Historical Chronology of Regional Plan Association

Regional Plan Association is the nation's oldest regional planning organization, formed in 1929 to implement the proposals outlined in the landmark Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs. The Plan was prepared under the guidance of the Committee on the Regional Plan, formed in 1922, which incorporated into RPA after the Plan's publication. With the production of a second regional plan in the 1960s and the release next spring of the Third Regional Plan, the Association has been working on issues of tran sportation and infrastructure, land use, open space preservation, economic development and social issues with its unique private, regional perspective for 65 years.

1920s

• Even as research staff prepared the First Regional Plan, the 10-member Committee on the Regional Plan was involved in influencing important decisions in the region. At the Committee's urging, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey agreed to move the proposed George Washington Bridge-only the second crossing of the Hudson River-from 57th Street up to 178th Street, to better conform with the circumferential expressway system the plan would envision. This type of highway system, with major roads circu mnavigating center cities, has since become standard in American metropolitan regions.

1930s

• As public works projects became necessary, first to invigorate the economy following the Depression and later to mobilize for a world war, RPA engineers and planners provided technical plans for the region's highway systems, railroads, and growing population, industry and economy. The Plan projected the region's growth, from around 10 million residents in 1920 to 20 million by 1965, and argued persuasively that new systems and infrastructure would be necessary to accommodate that growth.
• Following the Port Authority's lead, other pieces of RPA's circumferential route also fell into place quickly, as the New Jersey skyway was completed in 1932, with approaches that were one of the first applications of RPA's principle of limited access to a major regional arterial highway. The Whitestone Bridge, across the East River between Old Ferry Point and Whitestone, connecting the Long Island highway and parkway system with the Bronx arterial system, was completed in 1939 by the Triborough Bridge Au thority. And following RPA's emphasis on both environmental and infrastructural improvements, parks were proposed at each bridge approach. The Henry Hudson Parkway and park was another important section of the express route around Manhattan, built between 1935 and 1938.
• Inspired by the regional park systems designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and others, the Plan called for expanded preservation of open spaces throughout the region serving the population. The Plan successfully argued that parks and open space preservation are a regional-not just local-concern. The Plan identified specific areas that could be acquired for public use, and the Association successfully persuaded various public agencies to purchase land for a regional system, doubling the region's park space. E arly acquisitions were made in Nassau, Suffolk, Putnam and Dutchess counties, and other specific areas included Flushing Meadows, Orchard Beach Park in the Bronx, and the Palisades, of which 265 key acres were given by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to the Palisades Interstate Park Commission specifically to follow the recommendations of the plan.
• For urban areas, the plan established development guidelines that influenced early super-block development, such as Rockefeller Center, with dedicated pedestrian and transportation corridors and density supported by mass transit.
• Another important initiative undertaken by the Association was to assist local governments in the region to establish planning boards, including a city planning commission for New York City that would be similar to Chicago's. When the Plan was released in 1929, only 61 planning or zoning boards operated in the region. Ten years later, 204 boards were active in the region, often established with direct consultation by RPA staff.
• The Plan also suggested the location of major regional airports, endorsing the city's proposal for expanded operations at Idlewild Airport (now JFK) operated by the Port Authority.

1940s

• Only fifteen years after the release of the Plan, RPA staff were able to note that a circumferential metropolitan loop encircling the main centers of business and commerce about 12 miles distant from City Hall was being realized. Important additions included the development of Route 4 in New Jersey, the Cross Bronx Expressway, Francis Lewis Boulevard, parts of Sunrise Highway in Long Island and Linden Boulevard in New York City.
• But when New York's master builder Robert Moses proposed to build a bridge from the Manhattan Battery Park to Brooklyn, RPA broke ranks with the man who had built more of the Regional Plan's recommendations than anyone else. RPA President George McAneny provided strong testimony opposing Moses' project, favoring the tunnel that was eventually built when the U. S. War Department halted Moses' bridge proposal. This precipitated RPA for the first time weighing in to a controversial issue. RPA's objective and regional perspective has enabled the organization to have significant impacts on these types of issues ever since.
• RPA's Plan was also influential in the shape and form of new residential and commercial development. In 1949, New York Life Insurance Company completed Fresh Meadows, a residential development in Queens, that embodied neighborhood unit principles articulated in the plan.
• RPA was also instrumental in putting the administration of the three regional airports-Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark-together under the Port Authority of New York.

1950s

• The Verrazano Narrows Bridge, which was begun by the Port Authority in 1955, effectively completed the metropolitan highway loop that had been proposed by RPA in 1929.
• At this time, however, RPA also began to realize that developments in the region-many guided by the plan-were making the Plan's recommendations less pertinent in a changing world. During the late 1950s, research was conducted by Harvard University's Graduate School of Public Administration through a joint arrangement with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Ford Foundation to provide a foundation for RPA's Second Regional Plan, which was issued in a series of reports throughout the 1960s.

