Whither Bohemia?

By admin | Published: March 14, 2005

In Greenwich Village, good fences make good Fascists, or so the rabble-rousers at CB2 would have you believe. A recent meeting, The Villager reports, got a little nasty, when some attendees wanted to voice their dissent and point out that the creeping authoritarianism masquerading as renovation that the Parks Department has been quietly rolling out across the city is about to land on the most contentious piece of ‘public’ space left: the venerable Washington Square.

Once home to personalities and events that are the cornerstone of every liberal arts fantasy about sticking it to the man, and now the source of some of the best single-serving-size oregano in the city, Washington Square Park stands tall with Union and Tompkins Squares as the hallowed ground of alternative culture. And, like those two sites, the Parks Department has set its sights on providing beautiful planting and green space that will be inaccessible to humans, and dog run renovations, which, regardless of the final form, will incense some portion of the mercurial dog-owning community.

Though several of the design recommendations are under scrutiny, as one would expect with any vigorous community interest, the major point of contention is the plan to wrap the park in the same vaguely nostalgic wrought iron fencing that has slowly but certainly encircled every piece of park property in Manhattan. In some areas, it is used to great effect, such as the planting areas (Gustav Hartman Square and the like) along East Houston, or some parks, such as Tribeca Park, which, prior to renovation, looked like a traffic divider with trees. But in places like Tompkins, the fears of Washington Square residents are amply demonstrated. With only a few entrances, often blocked by NYPD patrol vehicles, the utility of fencing as crowd control and as a means of restricting access is strongly in evidence.

I haven’t seen the plan (the Parks Department is going to ‘try’ to put it online), so the real indicator of this will be in the handlding of the north and south entrances. Given the current layout, simply ringing green spaces won’t be of much benefit to putative police control: the plaza that runs through the park, mirroring the width of Fifth Avenue, terminating on the north end, and West Broadway, on the south, is so broad that other means of restricting access would be necessary to reproduce what is possible in Tompkins.

The indication from the article is that a more drastic intervention is called for; if so, this is a frontal assault on the what makes the park such a pleasant formal environment. Standing in an area that already features tree cover than can be found in most other areas of Manhattan, its continuity with the park creates the most humanly scaled residential and park interaction in the city. That most of the perimeter buildings have become institutional is more than unfortunate, but at least pedestrians can experience firsthand what idealized urban living can be. Tompkins, which is bounded by wider streets, lacks the same intimacy, and most other larger parks and squares are more commercial than residential.

How any fence that is enclosing enough to ‘secure’ the park at night, and, as the NYPD argues, deter drug dealing — which is funny, since a permanent substation with real cops and myriad cameras hasn’t stemmed the tide, so the new strategy basically admits that a fence may be more effective than live officers — won’t ruin one of the most commanding vistas in the city is hard to imagine. Perhaps the thinking is that we got so used to seeing awful cyclone fencing surrounding the arch for what seemed like decades of renovation that a permanent visual intrusion won’t be any further insult.

All in all, this creates the perfect storm of community resistance: a renovation that not even its mother loves. The lack of any formal precedent for the fencing, and likewise the obstruction of one of the most striking views in the city should get the even the most conservative preservationist exercised, and the threat to whatever vestiges of bohemian culture that exist in the Village should bring out the Tompkins battle-wounded in droves.

As glib as that is, it’s no small issue. The Parks Department has had a string of impressive successes throughout the city, and the decision to force this restrictive collar on what is legitimately historic ground to several generations of diverse New York culture needs to be seriously reconsidered. Here’s a good place to start.

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Giant stoops.

By admin | Published: March 11, 2005

Collectivist utopias never work. We’ve been told that over and over by the good folks over at the National Review (or, at least, back when people read it). You would think Gary Bettman was a subscriber. But he was out working the fields and writing poetry, and now the NHL is belly up, another dashed dream of Bolshevism. As a consequence, NFL owners are looking warily at the implosion. Sure, their ‘intentional community’ always had nicer digs, and was more popular with townies (they probably had better drugs), but their old magic — convincing powerful, moneyed pseudo-liberals to fund their self-involved exploits — is faltering.

