Gilded Catwalk NYC

Aristocrats frolic in the window at 51st St. & 7th Ave.
I remember the trolls in the comments at Curbed used to (still do?) claim that you have to either let developers have their way or cede the streets to crackheads.

Unsurprisingly, their hero Mayor Bloomberg comes up with his own false choice of extremes, on whether to allow Wal-Mart to build here: "You should let the marketplace decide," he said.  "Anybody who has tried to manage the marketplace, it has not turned out very well.  I think the Soviet Union is as good an example as you'd ever need of that."

I love it how people who can afford to escape the negative effects of The Market preach its innate wisdom, no matter how money's made or spent, and see moral superiority and a lesson for others in their singular ability to take as much as possible from the world without choking on it.

But Bloomberg's never seen anything special in NYC anyway, and never cared to find the balance point that could preserve what made NYC special: the humility, and the respect for millions of humble lives lived in proximity, that left enough air for people at the bottom to breathe.  Instead he's done everything he can to turn NYC into a gilded catwalk where arrogant aristocrats flaunt their wealth and admire each other.

Searching for the key to maintaining a "healthy" city, I keep coming back to this simple thought: There is nothing noble in poverty, but there is in humility.  And the arrogance of wealth is what's destroying NYC, block by block.

Greenwich Village Then & Now

Dylan & Suze Rotolo on Jones St. in the Village
Nearly 50 years ago, on January 24, 1961, Bob Dylan first arrived in Greenwich Village [Interferenza].  (Also see Touring Bob Dylan's New York, The Telegraph.)

Now the Village draws a different set, with Craigslist job listings like the one to the left for a High Frequency Trading Developer (Greenwich Village).

What more can you say about New Bloomberg City?  NYC is Wall Street's mistress, dependent on its mercenary drones and "innovations" like high frequency trading, all geared toward skimming as much as possible before the casino collapses.

Dylan said "New York was a dream... of the cosmopolitan riches of the mind.  It was a great place for me to learn and to meet others who were on similar journeys"  [Westwood One Radio, 1985; via Interferenza].

There's no room for that kind of nonsense now, when Young Republicans flock to New York dreaming of Bloombergian riches, of going to school and puking "east side, west side, all around the town," before joining the Wall Street fraternity and the shiny lifestyle it buys, eventually settling into suburban luxury in the middle of NYC -- something a Master of the Universe might find deadly boring without the knowledge that this city is always waiting up for him, legs spread, naked in furs, with lines of coke on the coffee table and a music video playing on the wall-sized TV, to the strains of Dylan's "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" (sample; original lyrics):

When you're lost in the rain in Cancun
And it's bonus time too
And your portfolio fails
And your hedge fund don't pull you through
Don't put on any tears
When you're down on Los Hooters Avenue
You had your way with New York City, bro
– you can do it to Mexico too!

Beekman Tower Launch Party

While vacationing in Florida, I tested
the concept with a single Saturn V rocket
If I ruled the world I would give the cream of the financial industry free apartments in Beekman Tower, then throw a blow-out party with gourmet food and recreational drugs served by sex professionals working the halls from top to bottom.

Then I would seal the entrance, strip the scaffolds camouflaging the half dozen surplus Saturn V rockets I had strapped to the building, and press the launch button.

Note that it wouldn't cost me a huge amount to pull this off because, where the typical manned space flight requires an expensive guidance system to go somewhere specific and come back, I really don't care where the rocket goes, just so long as it never comes back.

New Bloomberg City

Like wide screen TV, but $1000 a month to maintain
I think it's time we quit fooling ourselves, and rename NYC New Bloomberg City, or NBC.

Rinse off the stench of
wealth at ABC Home

The city's transformation is nearly complete, as Bloomberg Preferred Citizens^TM -- bankers, developers, and other people with Wall Street incomes, and the drones who furnish them with the regular and stainless amenities formerly found only in upscale suburbs -- have firmly taken control and, like arrogant weeds, are sucking up all the air that used to allow for the cultural and economic breadth and depth that made this huge village special.

Today's reminder that we live in two worlds: People who spend six figures on aquariums for their $16.9 million apartment as an alternative to a big screen TV.  Watching the bright, swirling trails of captive fish soothes the owner, and lets them imagine they are rinsing the filthiness off their wealth, transforming it to beauty and meaning.

Spend to Transcend ^TM*

I suspect that washing off filth via home furnishings and improvement is what a lot of people with too much money do.

From the window displays at ABC Home (above and right), where Spending is Transcending ^TM, to Jean Nouvel's "Vision" luxury tower in Chelsea, that had the normally egalitarian critic Nicolai Ouroussoff enthusing over interior details, as if the city is enhanced -- not by what anyone can see from the outside and the way a building meets the sidewalk but -- by imagining we were invited into one of those luxury apartments to enjoy the precious details and the way they express the owners' sensitive and complicated relationship to wealth.

