January 30, 2008
You Kent Go Home Again. So the bucolic artist colony that is Williamsburg is under assault by the forces of... grain? Can that be right? Apparently. Lots of paranoid theorizing is going on, of the kind that you might expect of people who think parties where attendees dress up like Jesus in blackface is a cultural zeitgeist that sufficiently inherits the mantle of 'artists community.' Oddly, though, this time real artists are involved. This is useful, because the pull quote from the lawyers and bankers who 'moved in last year' is not going to generate the crocodile tears necessary to gird this story.
You can be forgiven if this elliptical opening generated a 'hunh?' response (less so if you just got all up in your drawers about my lack of love for the fixie-set). The back story is last week the FDNY got wind of an illegal conversion -- one so underground everyone I know has attended at least one party there and even has its own name -- and, like any actual exercise of bureaucratic authority, managed to remedy the situation in a way that pleased pleased no one: namely, evicting residents on one of the coldest nights this year with scant notice.
The building is question is 475 Kent Avenue, just south of the Williamsburg Bridge. The reasons for the evacuation were the usual litany of code violations associated with illegal conversion and the bonus of the storage of highly flammable raw materials for an illegal commercial bakery in the basement. Not since Witness has flour been so sexy. That apparently was the source of the urgency, not a rumored court case that would garner the tenants some legal foothold.
Now, to be clear, the city was in the right. Legally the tenants have little standing, and everyone living there knew that (I can say that since anyone who didn't also doesn't apparently have access to the Internet, so they can't read this either). And I only have a limited amount of sympathy for anyone who willingly signs a lease they know to be nearly worthless -- a fact compounded by the fact that anyone signing in the past five years not only had to contend with the usual uncertainty, but had to be aware that the rapidly increasing property values in the area made their situation even more tenuous.
On the other side, we have the vigilant tag team of the DOB and FDNY, who have such a finely-grained inspection sense that they managed to pinpoint, perhaps down to the minute, when the over 100 violations racked up in the past ten years came to a head, requiring immediate and unrelenting action on a Sunday night -- with an outside temperature of less than 20 degrees.
As a consequence, most everyone involved doesn't look all that upstanding, save those benighted artists. And the funny thing is, even though the 'save the artists' rallying cry seems like it is on everyone's speed dial, there are at least a handful of real artists among the 200-odd residents. This in and of itself isn't reason to rewrite commercial zoning regulations, but it is interesting some part of the retread script we've been seeing is authentic for once.
What rings hollow is the posturing that clutters up the discussion. The "Williamsburg is under attack" quotes must feel tired even to the most indignant arriviste. Most of the leases coming up for renewal date to 1997. If the golden years of Williamsburg are 1997, then I'm Picasso.
There have been established paths to legal conversion. They are time consuming, expensive (though that's an exceedingly relative term), but mostly they are highly variable. Making the decision to commit can provide enviable real estate and a chance to either pursue one's dreams (artistic or otherwise) or save a good deal of money. And if that fails, it can result in losing your home and possibly a large part of your personal possessions. That's the sort of gamble that seems to be intrinsic to great New York stories - ones that can leave many of us who missed the boat seething with envy.
It can also lead to an artificial stasis in those lucky few: freedom from want (rent-wise) doesn't always impel the artistically inclined to new heights. And it is these landed artisans that generates such revulsion at the concept -- if this largess is wasted, why should it be restricted to the creative classes? Every frustrated writer, accountant or plumber might also believe a cheap loft is the only thing keeping them from complete self-actualization.
I haven't delved into the message board (of course they have a message board), but I suspect at least some of the residents had started down the tortured path to legality. I lived for a while with a friend who was at the tail-end of a 20-year journey: boxes of litigation dating to the seventies, tales of phone and electrical lines cut by the owner, and a full-time attorney, and they were still living with a TCO (that's a Temporary Certificate of Occupancy). It's not a process for the faint-hearted, and bleating about saving artists is not germane, it just happens to be what you hear from the less considered willy-come-latelys every time a building is demolished so Karl Fischer can make us hate him more (if it helps, young'uns, the scourge of McCarron Park has found his way to my block).
