miss representation

It’s a plan so good, you have to wonder how it evolved within the leaden confines of City Hall. It’s a plan so absurdly elegant, you are probably aghast it’s taken years to evolve. The City’s Department of Transportation, demonstrating actual commitment to innovation and taking it on the chin for complacent union city workers everywhere, announced last week a pilot program to suspend individual car perks in favor a shared fleet.

You can save your disbelief that that the department charged with reducing congestion had a fleet of 57 vehicles for another time. Ignore that they distributed them for free to employees. And by all means think not of the parking placards that enabled them to park in an almost unregulated fashion in the densest city center nationwide.  Instead, just breathe a sigh of relief that someone finally said, ‘Um, is this really the best way?’

The answer to that was obvious, so the challenge was only to come up with workable, efficient alternate. The solution is a reduced (hybrid) fleet, all off-street parking, and, best of all, taking a page from the car sharing service Zipcar, the new fleet will be available during non-work hours for private rental.

Think about the potential there: Zipcar, which is a nominally profitable as a private concern, is facing growth limits in the city because they can’t find flexible storage situations. If the city could convert the majority of their fleet (and then some) to a vendor like Zipcar, they might actually be able to increase the quantity of vehicles available for legitimate city business as well as rapidly expand their fleet for private use. The outline wording of the RFP certainly looks like they have exactly one vendor in mind, and that is Zipcar, so we can all hope that car-sharing, an eminently reasonable solution for congestion, is about to quickly increase its footprint.

The elephant in the room, of course, is that even though this moves 57 cars from the downtown streets, it leaves in place the other 500+ placards that allow DOT employees to bring private vehicles into the city center. And that number is a pittance relative to the total number believed to be in circulation. Even if the city took a zero tolerance attitude regarding placards for its employees, that would only eliminate 22,000 or so of the estimated 142,000 out there. The preponderance of parking placards go to teachers, cops (and related court employees) and fire fighters.

Given that placards are tied up with contract negotiations, and that the department charged with enforcement is the one that also happens to receive the lion’s share of the perks, as idealistic as the shared car plan is, it also has the whiff of Bloomberg’s preferred model of civic management evolution: start a pilot program that is light years ahead of what has been proposed to date, hoover up all the laudatory press, and then allow the majority of bad habits trundle forward with little to no improvement.

The information that leaks out of the ongoing investigations and criminal proceedings involving 130 Liberty Street (allow me this: never hire a company named after a Ayn Rand character — really) continue to be a sad testimony to the continued incompetence of just about everyone involved in the rebuilding. The kicker is, of course, that there are other remnants of the 9/11 attack, that, almost eight years later, still await disposition (demolition, renovation), notably Fiterman Hall, the CUNY facility that faces the entry court to 7 WTC. Though far less troubling, it too musters some bad practices in demolition. Related: official trinket shop. Finally.

The bloom is really off the rose: the Times does a fairly nasty (in that effete “we probably were in a dining club with him” kind of way that is typical for them) take down of the compensation structure for the top two execs at the High Line Foundation. If this continues, we’re definitely going to have to graph the relative strength of “my park is 154 times larger than yours!” against the “well, mine is thirty feet higher” argument.

Not all the best ideas are the simplest. But some do stand out for the perversity of their effectiveness, yet go wanting because of the difficulty in getting people to see the greater long-term benefit against immediate short-term self-interest. Any time ‘self-interest’ and ‘failed good ideas’ there’s a high likelihood that you are talking about traffic management. The two simplest dicta that prove that you can’t trust people to make good judgments at the macro or mirco level are capacity — where it’s been proven irrefutably that if you increase road capacity congestion increases — and efficiency, where every annoying behavior (racing ahead to merge out of turn, sitting in an intersection, etc) increases travel and time, yes, congestion. So today you might save five minutes, but over the long term, math and averages are against you.

It’s pretty easy to demonstrate how congestion develops, though just about everyone with a license doesn’t need a java applet to prove it. The challenge is to modify the behavior of all participants at an equal rate, since outliers experience disproportionate benefit at the expense of the whole. Eventually this benefit fails as everyone self-selects as an exceptional. In more simple terms, if everyone respect a queue, it moves at an ideal rate. A small number of people can cut the line, and the overall progress is still close to optimal. But as everyone attempts to move ahead, you are left with a scrum of unorganized people at the node, and everyone knows what that moment is like.

