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Health & Fitness

Marra's Fall Should Finally Bring Down the Wall

"Urban Renewal" and central planning continue to bring "the evaporation of downtown business" forty years later. If we seek revival and prosperity, the City must bring down The Wall–and the practice of picking winners and losers.

It was no surprise that School Street oozed with nothingness Saturday night. But with the closing of Marra’s, this time it looked more like a scene out of a post-apocalyptic film or more realistically, the Hurricane Sandy power outage. Thousands of Glen Covers and would-be visitors skipped the downtown for points east, south and west.

In a parallel universe, it might’ve been a School Street bustling with light and energy. In fact, I might’ve been in the back of a restaurant rather than spouting my analysis here. My grandfather ran La Trattoria del Pappagallo for many years on School Street where La Bussola operates now. Some of my family’s most nostalgic memories go back to the days when my late grandfather, Ralph walked around in carts, making fine pastas and entrees in carts right in front of patrons.

Unfortunately, I never got to see the restaurant that reviewers said “ranked with the best of Manhattan” for myself. Whenever it came up, I asked how such a successful restaurant could close so suddenly. “Urban renewal, the regulars stopped coming.” But “urban renewal” always sounded like a good thing–government help! How could that be bad?

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“Urban Renewal”, lead by the so-called government agency, was a top-down plan to turn School Street into a pedestrian mall. The renewers decided to substitute street parking for three-story parking garages and other structures. The New York Times reported in 1972 that the city would “acquire” nearly 46 acres of property and dislocate 102 families and 100 businesses. But it was done in the name of “modernization”–what could possibly go wrong?

Pappagallo’s story is hardly unique. It went peacefully, but others chose to go up against the planners. Alan Gengarelly, who operated Brigati Fine-Foods on School Street, chose to sue the Glen Cove Urban Renewal Agency in 1979 because he felt his property was being taken without just compensation, in violation of the Fifth Amendment. He said the urban renewal plan “deprived them and their customers suitable access to their grocery store.”

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Others were even more vocal. The Times interviewed the renewed downtown Village Square’s first tenant, Giuseppe Grella that same year. Mr. Grella had opened International Fashions by Giuseppe as an early adopter of Renewal’s promises, but it didn’t work out. “Ten years ago this was a boom town, you couldn’t find a place to park your car,” Mr. Grella told The New York Times. “Now it’s like a ghost town and no one can meet their rents.”

Then there was Stanley Eisenstadt. His landmark hardware store was the unlucky target of the planners who wanted him to vacate the land next to what would be the second Brewster Street garage. The planners called Eisenstadt an obstructionist, that the new plans would be completed if only for his “stubborn refusal.” Mr. Eisenstadt swore to persist as “the only one standing in the way of further urban destruction.”

In fact, the top-down planning platform was likely a marginal position. Alan Parente, running on the 1979 Republican-Conservative ticket for Mayor charged, “the garages are only the beginning,” that eventually it would “cause the downtown business area to evaporate.” Michael Hansen, a Libertarian candidate called to “stop the useless rhetoric about who is to blame for the garage and try to prevent the boondoggle from getting any bigger.” Parente and Hansen were right.

But as Ronald Reagan said, “the more the plans fail, the more the planners plan.”

In researching the garages one day and conversing with Charlie Bozzello, he noted that Urban Renewal’s most destructive error was that it assumed (or perhaps tried to correct) the opposite of all observed human consumer behavior: “people like to shop at stores they can see.” The massive size and authoritarian nature of Renewal structures have eliminated this fundamental marketing concept for the downtown. An industrial engineer by trade, Bozzello was able to calculate the opportunity cost of the Brewster Street garages in tax revenues, and it came out to hundreds of thousands of dollars–per year!

Aside from opportunities lost (think really nice things!), the artificial shortage of business units in the heart of Glen Cove’s downtown due to Renewal has allowed landlords to raise rents on businesses in the absence of competition. Part of rent increases result from taxes and the cost of doing business, though increased supplies would encourage competition and put downward pressure on rents.

No successful downtown does it with government owning so much of what should be the most valuable and productive land. Even more importantly, it is stores, offices and restaurants that require parking, not parking garages that create the need for stores and restaurants. And when the government promises “free parking” especially in the form of massive garages, residents pay with higher taxes, higher prices, or worse what Parente called “the evaporation of the downtown business area.”

Though the city earns some revenue for renting storage space to nearby car dealers and the roofed levels make for excellent indoor soccer games, liberating the downtown’s businesses of the garages is an idea whose time has come. Many are reluctant to agree. “But who’s going to go there?” An answer would suggest the knowledge of the desires and needs of thousands of people and businesses–impossible to know. That's why the market succeeds and government planning fails. All government can and should do is foster conditions favorable to organic development.

I wrote a piece recently advocating the privatization of the Pascucci soccer field. Admittedly, it wasn’t without calculation. Both the parking garages and the soccer field are tragically (in the sense of the “Tragedy of the Commons”) underutilized and neglected. While public workers help with upkeep, privatization would likely have no impact on city workers. Nobody is benefited by the status quo, and nobody loses from its reform. In fact, every interest group would gain.

Mayor-elect Spinello has a difficult task before him. He’s going to have to show voters before the end of 2014 that his election had meaning, and he will face opposition on freezing taxes and spending. But in the form of underutilized, destructive, ugly parking garages, he has a real starting point to begin undoing the errors of yesteryear and restoring Glen Cove’s downtown back to its historical glory and eventually, its maximum potential. The decision to do so would cut spending for years to come, expand the tax base, and grow Glen Cove’s downtown business community. Who doesn’t want that?!

With the Konica property on the market and proposed redevelopments about as real as the set of Boardwalk Empire, this could open the door for real development of Glen Cove’s downtown all the way out to the Waterfront. It would even realize the mystical dreams of pretentious planners who never understood–or respected–the necessity of spontaneous and voluntary cooperation.

Charles Krauthammer recently explained why he’d chosen politics over a career in medicine. “All of the beautiful, elegant things in life ultimately depend on getting politics right,” he said. All of the wonderful things and places we travel far distances to–restaurants, boutiques, bars, clothing stores, theaters, and “nights on the town” could flourish in Glen Cove if we get our politics right. After all, it is our history. It should be our future.

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