Wednesday, the Giants blinked when whatever crony-saddled private public partnership that runs the Meadowlands demanded a last-minute change to their clusterfuck of an agreement to expand the locus of Northern New Jersey culture. I can’t quite sort out the details, but the state wanted a guaranteed $3 million if the Jets deal fell through — or didn’t, I can’t remember — and somehow it is related to an “entertainment complex” called Xanadu (god, don’t you hope it will entail a skating rink — or at least opiates?) and a horse racing track. Anyhoo, the team put their foot down. Stamped it just like a petulant eight-year-old who still has 20 more years of parental hegemony staring them in the face. Why? Because the Giants’ leass runs until 2026. That’s right, the Giants’ lease will last longer than Social Security.

Like any good, family-funded anarchists, the Tischs’ & Co. seem to think that other people should not only love their communist paradise, replete with revenue sharing, centralized planning, and wage control (hell, they pay for everyone’s health care too, right? Fucking socialists.), but they want them to pay for it as well. Sure, they were gonna pony up some scratch, but they were also asking for a distinctly hippie-like rent of $1 a year, which was about one six-millionth what the mean old gubmen was asking for.

Today, the government got real, going to court just to show how serious they are. So serious that the Giants haven’t even tried to break their lease yet, but just in case they are thinking about it, there’s a lawsuit waiting. Mike, ever the coy debutante, played it distinctly cool, adding more evidence to the speculation that his nose need be medically extracted from Woody Jonhson’s ass.

Maybe we should just get real about revenue sources: Giants Stadium should be renamed Springsteen Stadium. Or Mike should build one over here. Considering that The Boss can draw better in two weeks than either the Giants or Jets do in a year, and it creates less scheduling conflicts, and you can have a much more event-friendly seating plan, why not back a winner for once? Of course, that would obviate the homoerotic Mandingo fantasy of pasty white guys buying, selling, and trading big, brawny guys who get all sweaty for them every Sunday.

No, no, let’s erase such thinking and get back to the tawdry soap opera that everyone lamented would be impossible if we voted in someone as dry and unexciting as Bloomberg. Just in case you haven’t honed your sense of irony precisely enough by reading Vice, you can mull over how interesting it is that every day, another rich, powerful guy makes noises about how he can get it done better, and then turns around as asks the goverment for a handout to kick start the process. You will wonder if that concept hasn’t been tried elsewhere, and been massively (if incorrectly) discredited over and over, by those very same guys. There is even a specialized name for it: welfare.

ON A RELATED NOTE, there is an excellent round-up at Transfer, a site that makes me sometimes think I’m not that mean a guy after all, on a particularly noxius eminent domain dustup in Connecticut. Since it’s gone national, it may be that a favorable ruling for the property owners might mean that the Times has to pay market-rate pricing for a development site in, oh, 43 years or so.

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Entasis: Just a fancy name for a bulge.

By admin | Published: March 7, 2005

The history of wavy buildings in New York is not one of great distinction. The short list includes a number designed by luminaries, and one can trace a theme of ‘genius’-driven arrogance to confound the grid formally while flaunting the economics that make it such a lucrative proposition.

Granted, FARs and setback requirements and air rights transfers make the undulations not so much a waste of buildable space as a demand that sums slightly greater than the absolute minimum be invested.

It is no small consideration to break the grid. Even though a few notable examples predate New York’s unrolling of its Euclidean masterstroke, the Manhattan grid is the tabula rasa of rectilinear American urbanity. Now the classic over-determined postmodern trope, it fits conveniently into any narrative (including lazy ones such as this). Even as we find alluring many of the neighborhoods that stand in contradiction to its unyielding geometry, several of our most commanding — and noted — vistas depend on its monumental monotony.

Perhaps noting the decided lack of success in many recent attempts, or perhaps only a result of a ‘luxury’ hotelier being maybe not so luxurious, Richard Gluckman’s new project, One Kenmare Square, serves up its undulations with far more restraint.

And speaking of restraint, why am I offering up comments on a building still some months from completion? Well, hyper-inflated real estate and the attendant fervid marketing efforts work to create an opinion and legitimation well in advance of construction. Add to that ready access to more detailed representations, and it seems that some level of critique can be offered to counter the manufacture of ‘buzz’. Any greater aspiration, such as the ability to attenuate the more dismal efforts through a welter of critical disdain, exists solely in my addled, design-schooled mind.