Is there a way out of this mess? In a general sense, no. The Loft Law, which is what governs a lot of these situations, is a defunct mechanism (very few buildings left in the city qualify, and it is at the behest of the owners, not tenants) in practice, even though that was the model of occupancy for dozens of buildings in Williamsburg. Everyone has turned a blind eye to this: the city because it is the city, the owners because they are happy to collect rent with next to no investment until it is convenient to have your building evacuated, and tenants, well, because more and more of our 'artists' are the self-involved progeny of the affluent who fully expect a purchased apartment courtesy the 'rents when they decide pushing out a couple kids and drinking at Union Hall instead of Union Pool is a better existence than Rubulad pot lucks.
In the specific sense, well, the people at 475 Kent aren't acquitting themselves very well. Check out this thread. One person seems to have their head around the unfortunately unpleasant reality, and they were asked to stop posting.
There isn't going to be a legislative solution anytime soon, and not just because of the convoluted city/state division in housing law and massive amount of influence exercised by REBNY and the four, five or whatever families who control so much of our real estate (not sure if we can still count Macklowe -- ha ha!), because absent blanket rent regulation, we are talking about valuing residents in preference of property rights. The sounds pretty socialist (fine by me), upends the bedrock of American tax economics (ditto) but also gets into a murky pseudo-Malthusian process that, given how we run everything else, would devolve from meritocracy into the usual nepotistic favoritism in no time (not fine).
How's that? Well, we keep hearing about how saving artists are necessary to keep a community vibrant, or something. But to riff on an very old Doonesbury comic about gentrification, what about the poor people who get displaced by the artists? If they weren't devaluing the neighborhood to begin with, the 'authentic' grit and low rents wouldn't inspire hordes of RISD and Brown grads to surrender their birthright to entirely unexceptional Midwest existences and decide that the world needs another DJ or performance artist in the first place. Circle of life indeed.
Found always via this permanent link.
November 29, 2007
Ain't no platform high enough. I'm glad so much energy is being put into saving the high line. Even though it has little historical relevance to anything currently in the city, it serves as a cosmic thread knitting together the idealized vision of high art, high commerce and really fucking high real estate values. Plus it served briefly as the touchstone for white middle-class photo blogger urban adventuring. I can imagine the likes of Jason Kottke and Jake Dobkin wiping a poignant eye at some future SoHo Apple Store conference as they talk about the good old days. An aspiring media studies NYU student asks one of them about the odd doorway in the corner of one of their photos. "That, oh, that's the entrance to Comme des Garçons; they opened a couple years before I moved to the city." So, yeah, I want to get to one of those Highline Ballroom fund raisers toot sweet.
The city, via the MTA, is doing their part, by mandating the recent round of dissimulation on the Hudson Yards try really hard to preserve the last mile, which bends west and then circles around the western edge of the site. That will satisfy the hordes of people who want an uninterrupted -- once you get around the movie screen, pool, and leaping clip art figures envisioned by Diller Scofido + The Other Guy -- from the Spice Market to, um, the Javits Center (now looking to expand by re-roofing the place for $800 million).
But I didn't start this post to carp about the facile just-add-water historicism that has pervaded the real estate development that is the High Line. And I didn't want to spend any time at all on the Hudson Yards submissions because they aren't legally binding, and I can't imagine that a single person in Manhattan believes that any portion that even looks remotely interesting will be actually built (if Gary Extell was really cool, instead of sliding in with the high design spoiler option, he should just hire Scarano and Kondylis to do his proposals -- a "going to war with the army you have" gambit), or to attack the shortsightedness of the entire conceit, the potential problems with a 7 line extension without other key transit improvements, or the fact that we are saddled with this cluster fuck because Pataki completely de-funded the state's portion of capital improvements for the MTA, forcing them into hopeless debt and questionable fiscal decisions such as selling assets for one-time gains. No, I'm going to skip all that and talk about flatness.
Unless you run or ride in Manhattan, you can be forgiven for not noticing how drastically elevation changes occur. The reclamation of large areas of land (Turtle and Kips Bay, Alphabet City and Battery Park City) also adds to the myth of flatness. But in areas where natural landscape is reasonably close to its unadorned state, you encounter what might be expected from any pile of rock: the landscape drops steeply and quickly to the water's edge.
