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December 20, 2005

Walking to Do.* Today is rich is headline possibility, regardless of where one falls on the political spectrum, or, perhaps more significantly, where one lives on the potential commuter path from say, downtown to Canarsie. Being a member of the exceedingly marginal media allows me the latitude to reflect what might be expected from my brethern: hoots and snark at the welter of coverage that tries to wring pathos, or just entertainment, from a fact that defines the ‘commuting’ experience of the vast majority of those alive: walking a reasonable distance in often trying conditions. In other words, never has so much been written by so many for so little.

There are, no doubt, stories to be had that involve discomfort, sickness, frostbite and certainly worse, since today’s labor inaction will more than inconvenience those who have congenital medial conditions and for whom the public transit exists as integral to their treatment as an insurance card (dialysis patients, etc.). But these next few days will do what any number of pseudo-emergencies have done for generations: provide fodder for Talk of the Town pieces and getting a handful of people laid. And perhaps tamping down some of that Brooklyn is great superiority meme that has been a little too present lately.

Here at MR Strike Central (written hastily on the back of a piece of scrap paper with a Sharpie and taped over the monitor -- okay, I haven’t actually done that, but I’ll think about it when I’m done), we’re taking it in stride (chuckle), but most because we haven’t had to actually stride anywhere today. Preparation consisted of buying a fresh bottle of bourbon (though this strike is perhaps a truly nefarious plague on the city -- my preferred brand was unavailable).

With lots of air time to fill, we’ve been subjected to mostly the uninteresting stuff, even though this is actually a rather rich story, from end to end: a militant union that is perhaps rife with an internal conflict that is the driving force in the walkout, a intellectually bankrupt governor who set the stage by cravenly handing out ill-advised benefits (with the rousing approval of a state legislature -- heavily funded by that same union -- eclipsed only by Maoist-era China in its intransigence and seeming permanence), and the seeming inability to manage (stocked with appointees from that dimwit governor) the long-term health of one of the largest, best, and most effective public transit system in the world. Instead, we get lots of comments about how cold it is (brrr!), traffic problems (aiyee!) and rueful inquiries about getting home (public radio types are resoundingly stereotypical, all biking off to Park Slope).

At the end of the day, the State Supreme court swiftly approved a ‘massive’ fine that, if this strike lasts through New Year’s, might get large enough to buy half of Lenny Kravtiz’s apartment. Not reported widely was the interesting counterpoint that the Taylor Law, which the city is invoking to justify the fine, also prohibits negotiating pension benefits collectively. Since Dubya has been too busy spying on us to notice, there are still some powerful regulations left in the labor department, one of which is that bargaining in bad faith might exempt the union or its members from sanctions. That is, they can argue that they had to go on strike, since the MTA’s demand to negotiate pension benefits put them in an untenable position. If it is found that this does constitute a violation, it may well end up that the union can demand restitution from the state, the reverse of today's ruling.

Aside from the very real effect this will have on those who can afford it least, and the certain and real discomfort this will cause many, just how central the transit system is to our culture was evident in the preponderance of counter-intuitive observation stories: just how empty it is. Given the nearness of the holiday, many workers likely moved around schedules, or worked from home. The masses of automobiles were not as great as expected because much of it simply wasn't possible. The hordes of Jerseyites or Long Islanders who come in on the weekend were working wherever they normally do. The large numbers of city dwellers without cars didn’t go out and buy or rent one. And even if any one of these constituencies made a go at commuting by car, where would they park?

As a result, we have a very clear picture of what density requires, and what a well-run (though not managed) transit system affords. For all our criticisms, one should never lose sight of what an amazing resource we have in the MTA. And it is operated every day by an army of workers who by and large perform their tasks thanklessly, and are today vilified more than ever.

There may be real tactical flaws in the TWU approach, and just as many embarrassing anecdotes about self-interest (when attempting to justify lowering the retirement age for station agents, it was argued that the dust and ink in money posed health hazards) as you would find in a corruption story on AIG or Enron, but the truly minor inconvenience (though it sounds like a bad stereotype, my grandfather, who worked almost forty years in a steel mill, never had a driver’s license, and for a good decade walked over ten miles one way to work) this presents for so many should not justify the ire the workers will face. Like the Postal Service, it is one of the best arguments for government regulation and ownership of crucial services (for all you privatization fans out there, remember that the lines started out privately, and next time you complain about the seeming inanity of the system layout, thank the magical hand of the market).