But, mostly, it was prompted by my discovery of the project in the usual manner, followed by an unexpected walk past soon after, and a lunchtime perusing the Herzog & de Meuron issue of El Croquis — which has two absolutely stunning mixed-use / apartment projects (though I didn’t read closely to find out if they are public or private). It’s hard to draw corollaries between housing in modern European and American cities, I know, so I fall back on the awkward but seemingly logical point that Manhattan is now overrun by what are endlessly touted as luxury dwellings, what standard is fair to apply? One would think condos that fetch near $1,500/sf should be able to compete fairly with government-sponsored housing in Europe, no?

Add to that an architect I typically admire, if not for his strikingly original forms, then at least for his sustaining a practice that has enforced a mandate with clientele that produces consistently impressive work, and one might have reason to work up a little more hope than usual. Which is any. At all.

There isn’t much in the plans, presentation, or completed work to indicate any exemplary success. Soon (well, once Winka Dubbeldam ever figures out how to install that last window), we will have enough name brand works to create a hierarchy or sorts. Of sorts, since it seems everyone will be lumped at the bottom, and victory means perhaps as little as rising incrementally above the rest. Using this tepid yardstick, One Kenmare Place fares, well, fairly.

The undulations featured in the lovely dbox renderings appear a fallacy compared to the current state. The windows look to be set in perpendicular to the floor plane, though the rendering seems to imply they will shift on two axes, if not three. The difference is subtle, and even sensible from an assembly standpoint, but given how much attention is lavished in the curve, it is also a little disappointing. And the operable window sections, which diminish the rhythm considerably, are absent altogether from the renderings.

The write-up on materials and finish hold some promise, though the interiors shown, not so much. There are few instances where the presence of the dominant, curved façade impacts the plan, but otherwise, they are an intelligent, but unexceptional, response to zoning and service requirements.

The website clumsily explicates a connection with the ‘Crosby House Residences’, which is a rather high-toned name for what will be the least attractive building on Crosby Street, a disappointing response to the residual standard width lot that came with the property (previously a parking lot with more frontage on Lafayette, and a pass through to Crosby). It eschews the expanses of glass typical in SoHo and TriBeCa for what appear to be contractor grade casement windows (and only three at that). The façade is finished in the same brick, which is promised to shift colors with changes in daylight, but in my visits has remained resolutely dull grey.

And though it is still months away from a form that will be close to finished, I can’t see it improving substantially. The curve that repeats itself, while sliding as it rises is interesting as an abstract idea. The presence of banded windows and a brick that will look like split-face CMU more often than isn’t going to appear to the casual viewer (or maybe even the uncasual) all that original. The archetype that one will recall upon seeing it will likely be any number of spec office parks found near freeway interchanges in anonymous suburbs in Atlanta or Dallas. If you peer closely, you might conclude that the subtle gradations in how that curve occurs indicate more investment, and you would be right. But you might also think it a rather timid investment, and perhaps a cynical gesture, a scrim of design fussiness masquerading as something more. Which, when you think about it, sums up what the ‘luxury hotelier’ role is all about.

But let’s be clear: this is not a Scarano or Kondylis project. It will no doubt be superior to that. Like the proverbial sports adage, it’s a game of inches. Gluckman didn’t move the ball that far, but it looks like he put his head down and ran with it. If the next one in the pipeline moves the sticks a little further, then perhaps it will be time for real excitement. But, like one of my most astute college professors pointed out, exasperated at another half-assed effort: “Everything is an attempt!”

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I like Mike.

By admin | Published: March 4, 2005

The other day a friend wrote and observed that I didn’t like Mike Bloomberg. I replied that this was not actually the case, only an effect of writing about him as pertains to only a single issue, the West Side Stadium (which, at the pace we are moving, will be termed the ‘Third Rail of City Development’ in no time flat). I was coincidentally at the Crain’s breakfast forum that very day (no, not because I am that obsessed with the stadium, but because most of the day people think I am a reasonable and even-tempered person, and my attendance was a consequence of those activities), and what I saw was a textbook example of my point: as long as the word stadium didn’t leave his mouth, all that he did say was, on balance, the most I could hope from a mayor in this city.