Admittedly, most cultures aren’t predisposed to high levels of self-organization. And most instances of authoritarian imposition do not work over the longer term (and fairly so – a healthy amount of self-interest should be one of the motivating factors). As much as berating people into becoming better behaved dovetails nicely with my personality, it’s not a template for change agents.

Perversely enough, there are alternates out there that show signs of working. And they do that by proposing the exact opposite: the complete removal of all regulation. The concept is called ‘shared space‘; brilliant in its simplicity and as likely doomed to marginalization. You can’t really even call it a policy. It’s more of an anti-bureaucracy, the putting into place — through inaction — the notion that personal responsibility is the best regulator or human behavior.

We already have some versions of this — the generally established notion that you walk on the right in the subway. Up stairs, or down, the right way is just that. Here and there the MTA has tried to institutionalize this with signage, but most people learn the hard way (at least if they are in my way). It generally works.

The prevalence of jaywalking, and reasonable (a highly qualified statement, given the still distressing amounts of rude behavior on the part of cyclists) amounts of cycling traffic signal flouting also represent versions of this logic. And though any experience with driving in the city would lead you to think it’s hopeless to add drivers, it might not be as far fetched a notion as you might think.

I live near Pitt Street. And I’ve noted previously that I do own a car, so I have a regular occasion to drive around and through it in search of my unfairly subsidized parking. Pitt Street, for most of its brief existence — running between Grand Street and Houston (where it becomes Avenue C for all you weekend transients looking for Babel and Porch) — is an unwieldy beast that looks in parts like a parking lot for a police and fire precinct or an open air market where the vendors have just packed up, and is the closest thing to a Shared Streets experiment you will find in Manhattan. And, for the most part, it seems to be a pretty successful one.

The width of the street, along with the tail in parking (abetted by residents who take a liberal attitude about standing and double parking) barely looks like a street. Delancey intersects an awkward angle as it constricts, the most notable marking being a skewed crosswalk that is taken as a suggestion by just about everyone. Turning north, the only major traffic regulator is the light a Rivington, which serves to manage cars, but barely. People cross at all points with immunity. Kids ride their bikes when they aren’t wandering someone on the expanse. Emergency crews from the Engine 28/Ladder 11 house on 2nd Street that are assisting on calls with Fort Pitt routinely head southbound (against traffic), without even disturbing traffic flow, as the street is so wide.

There are a number of extenuating circumstances regarding this solitary example – it’s a marginal neighborhood, relative to tourist and commercial needs. And it is a dead end or inefficient for most automotive routes. While this means it would be difficult to recreate initially, it also demonstrates that communal acceptance (in this case through a rather anarchic system of non-enforcement) can enable circumstances like this. The instances where it has been applied have proved to be just as safe (if not more so) that what we currently have in place. And this famous video, which is not the result of any top down organization, is a good exemplar of how self-regulation can work in practice.

Unfortunately there is little support for radical revisions. Even the limited steps that are being undertaken are being undermined by politicians who would nominally support such measures, out of cheap pandering to hyper local (and politically-connected) interests. How such ideas get a sounding board when much of our streetscape is managed at the state level is a question I don’t really have an answer to. But it seems like a good way to think about where we should head.

Writing a post about the World Trade Center is appallingly easy, a gross natural resource of failure, seemingly malicious incompetence, an almost perverse effort by all those involved to identify perhaps the best — should we even admit just qualifiers — possible path, so that when they upend it and crawl inexorably down its inverse, we can be certain they are doing the worst possible job.