I salute everyone who is making the ugly, dark (it’s almost the solstice) trek home, and I likewise salute the mostly unappreciated effort our transit workers make every day (remember, at best they didn’t get paid today, and it may be worse still). A drink to you all, from the admittedly comfortable command center for smart ass urban blogging.

*The Nancy Sinatra struck me as archaic, so today is a bit more age appropriate (for me at least)

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December 15, 2005

Let me be the first to make a Nancy Sinatra reference. “Daddy, where were you during the Great Transit Strike of 2005?” “Why, honey, the exact same place I was during the Great Blackout of 2003 (or was it 2004?) -- sitting in a Manhattan apartment, getting stoned, and wondering if the bar scene was going to be really boisterous. Then I remembered I was really stoned and went to sleep early.”

I’m not trying to be too glib about the Big Inconvenience, but considering that sometime between midnight tonight (should the strike actually take place) and midnight tomorrow, someone, somewhere will compare their circumstance to Katrina or the Tsunami, and there’s a good chance it will be in front of a hapless local news reporter trying to find a better spin for the ‘it really sucks to walk story”, I guess I’m excusing myself a wee bit for stifling a yawn.

Of course, it’s not a yawn worthy situation, considering how far apart the two sides are, and what myriad levels of incompetence are being revealed by this. We are all used to media-savvy grandstanding (the Times found a TWU member -- who apparently works in a part of the subway that lacks potable water -- that claimed they were treated like “Fourth World” peoples), and massive gaps in the relative positions. All these ostensible leaders are staking out drastic ground to justify their pay and chauffeured rides (isn’t it ironic that all the public transit employees and union reps get ferried by car? Wouldn’t it be cheaper and more symbolically satisfying to give out free MetroCards?).

The union wants a 6,000% raise, and the right to retire next week, and the MTA wants the staff to perform their own appendectomies and to commit suicide upon retirement. Perhaps they aren’t that far apart, but I haven’t been looking that closely.

And who can blame them for being at loggerheads? After talking all of 75 minutes on Tuesday, everyone threw up their hands... and probably when to a hockey match. The union is claiming the MTA is hiding evidence of the surplus, a claim the MTA shrugged off as less than ridiculous because everyone knows there’s not a chance in hell that MTA actually has that much of a grasp of their finances.

The big news today was that the head of the MTA, Peter Kalikow was going to join in the negotiations. Yup, it was news that he was going to, you know, come to work today. Which is a sight better than our governor -- off in New Hampshire, raising money for his political consultant jobs program -- was doing.

Yes, that’s right. Scratch a local or state issue rife with incompetence that ranges from the everyday abysmal and scales up to borderline criminal, and you will find the goofy grin of the world’s luckiest Westchester pasty. Working overtime to be get himself remembered as the worst governor of his generation, Pataki’s all-thumbs-prints are everywhere, from appointing people who are worse at numbers than circulation managers at the tabloids, to pandering to suburban voters by forcing unequal fare increases, to now standing idly by while the one of the greatest public transit systems grinds to a halt a week before one of the most important tourist weeks (and one of the coldest Decembers on record) of the year.

Surely the TWU has to get real healthcare costs and pension expense (and recognize that evaporating pensions and retirement benefits in the private sector are going to make the typical base of support far less sympathetic to their retire at 55 deal), and the MTA has to get real, at, well, managing the books (you can’t credibly argue you have long-term financial planning issues when you report swings from surplus to deficit and back in a single fiscal year), but none of these things would seem as dire, or insurmountable if we had a leader.

Then again, maybe Pataki spends his ‘crisis’ times the same way I do, which would go a long way to explaining his inaction. But that’s not what I’m paying him to do, and can you imagine a more annoying stoner? He’d never have his own (yammering about how he’s can’t get busted, cause of his job), and would probably want to spend the whole night eating Cheetos and watching the Young Ones. Come to think of it, I’d better make sure I’ve got some Cheetos; Metro-North is saying they’re going all in on this too…

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December 13, 2005

Eloquent, attractive. Irrelevant? In a fit a nearly responsible writing/vituperation-justification (and providing a chance to write another of those patented really long posts), I took myself to the Zero Culture event last evening, being of one those well-dressed serious-looking art/culture hangers-on (read: I'm still a little too young to troll the 92nd Street Y), and a little curious to see what Paul Golberger is like (and, surprise! he seemed pretty reasonable and incisive, Michael Sorkin's vitriol notwithstanding). If you missed it, or last week's post, the goal was to interrogate:

The ongoing wrangles, which have variously devolved around issues of design and security, have most recently polarized around an opposition between culture and memorialization. Culture, ordinarily the bedrock of any act of remembrance, is estranged, even desecrates ground described as hallowed and sacred.