He spoke very bluntly about the need for investment in services to insure that the city remains a popular destination for long- and short-term visitors; he spoke of the need to reduce the city’s dependency on Wall Street for tax revenue; he wished he could pay city employees more, and he underscored the role of New York as an exceptional destination, one that is made so by the strength of our cultural institutions and diversity, and those exceptional characteristics place a premium on residents and companies that want to be part of it. And he said what I’ve never heard a public official say: namely, that companies don’t have much choice but to locate here, because the best and the brightest flock here, and the companies must follow, should they want to be competitive — though he stopped short of saying we should exert more leverage as a result, he also did not pander to the call to lower their taxes.

None of these are small points. The inane cudgel of taxes has blinded people to the notion of a social contract. Perhaps it has worked so well that the entitlement we have provided a portion of our population empowers them to think they are actually responsible for their success, even as most of their personal decisions belie this logic. Without a vigorous support of taxes and the resulting city services and, yes, direct subsidy (one way or another — grant-making, rent stabilization, graduated taxation) they provide, we cannot hope to continue to have the city we do. It’s not so much that New York is unique — even as we all believe it to be — but that we carry an ideal, one that is remarkably consistent, considering the large number of people who contribute to it, and that ideal is not self-sustaining.

Given his relatively clear-eyed assessment of the struggles the city faces — and if he were a better orator, he would have been able to better shame the Crain’s hack, who clearly longs to run the Chamber of Congress in Peoria, for asking flat-out stupid questions — his continued support of the stadium is puzzling. One possible answer is he believes it to be a prudent fiscal investment. But given the history of the process, lacking competitive bidding or a reasonable effort to solicit a variety of development plans, there is no indication this was the case.

Two recent events have not helped his cause — the introduction of legislation by Clifford Miller that may take away his power to assign city revenue to the project, and two separate studies: one, whispered about by the IOC, indicates that less people support bringing the Olympics here than in the other host cities (which, as a matter of pride, we should note is exactly how New Yorkers would respond), and one, by Quinnipiac, that indicates that a majority of residents do not support the stadium, Olympics or not.

As he protested that he is tin-eared when it comes to politics and will not abandon his convictions to pander, that Bloomberg isn’t backing down makes sense. At the same time, a relatively small minority also said that his stance will effect their support. So his Quixotic pursuit may actually be winning him some respect — at the very least, it is not noticeably diminishing his prospects. And it isn’t with me. Unless Freddie Ferrer manages some sea change over the next six months (or, at the very least, distances himself from the machine that holds jobs open for people when they are convicted of defrauding the city), I fully intend of pull the lever for Bloomberg this fall. Between now and then, though, he can expect a vigorous fight from me, and many others, on the foolish stadium — a fight that only a year ago seemed hopeless, but now looks to be winnable. Viva la France!

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I have to apologize: I used the adjective bilious improperly last week.

By admin | Published: March 1, 2005

Let me clarify further: I did not necessarily use it improperly, but, better, I used it in haste. Were I to know that I would be walking in the East Village on a crisp, cold day, and coming upon the mostly complete superstructure of Charles Gwathmey’s “Sculpture for Living” in Astor Place, I would have held on dearly for a week further, thus affording myself the occasion to relish it’s all-too-elegant propriety. For those still unclear on its appeal to me, a snippet:

3 : sickeningly unpleasant : of a kind that makes one queasy : NAUSEATING, REVOLTING {utterly bilious weather} {with clapboards painted red and bilious yellow — Sinclair Lewis}
— “bilious.” Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Merriam-Webster, 2002. (27 Feb. 2005)

I find it so useful, since it allows a paronomastic construction with the certain to be employed “billowing” in the lesser lights of critical reflection that will delude themselves into finding good things to say about this abomination.

But let’s pretend this is a New Yorker profile: I will interject a vaguely related anecdote from times past that will eventually, after too long a detour, return us to the overarching premise.