As a writer, it’s handy. It even provides an uncomfortably glee, the opportunity to conjure your most withering ire — the bon mot realized too late at a cocktail party, that particularly egregious episode of getting dumped, the quarter-long festering of hatred for a thesis advisor who had you by the short hairs and was making you write them a tenure recommendation — gather all that anger up and just start slapping one of any number of public figure names to whatever comes to mind:

Want remind everyone that Pataki was at best only a coat carrier? People applaud! Silverstein a heartless sot who wants to clamber over the graves of 2,000 people to prop up a futile edifice of immortality? Spot on, friend. Kevin Rampe a duplicitous macher concerned most with his next paycheck? Fine! Any one of them bordering on criminal? Likely true! I can’t even imagine what we would call that guy who actually designed the memorial. What was his name again?

So, yeah, there’s a regressive level of poisonous irony in the fact that writing angry screed about the abysmal pace of progress at the WTC site is in an of itself an act that wallows in the same filthy pile of almost unwatchable failings of humanism. Perhaps Dr. Phil could have a big Pop Psychology-In and figure out just when everyone involved has hit rock bottom (given the state of construction, it looks like we are a ways off). The sage advice would be to know leave your wallet unattended while they are around, but it’s too late for that: they don’t need your permission to take a dip now and again. And again, and again.

Marching right along with this bounty of ineptitude and wellspring of deadlines hastily assembled and just as quickly dismantled is an impressive body of treacly recollection. Maybe there is a fear that once the last bolt has been screwed into place such writing will be looked on as unseemly, and in a town where no one’s suffering is as acute or important as that split all over the back pages of the Sunday Times Magazine that would be viewed as a tragedy to which everyone could truly relate. After all, think of all those poor Dalton students just itching to put their 9/11 experience into a college application essay. Who will think of those children?

As I write this, the Tribute in Light is still aglow. The only response that evinced the least bit of elegance, now they stand like uncomfortable guests. What they say is still simple and direct, and their specificity to place admits any range of emotion. The worst is being reminded that from where they spring is a hollow that seems to regress in painful small steps. This is perhaps the finest example of what a memorial does, reminding that tragedy is not a neatly comestible nugget, and our continued complicity in belaboring the failure of imagination and wherewithal that marks every project there also besmirches even the most strident critique. Silence is the terminus, and still deafeningly inadequate.

So I’ve seen all four of Olafur Eliasson’s Waterfalls via automobile, at a leisurely jogging pace, and from a couple of vistas while cycling. I haven’t walked down there yet. Honestly, I don’t know I have the interest in making a specific journey, having seen them more than once now via the means listed.

There’s an inherent difficulty in trying to create monumental art in New York. This is a town that grinds down every attempt at out-sized presentation: of people, or art, of place. Larger than life here at times requires cosmic performance. To get it ‘right’ is not necessarily success anyone should venerate. You could argue our best known citizens of the past three decades, a short fingered vulgarian and a thrice married proponent of “traditional values” are the sort we would prefer dissipate into the either.

The at times breathless run up to this latest, self-conscious effort at grandeur is as much an indication of the move or die shark-like mentality of the blog news cycle, and perhaps maybe a little Gilded Age navel-gazing (apartment sales still up in Manhattan! — even though they are down by an unsustainable level in Brooklyn and the backer of half the outstanding mortgages nationwide is about to enter receivership).

Just three years ago, art tussled with this very issue in a very determined way in the form of The Gates project by Christo and Jeanne-Claude in Central Park. And like Eliasson’s project, it came off a bit thin. The promotion was certainly gargantuan, at time seemingly like a struggling second city claiming a bit of cultural relevance — as if Portland tried to open a ‘world-class’ contemporary art museum (or, hell, I’ll say it: SFMOMA). But you don’t take on Central Park unless you think you can win. Granted, there were more than a few obstacles working on behalf of the park, but I remember thinking one thing a good artist did was to know when an idea would fail.

I worked on The Gates — and one reason was that I knew that if I didn’t make that kind of commitment, the likelihood of getting uptown in February was small (a failing that starts way back in 1995, when I couldn’t find the time to see a Richter exhibit that was up for what seemed like years), and my fears proved to be true. Aside from an abbreviated circuit in the hours following the unfurling and an abortive visit to Tavern on the Green (my only), I never went back to see the exhibit. Likewise, the times I’ve seen the waterfalls have been incidental — which is nice and in large part how public art should be seen, but I have little desire to make a specific pilgrimage

Honestly, I was disappointed (though I was more sanguine at the time). Particularly in the southern reaches it seemed like we are a couple thousand gates short. Seeing the materials in the warehouse in Queens, or lining the park roads, that was some impressive hardware. And I was lucky to be working the northern end, where some vistas were compelling. When I walked south for the first time on opening day, I was stuck at how sparse it seemed. If you want to make art based on repetition in New York, you need to go balls to the wall. And we were balls to half court if lucky in most spots.