There's nothing wrong with this: it creates interesting vistas, and, assuming rational zoning, even helps with views and light -- though in most cases the 15-20 feet differential isn't that substantial -- except at ground level, where vertical circulation is most evident, and often creates memorable vistas. The slight incline up Broad approaching Wall Street give a subtle monumentality (well, before the guns and fences distracted); as you head uptown, the changes are more drastic, as are the resulting views. Coming upon St John's from the park side, at night, with looming darkened towers helps one truly understand why Gothic majesty persisted for so long as the go-to style for institutional might.
All this wondrous variation is the enemy of developers everywhere. Flat land is so... efficient. Cheap. Regular. Repetitive. Banal. So every time the city tries to jump start development and hands over the keys to the charlatan cabal that dutifully turns up (Related, Brookfield, Vornado, ad nauseum), the part of the solution that is hardest to parse is what happens on the ground.
There are many reasons for this: developers are trying to minimize promises of urban amenity (read: parks and plazas that must be maintained), while also shading just how much retail and advertising it to come (read: lots). In a couple cases it also helps paper over the difficult gap between concept and execution, often summarized in the distance, top to bottom, from one end of an idea to another.
At the WTC site, it's about twenty feet east to west. The Hudson Yards gap is even larger, and even if the flat earth crew got creative, there's only so much to be done, since the first thing they have to do is build a platform. A developer's dream yes? Sort of; it seems that this might even be a parking lot a developer can't love. That's because some estimates put the gap at the west end (the part that is supposed to, you know, connect with that park -- or garbage transfer station, if Andrew Berman gets his way) at over thirty feet.
And that's not just the western edge. That's a sheer wall that will run along 34th street as well. There is little hope for street level anything, since the other side of this wall will be the rail yard. It will top out higher than much of Javits (some previous plans for expansion included a second floor, but were scrapped for cost reasons). It will isolate the project from just about every direction, and it will look like nothing other than every bad large scale attempt as 'revitalization' from Albany to La Defense. Take a look at this rendering. See that little squib dancing across the gap in the distance? That's the "High" Line, below the horizon of the public space of the Brookfield proposal. That's what developers are expected to spend an extra $130 million on: so the High Line can circle a big lawn straddled by even bigger towers festooned with the latest Karim Rashin gimcrackery. So, yeah, the Steven Holll renderings look sorta cool, if I ignore the fact that the massing is on the south side of the site, the most interesting feature, a monolithic low rise, would never get built without retail intrusion, and the entire thing will stand head and shoulders over the west side -- in the worst way possible.
Found always via this permanent link.
September 17, 2007
Easy on the lies. Hey, did the 9/11 fairy leave new renderings under your pillow too? So best. Splashed on the back cover of the Observer is a glorious testimony to the skill of the Dream Team of architects, the indomitable spirit of American can-do, and the awesome hardware capacity of dBox. It is also the first time we've seen anything that details the ground level conditions at the World Trade Center site.
Over the past couple months we've been seeing more details (albeit in a tertiary way) of what the actual streetscape would be, each seemingly a counter-argument for limitations we haven't yet seen fully explicated. Just about this time last year (or was it the year before?), the last futile attempt of New York New Visions to impact the planning process made it pretty clear that security considerations were going to keep street life to a series of cordons leading to buildings wrapped in prison quality sheathing at the base. But no one wanted to say for sure. Excuses about 'too early' were offset with 'we really are worried and working' which no one took as a good sign.
The new renderings from last week, along with Childs' most recent emanations, tout lots of glass, which is the sign universal symbol of powerful, elegant, affluent modernism. It also enables you to create nighttime renderings that shine like an Aldus lamp.
The most exciting thing I could find is sadly underreported: apparently rebuilding the World Trade Center not only requires moving heaven and earth - it is actually going to happen. With nary a dollar of funding from the state DOT, and defying all altimeters known to science, the new site is so incredibly flat. The sixteen to twenty foot elevation change running from Church to West Street is now a couple delicate steps at the corner of the Liberty and West Streets. See, this is what you get when you hire European architects. They must do their calculations in metric or something.
