a school night in winter, and there are fewer reasons to ask how to get to the lower level, where plastic mannequins, sporting the latest style of winter coat, are frozen in place. However, nestled behind nondescript glass doors at the far corner of this basement—for one night, only—is a banner with the words “Welcome to Rome” fingerpainted in red. Figure out how to push or pull the doors apart—there’s no indicator to inform a curious visitor—and be greeted by a Gladiator Movie Fan Event in medias res as the hall opens into an atrium filled with people dressed in thrifted window curtains, laurels on their heads, drinking apple cider from dollar-store champagne flutes. Another gladiator battle is about to begin, and this—cardboard helmets and paper-towel-roll swords ablaze—is just one of the many ways to spark life into the otherwise lifeless Privately-Owned Public Spaces, or POPS, in our city.

 This event, and many more, was hosted by people at Communiversity—a student group formed when faculty at the New School were on strike. They describe themselves in an inaugural Instagram post as an “irresponsibly optimistic group of NYC students with plans to inject doses of freedom into our late capitalist lives,” and they seek to raise alarm about the hidden pitfalls of POPS. The flyers found at a mud painting event they held in defiance of an empty POPS in midtown explain a crucial caveat: 

“As a result of a plaza being built:

1. The building owner pays fewer taxes
2. The building owner gets permission to build taller than their original air rights would allow”

Real estate developers can build 10 square feet of rentable or sell-able floor area if they set aside just a single square foot of public plaza—a place that doesn’t even need to have chairs or lighting—and this incentive program, designed to have more public space in the city, ended up mostly failing. Local authorities in the cities worldwide where this is happening claim that they cannot afford to build these public spaces themselves, and this makes it unlikely for city governments to enforce people-centered design principles in these spaces as well. At the Gladiator Training, despite signage saying the public space is to remain open each day until midnight, private security and employees of the building politely informed us that—for that night, only—it would close at 9:00 p.m. Instead of clearly and broadly communicated information about which places New Yorkers really have the right to go, the best source for being able to identify a POPS in the city is a hardcover book for sale—that runs upwards of fifty dollars on Amazon, unsurprisingly—compiling the history and reviews of hundreds of these places. The book determines that 41 percent of POPS are of only marginal quality.

Although POPS is a uniquely Manhattan-ish concept, the people at Communiversity warn, “This is a blueprint, a trial run. They’re going to do this all over the city. We’re seeing POPS appear in Williamsburg and we know that it’s going to push east. A place like this is coming to your neighborhood and soon. Are you ready for how that’s going to change the dynamics of the place you call home?” The proliferation of POPS—a sort of apology or license for real estate encroachment and expansion—has ramifications that run the risk of exacerbating gentrification.

  An early assignment for Stuyvesant’s Urban Ecology elective encouraged students to visit one of these POPS: Elevated Acre, one part of the largest office building in the city. This space is a park embedded between the arteries of the Financial District, and it is accessible to adventurous pedestrians…primarily by escalator. The visit to Elevated Acre is meant for students growing up in the city to get a physical sense of how large exactly one acre is, but instead, the most striking impression is how bleak and desolate the built structures that surround and intentionally hide these public spaces are. Architectural critic Paul Goldberger best captured what feels “off” about the building when construction was completed 40 years ago, writing that it was "designed by commercial architectural firms that admitted to few interests beyond the quick and efficient creation of rentable space." The AIA Guide to New York City described the north building as resembling “a complicated cell phone tower.” It’s such downsides that weaken the whole intention behind creating these public spaces— there are over 590 POPS and counting, but if asked to visualize an ideal, local public space, many of us wouldn’t conjure up the image of Elevated Acre’s dull concrete plaza attached to a commercial building.

At Stuyvesant, we have some evolving and unfortunately complicated relationships with the spaces available to us. It’s getting more and more difficult to secure the theater for an event like SOS or even the cafeteria for much needed celebrations. It’s not much easier out of our doors, either; the attempt to host a freshman picnic at the beginning of the year was met with the Battery Park City Authority reminding students they should have applied for a permit. Where do we go when we want to build community?

 Despite the reliability of wooden benches lining the hallways, print-outs still quietly notify us of a bafflingly obsolete rule: students are really only supposed to hang out on the half-floor or senior atrium during their free. For seniors in Video Production, permission slips for the class to film in Rockefeller Park, or routine, signed hall passes for a group to have free rein in the school building to record a music video, make exploring entrenched in bureaucracy. In some ways, a high school building ends up being a microcosm of the conundrum New York City faces: there are fewer and fewer places one feels really “allowed” to be in. 

During our free periods, it’s possible that the light pressure to be doing something productive spreads just as easily as the social pressure to get the most out of the holiday season. Privatization of space—see: being “priced out” of the winter villages—goes hand in hand with the feeling that it’s getting more difficult to celebrate the holiday season “authentically” or “festive-enough-ly” if you’re not spending a lot of money. At Stuyvesant, few of our common areas are designed to foster either conversation with others or concentration on schoolwork, whether that’s because of the lack of seating, dreary lighting, or the resulting feeling that sitting on the floor—the only recourse—might put one in somebody else’s way. Students out and about in the city will find that there are thousands of places to go to do work or hang out with friends this time of year, but the number of places accessible to them without having to spend money on a coffee to gain entry quickly dwindles to the double digits.

It’s no coincidence that our city’s administration seeks to both defund public libraries that are bastions of public space and criminalize homelessness at the same time. Funnily enough, the lobbies of hotel buildings can sometimes be convenient “third spaces.” Even public parks like Central Park, Prospect Park, the Highline, and Madison Square Garden are all in operation because the boards of trustees help with funding, putting into question how truly public these parks feel. When I sat in a municipal courtroom and witnessed all sorts of petty cases that went before a judge, I was struck by the number of people my age accompanied by a public defender, apologizing for being in a public park after hours. The need for a people-centered perspective is increasingly dire. New York City’s hostile landscape for renting out and sharing spaces—a vision of a different kind of POPS— puts publicly-owned public spaces out of reach. In this way, we’re left wondering whether it’s up to us, in our high school building, to envision better ways of sharing space. Ask your teachers for access to the hidden spaces of the Stuyvesant building: the garages, the basement, and the catwalk—the walls of which are decorated with signatures of students from years past. Then, we’ll take it to the city to compile and grow a list of third spaces for each other.