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June 20, 2006
New York Times, meet developer's pocket; developer's pocket, meet NYT. I was hoping to find the time to craft some long-winded ire, but the real world conspires against me. That, and the panoply of horrendous journalism churned out in the course of a single afternoon from the House of Ratner (okay, okay, Neighbors of the House of Ratner) make it a little unfair that I gird these pages with 3,000 words explicating the missteps and oversights. So, quickly:
$120 million is all it takes to land a tenant at 7WTC? Hell, I need some space too. So Larry found hisself some medium time tenants huh? 600,000 sq ft, over 20 years, proof positive that downtown real estate is en fuego! Let's look closely at the numbers, shall we? The Times estimates that a raft of tax breaks, gee gaws and other sordid do dads are taking $10 a foot off the lease number (which is already lower than Midtown, but isn't a subsidy a sure sign of economic health? It sure is for every trust funded boutique in the LES). Over twenty years, that's, um, $120 million of subsidy -- but Bagli doesn't have access to a calculator, so they leave it up to me to figure that out.. If that's the cure, you sure don't want to know the disease. Oh, other fun number: net gain in commercially leased space downtown: d'oh-nut! If Moody's current space becomes 'luxury housing' well, then we will see a small uptick (did I get that from the Times, or did I have to figure it out -- you get one guess). But that's what we call a technicality. In a nutshell: Why did the Moody's cross the road? $120 really big ones.Somewhere in there is a train station, if you can find it admist all the developer slash and burn. Back in midtown, where the market is so hot the Dolans will move a block if they get a free arena and an extension on their tax break (which makes you wonder how this will end up being a bad deal -- after all, when is the last time you saw the Dolan family make a smart decision?), we get the most confused shilling possible. It seems that everyone in midtown loves the idea that Penn Station will be transformed from a cramped ancillary space under the current MSG into a cramped ancillary space adjacent to a new MSG, except they can't find anyone to quote, save for the developers taking what was a good idea and shitting all over it. A diagram of how a reduced allocation of space and removal of an intermodal hall will be an improvement (to say nothing about the sticky issues of development fees, the inevitable request for PILOTs, and whatever else flimflammery Roth/ss can come up with) would have been helpful. The slug here is that this plan is actually better than the one carefully crafted over the past ten year because "the current plan won't relocate 80% of the passenger traffic"? Huh? Did the Times do this analysis? Or, um, maybe the developers? Hard to say, hard to say.If anyone remembers, the big problem was that no one could get Amtrak to move (because the Feds are suffocating them slowly), making the whole intermodal dream a little ricketly. It couldn't be that the developers have convinced themselves that Amtrak will fall all over this idea and climb on board, thus resulting in a more efficient plan? And how about selling the Farley air rights and development rights for $318 million? Aren't air rights going in some neighborhoods for $400/sf in this overheated market? All interesting questions, and more challenges for that lost calculator. But don't ask the Times. They are still hoping everyone forgets the shenanigans that resulted in their PILOT deal (if you recall, they were stumping for Liberty Bonds at one point).Don't get me started on the Memorial. Take a look at this rendering. So, um, now we are going to argue about who gets their relative's name close enough to be acutally legible? And those ramps cost $160 million? Wow. Recall how much of the New York article was devoted to Arad arguing for his ramps. Payback is a bitch, honey. What's the over/under on the number of days before he sends out a press release asking that the media no longer refer to him as the designer of the Memorial? If he really had the cojones everyone says he does, it'd be before this gets posted. But Gary Handel won't let him do that, because that might make for some bad press and undermine efforts to build 13 versions of the same bland glass box over there in Hudson Square.
Found always via this Permanent Link.
June 12, 2006
Where is Landmarks West when you need them? I would have opened with the "first they came for the Jews" reference, but that would be as tacky as my friend who always laments having to make a tough decision playing cards as similar to Sophie’s Choice. So I’m not that tasteless and overly melodramatic in the face of what is nonetheless a tragic loss to my manufactured sense of identity and personal history.
The Gas Station became a Duane Reade. Save the Robots became a series of depressingly obvious clubs (I don’t even know what the latest incarnation is). The lot on Attorney Street, where you would watch two dozen frozen ice vendors cleaning out their cars with water pilfered from a fire hydrant has become, well, it became a NYCHA facility, which isn’t so bad. Eric, the quintessential EV bartender, has been demoted to working tables at a restaurant. The more things change -- maybe not. Anyway, do you know this car? Well, you think you did. The two guys who came by every couple months to beat back the truly impressive weed festival that took place there got ambitious late last week, and as a result, the lot is picked clean, two clear scrape marks testifying to the battle this last real East Village landmark (oh, okay, it was an LES landmark, but having lived ten feet north and south of the putative border, I have to tell you, the difference is imperceptible, at least these days) put up before surrendering to a certain future of overstated luxury and long lines at Clinton Baking.Where was the Hungry Marching Band? The flyers posted from some hastily formed neighborhood association? The outrage at the injustice? No, this last stand took place in silence and anonymity, and the best we can hope for is that is was given a proper burial, at the Sixth Street Garden (which, I hear, is going to become a Chipotle).
Found always via this Permanent Link.
June 8, 2006
Meet Frank Sciame, architect of the WTC Memorial. The Downtown Express is reporting that Frank’s red-lining of the Memorial plans is, frankly, quite a hatchet job (okay, that's my take -- they are a little more even-handed). He’s talking about eliminating the waterfalls -- and not just for winter, but altogether -- and moving the victims names from below ground.