A friend moved here some years back, not many many years, but a while ago. He made the dutiful phonecalls to nameplate firms, and ones that might actually be hiring (it wasn’t always that you got to fall out of bed and into the hands of a developer willing to pay for you to vomit all over our streetscape). When he spoke to an associate at Gwathmey/Siegel, he was told their ideal profile for a new hire was someone “really good at CAD and willing to work for $6/hr.” My friend chuckled appropriately, until he realized the associate was dead serious. Later, he heard tales from people working there (the juiciest of which I can’t report, unfortunately, since they might well be libelous) including that Charlie used to bring his wolfhounds to the office, and once, being told by an underling that one had done its business, looked up, and said distractedly, “Oh? Can you take care of that?” Which leads me to say (can you see it coming? can you?): one would hope his staff has grown enough that he can dispatch them to clean up the shit he’s taken on Astor Place. That his last major work was nicknamed the toilet tank makes it all the more ironic (whammo! sign me up, Remnick!).

In case you’ve been living under a rock — or in denial, which is more likely — the Cooper Union traded part of Manhattan for a shiny trinket courtesy of Charles Gwathmey (gory details), who delivered what looks like a parody of a first-year studio project: a squared-off base, rationalized for high impact retail, surmounted by a completely featureless and banal curvy shaft of residential, topped by another rectilinear form, as arbitrary and unattractive as the rest. At least it’s consistent: ugly from top to bottom.

I remember back in the day when my distaste for his work was malformed and juvenile. I used to think his formal explorations seemed facile and unconsidered, compared to those of his contemporaries, such as Hejduk and Eisenman, who were doing work that was superficially similar. But, being green and lacking an academic pedigree of any kind, I figured my confusion was simply a lack of sensitivity or discernment.

Now, years later, my for distaste his work, highly polished and juvenile, and lacking any credentials whatsover, is tempered by understanding that he is a high-class hack with a bulletproof rolodex. Coasting along on second homes that dot the eastern end of Long Island with no distinction whatsoever, I struggle to name anything he has done in the past twenty years of note, save the aforementioned addition to the Guggenheim (which they found necessary to gussy up with a shard from the golden boy of sinew).

Perhaps someone will rise in his defence and list some for me. Perhaps that same person can try to use logic and reason to detail the virtues of his Sculpture for Living. Perhaps I should actually bother to craft an argument. But it’s like complaining about American Idol or Fox News: it’s barely worth mentioning, let alone expending precious brain cells that could be better used as fodder for alcohol or playing solitare. So, my apologies for taking your time in the course of an unnecessarily elaborate warning: stay away from Astor Place. For, um, I guess, ever.

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I can hardly contain myself.

By admin | Published: February 28, 2005

Apparently New York can only take the imposition of overscaled art work when it’s too cold out to properly appreciate it (though considering the two million plus at Central Park, a fall installation may well have broken even the elastic potential of our collective backyard). Just six days after The Gates close (and even as they are coming down), the Nomadic Museum on Pier 54 will open.

Brought to us by the BiAnimale Foundation, an environmental nonprofit based in Switzerland, it is a temporary exhibition space designed by Shigeru Ban (a member of the THINK collective, and one of the architects of the Houses at Sagaponack project), which will display a work by Gregory Colbert through June 6.

The notable, and obvious, element is the use of entirely recycled materials, including paper tubes for structure and shipping containers for side walls. Just as the past two weeks has been a veritable festival of saffron, née orange, it looks like shipping containers are ready for their close-up.

This is not a new idea, at least to the GSD cocktail party set. Holt, Hinshaw, Pfau & Jones published a concept for a house made from shipping containers back in the eighties, and LOT-EK seems to have made an entire industry out of suggesting that other people live in containers and foam tents. Wes Jones is still beating that horse, with a site devoted to the benefits of container construction, though it looks more like a manifesto than a catalog, with no constructed examples.

The recent interest in shipping containers is a useful lesson for architecture students, for it recalls an older generation who had become a little too enamored of the aesthetics of modernism that quickly became detached from both the social and ideological realities that were much of its inspiration. Now, it should be evident from my irregular writings that I have no problem with the much of the ideology (and also recognize that there are still instances of the dream being real, hence the work from firms such as MVRDV), but find the facile appropriation frustrating. So now we get our own disgusting historical moment wherein the material of the ‘masses’ becomes appropriated and celebrated, but also made sufferable with the addition of $3,000 range tops.