Lots of other things have gotten flatter as well. Bollards, for instance, are slim, or actually invisible now. As are control gates in the pavement and armed guards. Maybe that's why everything is so expensive. Though the intersection of Broad and Wall Streets require physical interventions and personnel presence that make the security tighter than a joke about a nun's sexual habits, the new WTC will be a gracious, flat esplanade that is so dignified that even Roberto Cavalli will only want signage facing Church Street (that's an obscure one, I know: when doing speculative renderings, you usually get faux retailer logos, but either as a joke or because someone at dBox fancies Cavalli -- a clothing line best summed up as 'where Italian-Americans on gambling junkets in Vegas go with their winnings to upscale their personal appearance' -- it appears prominently in one of the street-level renderings).
So we are faced with one of two unpleasant options: one, the money shot, Numero Uno at Freedom Focus is either two years out of date from the current security technology and it's too late to revise the designs again, or it is only a short truck (bomb) drive from the most secure office building ever built to three, nearly as large, that are some of the most insecurely designed since the dawn of the Age of Terror. Oh, or the renderings are lying. There's always that.
It's not an insignificant point, as always. We went through two rounds of substantial redesign after the NYPD wasn't seeing turrets and water cannons at the Freedom Tower. Everyone at PANJNY has been as mealy-mouthed as possible about the actual street conditions. At this late stage, we still get delicate renderings of the PATH station resting on the plaza, even though it's been said more than once that the first ten to twelve feet of the façade will be completely opaque. And what of all that extra ground that Calatrava needed for exhaust stacks and light monitors? It sure looks like it's gonna be dark in the billion dollar concourse.
There's no evident security or control at either end of the new Greenwich Street, and no controlled access to the Memorial. Silverstein's gambit of rebranding the World Trade Center as TriBeCa South (hey! Never forget! Until it means we can get reservations more easily at Nobu, or something) is certainly in line with the new look. But they didn't need to get all clever about the addresses -- they just need to make sure the streets are empty after five and that Law and Order shoots there every other week. And some Maclaren strollers filled with kids named Tristan.
I'm not saying I think we need all that security - or, hell, even the cultural center, which doesn't clutter up the renderings (if you are keeping score, it's a net gain in office space from the previous incarnation, with a reduction in open space and no new programmed spaces exclusive of offices; I'm not counting the Memorial Foundation Remembrance Space, because for all we know, Debra Burlingame might not even let us in). And feds seem to foot the bill for a big chunk of the guns and butter showcase, so it's no skin off our tax bill. But can we the get some realism injected into our planning? Do we need scary looking control gates and overweight, ex-football coach-with-a-chip-on-his-shoulder security guards on every corner that doesn't have a full-gear guardsman with an assault rifle or not? And if we do, how about we show that while drumming up support for our funding? That two billion dollar overrun could go a long way towards improving airport access.
Now is also about the time we should pause and give a shout out to the sad sacks at Beyer Blinder Belle. Even as the steaming teapot that is Rafael Vinoly continues to opine that he won the design competition, I suspect he will get little support or complaint from the Libeskinds at this point, though he might get a little guff from BBB. Because if anyone wants to dig out those renderings that made the entire city, or at least Michael Sorkin and the people who still return his calls, rise up indignantly and declaim that we couldn't possibly begin to consider a memorial or rebuilding process, let alone one that seemed to roll over for both the most craven of commercially-driven design and the saddest aspects of no-account cross-border state bureaucracy, well, welcome to 2007, where we aren't just capable of it, but enthusiastic. Of course, BBB didn't presage the grandeur that is the PATH terminal, which now is so glorious it costs just a hair more than it would take to rebuild every school in the New York City education system. Oh, and boy, it surely isn't as soary now that it's hemmed in by Foster and Rodgers. They even did a special rendering to prove that our billion dollar spines will still be able to open and not hit a Forever 21 (okay, there isn't a Forever 21 in the rendering; it's Hot Topic).
Expect to hear muddy praise from what is left of the architectural commentariat, invoking Rockefeller Center and forgetting that the last vestiges of it was the Avenue of the Americas side. Sure, hire four top notch corporate lackeys and they produce top notch corporate lackeydom. After the abortions of Hudson and Atlantic Yards (I'm still crossing my fingers for a collapse in the CMBS market that will submarine this), you would think someone in the shitty New York real estate press would up and say 'Hey, guys, is there a reason we are trying so hard to emulate Canary Wharf and La Défense? Cause those places, you know, suck.' But we are New York; we're going to make sure our Canary Wharf sucks bigger and better, longer and harder, etc.