Quote of the Day (David Brooks, on Office Parks at the Turn of the Millennium)

“Office park buildings are five- to eight-floor layer cakes of tinted glass and composite stone. They have labor-unintensive flower arrangements out front and dwarf-trees inside their deserted lobbies. There are take-out cafes near the atrium, FedEx drop-off boxes just off the main driveway, and rows and rows of open parking. Airport shuttle vans cruise by throughout the day, and there's usually one of those suburban strip mall restaurants like Chi-Chi's or Outback Steak House a short drive down the road.

“Office parks are very quiet. There's no street life except for the huddles of smokers by the front doors. All the action is inside, among the scientists, the techies, and the entrepreneurs. Office parks represent the marriage of science and commerce, and the withering away of just about everything else. And when you hang around them, you sometimes wonder, what is this office-park culture doing to the American character?” —Conservative commentator David Brooks, “Our Founding Yuppie,” The Weekly Standard, October 23, 2000

Sometimes, you can’t help re-reading something from some years ago and wonder what happened in the interim. That was my sense when I came across David Brooks’ speculation about which Founding Father would feel most at home in suburban office parks.

Let me give you a hint: it’s in that phrase, “the marriage of science and commerce.” If you’re thinking of Ben Franklin as the Founding Father in question, you’d be correct.

But trends of the past two decades put paid to any notion that the office park indicated anything much about the changing American character. Nowadays, it looks less like an instinct towards bringing people together for work in the suburbs than a real-estate bubble reaching its zenith just when the market need for such space was outstripped by the rush toward this outlet for capital investment.

More or less starting in the early postwar period, the office park reached its peak in the 1980s and 1990s. But the rise of the computer and the Internet meant that sole-proprietor businesses, for instance, could function just as well at home as in a larger space outside, and COVID-19 left many of these corporate boxes empty.

We’re going to see whether the accelerating back-to-office movement picks up momentum. But my guess is that new environmental and demographic trends—some in only the barest of outlines at the moment—will mean that the office park (including several out here by me in New Jersey) will not flourish as it once did.

Open Plan Offices: Weighing Their Effectiveness

“For decades, research has found that open plan offices are bad for companies, bad for workers, bad for health and bad for morale. And yet they just won’t die. Human beings, if they are to thrive, need a bit of privacy — walls and a door. And yet employers, decade after decade, neglect to give workers what they need, refuse to do what’s in their own self-interest.”— Columnist and TV commentator David Brooks, “The Immortal Awfulness of Open Plan Workplaces,” The New York Times, Sept. 9, 2022

New York City was utterly transformed by a number of the projects begun or completed under former three-term mayor Michael Bloomberg (pictured): the High Line, a rebuilt World Trade Center and its surrounding Lower Manhattan neighborhood, Hudson Yards, East River Park in Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridge Park in Brooklyn, Long Island City in Queens, 400 miles of bike lanes throughout the five boroughs. 

No mayor has left such an imprint on the look of America's largest city since Fiorello LaGuardia (with the help of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal) in the Great Depression.

Bloomberg supporters fervently wished he might have similarly altered the landscape of The Wall Street Journal if he had successfully achieved his rumored interest in purchasing Dow Jones. (The Washington Post had also reportedly caught his eye.) That hope was dashed (at least for now) when a Bloomberg spokesman quickly tweeted that he had no such interest.

If Bloomberg could only get his mitts on Rupert Murdoch’s most influential business print publication, the thinking in some quarters surely went, maybe he could return the Journal to something like the separation of news and opinion that largely held sway before the Australian media baron bought the company from the Bancroft family in 2007.

I won’t comment on the political change that might occur under such a scenario. What I’m concerned with here is a physical environment far different from what he left Gotham: the office space that would become part of his media empire. My apprehension arises because few other American corporate titans have trumpeted open-space offices as tirelessly as Bloomberg.

I don’t know if the Murdoch family follows this office model. Maybe they consider it an outgrowth of Bloomberg’s hated RINO outlook.

Judging by the impact Hiz(former)zoner has had on American office design in general, I’m afraid he’ll exert a baleful influence on the health and creativity of any Dow Jones workers that could come into his fold.

I don’t always agree with David Brooks’ views on politics, but his analysis of the controversial and crazy American corporate embrace of Bloomberg’s “open office” is spot on. I just wish the Times columnist would have mentioned Bloomberg by name in the article, so that the debate on this could get the thorough airing it deserves.

In his otherwise excellent piece, Brooks notes the dangers that open-space offices pose to employee health, but dwells on one aspect (stress) without mentioning the one that’s become ubiquitous since late-winter 2000: airborne illnesses like COVID-19. 

Even urging workers to stay home if they feel something coming on is not likely to be helpful if they have insufficient sick days. (And COVID—not to mention a COVID rebound—can exhaust that supply quickly.)

Brooks rails against cubicles, but I’m afraid those units have long since become staples of the modern workplace. At least they could, at their best, provide a modicum of physical separation from adjacent workers.