Don’t get me wrong: there is a palpable housing crisis in most of the world, and modular construction has great potential to address this. Jones is also a participant in Modern Modular, a collective that is selling prefab housing solutions. And there was, and is, the highly publicized inaugural Dwell Home competition, won by locals Res 4, who did a tremendous amount of research and work developing a prefab solution — one they admitted was not necessarily as affordable as the competition set out to establish, even as they tried like hell to make it so. They are pretty pragmatic about the potential. Most of the typologies they present would be no more economical than stick-built construction, but prefab is about scale, and the scale must be cultivated. And you do that by making the nice stuff and hoping that it gets disseminated widely when manufacturing costs drop (see: IKEA).

Containers have scale, so the argument for inexpensive startup is ostensibly strong, but after that, it’s pretty much a shitty idea. The numbers are staggering (in terms of available material), with hundreds of thousands of empty containers piled up in ports such as Newark-Port Elizabeth, which see far more importing than exporting. But that makes their use only viable within a narrow radius of initial location. So it would cost as much, if not more, to ship a container to Sudan as it would back to China. Some ideas, such as Fox & Fowle’s proposal to build student housing in Gloucester, Massachusetts — a port city — verge on the viable. Add to that the high costs of labor in urban locations, and the numbers begin to make sense.

But anywhere else, they fall apart pretty quickly. Jones estimates it costs $20,000 — including his fees! — to convert a container into a house segment, but excludes fancy windows and finishes (which figure prominently in his renderings), and any site acquisition, prep, engineering or permitting, etc. Excepting that, his estimate is a rosy $62.50/sf, which is competitive with stick-built wood frame, but not a substantial improvement.

And now for the fun part, which no one likes to mention in detail: containers are only eight feet wide. There is no way around this. Add insulation and services down both sides, and you have seven feet of livable space. To improve upon this means lots of labor: cutting, custom attachment for reassembly, etc. In short, traditional construction with non-traditional materials, which means costs will spike, since most framers have never faced steel corrugated steel wall systems.

Now, you can see why it’s so popular with the architecture cognoscenti living in Manhattan shoeboxes, but seven feet is appropriate for just about no one else. Sure, students and the downtrodden will deal with it, but there is no reason to when there are cost-competitive alternatives that provide a decent footprint. There are other viable uses, but the prevailing aesthetic is nothing that would serve to uplift or edify. And if you want to play the affordable housing card, spend a semester at the Rural Studio, then get back to me if you still think containers are the end-all and be-all of adaptive reuse or recycling.

None of this really has anything to do with Ban’s design, where the scale of the containers isn’t relevant, but rather, they are used like traditional materials, albeit writ large. Stacked in running bond style and interspersed with fabric panels that run diagonally to mimic the roof slope, it is an impressive, colorful and enticing image. Since the final form may be more enclosed, and I don’t know the hours of operation, seeing it this week might be advisable, since lights are used at the end of the workday, and the interior illumination is striking, especially in late evening. If this will be a constant throughout the exhibit, perhaps waiting for a warm April evening would be advisable. But if you are a suspicious or worrisome sort (and I’m all that), go by now, while it’s a definite feature.

And, whatever you do, don’t be sucker for the impending Wallpaper* fetishization of shipping containers as homes. It’s a stupid idea in most executions. Prefab is a viable and compelling alternative. It’s inevitable that the 2050 version of John Pawson will make the 2050 version of a Calvin Klein boutique out of them, but hopefully it won’t come at the expense of a generation living in thousands of government housing program homes made from containers. But who am I kidding? It’s not like the government even builds housing any more.

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EPA: Still confused by that ‘Protection’ part.

By admin | Published: February 28, 2005

Master Dissembler Kevin Rampe did a little lip service duty last week in front of City Council, announcing that the demolition of 130 Liberty Street would not begin until this summer at the earliest, and warned that any timeline speculation on completion would be foolhardy. I could bother to provide the myriad links detailing Rampe’s checked history regarding the management of this process, but I feel lazy today, and suffice it to say, this is the kind of man you wouldn’t want dating your daughter.