And now, as usual, the rest of us are left to watch the Elect, those who gave their souls to Mammon, live the high life in their pretty fish tanks strung like pearls along the High Line, and let the enjoyment trickle down on our imaginations.

[ Previously: A Tale of Two Economies ]

* This ABC Home display, though up during Black History month, always made me think of a home makeover by the Manson Family.

The Ugliest Buildings in NYC

Several Top 10 Ugly lists have been plucked from the American Institute of Architects' most recent "Guide to New York."  (By, among others, Curbed and Gallerina.)

Well, I don't have to refer to any stinking guides.  Though I avoid posting straightforward photos of ugly buildings -- why spread suffering? -- I've picked the ugliest from photos here (7 for now*, maybe more after my stomach's settled).

First up, to the left, on 6th Ave. near Vandam.  The building on the left aspires to Class on the first floor, then slumps into an Edge City Budget facade as it rises, and finally erupts in a splashy crown of sheet metal pipes combed over the bleak bald lumps on its head -- designed to suggest labor camp cottages downwind of a Hershey's factory?  From West Side Eyesores.


To the right, the Trump Soho at Varick & Spring.  It takes some doing to make a reflective building this ugly, and it's even worse close up.  The cutouts / lumps that define the building give it the look of an evil robot, and every time I look at them I think of people inside the lumps remarking "Hey!  We're inside one of those lumps!"  From 7 WTC's Clear Complexion 2.

To the left, the World Financial Center, on the Hudson west of the World Trade Center site.  This is the most flattering shot you can take of the complex.

Its surface looks like brown plastic mailing tape, and the "grand entrance" on the complex's south side should come with a warning that -- like Lot's wife leaving Sodom -- bad things will happen if you take a good look at it.  From 7 WTC's Clear Complexion 1.

To the right, on 31st St. off 5th Ave.  It's the top of this building that's ugly -- they replaced the original, ornate top with something that looks like a cinder block septic tank with windows, or a prison-issue shaved head.  It's part of a shortsighted, cheapskate trend that's stripped cornices and ornamentation off way too many old NYC buildings.

It's especially cruel since this building was the original home of Life Magazine, and the now-naked top was full of bachelor apartments that served as the magazine's "esthetic maternity ward."

To the left, the orange building on the right, which sits at 34th St. and Park Ave. South, is pretty putrid.  (Meanwhile the green Tyvek, exposed for 3 years now, makes the building it covers on the left look better.)


To the right: Almost any NYU dorm could make an Ugly list, including this one on 14th St. just west of 3rd Ave., where there are more ugly NYU dorms.

Education is big business, and ambitious self-serving colleges devour their host cities; NYU warehouses its students in hulks so thoughtless they practically spit on their surroundings.

To the left, architect Karl Fischer's heinous 20 Bayard, on McCarren Park in Williamsburg.  On the left in the picture, what must have been Karl's inspiration.

The building's empty clock face, its vaguely Transformers shape and puny robot head, the kitchen slicer & dicer entrance... It all adds up to make 20 Bayard The Ugliest Building in NYC if not the world.

Note that I have improved and used this monster a few times: 20 Bayard a la Frank Gehry; 20 Bayard a la Rick James.

* Note that when it comes to Ugly in NYC, this is just the tip of the sh*tberg.  There's an endless supply, but just a few reasons the buildings exist:

- Developers and their architects don't care how their unsightly pile of crap affects others -- they would put up a 5 story used cardboard box if they could get away with it.  This is where crapitecture [Queens Crap] and the Budget Hotel Look comes from, and it likely accounts for 90% of the ugly buildings in NYC.

- They may care a little, but they are inept.  Humble or arrogant, with their student architect cousin or a million dollar "starchitect," the developer is blind to the difference between wearing an ugly shirt once in a while and planting a massive, ugly building that poisons its surroundings for decades.

Gateway to Tourist Hell

Speaking of hell, summertime 8th Ave. above 42nd St. always seems like the gateway to tourist hell, with hot, humid exhaust blowing up 8th from the Port Authority Bus Terminal, a cluster of Soviet-scale package-tour hotels, and crowds of sweaty tourists lining up for tour buses or staggering out of nearby Times Square, blinded and wrung out from their journey to the Heart of Blandness and its scorching, Burger King-scented emptiness.

Greeting them here on 8th near 47th, left-to-right in the photo below right, and in the other photos: a tour company Statue of Liberty lost in a faded orange theater front (formerly Hollywood Twin Cinemas); a lonely porn holdout; a bar full of sharks in suits from nearby office towers; and on the right -- warping the photo below right, if not spacetime -- the Ismael Leyva designed winner of my Superfinger award.


