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February 27, 2007
'Not So Bad' is the New Black. In a fit of journalistic coming of age, amNY broke real news this week. Well, it wasn't that newsworthy -- probably just a trumped up press released fired in the opening salvo of Community Board hearings intended to garner a variance, if the follow-on Curbed note is accurate.
The upshot is that the Rouse Company, purveyors of high quality themed destinations such as Faneuil Hall (Boston) and Harborplace (Baltimore) finally gave up the ghost and sold itself to General Growth Properties, a name that should inspire the confidence that only a mall developer founded in Iowa can. And these new corn-fed developers -- gasp! -- find the economics of Lids and The Bodies Exhibit to be unsustainable.
And their answer? Wait for a new clever turn of a phrase: a luxury housing tower! You can't fault these mid-westerners for being slow on the uptake; they just got here and they already figured out the scam of overpaying for an asset, then immediately running to whatever governmental agencies that is most amenable to pressure, contributions or other soft forms of influence, pleading poverty and requesting the right to pillage the surrounding community's quality of life for short-term profit.
The fun thing about this story is that though it's not exactly the playbook the Rouse Company employed in building the South Street Seaport, it's damn close. And look how well that went. The fun part will be watching the various lackeys from places like the ESDC rolling over like they are getting their bellies scratched while these farmers are actually pissing on their face.
But I'm not here to complain again about how shockingly ignorant local and regional planning is in New York; we just have to sit tight for a couple more years, and the shimmering evidence of that will be visible from most of Long Island. I'm here to complain more locally about what any regular reader of this page might find shocking: I don't think this should be allowed because I actually like Pier 17.
When I say I like it, I don't necessarily mean the exceeding poor execution of the retail destination concept. People are forever proving that malls don't work in Manhattan. This is because everyone hears the statistic that the Shops at the WTC was the most successful retail space in the world. This was true, but the confluence that enabled this -- astoundingly high foot traffic, and the completely unique of opportunity of placing what was essentially a suburban shopping model diretly in the path of regional commuters (their target market) -- cannot be easily reproduced.
Rouse, which pioneered the vaguely historical, vaguely upscale, vaguely vague historic-y shopping/eating concept, managed to make it really work only once, even though they got a number of locations to provide them with sundry tax breaks and development dollars. In the end, lots of retailers and cities got hosed, and time eventually caught up with Rouse.
Looking around at the various 'districts' that work in New York, the only commonality they share is that, excepting Dumbo, there are several competing commercial interests. So going from one big confused shopping center developer to another is not going to produce any groundbreaking insight. Indeed, their one big idea is to tear down the one thing that sort of works.
Again, forget the mall part. The building part -- a big, open shed structure with great views in every direction, lots of exterior space, and a reasonably compact and innocuous footprint. Easy to find, with the name right there on the side. The presence of ungainly, corporate-scaled food establishments that scream Bennigan's and decidedly middle-market retail is a problem of programming, not form.
When you look at the various proposals floated for Pier 40, it makes you wonder, why wouldn't that work just as well at Pier 17? Performance Arts complex, abutting some high end residential (in the perfect loft luxury scale), all of it a five minute commute from the target market. Haven't these people heard of St. Ann's Warehouse? Hell, you could make it a big nightclub. Then the besotted patrons would fall right off the peir and into the river and we wouldn't have to worry about them driving home drunk.
The one redeeming quality of Rouse was they did entertainment architecture a hair better than everyone else. That's not saying much, but when Exhibits A & B, are, say, 'Miss Brooklyn' or the new hotel Carlos Zapata is offering on the Bowery, the sturdy faux historicism of Pier 17 starts to look pretty damn appealing.
Found always via this Permanent Link.
February 14, 2007
People say I'm extravagant because I want to be surrounded by beauty. But tell me, who wants to be surrounded by garbage?* The rich aren’t like you and me. They have better views, and they don’t defecate. Or so you would think, given their hyper-aversion to refuse. Who can blame them? With private sanitation trucks running down pedestrians every time they turn a corner, and bugaboo still a couple years away from producing a stroller than can go toe to toe with a Mack truck (but it’s coming, I promise), one has good reason to fear garbage – even if you discount the potential mafia connections.
The latest skirmish in the inevitable nexus of shitty, ready for their Wall Street Bonus close-up condos, development creeping to the edges and rapidly disappearing industrial lots for city services is occurring in WeSp (no, that isn’t a Swedish snowboard fashion company). Or, rather, the butt end of Spring Street, being feverishly hawked as upscale.
This time is it a proposal by the Dept of Sanitation, being pushed off their existing garage location up near the Meatpacking District, to build a garage just south of the UPS depot that runs from Houston to Spring long Washington Street.
I’m not going to bother with the list of sins. The Downtown Express did a good job of it, but even if they hadn't, you can easily fill in the blanks: terrorist threats, WTC suffering (though none of the new residential buildings nearby existed on 9/11), on site fuel storage, rats, etc.
No one mentioned ruined views, though this is an obvious and important subtext. Why? Because residents of The Glass House, 515 Greenwich and the Dubbledam building have astoundingly bad views, mostly because the exhaust towers for the Holland Tunnel block the due west view. If you crane you neck in a whiplash inducing way, you might be able to gaze out over the UPS lot currently there, over Pier 40 and a multitude of parked cars, to look upon Hoboken. Should the garage plan happen, their limited view will likely be reduced to a glimmer of sun disappearing around 4pm.
Follow closely here folks: No view lasts forever. In fact, most views don’t outlast the duration of your residence in a particular locale. When that view is taken over by garbage trucks, well, I sort of feel your pain, but isn’t that part of the sexy danger of rezoning industrial lots as residential? That’s the beauty of gentrification: just because it’s expensive, doesn’t mean it’s a good deal.
This is a retread of the fight a few years back when the city issued a revised solid waste plan. New York has a massive solid waste problem (how massive? Well, check out Staten Island), regardless of what all these “New York is actually sooooo green” articles pitch. The city is in the verge of getting sensible -- a qualification that will stick until a train tunnel for freight and waste is underway -- plan, but such a plan requires hard, ugly, smelly decisions. If we don’t truck out our garbage, we barge it. So we need waste transfer stations -- near water, tunnels and major roadways.
The mayor got his plan pushed through in 2005 by basically sticking a transfer station in his backyard, a act of civic virtue and realpolitik that was probably lessened by the fact that he has a couple jets to get him out of the neighborhood if the smell gets too bad.
The Department of Sanitation is doing its part to shift towards multi-storey garages (on 56th Street and in this plan), to reduce the footprint and, in principle, the visual clutter, so no one has to stare at a field of dirty trucks. Everyone seems to be a reasonable adult of about some very unpleasant, pragmatic choices.
Except for, of course, the NIMBY-come-latelys over in ‘Hudson Square” (which takes the award for a the neighborhood moniker that still won’t stick, even after ten solid years of Trinity marketing). But since the Borja Brouhaha has pretty much cemented that the WTC attacks were actually all about giving magnificent, old school New York assholes bulletproof license to pout and whine about tragedy they are entirely divorced from (I can't wait for the stories coming years down the road of Brealey girls who were in preschool the day of using 9/11 on their college applications) to gain a minuscule advantage on a meaningless point, go crazy you HudSquos: if we build this garage, then the terrorists have won.
Links in the header don't work so well.