If it was an opening salvo to further the debate on the role of "the arts" or "culture" (it was an entire event that awash in air quotes and qualifications) at the WTC site, it was a tepid one. The points themselves were reasonable, there was a teensy bit of spark, but no position was established that could reframe the debate in terms that might realize something.

Two things, I would hazard, prevented this: one is the unwillingness to place most of the recent changes squarely in the context of politics, and, two, the inherent partisan position of the participants, asserting a right for a particular element -- "the arts" -- instead of focusing on the insulting behavior of those who mouth fealty to process then jettison that promise when it is politically expeditious. The point is, we could have been defending a rollerderby rink, and the arguments should have been the same.

If anyone there thought "the arts" were worthy of exceptional status and deserving of veneration or priority election or placement at the site, it wasn't clearly articulated. Mike Wallace and Thelma Golden both made allusive comments about the problem of situating culture in the context of development or memorials, and even more briefly spoke on the conflict between high and low art, but no one made a forceful argument about what or if "the arts" deserve in terms of exceptional recognition.

After about an hour of speaking, the thought that coalesced in my mind was we were watching the replay of the NEA Four, Chris Ofili and Robert Mapplethorpe all rolled into one. There was a brief moment where a crucial point was made (it was Mike Wallace, I believe) that a structural flaw in the entire process was that the narrative of the event and the recovery were commandeered at the national level, and deformed to fit an almost pre-existing ideology (the farcical connection between Al Queda and Iraq). In light of that, it occurred to me that the various defenses being made were a fairly typical, and futile, running hard up against the well established playbook that politicians use: assume a proto-populist role, and find some freaky artist to attack. The artists are defended by and large in the framework of vaguely leftist, aspiring to be populist (free speech) rhetoric, but that is an unwinnable fight. Arms were taken up, nonetheless, because the left has been consistently fractured in its opposition to the war in Iraq (and even in the best way to counter terrorism), and I think many thought, consciously or unconsciously, that we could "win" this one, that somehow a counter-narrative could be established that would stem the putrid grandstanding happening downtown, and that it would ripple outward, bringing down the house of cards our petty emperor was attempting to erect.

How the arts community got suckered into this one (not that it isn't easy to most of the time) was addressed only once: in one of the few truly insightful or scandalous observations, Paul Goldberger inserted an almost parenthetical comment that people used to attending expensive benefits for arts organizations got caught up in the brush with power and were unduly flattered by the idea that their input would make difference downtown (I'm paraphrasing a bit, so don't sue me).

Why is it an unwinnable fight? Because art is inevitably an expression of, and distraction for, the elite. Everyone in that room last night knew who Hans Haacke was without reading his bio. I could walk into a gathering of people of similar scale from here to LA and find at best a tenth of the attendees who even heard of him. The Drawing Center is an elite institution, there is no denying that. And there is nothing wrong with that. We are not a populist country; we are country where political identity can be manipulated by appeals to economic self-interest, and, apparently, appeals to religious belief (though I suspect this is a synecdoche for economic self-interest). That self-interest, more often than not, is a limitless desire to accumulate capital, regardless of the impact on community. The arts sit uncomfortably at the apex of that process, leeching off those who have managed this trick to an effective degree (or were lucky enough to be borne into it), trying to hew an impossible path of jealousy, criticism, and some vague claims of exceptional status due to the mirror, prism or whatever allegorical device one posits for filtering culture.

We wanted to put the Drawing Center downtown for no particular reason, except that Manhattan is the center of the arts (because it is, without coincidence, the economic center) in this country. The World Trade Center housed as many populist, working class strivers as any other building, but the firm that suffered most dearly, Cantor Fitzgerald, was filled with an aberrant number of millionaires who did things that most people couldn't even identify. They were elites, and I'm sure a number of them supported the arts ardently. And if they didn't, they would learn to when their expensively educated kids woke up and realized being a painter was a lot more fun that being a bond trader like dad.

Surely one could say there is something flawed about this, but those who do dwell pretty regularly on the fringe. But the debate downtown is limited largely to those who think this is just fine a model, the only separation being some got a lot closer than others, and that creates friction.