But everyone is mouthing positive feedback to the recent developments, which include revisions to the plan to accomodate concerns about contaminants and remediation, as well as a significant increase in budget (to the point where it will now likely cost more to remove the building than it did to build it).

There are, of course, anti-American cranks out there, so evil that they have compiled a whole list of suspect documents, many authored by lawyers, and insurance companies, and other insults to the American way, all of it an attempt prevent the marking of our tragedy with spec office space (and if it’s a penny — sorry, square foot — less than seven million, Mr. Rampe will be sure to let you know what kind of terrorist supporter he thinks you are). They even go so far as to use inflammatory quotes:

“Twenty or thirty years from now, when those New Yorkers start falling over dead, some young government bureaucrat will get all choked up apologizing for what the EPA and others didn’t do. That’s what they did here.”
–Asbestos Miner Les Skramstad, of Libby, Montana, whose has four family members with asbestosis [Andrew Schneider in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch 1-13-03]

So I’m not sure whether we should be glad or angry that the EPA is continuing in its stance of not saying exactly what it is they do, or intend to do, about any of this, but I’m sure if you asked them, they’d be happy to tell you there is no threat to your health, past or present. From the safety of their offices in DC.

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The poignancy might have been greater if we still had mimeograph machines.

By admin | Published: February 26, 2005

Seen today in the Port Authority: a wire stand that exhorted passengers to peruse a bulletin from the PANY/NJ. It was about as tidy as one can expect of a wire stand with sheets of paper placed in the pathway of one of the busiest entrances in the city, a scattering of leaflets trapped beneath the stand itself and a few visible, discarded or fallen, within a short radius.

The bulletin itself was a single sheet, memo format, run off a dying toner cartridge, and was addressed to all passengers, and serving to remind each of them that today was the 12th anniversary of the first WTC bombing, and to request that they join in a moment of silence to observe the passing. Staring at it somewhat aghast at the perverse admixture of kit memorializing and insensitive bureaucracy, I did not read it closely, but it does seem they neglected which moment, specifically, in which to observe the silence. Perhaps, then, we are all encouraged to take an individual moment and reflect. So, unless you’ve been reading this aloud, consider your quota filled.

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Westside development made more interesting with malice!

By admin | Published: February 22, 2005

Yet who would have thought the old yards to have had so much potential in them? Turns out that the Dolans will spend $600MM to protect a $12MM a year subsidy — oh, and a monopoly on large event spaces in the city. And even better, it turns out that Adam Victor, the owner of TransGas, a company desperate to bring competition to the city’s energy market in the form of a behemoth power plant in Brooklyn that is as certain to bring asthma to the lives of small, non-traditionally complected children as his goofy vents are unlikely to bring a smile to their faces (which could be the posthumous work of PJ — and we aren’t even going to touch the irony that his last masterstroke was an edifice of smokestacks cheek by jowl with a large, traditionally Jewish neighborhood), is willing to pony up $700MM, just because he’s pissed.

The city’s response to this offer is as dismissive as the Dolans’, even though all the conditions Victor is requesting (an everlasting Gobstopper — er, MetroCard, the first born of Peter Kalikow and a date with the woman who is the computerized voice on the IRT) don’t require city or federal approval. Of course, like the Dolans’, or RWJ III, he’s going to suck the city dry of revenue one way or another, but still, $700MM is a lot of fuck-you money.

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Downtown tragedy made fresher with snark!

By admin | Published: February 22, 2005

I received this email today from the tone-deaf folks at Project Rebirth. It looks like they are getting a little too envious of the popularity of Denton’s Kids:

When the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation called for entries in their open Memorial design competition, they received over 5000 submissions, many of them from amateur — but earnest — hopefuls. We combed through all the entries to find the most unusual, unique, and outlandish ideas, choosing our top ten favorites based on originality and heart, regardless of practical concerns. You can see them here, and vote for your favorites!

Granted, it’s not as well written as Gawker, since someone probably had the good sense to try and rein it in a bit, but the project they included in the email was from a one Mark Walhberg, whom they do not take pains to qualify as a former teen idol (if it was indeed him). If it was from Gawker, I’m sure a prosthetic penis joke would have been worked in there somewhere. See the whole presentation here.

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