1960s

• Two RPA documents, The Race for Open Space and Spread City, were published in 1960 and 1962, and a series of five television programs, Goals for the Region, produced in 1963. Thus began a new direction for the Association, leading to a more open and democratic type of regional planning with a renewed emphasis on preserving open spaces and containing development in centers served by transit and infrastructure, while attempting to contain urban sprawl.
• Between 1961 and 1973, local governments in the region acquired 210 square miles of additional parkland, including $2 million in federal funds for acquisition directly conforming to proposals in The Race for Open Space, doubling the region's public parkland. Significant acquisitions included Fire Island and Sandy Hook, and Breezy Point on the tip of Long Island's barrier beach was purchased following a strong campaign by RPA and other groups.
• RPA had also come to realize the problems with automobile dependency in the region. With all seven of the region's private railroads near bankruptcy, the Association began a campaign to save mass transit that helped foster the creation of NJ TRANSIT and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The Mass Transit Act of 1964, which adopted the principle of federal assumption of capital costs for urban mass transit, was a significant triumph for RPA in this effort. Addressing the lack of funding in basic in frastructure, RPA convinced New Jersey state officials to establish the Capital Needs Commission, which recommended a unified bond issue program that generated almost a billion dollars for critical infrastructure and capital investments.
• Other programs RPA initiated or fought for, such as the Port Authority assumption and subsidization of the operation of PATH and amending subway proposals to better serve a center in Jamaica, Queens, were also successful. Other initiatives, such as proposals for a Second Avenue subway line that was superior to the City Planning Department's or Transit Authority's and rail access to Kennedy and Newark airports, were not completed during this period, and remain unresolved today.
• RPA lobbied for limited automobile access to the region's core by such means as raising tolls on bridges and tunnels and using the revenues to finance mass transit; altering New Jersey Turnpike Authority plans to route additional lanes through the Lincoln Tunnel and instead having the lanes routed to the George Washington Bridge; and opposing a bridge from Rye to Oyster Bay, across the Long Island Sound, that would have induced more traffic and development outside centers. A proposal to add a third tube to add a third tube to the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, that would have simply dumped more automobiles onto New York City streets, was successfully challenged by RPA, and the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority and the Port Authority came to accept the concept of imposing higher highway tolls to finance mass transit.
• Another major achievement was RPA's opposition to Port Authority plans to develop a fourth major airport for the region in Hunterdon County. RPA reexamined the economic and demographic projections on which the need for an airport was based and built an effective campaign against the Port Authority's plan

1970s

• During the 1970s, RPA undertook its most ambitious public outreach program ever, producing a series of television programs and accompanying discussion booklets on planning issues in the region that were broadcast on every local station through the spring of 1973. Each of the five individual shows that composed CHOICES for '76 was watched by 450,000 to 700,000 households, educating the region's citizens about the choices and decisions in regional planning, and making regional planning a more open and democratic process.
• Choices that RPA was addressing dealt with preserving urban centers and open space, alleviating poverty and investing in public transit. For example, in Paterson, New Jersey, RPA helped preserve an historic factory district and proposed that a highway project not cut through the district, but instead circumvent the area. Other projects were sponsored in Bridgeport, New Brunswick, Poughkeepsie, Stamford and White Plains. To preserve land and focus development, RPA became involved in plans for the New Jersey Meadowlands, successfully increasing housing densities and reducing office development that would have hurt the economies of surrounding cities.
• RPA also continued to propose transit systems to serve centers, arguing for established and stable sources of financial support for transit.

1980s

• The 1980s saw RPA continue on the programs were set in motion with the second Plan, while looking toward the Third Regional Plan.
• RPA supported the MTA as it negotiated a capital budgeting program to rehabilitate buses, subways and commuter rail systems. Restoring funding commitments to that agreement is now a major priority for the Association.
• In an effort to highlight the strengths of regional downtowns, RPA produced a report for Downtown Brooklyn that advocated a new development complex, which became Metrotech. In New Jersey, RPA created River City, a campaign for coordinated development, preservation and design along the northern New Jersey waterfront, and advocated construction of a Growth Connection rail link to Newark Airport that resulted in a NJ TRANSIT rail link proposal (still pending) for Newark and Elizabeth and a one-mile extension of Newark Airport's people-mover that will connect the airport to the Northeast Corridor commuter line.
• In state planning issues, RPA helped establish a watchdog agency, New Jersey Future, to campaign for the New Jersey State Development and Redevelopment Plan adopted in 1992, and the Connecticut Land Use Coalition and New York Future, which continue to advocate rational changes to those states' land use regulations.

1990s

• RPA identified 2,500 acres of reclaimable land in Union County, NJ, and performed a review of how current regulations may be streamlined to facilitate redevelopment efforts.
• RPA is advocating a plan to provide badly needed rail access to the region's two airports in Queens. The plan would connect JFK with Jamaica Station, would run an automated people-mover from LaGuardia to Woodside, and would bring LIRR directly to the east side of Manhattan via the unused lower level of the 63rd Street Tunnel.
• RPA helped develop and implement a management plan to protect Long Island's largest groundwater supply system, below 100,000 acres in the Central Pine Barrens, authorized in June 1995 by Governor Pataki and the towns of Brookhaven, Riverhead, and Southampton.
• In 1996, RPA releases their Third Regional Plan, A Region at Risk: The Third Regional Plan for the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut Metropolitan Region a five-year project which provides a coordinated direction and agenda for the Region into the 21st century. The Plan is rooted in the concept that the future vitality of the tri-state metropolitan region depends on our ability to fundamentally improve our quality of life. Achieving such improvements will require us to coordinate our efforts in the normally disparate fields of economic development, infrastructure planning, environmental preservation and social equity.

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rev. August 1996