But I am aware of at least one employer, just before the COVID outbreak, which implemented a renovation that did away even with that. Instead, workers were herded together in triangles, with no partitions between.

Did I mention that this design model became obsolete within just a few months after the COVID outbreak?

How much do you think that America’s C-suites have invested in up-to-date ventilation systems? Your guess is as good as mine. As Liz Szabo’s article nine months ago from Kaiser Health News noted, the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers published updated recommendations in 2020 not only for limiting indoor odors and dust but control viruses like COVID-19.

But, because those guidelines are voluntary, there’s no way of telling how closely the business world is adhering to them—anymore than we know right now they are following up on the White House’s initiative (again, voluntary) encouraging schools and workplaces to improve ventilation.

Companies’ best-laid plans for a return to the office—and, let’s be frank, a return to traditional top-down control—keep getting upended by a disease that evolves and adapts to new environments far faster than corporate heads ever have done.

The move towards a more open environment often rests on the contention that it fosters creativity and managerial transparency. That would send great—if corporate heads were willing to accept ideas other than their own, let alone dissent.

But, before Elon Musk started going seriously off the rails with managing his new toy, Twitter (like firing janitors, thus forcing workers at two locations to bring their own toilet paper to the office!), more than a few other CEOs were not only rooting for his return-to-the-office mandates but implementing their own.

Employers are anxious to herd their workers back to the office. If various Amenities of the Month can’t lure them back, then diktats from Human Resources will have to do.

Unfortunately, the types of layouts in Bloomberg L.P. that have been copied elsewhere don’t inspire workers to rush back to their cubicles—and, if those employees find any kind of alternative arrangement out there in the market, they will seize it.

I suppose that if there’s any good outcome from the turbulence that has roiled American politics over the last several years, it’s that Mike Bloomberg never won a Presidential election so he could implement his 2019 plan to make the East Room of the White House into another showcase for theopen office model he followed in his own company.

(The image accompanying this post of Bloomberg, speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at Warehouse 215 at Bentley Projects in Phoenix, Ariz., was taken by Gage Skidmore on Feb. 1, 2020.)

Photo of the Day: Stranger in a Strange Land—or, Back in Midtown

A week and a half ago, for the first time in 14 months, when COVID-19 restrictions went into effect, I ventured back into New York City. In meeting friends for lunch, I was as curious about what I was about to encounter as I was apprehensive, given the rapidly changing and confusing guidelines issued by the Center for Disease Control (CDC).

The bus ride through northern New Jersey into the Lincoln Tunnel contrasted strongly with what I saw and heard even only a few weeks ago, though the evidence for a change in ridership habits was still apparent. In the spring of 2020, with the lockdown in place, I walked by buses that, though once standing room only, now had only one or two passengers during the morning rush hour. So few people were on board that it made me feel as if I were viewing a ghost bus.

Though a good deal more people were on board the New Jersey Transit bus I took that Monday morning, plenty of seats remained—even with the four seats behind the driver roped off. (The driver was additionally protected with a glass shield.) I was relieved to have the opportunity for social distancing.

As late as last fall, friends were still telling me that pedestrian traffic in Times Square had diminished markedly—especially during the Christmas season so critical to retailers.

Stepping off the bus and out of the Port Authority terminal, I did not feel as crestfallen as I might have at year’s end—there were a good number of people on the streets. Still, something had changed, in a way that this shot, which I took from Times Square, looking uptown, can’t convey.

I didn’t get my first real sense of how much was different until I met my friends at an English-style pub in the Garment District pub. Though still anxious about being inside, I took comfort in the considerable distance between our trio and the closest customers in the restaurant.

In fact, one of my friends at the table indicated that, in this same restaurant, at a comparable hour, he would have been lucky to get a seat here before the pandemic.

Analysts are talking about the pent-up demand that restaurants will experience from people anxious to celebrate the end of isolation with friends. I am sure there is something to that—and indeed, compared with the desperate situation at this time last year, when so many restaurants were gauging how to move towards a take-out model, the situation is vastly improved.

But I suspect that restaurants in many cities such as New York will still find surviving a difficult matter. Many will depend on lunchtime spending by the white-collar sector to supplement expenditures by friends and families.

Even with tourist bookings accelerating, the damage to the office sector will continue—at least until Labor Day, when many companies will be able to put their post-pandemic plans in place and see how early returnees to old spaces are faring.

I believe that some of the damage to office space will be permanent. Over the course of a year, companies have proven that they can operate remotely if need be. They no longer have the need to have all their employees in their buildings five days a week. Some companies reduced their workforce so dramatically during the pandemic that it will take years to reach their former levels--if even then. This means that fewer workers will be making lunchtime purchases.

In some ways, the post-pandemic city may be better. My friend Rob, for instance, looked forward to fewer people on subways during rush hour. “Who wants to get on trains packed like sardines?” he noted. “After all, there is a quality-of-life issue involved here, too.”

You can forgive New Yorkers who blinked at what they saw all around them as the restrictions came down. Everything looked familiar but wasn’t—much like the post-pandemic city whose dimensions we won’t be able to grasp for weeks, months—even a few years.