Kingsbridge Armory Redesign
NYCEDC trades design vision for developer community jargon
Steve Jobs, a the patron saint of design, had a dim view of customer-led design process. “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. You can’t just ask customers what they want and try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.” Of course, urban design politics requires a lot of real or fake community lip-service, which leads us to the long-gestating design plans for the Kingsbridge Armory in the North Bronx, now branded “El Centro Kingsbridge” because some marketing firm saw there were Dominicans in the area.
“Community-led” design processes can’t help but patronize.
The Kingsbridge Armory was built in the 1910s for the military, but has sat vacant, mostly unused since 1996. During COVID season in 2020, it served as a food distribution hub. It is also a National Landmark.
After multiple recent redevelopment proposals fizzled out, including a National Ice Center in 2013 (during the Bloomberg era), the Hochul and Adams administrations have now promised $200 million to renovate and redevelop the Kingsbridge Armory without any clients or clear program to speak of. Something something community. Now the NYCEDC and FXCollaborative have released shiny aerial renderings and a lot of community-focused programming promises that have yet to be fully-formed.
The new plans as of January 2025 don’t reflect either design vision or common sense, trying to please everybody and ended up giving nobody what they need. El Centro Kingsbridge ends up looking like a smokescreen for another developer giveaway.
The smoke: 25,000 feet of community space, workforce development (?), an affordable housing complex behind, youth sports, commercial and cultural spaces.
The problems: many.
Let’s start with the idea of “community space.” There is an existing community center in Kingsbridge Heights, a lovely historic building that already serves this purpose. Additionally, there is a community hub in St. James Park that has a media lab, auditorium, classroom, performance and other similar activities. The downside of community centers in the Bronx is that they can serve as gang recruiting hubs of minors to do their dirty deeds. Without proper guidance, Community Centers can be ironically detrimental to the community. They aren’t real businesses with real jobs.
So-called “workforce development” can also be riddled with problems. Even with a focused program or vision, they end up as money pits for government to keep afloat with high-minded missions that don’t serve any purpose than to keep communities in line. Especially in the machine politics of New York.
The affordable housing scheme here is even more questionable. The renderings give away a demolition of the historic schools of The Kingsbridge Heights School and Celia Cruz High School. It even shows modern housing where Lehman College campus is. This is the wrong direction. And about a decade out of place with the current housing design — nobody wants banal glass facades anymore.
The renovation of the Kingsbridge Armory itself is not all bad. The renderings show new openings in the dark roof to let light into the massive cavernous space. The plaza is opened up from the existing security gates currently keeping people out. But the new design-ish plan misses the crucial development needed in the Kingsbridge Ave commercial corridor, much of it old single-story right across the street to the South (out of picture). That’s where the new housing should be.
Additionally, there is a large parking lot owned by the VA Hospital adjacent to the site and a few blocks down that could be reimagined to connect to the Kingsbridge Armory. Perhaps a parking garage that could free up street parking and open up other urban planning options and development.
Back to the programming of El Centro Kingsbridge: community centers, job training, etc can go anywhere. But the Armory is a one-of-a-kind building that deserves a unique design vision. What can you do in a huge, potentially climate-controlled space in New York City?
Community-involved design sounds great in theory, but it just leads to spaghetti-on-the-wall. You can tell that the planners just copied and pasted some community questionnaire answers that just reveal a lack of design. As Apple and Steve Jobs knew, you have to take user needs into account, but they aren’t the designers. Even worse, the NYCEDC just appears to be astroturfing community input in order to get the mediocre housing development they really care about.
The NYCEDC isn’t equipped to provide design vision. The new plan for Governor’s Island at least has some vision to it — a NY Climate Hub that partners with many institutions like Stony Brook, IBM and others to develop climate technology. El Centro Kingsbridge needs to find a “thing” such as Healthy Buildings and Design, that could inform both the design and programming, without becoming a corrupt free for all.