After a good year or two of advertisement on its facade and one notice as being the hot new thing, 36 Hudson Street, henceforth known as the Mohawk Atelier, commenced construction this week. It is being developed by Joseph Pell Lombardi, who has done realtively innocuous residential conversions forever. Excepting the social/economic practice of this work, critical judgement of these buildings is difficult since often the only visible intervention is the window and entry detailing, a variable highly dependent on budget. In some instances the work is exquisite. The other major component of his work tends to be the inevitable penthouse additions, which are fairly pedestrian, glass clad affairs, with enough humility to be stepped back and largely invisible. I’ll reserve any comments of the current out of the ground work he has going, since I can’t directly recall the sites, but will do a walk by and report back. But the big neighborhood news to report is how the new scaffolding at the Atelier will affect the street life of the most precious skate/BMX scene in the universe, which is centered exlusively around the steel platform on the Hudson side of the bulding. After ten years of watching the sad spectacle of the skate punks around the Cube and concluding New York has the world’s most incompetent skaters, I was duly impressed by the three foot (and less!) rail slides, grinds, or whatever else you call it when you hop a bike up on the corner of a solid surface, travel a very short distance and then almost fall on your face, produced by the very carefully attired youth of TriBeCa. I fear the already abysmal quality of extreme sports in the area will sink a little further, as the ravages of high-end redevelopment claim yet another precious stretch of streetscape in which not-criminal skaters can display their wares. Oh, the humanity.
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The new diaspora, TriBeCa skate punks.
After a good year or two of advertisement on its facade and one notice as being the hot new thing, 36 Hudson Street, henceforth known as the Mohawk Atelier, commenced construction this week. It is being developed by Joseph Pell Lombardi, who has done realtively innocuous residential conversions forever. Excepting the social/economic practice of this work, critical judgement of these buildings is difficult since often the only visible intervention is the window and entry detailing, a variable highly dependent on budget. In some instances the work is exquisite. The other major component of his work tends to be the inevitable penthouse additions, which are fairly pedestrian, glass clad affairs, with enough humility to be stepped back and largely invisible. I’ll reserve any comments of the current out of the ground work he has going, since I can’t directly recall the sites, but will do a walk by and report back. But the big neighborhood news to report is how the new scaffolding at the Atelier will affect the street life of the most precious skate/BMX scene in the universe, which is centered exlusively around the steel platform on the Hudson side of the bulding. After ten years of watching the sad spectacle of the skate punks around the Cube and concluding New York has the world’s most incompetent skaters, I was duly impressed by the three foot (and less!) rail slides, grinds, or whatever else you call it when you hop a bike up on the corner of a solid surface, travel a very short distance and then almost fall on your face, produced by the very carefully attired youth of TriBeCa. I fear the already abysmal quality of extreme sports in the area will sink a little further, as the ravages of high-end redevelopment claim yet another precious stretch of streetscape in which not-criminal skaters can display their wares. Oh, the humanity.