The Leyva finger seeks to blend into the neighborhood at its base, above right, but still comes off like a plastic dominatrix.  And the rest of it, below, still looks like a place built by aliens to slice & dice humans, not house them.


[ Welcome to Hell ]
[ In Search of Superfinger ]

West Side Eyesores

East side, west side
All around the town,
Eyesores are popping up
Like daisies, best
Keep your eyeballs
Pointed down

First up, above and to the left, some Williamsburg "luxury condo" backwash at 7th Ave. & Carmine in Greenwich Village.  From the silver & black yacht deck penthouse roof line, to the trademark soot gray condo brick & balconies, to a Cafe Roadburn -- I mean Caffé Roastbean -- fastfood coffee outlet, the building screams Emptiness like a slice of black vinyl cake.

Then a few blocks southeast at 196 6th Ave., below, co-op "architecture" that -- in the brutally thoughtless style favored all along the BQE Condo Belt -- puts most of its energy into the utility stuff on the roof.


Above left, the building starts out looking like it aspires to Class on the first floor, then slumps into an Edge City Budget facade as it rises, and finally erupts in a splashy crown of sheet metal pipes combed over the bleak bald lumps on its head, designed to suggest labor camp cottages downwind of a Hershey's factory?

Plastic-Induced Paranoia

Poison Molecule Emitted By That Plastic Building in Back
I can hear worms scrape through the dirt under the sidewalk, and both ends of cellphone conversations a block away.  Everyone's laughing at me... my blood vessels are sticking out like rope, throbbing, about to explode!

I know something's wrong.  The glue and plastic fumes from all the shiny new buildings is poisoning me, making me super sensitive, like a spider.

You see what I mean, above?  My eyes are so powerful I can pick out individual molecules in midair!  And I can hear those two-faced signs, below, laughing at me and calling me names, "U ho!  U mad!  You pathetic, ass-face freak!  Ah... ha ha ha!"


I just stole a couple 3-packs of that new instant coffee from Starbucks and poured it in my beer.  Once it kicks in and I'm back in the flow, invisible, I'm heading for Grand Central to jump a train north -- the air up there will fix me up.  I know it's cold and I only got this t-shirt, but I've been sweatin' like a pig, so I ain't worried at all...

Maya Lin to Atlantic Yards

Seeing Maya Lin's work, left, reminded me of my simplest design for the proposed Atlantic Yards Nets Arena.

I don't care if the Nets new Russian owner is ready to spend like Bloomberg going after a fifth term, the Yards site is architecturally cursed.

This design is guaranteed to invalidate all complaints about crappy architecture and how the arena might fit into the surrounding environment -- by burying the whole thing beneath a gigantic mound covered in grass, in a style the ancients referred to as "green architecture," below right.

Fans won't care that they're buried alive.  They'll be too busy watching the massive plasma TV screen hung above the court, with closeups of LeBron James diving into the laps of Siberian supermodels in court-side seats, wrapped in wolf pelts, nibbling caviar bagels, and pouring Stoli down their gullets like gas into a Hummer.

To pay off the bonds needed to complete the project, the mound can be covered with billboards, like any other arena.  Then the BQE can be re-routed by the mound so there's an audience for the billboards.  That swell, sustainable future is rendered below.

Williamsburg Sights

Recent sights from Williamsburg and the Williamsburg Bridge.  Above, the view from the top of the bridge's south walkway.  Note the old-school Navy Yard cranes that echo the rooftop cubes in front.


Above left, I'm so used to this thing on N 7th that I believe it should be landmarked as-is.  Above right, I bet this building at Bedford & N 3rd will never look better than it does here.


Above left, the huge pit behind the Bedford & N 3rd building, that has warped spacetime and swallowed sidewalks.  Above right, a soft tank down on River St. near N 1st that fits right in with the gray day.


Above left, near the entry to the bridge's south walkway, Intel Outside.  Above right, from further up the north walkway of the bridge, a scrawl that proves we've moved past "the medium is the message" to "there is no message, just buzz."  I blame spray paint manufacturers, the Internet, and the idiots who post these pictures (oops) for this sad state of affairs.

And finally, below, up on the middle of the bridge, living proof that taggers operate in the armpit of the world -- a pink world at that.

Bowery Extremes

Extreme examples a block apart on the upper end of Bowery.  Above, a repair shop at Great Jones, one of the neighborhood's last outposts of raw visual funk.

Left and below, a unit of the suburban "Edge City package" so popular with developers -- slick, context-free living above a bank branch -- plunked down on the corner of Bond.

I would guess the well-to-do tourists at nearby sidewalk cafes are thinking "The great thing about New York is: You feel like you never left home!"