Eliasson doesn’t even seem to get that close, even though his four spindly towers cost almost two-thirds the total cost of The Gates project. I’ve assumed since the first time I heard that number that most of it went for the lawyers. Surely there is some fancy engineering going on in the fountain part — and let’s not kid ourselves, they are fountains — but beyond that, it’s four mid-sized scaffolds that need to weather six months of salt water. It can’t be that much.

The brochure says the use of stock materials recalls the pervasive element that brings us joy everywhere, the interminable scaffolding surrounding so many buildings, and (though less clear) perhaps to make the towers as ‘dumb’ as possible, so that they wouldn’t overwhelm or detract from the ‘work’ — presumably the cascading water. But the water barely cascades. It responds too quickly to wind, and never seems to reach a critical mass that imposes they way you expect a ‘waterfall’ to. Like The Gates, it just leaves you wishing it commanded more.

At more acute angles, this both less and more successful. Without the latticework back to provide immediate ground, the spout of water can be more impressive, but it is also foreshortened and can look like no more than a particularly strong fire hose. Seen dead on, which seems to be the preferred vantage, in some light the water is barely visible, unless it is being pushed off center by the wind.

Given the loaded terminology of the name, competing with something like this, regardless of locating it in the East River, far from any impressive natural occurrence still means you have a tall order (pun intended). If they were only called ‘Fountains’ they might not leave one with a sense of lacking, but the branding would be weak.

Not knowing, and not trying to know (some art is worth reading the placard to, but this is the sort of thing that should work on its face[s]) what is trying to be achieved, I look on to them as discrete objects — only a view points really present them as a set piece. Each time, I mostly see the flat grey, squat towers. Their actual size can be promoted (90 feet! More!), but we live in the town that invented tall. They are squat, either pointing up rather timidly against some really uninspired backdrops, or hunkered down in the shadow of one of our most impressive landmarks. And even that one is not so grand, unless viewed though a high pass filter, ultra long exposure photo.

Look, you could put a pile of hot dog vendor carts under the Brooklyn Bridge and they would look impressive. Everything looks good in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. Surely there is a modicum of admiration of what it takes the city of New York to approve even the temporary defacement of one of the most storied images in the history of organized civilization, but if the gesture is as much the writing a $15 million check as it is the result, then hell, we should have held out for an even more substantial sum and concomitantly gratuitous splurge. Why shouldn’t it have cost at least what a ‘good’ penthouse goes for these days?

This is not Eliasson’s first large scale ‘environmental’ intervention. His most popular work is likely The Weather Project, in which he constructed a simulacrum of the sun in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London. By most accounts, it was an impressive gesture. Others don’t strike me as powerful, particularly Green River, since I used to live in Savannah, where the river was dyed green every St. Patrick’s Day (a practice that was finally halted, ironically, out of environmental concerns, though by then every one noted cynically that the presence of multiple riverside factories made the additional color superfluous).

I’m not going to use the failure of this as a cudgel against large public installations, The Public Art Fund has in its portfolio some fascinating projects. I won’t say the money was wasted (it was mostly private), but the opportunity? Well, maybe a littl
e. You could try to embrace it as grand futility, but it just looks like a testing station for perhaps a more impressive work to come, be it art or utilitarian. But, alas, this is all we are going to get. Unlike The Gates (or Chris Burden’s installation at Rockefeller Center, which comes down this week), it’s with us for a while — October — so don’t feel compelled to rush downtown. Perhaps they will work better at night and as the days grow shorter, I’ll prove to be less critical.