All of this makes it impossible to posit an argument that resonates in a broad cultural context. Even most of the people who can be goaded into turning up their nose at the liberal, East Coast elite, still eagerly come to see our museums, and often take great pleasure in the process. More than anything, they don't want to be reminded of how provincial they appear to the people in that room last night.

And there is no doubt that is the case. A fascinating moment of total implosion occurred when a family member came up and read a mostly disingenuous statement that seemed like it came directly from the Machiavellian mind of Debra Burlingame. We heard the usual garbage talking points about "it's not about the arts, but the kind of the arts" followed by a litany of projects that, absent the loaded emotional context from which they were drawn, would have resulted in pained eye-rolling from most everyone there (and probably still did for some). There were glimmers of a viable argument, via pandering to positioning these examples of outsider art (that might be welcomed at places like MAD or the American Folk Museum), or terms that might indict the clannishness of the arts we were lamenting the exclusion of. But no one rose to point out that the some 30-odd examples offered, from a traditional curatorial viewpoint, were infinitesimal for an institution that needs to fill programming for a century (MoMA has what, 100,000 items in inventory?), and the Memorial is already slated to have something on the order of 200,000 sf of display space. I'm not aware of anyone recommending that the Memorial Center -- or whatever we are calling it nowdays -- not include such items. But, true to form, no one wanted to attack a family member by pointing any of this out, or, worse, the awkward, polite disinterest indicated that, yes, there is even less a dialogue than anyone presumes.

It was said obliquely by panel members, and more vociferously by a downtown resident that the families have a disproportionate influence. No one likes to say that publicly, but it is demonstrably true, and it is not an attack on the memory of the victims to say so. Rather than speculate on the particulars of why this has happened (which I fear may succumb to the perception of ad hominem), it might be better observe the counter-arguments against such a strong involvement by the families.

It was, and is, a public space. Who was there was, in the end, random. Many of those who did die had an almost infinitely higher probability of being victimized, but they were not singled out as individuals, nor were they electing this risk cognizant of impending doom (unlike a member of the armed forces). As a measure of how random the risk was, my sister, who never lived here, and was visiting friends of her fiance in New Jersey, was planning to make a trip to the WTC the day of the 1993 attack. I forget what exactly prevented it (sickness, oversleep, something innocuous), but considering the likelihood of this coincidence is indicative of how wide the victim pool was. Therefore, acknowledging the human impact of this event is essential, but the symbolism of the attacks should not be subsumed to individual experience.

Hewing a path between remembering the individuals, which strikes me as a private process, and examining and remember the context of the event, which is a public one, has been at the forefront of every rational person's consideration since the day it happened. As it was pointed out more than once, it was the process as was promised at the outset that led local leaders of the arts to believe that their interest and participation was both welcome and encouraged. Certainly, the purported openness and inclusiveness lulled everyone into a false sense of collaboration. But the presumption that Libeskind's vague pronouncements would carry enough force to effect a long-term plan (and inspire the funding) was abetted by the myopic arrogance of cultural institutions that forgot that they are easy targets for a populist argument, and often are fairly deserving of that charge (and if you want to quibble, ask City Harvest what they could have done with the $600 million MoMA spend building a new building).

Even as everyone comes away looking like a patsy, a fool, or a craven operator, the entire evening mostly avoided the huge amount of blame to be laid squarely at the feet of our ostensible leaders. It took over an hour before anyone uttered Pataki's name, and only in the very last minutes did anyone bother (it was the go-to guy for controversy, Haacke, likely feeling the most frisky, since he has the least to lose, his air rights fully exploited) to note that our liberal champeen, Hilary Rodham Clinton, moved pretty much in lockstep with Curious George throughout the process. This bipartisan bit of politicking affirms the most consise and forceful argument of the entire evening, again from Haacke, that, as regards development at the site, vis a vis both the inclusion of culture and the larger issue of expecting some amount of transparency as the projects move forward, there is no hope.

Found always via this Permanent Link.

December 9, 2005

1,000,000,000. What does a billion -- excuse me, make that $1.4 billion, but, really, who is counting? -- get you downtown? Nothing, apparently. This week’s theater of the absurd downtown featured a scuffle about Liberty Bonds. Set to expire in just about four years (roughly the same amount of time that has elapsed since the attacks, if you want to measure progress), the $3.35 billion in government funds can buy a lot of something, provided that something is agreed upon, designed and built. Or it can buy more of the $1.4 rabbit hole built so far -- currently filling that are "pay[ing] off the mortgage on the complex and on rent and legal and development fees".