Urban Shed Competition

Something Is Going On Up There; 38th St. off Sixth Ave.
I got excited when saw a blurb about the Urban Shed Competition: I thought I'd finally be able to share my plans for a stylish shed with room for the moonshine still, an outhouse, and other stuff you either don't want indoors or don't want the Sheriff's boys to find in your possession.

But when I visited the Urban Shed website, I find out they're serious, and want suggestions on how to paint a Happy Face on the unbridled development required by Bloomberg's core constituency: the Masterds* of the Universe and the greedy developers who build condos for them and their legions of wannabe Masterds (who binge crawl all over the LES, East Village, and soon Williamsburg, doing their best to eject their soul along with their stomach contents and thus attain Masterdhood).

The point of the competition is to design a new system of scaffolding and "sidewalk sheds" (like the one to the left, at 2nd Ave. and 12th St.) -- a ridiculous idea, because the current scaffolds nearly always look better than the naked buildings, and the ad hoc, zigzagging sheds are some of the most interesting pedestrian passages in New York City.  (And most exciting: pedicab drivers could sell thrill rides through these twisting labyrinths, swerving around groaning cranes and whooshing I-beams, welding sparks and hungover construction workers.)

Not only is there no need for new scaffolding & sheds, but we get the insult of the Urban Shed website, a detailed propaganda exercise selling the idea that a jury headed by Dept. of Building officials, in a competition supported by the players who've brought us all these years of Masterdization, will somehow come up with something good for the city.

High Above Lexington at 48th
It's a little irritating for a creative type like me to see the respected architects and designers on the jury.  I know that's the way of the world -- rich people buy the art and develop the buildings that keep artists and architects afloat -- but the idea of tarting up passageways around construction sites -- usually the most interesting sights on our increasingly drab and uniform blocks -- just to make the Masterds, the developers, and their friends in office more comfortable is a bit too much.  I accept my place as an artist in the economy, a lapdog to wealth if lucky enough to sell work; but I draw the line at whimpering and licking its face like a neurotic toy poodle.

If the competition could come up with something guaranteed to withstand a semi-truck sideswiping a scaffold, I might be impressed.  As it is, I can almost guarantee the results of this needless exercise: A design that somehow complements the slick blandness of new construction, and is smooth enough in spots to sell to Cemusa as ad space.

Like the case of the "urban shed" that wraps the still-dead escalators at the Union Square subway entrance, right -- courtesy of a sweetheart development deal that cheats the public -- the perceived ugliness of the sheds is not the problem.  The sheds distract from the problem.  To turn urban sheds into something that fits in with the Cemusa newsstands, bus stops and "bike shelter" ad platforms that, thanks to Bloomberg, now bring that slick plastic corporate flavor to every corner of the city, just adds to the problem.

[ Union Square Subway Shed: A Tale of Two Entrances ]
[ Urban Shed Competition ]

* Excuse me, I just read about Quentin Tarantino's new movie "Inglourious Basterds"

Cooper Union Cooper Square

Cooper Square is a hotbed of controversy, from the new Cooper Union building above and below left, to the Cooper Square Hotel in the remaining photos.

The NY Times' Nicolai Ouroussoff mainly admires the Cooper Union building, for its boldness and the way it wears its construction material on its sleeve.  The Times ran some excellent photos with the article, but I like the one I took yesterday, above, that captures the armored, war elephant essence of the building.


The Cooper Square Hotel wears its decadence on its sleeve.  I'd wondered what it would be like for the crotchety hold-out owners of the two old buildings at its base -- with cavorting jet setters and cocaine music thumping till dawn a few feet above -- until I figured out that they've been absorbed into the hotel.  Note the space-age awning that skewers out the side of the old building, below.

I've had mixed feelings about both buildings all along.  I agree with Ouroussoff that (thoughtfully) bold design is good, and I make a distinction between buildings built for schools and those built for Masters of the Universe.  With my weakness for spectacle, I've enjoyed watching the Union building's construction, especially the scythe-like shapes captured above left.  And I like the crumpled parts of its veil of steel.  But I miss the view of the beautifully colored buildings behind (east of) it, and from the east the Union building doesn't pretend to care -- I've seen more consideration in proposed garbage barn designs.


And though I see the hotel as a bookend to the New Museum further down Bowery -- anchoring the conversion of yet another distinctive swath of NYC into something (Bloomberg and) the yacht club set can enjoy -- I admire its fetishistic finish and space-age look, and the honesty of its arrogance.  Where Donald Trump's erections hide amid the skyscraper grass of Midtown, the Cooper Square lords over the puny East Village like a mammoth alien sexual appliance shot from space -- Battlestar Dildactica? -- a monument to the penile enhancing power of unapologetic greed, and decadence that is an end in itself.

[ Rome Burns at Cooper Sq. Hotel, Jeremiah's VNY ]
[ Civic Value of a Bold Statement, Nicolai Ouroussoff, NY Times ]