I’m going to try and make this short. I hear blog readers want bullet lists and such, so let me hit the high points quickly, and then the three of you that read for, you know, style, can continue south. One: Vote for Paul Newell, who is the first person to challenge Sheldon Silver for the 64th Assembly District of New York State since 1985, this September 9, in the Democratic Primary. Two: if you are inclined to do more, come to M1-5 (52 Walker Street, between Church & Broadway) next Tuesday, June 24, and toss some dollars in the pot. I’ll be there, if that’s any appeal.

I’ve been a constituent of Sheldon Silver for most of my time in New York. What Sheldon Silver has actually done, for me, as a constituent, I’d have a hard time enumerating. As much as I admired his (nonetheless) dirt dealing quashing of the Jets Stadium (a project I showered less than no love for), it affected mostly my abstract principles about urban development. On the ground, things like congestion pricing, rent stabilization, and the commuter tax, he’s been an absent landlord at best, offering obfuscation about his reasoning that at best sounds like ‘we know what’s better for you’. And I gotta tell you Shelly, paying well over two grand for a tenement pad feels great. Thank you.

When you live in New York, you can be forgiven for not seeing the gradated differences in what we loosely call progressive politics. Give the Speaker some face time with just about any national politician, and he will play the way we expect: somewhere left of Emma Goldman, and we can all pat ourselves on the back for the symbolism of unrepentant liberal idealism.

But, you know, when the proverbial rubber hits the road, Silver comes up more than a little short. The oft used excuse for his lack of constituent service is the larger problem of holding down the fort against Joe Bruno. But you know, the Democratic majority in the Assembly is overwhelming, and we are creeping up on the Senate. So every craven accommodation and compromise, is suspect. Considering how drastic the impact of some of those issues has been (the commuter tax and luxury decontrol, to name two), trading that to protect upstate assemblymen who sell us down the river for a stoplight, even when our tax dollars subsidize the entire state, is a bit rich.

Paul Newell has a very simple point. For everything else Silver is, he still represents a discrete district. He has an obligation to those people, to act in their interests, with transparency and honestly, two qualities that he is distinctly lacking around the largest issues. Smaller issues, like funding security in public housing, developing the few remaining viable lots in lower Manhattan for affordable housing, things that can directly effect the people he ostensibly serves, get caught up in these supposed larger battles. But those battles often look like they all center on one struggle: sustaining Silver as one of the “three men in a room.”

The Democrats are poised to retake the Senate. Their control of the Assembly is seemingly unyeilding. We have a Democratic governor. That we have to go hat in hand to try and get Silver off the dime of business as usual is an insult to the progressive ideals that people often point to as a defining feature of this city. And it is particularly galling to those he was elected to serve. People like me. I’m more than ready for Change. We are on the verge of the possibility of an historic change. At all levels.

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.

So people really like real estate on Central Park. This brilliant insight is courtesy the golden pen of Paul Goldberger, a man who was considered (by Michael Sorkin at least) to be an over-the-hill hack nearly 20 years ago. Things clearly haven’t improved. Everyone — okay, Goldberger and Felix Salmon, a man from whom you will have to pull his CDO’s from his cold, dead fingers — is gaga over the numbers and success of 15 Central Park West. I think it has a fancier name. No matter. You can’t buy an apartment there, and it’s not even done. Whoa! (say that in your best Al Pacino voice). Yeah, apartments facing the park sell well.

Not only that, but they are “instant classics”. The mysterious prewar formula has been unearthed by the imagineers at Bob Stern’s office. I can imagine some dusky eve, fog spilling through the candle-lit offices as a hooded figure marched a book with vaguely demonic figures on the cover up to Bob’s desk, planted it with a thud and opened to a page that revealed… an entrance gallery with an eleven foot ceiling. Whoa! (you know what to do).

I never finished architecture school. So maybe I missed the crucial studio, “Designing apartments with 11’0″ ceilings” and was consequently barred from the star chamber where they hid that book (have you ever seen the News Radio episode where Jimmy James reveals the Secret to Business? I digress. Whoa!). Paul hasn’t either, and has to resort to invoking the names of a couple architects you, I and just about anyone who didn’t furtively sneak a look at the index of 740 Park to see if they were included haven’t heard of. Because they were mediocre hacks in service of a generation of arrivistes that have aged enough to aquire the gilt of institution. And thus their dwellings, at the time attempting to expropriate the grandeur of, say, Kesington, are now being photocopied for the latest generation of people who need the scrim of Anglophile identity to buttress their mania that amassing seven figure fortunes isn’t an adequate accomplishment in a meaningless world, nor apparently a mandate to help the less privileged.