So we know at least one thing got built downtown with this money: Libeskind’s TriBeCa loft, from which he looks woefully downtown and laments the tattered remnants of his master ‘plan’ reduced now to a shopping mall, replete with a galleria, a train station filled with three levels of shopping, one tower that is clad in large part with opaque stone, and a memorial that, even as more and more elements are removed, gets more expensive every passing month.

Even as everyone is maneuvering for the scratch, no one is really ponying up with hard numbers (what do these people do all day?). There are no solid estimates for infrastructure development (what part of site prep the PANYNJ will pick up, how much is covered by the PATH station, who will pay for the bus garage), the memorial (RFP for construction management released this week, only what, two years after design was complete?), the Freedom Tower or the shopping mall. The most recent budget scrambler was the decision to eliminate the plan for a single chiller (which would provide the cooled water necessary to run air conditioning systems) for the entire site. In a fit of 1970’s planning, the PANJNY went ahead and designed it (remember the discussion about the holes in the PATH station and the Freedom/Drawing Center? They were for the chiller.), then someone found out it was going to pulverize large numbers of Hudson River fish (that we gave up Westway to protect) and now everyone is scrambling to redesign HVAC systems.

About $6 billion is available, between insurance funds and Liberty Bonds. Silverstein’s position is he should get all of it, since, based on the lease he signed, building buildings wasn't part of his expense, so he should get the money (which isn't even enough, by most measures) to return to the site the amount of office space square footage lost (absurdly, the lease he has is still in effect). Everyone else, upon hearing this argument, looks meaningfully at 7 WTC, which has made the news [sic] only once in the past few months, and that was because the Architect’s Newspaper had a party there (and it wasn’t to celebrate signing an anchor tenant). Given that the PANYNJ seems to have the authority to build their godawful mall regardless of what Silverstein says, the 200+ feet of fortified cladding on the Freedom Tower, and the general confusion about the site, none of the five towers proposed for the site proper will be very attractive as rental properties (for towers two thorugh five, it’s not even clear where the lobbies would be). This means 7WTC, also very nearing completion, should be the easiest to rent. And we’ve seen how that has gone.

There isn’t much in the way of a counter-proposal, beyond a request that Silverstein cough up the lots where the mall would sit (interesting how that got designed in such a transparent way, huh?), and let the PANYNJ do their retail thing, with towers to follow when the market rebounds. Which is another way of saying never. But don’t give any props to that move, since it presumes that after memorializing, the most significant activity that should occur on the site is shopping. The argument that the previous retail was so successful ignores the 50,000 people who worked there, perhaps another 20,000 who passed through on their commute, and another pile of tourists who didn’t arrive on site to honor the dead. By planting basically a suburban New Jersey mall at the start of everyone’s evening commute was a stroke of retailing genius, but that isn’t a condition that can be recreated -- nor should it.

Silverstein claims he is ready to go on everything, provided he gets the money. A passel of state pols are in support of this, but mostly because it is an expedient political position: far better to foist a boondoggle on New York that won’t be proved as such until they all secure their next term rather than appear like they can't get anything done. The silver lining is Chuck Schumer, who said moneys should be contingent on renting something. Silverstein also thinks this eagerness should be rewarded with a cool $100 million in development ‘fees’, an idea no one likes.

So we have a bunch of unrentable buildings, some of which seem unlikely ever exist except as chances for more insurance and federal funds to be whittled away by various fees, a bad mall, and an expensive memorial. What about those cultural buildings? Well, no one is holding their breath, but some folks still want to talk about the process, and that all the energy spent in thinking about how culture at the site might still have a valid role. On Monday, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council will gather Tom Bernstein (head of the Freedom Center, which was disinvited from the site recently by Pataki), Thelma Golden (Director and Chief Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem), Hans Haacke (renegade artist turned developer courtesy his frenemy Giuliani), Mike Wallace (author of Gotham: A History of New York City), and Robert Yaro (voice of reason extraordinaire from the Regional Planning Association) at the New School to wrestle with these issues (7:30pm at The Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, The New School for Insipid Branding, 55 West 13th Street).

