is New York City dead?

Rent has been climbing like wild for years but the trend may be finally leveling off. Unlike San Francisco there are actually new apartment buildings being built, though we still haven’t got the political will to start bulldozing single family homes.

Doesn’t Seattle have more working cranes on high rise construction sites than any city in the us?

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-has-most-cranes-in-the-country-for-2nd-year-in-a-row-and-lead-is-growing/

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Sarus_Crane_%28Grus_antigone%29_at_Sultanpur_I_Picture_151.jpg

*Flintstones voice* eh, it's a living

When a man is tired of London etc.

A little bit of apocalypse that doesn't involve the subway, for once

http://gothamist.com/2018/07/19/exploded_steam_pipe_asbestos.php

Exhibit C: there is LITERALLY a man on a @CitiBikeNYC commuting to work out of a plume of steam in this video https://t.co/eCLCizPdXC

— Rebecca (@RebeccaEgler) July 19, 2018

All,

Further update:

Please advise your employees to steer clear of the area on 5th Avenue between 19th St and 22nd St. due to environmental concerns related to the material that was dispersed from the explosion. Office of Emergency Management is currently involved in the cleanup and environmental testing to ensure there is no additional danger.

Thank you,

Anthony

https://www.villagespoke.com/2019/05/03/a-city-for-the-rich-built-poorly-the-construction-of-hudson-yards/

http://i0.wp.com/www.villagespoke.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/4.29.19_HYardsBroken7.jpg

You get the distinct sense that you’re walking through a computer rendering rather than a real place. Aesthetic is prioritized over function everywhere you go. It’s easy to get the feeling that the faceplates of brand-new signs popping off their fixtures were simply pixel-off details unnoticeable in a 100:1 scale virtual world.

Considering the scope, ambition, and execution of this project as a whole, pointing out an "overextended saw cut" in the ground seems ridiculous

https://thebaffler.com/latest/fuck-the-vessel-wagner

From some points on the Jersey side, the view of the Empire State Building is totally blocked by Hudson Yards

In so many ways New York is a great city that has embodied what is best about America, particularly multiculturalism and innovation. (Never perfectly, of course). It’s where many generations of my family grew up, and most of them are buried out in Green-Wood Cemetery. However, the city also kind of sucks and is dumb now.

There is so much luxury housing development, all over the place.

despite President deBlasio's promises

I feel like the point of the above articles is, if you're going to do seamless luxury, do it right (i.e. the beautifully alien Oculus). Which as a point is.. okay I guess. But maybe we could forget about seamless luxury altogether?

Anecdotally I walked past the Barclays Center a couple of months ago and was astonished at how jank-ass it looked

i can't imagine going anywhere near hudson yards, but fuck the oculus

i even wrote an article once about how stupid the oculus was

It's oppressive even to walk from the subway to the PATH there

how many people fall on these stairs every day?

https://cbsnews1.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2016/09/08/89a46d4b-2070-4fb8-9bcd-39b435dc69f0/resize/620x465/b3933a85612b51f6ee02f60ea41e57fc/daniel-jones-steps-from-path-trains.jpg

I hate the way that thing is wedged in there, w evidently zero regard for any of the space around it

i kind of like the barclays center though

xps

and yeah, like, "a bird in flight" makes no sense as a concept for a building hemmed in by skyscrapers. calatrava's buildings look nice on a waterfront. but this looks like a trapped bird, or else some kind of unidentifiable carcass that has been picked apart by vultures... which maybe is a good visual metaphor for wall street

spent some time in hudson yards a few weeks ago. It is not good. It's suffocating and claustrophobic and mostly ugly. People were confused about how to get to things. Pro tip though, I walked into the rear entrance of The Shed and found my way to very clean public bathrooms which as any New Yorker knows, is very valuable knowledge.

parts of NYC might not be so impressive these days, but tbh 99% of the rest of the country is the same fucking corner with a gas station + fast food restaurant + abandoned strip mall, on every other intersection, every highway ramp exit, everywhere, the fucking worst and least aesthetic combination of buildings, monotonous and interchangeable. so even a shitty set of stairs that hurts people seems impressive and potentially groundbreaking

A while ago, I was offered a job as Calatrava's personal assistant. I recall the pay as being $32k. I remember telling all my architect friends and they were a little horrified about how little he was offering considering... He had a very nice dog though.

treesh otm

That’s interesting. I used to write about architecture as a freelancer, and the website I wrote for had a run-in with calatrava. I forget the details, but he doesn’t like criticism apparently

many xps to calstars: if you think pointing out poor paving is petty, check that full article. the point is that the structure just opened and already the shoddy, non-union construction is showing serious wear and poor consideration. hudson yards was supposed to be the hermetic future and it's suffering near instantaneous mcmansion breakdown.

also xps to dan: https://www.charmin.com/en-us/about-us/sitorsquat

I think it’s annoying that it’s the final stop on the high line, because the high line is actually really cool. I love the newish whitney too

yeah the whitney is great

here's the problem with the highline in a nutshell:
http://gothamist.com/attachments/arts_jen/agora-43.jpg

Sometimes it’s like that but not always. It feels legitimately like public space though to me—not like I’m loitering in a corporate plaza

i'm prickly about public land issues and park space in particular and i'm glad that highline exists but c'est ne pas une parc

it's more like an amenity

i like the new whitney too, though i haven't had any luck catching anything good there.

There is just too many people everywhere, all the time. I thought once about going to the Queens Night Market once when it opened but then saw that it's always a mob.

it's easy for the crowding in the city to color everything and leave you jaded and cranky... though i bitch about it when it's in full swing, going to smorgasburg at the start of the season during a light rainstorm two weeks ago was great fun! not so much in mid july.

Give the night market another shot xp. It's not always a mob, especially if you wait for the excitement to die down after opening. Going early is always good too -- I think they start at 6pm. I say this as a person who hates crowds -- the ones at the night market are pretty manageable by NYC standards.

You can also try going in the fall as it's sort of under the radar that it closes and then reopens in fall for a few more weeks.

That said, I fucking HATE most of manhattan. I no longer work there and love not working there.

I just visited the Hudson Yards area because a relative won an affordable apartment lottery there -- the whole thing was a dystopian nightmare.

Smorgasburg is comically crowded in the summer

Even when it’s 195 degrees people are queuing for hot food

people pollution, incidentally, iswhy i prize greenwood cemetery so much. you can go out there in the heart of a metropolis on a June weekend at 75 degrees and walk for an hour and see maybe fifteen (live) people... that's changing too though!

i jog around prospect park and, at one point, had made the smorg grounds an irregular part of my route. there was a point last year where you literally could not jog within a football field length of the grounds; ridiculously overrun with drunk kids taking photos of their arepas

Prospect park has some semi-quiet spots

I used to have a couple of spaced out spots all over manhattan that I would hang out because I had to frequently kill an hour or two during the day during work and all those places have been completely overrun by "where did all these people come from?"

I gave up on smorgasburg pretty early on in its history. I couldn't get over spending $15 to eat streetfood while standing in a parking lot.

Astoria Park is a spot that I feel like is really beautiful and accessible and not insanely crowded IME, plus close to good food.

mods please redact that post