Apparently in the intervening sixty years architects forgot how to design. It’s an old canard, and if you perambulate Manhattan, you would have plenty of evidence to this fact, or at least the continuation of a myth perpetuated by misguided cranks (hello!) and a gullible and uncritical press, namely that architects have much to do at all with the quality of plans in apartments in this city. Sure, some GSD student spent a bunch of time picking this light fixture over that, or argued at length with the sales agents about whether or not luxury could be adequately communicated by Viking, or perhaps the more esoteric Wolf was called for, but otherwise, the failure of new housing to evoke the grandeur of a 30-foot long sitting room isn’t really about limestone sheathing or how big the windows are: it’s about whether or not your sitting room is 30 fucking feet long. And it isn’t.

Maybe that knowledge is lost in the sands of time (except for that paragraph, right there, above), or in that mysterious book Bob won’t lend to anyone, or, hey maybe it’s that people who seek outsize returns in property development are short-sighted, greedy and completely oblivious to the idea they exist in both a community and culture and have a duty to sustain it, rather than just skim the rewards off the top. No, it can’t be that. Otherwise we would be awash in town filled with buildings designed by Costas Kondylis and Richard Scarano (you know, I long for the days of the mid-90′s when you had to be a total development wonk to even know who Kondylis was). Of course, a 30-foot living room isn’t necessarily giving back to the community but I think you can see where I’m going here.

Felix brings up the A.A. Gill article from Vanity Fair about the successes and failures of floor-to-ceiling glass and what kind of role that plays in the perception of a ‘comfy’ room. I’m surprised that he buys it uncritically. Might it not be a more complex issue that the modernist ‘ideal’ is yes, a bit nihilistic, but that’s not a romanticized fetish but perhaps only a rueful conclusion about meaning and life? Nah. It’s about cushions. The overstuffed cushions and Victorian details of a classic six spin a yarn that we may have attacked and devalued pretty thoroughly in philosophical circles, but when it comes time to shuffle off this mortal coil, staring down a stark, empty hallway isn’t the last image we want. A lie about continuity and generations and return and afterlife is far more comforting, regardless of ceiling height

Because we can find us some 11-foot ceilings downtown, and some pretty sumptuous luxury on the part of 40 Bond, which has been the desperate hope of all us avant gardists that hiring the right guy(s) really could forestall the march of places such like the Sculpture for Living. Competing on a per square foot price point, and featuring windows that, frankly, are so big they scare me, everyone probably did the same awkward double take when the images were first leaked. Herzog & de Meuron, who walk an incredibly fine line of material mastery, formal innovations, and finding elegant and clever solutions to age old programs, all without like seeming to be the houseboys for the ultra rich and tasteful, were finally going to kick the legs from underneath this pastiche, be it Gluckman on Kenmare, or Stern on CPW.

Except they don’t seem to have. Sure, those windows are big. But all they are is big windows, with odd and not very interesting extrusions clipped to them. On the upper floors, the plans actually establish a degree of parti rigor rarely seen, but, wow, how about those townhouses? That is the hell you get when developer mandates rule. The renderings actually demonstrate some saving grace, but there is no escaping the fact that the plans are sliver better than something you would see Scarano dump on Berry Street.

Everyone is waiting for the big reveal on those cast aluminum gates, but the whole shebang is going nowhere fast. And that’s sad, since rumors are it’s selling slower than hoped (plenty of units left), and the success of Stern’s project is going to grind down the chance of something interesting. Of course, when that interesting is the sort of tripe we get from Asymptote or Winka Dubbeldam, well, no one really has anywhere to turn. I guess we all have to put our money on Norten.

