Doing a fine bit of muckracking, The Villager details the ownership on two strips of land that ideally should be controlled by the city, but actually belong to NYU. Ideally, we say, since it’s one of those situations where a lot tut-tut-ing goes on about how NYU is really a benevolent land owner, and then you wake up one day and someone is tearing down Edgar Allen Poe’s home. Or, as the article points out, building Bobst Library.
The more interesting of the two is the Time Landscape, the strip of inaccessible park on the east side of LaGuardia Place (just north of Houston). For years, this plot has been carefully tended and untended in an attempt to recreate what is thought to be an example of what a ‘native’ Manhattan landscape would comprise. That it was intended by Robert Moses to be a central element in his Faustian vision for a freeway blighted Manhattan makes it ironic in the simpleton way even an NYU freshman would understand (that’s right — I’ll never be welcome at Dojo, a distinction I am completely comfortable with).
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Hey, there’s an empty lot! Cover it with a nasty institutional behemoth, stat!
Doing a fine bit of muckracking, The Villager details the ownership on two strips of land that ideally should be controlled by the city, but actually belong to NYU. Ideally, we say, since it’s one of those situations where a lot tut-tut-ing goes on about how NYU is really a benevolent land owner, and then you wake up one day and someone is tearing down Edgar Allen Poe’s home. Or, as the article points out, building Bobst Library.
The more interesting of the two is the Time Landscape, the strip of inaccessible park on the east side of LaGuardia Place (just north of Houston). For years, this plot has been carefully tended and untended in an attempt to recreate what is thought to be an example of what a ‘native’ Manhattan landscape would comprise. That it was intended by Robert Moses to be a central element in his Faustian vision for a freeway blighted Manhattan makes it ironic in the simpleton way even an NYU freshman would understand (that’s right — I’ll never be welcome at Dojo, a distinction I am completely comfortable with).