New York (N.Y.). City Planning Commission

Under the 1990 Charter of the City of New York, the City Planning Commission consists of the chair, who is also director of the Department of City Planning, and six other members appointed by the Mayor. The six other appointments are apportioned among the president of the council and the five borough presidents.

The City Planning Commission is responsible for planning relating to the orderly growth, improvement, and future development of the city, including adequate and appropriate resources for the housing, business, industry, transportation, distribution, recreation, culture, comfort, convenience, health, and welfare of its population. The Commission is also responsible for overseeing the implementation of laws requiring environmental reviews of actions taken by the city.

Specifically, the Commission is concerned with plans, relating directly to its various responsibilities previously cited, uniform land use review procedure, zoning resolution, and land platting and dedication of streets and public squares.

In addition, the mayor will file with the City Planning Commission a criteria for locating new facilities and expanding, closing or reducing in size or capacity existing ones. Furthermore, the Commission and Department of General Services will assist the mayor in an annual citywide statement of needs concerning city facilities based on the previously established criteria for them.

The Department of City Planning with the City Planning Commission as its focus was originally created under Chapter 8 of the revised City Charter of 1938. Appointed by the Mayor, the Commission, whose chair acts as head of the Department of City Planning, consisted of seven members.

A contemporary evaluation prepared for the W.P.A. Historical Records Survey--Federal Writers Project, "The New City Charter," stated "very interesting and important is the new City Planning Commission...an independent commission concerned with and responsible for the welfare of the entire city, advising and reporting upon all questions involving the growth of the city: changes in the city map and in zoning and decisions about the expenditures of capital funds; making a master plan on a long-range program for the improvement and future growth of the city...."

In defining the current uses and planning for the future needs of every sector of the city, the commission in the 1940's developed a series of plans.

These were specified by Rebecca B. Rankin, Librarian of the Municipal Reference Library, who wrote in her chronicle of seven years of the LaGuardia administration, 1939-1945, "New York Advancing," that the City Planning Commission, "has adopted master plans for areas selected for clearance, replanning, and low-rent housing, arterial highways and major streets, Brooklyn Civic Center and Downtown area, health center districts and building locations, sanitation facilities, sewage treatment plant sites and tributary areas, existing schools and parks" as well as studies of other citywide facilities.

It was Mayor LaGuardia's purpose, Rankin observed, to leave New York and succeeding administrations a complete, well-studied, well-rounded public improvement program covering every civic, educational, social, health, traffic and safety requirement, insofar as intelligent planning and predictable funds could make that possible, as the listing of master plans attests.

Until the 1938 Charter formed the Department of City Planning, the planning of New York City was the responsibility of various commissions and authorities.

The initial effort began in 1807, at the request of the City's Common Council, the State Legislature appointed a commission to lay out the undeveloped areas of Manhattan.

In 1811, the report of the commission platted Manhattan in a grid pattern extending northward to what would become 155th Street, with east-west streets predominating because of the need for transporting people and goods between the Hudson and North Rivers.

During the remainder of the nineteenth-century, a series of special state-appointed commissions laid out a street system in a grid pattern for the City of Brooklyn, and in 1860 the Commissioners of the Central Park platted the portion of Manhattan island north of 155th Street, and in 1869 the Commissioners' powers were extended to include that part of the Bronx west of the Bronx River. In 1871, these powers were transferred to the Department of Public Parks and in 1891 to the commissioners of Street Improvements of the 23rd and 24th Wards.

In 1902, four years after the consolidation of the City's five boroughs into Greater New York, the responsibility for laying out street systems was vested in the borough presidents.

The New York City Improvement Commission was created in 1903 and in 1911, the Brooklyn Committee on City Planning was organized by a group of private citizens. In 1914, a standing committee on the city plan was established in the Board of Estimate and Apportionment.

In response to the completion of the monolithic, 42-story Equitable Building near Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan in 1915, the City itself passed in 1916 its first Zoning Ordinance imposing standards for height and setbacks for new buildings and rules for land use. Cited as, "one of the first assertions of city control over the development of private property," it became a model for urban centers across the United States.

Other predecessors the City Planning Commission included a Mayor's Committee on City Planning in 1926, and another in 1934. The latter functioned until 1937.