With the dog days upon us and the first legitimate heat wave about to break, that means it’s time for everyone’s favorite season: September 11th Memorialization Contrempts! This year’s model doesn’t break much new ground, the singular complaint being the decision to move the ceremony from Ground Zero proper to A Park Across the Street. It has a proper name, but I think they write it on a chalkboard (I swear it’s been named five things in the past decade), and it is mostly paved. You know the space — the long swath of concrete that dips down from Broadway to Liberty and mostly looks like a really wide street with poor markings.

The relocation has to do with the fact that Ground Zero, at long last, is a construction site. A group that purports to represent the interest of the Families is opposed to moving the ceremony, and applied for a permit for another ceremony, presumably on Ground Zero — it’s interesting such formal language was used here. Does the PANYNJ have an actual, pre-existing form for this? Did they use the new parade permits?

The Port of course rejected the request, but agreed to stop construction for the day. An unacceptable compromise, I’m sure the families will say. I guess in the interest of sensitivity, no one asked the obvious question: okay, so maybe it’s fair to complain this year, when the actual construction work is focused on the tower portion of the site, even though to anyone involved in the building trades, the notion that only a corner of the site is ‘under construction’ is absurd. But what are they going to say when the actual Memorial construction is underway? Every square foot of dirt is sacred and all, but they did agree to and support the memorial design, and eventually some concrete is getting poured there. Are they really expecting to engineer the construction plan so that it will be practical and possible to have people clambering all over a live construction site to hold the memorial?

As of late this afternoon, the latest word is that the planned memorial will be moved closer to Ground Zero — ‘within sight’ of it, though Zuccotti Not-Park is about as close as one can get. Expect more posturing over the next couple weeks.

Also recently noted was a subtle, unannounced renaming of the Freedom Tower. The Port Authority has taken to calling it “1 World Trade Center, the Freedom Tower” (which rolls off the tongue about as elegantly as “Frederick P. Rose Hall Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center” — located in the Time Warner Center). It is admirable we have begun to jettison the sad spectacle of forced symbolism, though I suspect this might also cause issues with the families. The September 11th attacks destroyed all of the World Trade Center (Buildings 1-7), though anyone who visited it regularly could only readily identify 1WTC and 2WTC (the Twin Towers), and 7WTC (just because it was tall), and even though most people didn’t know which was 1WTC or 2WTC. Buildings 3-6, I doubt even people who worked in them could keep them straight. Naming the new tower ’1′ again does two things: presumes to replace the lost tower, and ignores the other.

Since we aren’t replicating the Towers, enumeration is an interesting problem of signification. One approach would be 3WTC, which would acknowledge the absence of first two, a fact affirmed by the voids in the memorial. Since 7WTC is already complete, it’s perhaps awkward. And there is the fact that there was a 3WTC. So 8WTC is not so elegant (lesser than 7WTC in name, and by all this logic 7WTC should be renamed).

Clearly, there is some real estate marketing at work as well. Even with thousands of government employees being volunteered to patriotically work in the Building That is Still Being Named, there are concerns about it’s commercial viability. And the machinations developers go through to prefix their projects with a one make Chinese number superstitions seem quaint. You don’t think it’s effective? Just look at One Hudson Square. If, you know, you can find it.

And if the ‘It’s Number One!’ doesn’t sway you, this sexy, sexy rendering certainly will. Released just today, it is intended to assuage fears that the base will be 15 stories of opaque, security fetishized Logan’s Runchitecture. Turns out we are all just being nattering nabobs, because the main entrance is going to be a ‘celebrated’ 60 feet of glass that looks down on the memorial plaza. Take that! And take a bombproof wall that is, um, 55 or so feet tall, and put it, well, four feet inside of that glorious expanse of glass. There will be slits to admit light (David, call them oculi — it will sound better when presenting it to credulous undergrads) and illuminate the opaque wall above security. Classy. Maybe they can paint a big ’1′ there.

I didn’t really end up on a number that made sense, given all these variables. You could simply call it “The World Trade Center”. Because if you want to come up with something to replace the ‘Freedom Tower’ is needs to be easy to say. No one is going to say 1WTC when they can say ‘Freedom Tower’. Maybe they can just point.