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December 6, 2005

We Don't Need No Education(al Facilities). Water always reaches its own level, which is how the less charitable among you would characterize the hulking and banal presence of NYU in Greenwich Village and it's virus-like spread eastward. Even if you wouldn't, dorms and near-dorms are the latest battle line in the war of what I guess should be called institutional gentrification (or maybe Gentrification Plus!(tm)).

Three projects have made the news recently, all of them because they are big, big, big. There might be an undercurrent of the pejorative ‘filled with NYU students’, but that isn’t such a controversial statement to anyone living downtown (no, I kid, NYU students are such a joy; I can’t want to go to Dojo and see some). To their limited credit, not all the dorms in question were inextricably associated with NYU.

The latest skirmish, though by any measure just about over, involves another featureless behemoth closer to the campus proper, on 12th Street off Fourth Avenue. NYU has secured air rights, preservation exceptions and all manner of clever zoning geegaws to insert a 26-story dorm behind the façade of an almost National Registered church (St. Ann’s). Of course, you can still vent this evening before the project is rubber stamped, but don’t get too excited.

The scourge that is NYU development is so pervasive, they can probably get away with arguing that mediocre, over-scaled projects that hardly relate to the street life of the surrounding neighborhoods are actually contextual, a nifty trick, since they are responsible for most of them. How bad is it? Well, when the Kimmel Center was announced, it was touted as a sea change in the development process, a building of superior design quality and closer in character and scale to the immediate environs. Yeah, it’s that bad.

Dorms aren’t inevitably bad. In fact NYU squeezed out two not so bad ones just a block away on Third Avenue (both not far from two other very modest and serviceable efforts from the Cooper Union and New School -- perhaps the aura of institutional bland peters our just east of the Alamo?). But that seems to be a long time ago. The most recent example, on the corner of Fourth Street and the Bowery, is nothing short of horrendous. You can see the control joints where the prefab brick panels come together from my apartment, and I have to walk a good ways just to get to Avenue A.

But NYU almost always is. The area that best defines the campus (roughly from Bleecker to 9th Street, west from Broadway to Washington Square Park West) is a mixture of interesting to average older stock, with any street level services thoroughly scrubbed of interesting events and heavily privatized, and the addition of a series of boxy, awkward examples of the worst of educational architecture: haphazard, multivalent programs, repetitive spaces, the occasional pander to style that attempts to subvert the nearly spec office space model that dictates the thinking behind most of them.

Quickly approaching preeminent status (if not there already) as largest private landowner in Manhattan (if you’re curious, the main competitors are Columbia University and Trinity Church), it seems hard to fathom a way to stop them, especially as there seems to be an endless supply of affluent parents who operate under the delusion that NYU produces something other than self-important and talent-less scenesters who aspire to nothing more than someday coming up with something as cool as Misshapes.

As if that weren’t insulting enough, people who aren’t even attached to NYU are using it as an excuse to build their own awful residential projects. Way out in the wilds of the East Village, one manage to slip under the radar, while the other has come up hard against the people that wrote the EV Gentrification Handbook: the residents of Christadora House.

Both attempt to end run FAR (the calculation that determines maximum buildable envelope) limits by qualifying for a community use bonus, and option that includes dormitories (how itinerant residents help communities, well, let NYU explain that). One project, at 81 East Third, was built with a vague promise that it would cater to New York School of Law students (a very convenient commute to Worth Street, yes), but it turns out they didn’t even have leases in places (one of those legal details that just unnecessarily encumber developers). That one was so bad they even tightened up the rules after.

But the man who likely will force a wholesale redrafting of community use bonuses is the man everyone in the East Village has found a reason to hate. Buying PS 64 (best known as CHARAS/El Bohio for the past decade) from Giuliani in the late nineties (in an auction that seemed designed to be a monstrous fuck you to his least favorite nabe), Gregg Singer has trotted out every school except DeVry to justify a 22-story tower. Stonewalled a number of times, he’s taken to grumbling at local papers, and has petulantly put his property back on the market. You have to feel for him; if it sells, at a reported 20 or so times his purchase price seven years ago (that’s about a 300% return a year, right? and you thought your co-op was appreciating fast), he’ll barely have enough left over after licking his wounds and paying his lawyers to, I dunno, buy both Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch’s properties.

The EV types seem pretty well organized, and funded, and have plenty of Community Board support in their collective distaste. But back in the land of purple banners and empty trolley buses, it looks like they could use a little more help. Make your voice heard in a couple hours at 333 Bowery.

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