And here I was thinking that it was only trees above ground. Where are they going to put the names? On slips of paper? The grove, by the way, is not up for consideration as an expendable item. It's not clear whether or not it was because removing the trees wouldn’t save much money, or if the new designer just thinks they are really cool. Score one for the conciliatory Peter Walker and score none to everyone’s favorite prune, Michael Arad! Bloomberg’s off-the-cuff recommendation, moving the Memorial Museum (which has had a checkered history, coming later into the program, and then switching up with the Freedom Center in terms of prominence and programming, and then moving front and center of the entire affair after that nefarious hub of subversion, the Drawing Center was sent packing back to that land of commie rabble rousing, SoHo) to the Freedom Tower, which seemed very sensible to me, is a no go. Why it remains firmly nestled in the subterranean space is unclear, except when you consider the other changes -- eliminating the waterfalls, moving the names, and reducing the slurry wall exposure -- you may find yourself asking, well, what’s going to be down there (aside from Debra Burlingame in the super-secret family bunker)? Well, there you go: the Museum, the Museum, and the Museum, which may or may not be free, and sure to be a site of unending meddling about exhibition content.One reason cited by Sciame for removing the falls was noise (also why he recommends keeping the trees). This is an interesting wrinkle, since everyone probably assumed that they would be the understated whisper of water slipping over concrete, not unlike the urinals at the Royalton, but apparently they are rated at 80db, which is the equivalent of an electric razor or lawnmower (they have awfully powerful razors over there in Cape Town). So much for quiet reflection.So this is a good thing, discussion-wise. No one wants have their solemn observation besieged by overbearing white noise. Unless, of course, you are trying to drown out the inane observations of tourists, the braying of tour guides, and the far off sounds of people hawking 9/11 toilet paper.Of course, that is playing kind of fast-and-loose with notions such as ‘discussion’ and ‘process’. In reality, it is exactly what it looks like: the latest in a series of putative decision makers, people accustomed to conniving and obstruction to get their way when not in charge and who then morph into tinpot dictators when they are (because, like, they are so much more talented the those other pretenders) but fail miserably because everyone else is being as obstructionist and conniving as they can be, in hopes that they are given a shot to be the biggest idiot in the room.Since having other people do your job for your is the new black, I invite everyone to take this, or any other WTC posts (hell, grab some from other sites too!), and rearrange everything, mad libs-style, and wait for the real world to catch up.
Found always via this Permanent Link.
June 6, 2006
Maybe Hevesi didn’t have a bad idea after all. Either our off-the-cuff challenged comptroller is pyschic, or the Rovian practice of payback really is a bitch, cause last week the Department of Homeland Security -- an organization that has already presided over the destruction of one American city without major changes to its management -- determined that just about everywhere in America is in more danger from terrorists than us. You know, all the people who were never attacked.
In case you’ve been hiding in a bomb shelter (not a bad idea, since the Federal government has no interest in protecting you), the DHS massively scaled back New York City’s allotment of security monies for the coming year -- a number that was rather unimpressive on a per capita basis to begin with. Apparently the dog ate our homework: there were two reasons cited for the ‘adjustment’: one, a lack of landmarks, and two, we didn’t submit the paperwork properly. There’s an argument about how it was supposed to be received: they said we were supposed to email it, and we supposedly faxed it; maybe we did email it, but it’s on a laptop in some bureaucrat's den waiting to be stolen. And yes, while your safety is being imperiled, we are witnessing an argument about how to file fucking paperwork.In what seems like an almost hysterical response, a postcard campaign has been launched. Yeah, that’s right: postcards. You are supposed to go buy postcards of some of our not-landmarks and write things like “NY to DHS: Um, we’re not dead, except for the 2,800 murdered by terrorists.” or “Now I know what it feels like to be NOLA” (oh, wait, that’s Reed’s card) and send them to the small-time Bush crony who cut our budget while sending money to fucking Missouri, a place so backwoods that not only can’t American students find it on a map, but even terrorists would miss it. As much as this seems like pouring a bucket of water on a wildfire, I can’t think of much of a response, except “What the fuck?” And given that this is more evidence that the stupidest people since Wrong Way Corrigan (well, actually, far worse) have wrested control of the entire government, perhaps anything more complex than a postcard will cause their brains to implode. There was some talk that the problem rested on a simple misunderstanding. Apparently our submission consisted, in its entirety, of an image of the World Trade Center. When the DHS received it, their research indicated that the WTC no longer exists, and thus was not legitimately a landmark requiring protection funding. Now, I just made that up, but doesn’t it seem more plausible than the truth? That regardless of the paperwork snafu, when the short bus committee at the DHS was going over the paperwork, nobody thought it was odd that NYC wasn’t listed as having any landmarks? That the location of the event that was the impetus for their fucking jobs was coming up with no targets of significance?Maybe it’s all an outsourcing thing. In order to save money to fund another tax break, Bush has simply authorized turning over all those recorded phone conversation to terrorists, so they can have better information on where to attack next. Really, since every single news story about the DHS over the past two years indicates they couldn’t protect a hooker in a roomful of eunuchs, why waste all this money on anti-terrorism? Hell, maybe the DHS should just start killing people themselves, and save everyone the trouble. After all, a plurality as large as the one(s) that elected [sic] Dubya already think this is true.But it’s not all bad: you can still move to Alaska. They got a big increase, and pot smoking is still legal there.