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my city was gone

  • Mar. 26th, 2008 at 8:02 PM
papa, lait, big dummy, pipe, prom nite, balls, captain vegetable, orphans, target, teuffel, teacher, love machine, jack, bee, gordon ramsay, tiki, hunter, spades not ships, ron burgundy, berlin, sooty, walrus, mummy, hate, trust, squid, Mr. F, woman, bat country, trelawney, patronus, crunk, robot, goto work, moe green, johnny and june, horse head, michael, japan, sanger, scorpio
Ignore the insightful piece of writing that accompanies it, and just marvel at the insanity that is TIshman Speyers' vision for the West Side Railyards.

It's like Walt Disney and Le Corbusier bought an eightball of coke, and then hired the guy who paints the illustrations for The Watchtower.

Put aside the horrible "City Beautiful" urban planning and actually look at a map of the West Side yards. The yards are boxed in by two highways, the Javits Center, and the central Postal facility--which will be new Penn Station. And here's what it's not surrounded by: mass transit. (Ironic, given it's a rail yard, but still.) Great choice for a pedestrian arcades surrounded by a mall and high-rise condos: a place with no transit and no parking.

More to the point, this is all still above the tracks of two of the busiest transit services in the nation. A platform the size of two city blocks, three stories in the air, with trains (many of them diesel) running underneath 24/7--that's right where I want my high-rise apartment built. It's somewhere on the spectrum ranging from "constant annoyance" to "terrorism welcome mat."

For all the Atlantic Yards project gets maligned for not being sensitive to the needs of the community, at least it's a centrally-located commercial space that's being repurposed. The West Side yards project is like something you'd cook up in SimCity.

Comments

( What you got to say? )
[info]archaica wrote:
Mar. 27th, 2008 12:45 pm (UTC)
"City officials say the deal will generate $1 billion in income over a 99-year lease."

That's it? Man, why do public officials and agencies come so fucking cheap? We just sold off whole swaths of the electromagnetic spectrum for like, .01% of the profit the companies that bought them will make off of them, and now this? Not to mention how public officials can be bribed to do almost anything for so little as a chicken parm sub? It makes no sense to me. If you're going to whore out the public office you hold, at least be a high-class whore.

This idea is awful. It's a terrible public development idea. Haven't any of these fucking people looked at any city planning pre-1950? Are they all looking at Mussolini's Rome as a model? What the hell?
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[info]docmanhattan wrote:
Mar. 27th, 2008 02:14 pm (UTC)
"Manhattan Open City"?

A chicken parm sub does sound pretty good right now, though. Wish I had anything worth bribing me for.
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[info]archaica wrote:
Mar. 27th, 2008 02:36 pm (UTC)
A chicken parm sub, with cheese, sauce, and all that breading .... mmmmmmm, that does sound good. Fucking heart. Where the fuck are the invulnerable Jarvik 7s, so I can eat all the fuck I want?
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