is New York City dead?

wow i'm surprised at the hate for the Oculus! I mean, I hate Westfield, and they chose terrible shops to go inside it - upscale fast-casual but completely anonymous - but the space itself, and the elaboration of it back inside the mall - i was completely blown away. it's both alien and totally familiar. the latter in that it's explicitly retro on two levels: the slanting ribs of the Oculus which pretty much have to be a direct quote of the famous shafts of light that used to fall in Grand Central before the buildings on either side blocked it out; and a globular 70s Kubrickian modernism. the alienness in just the sleek, slightly non-human vibe going on - those weird benches in the center that look like they might not be designed for people's actual asses to sit in; the Giger-esqueness of the "ribs". i felt like i might have to become something other than human to feel welcomed by it - which is a feeling i kinda like?!

I have no gripe w the design, independent of context it's super cool! I just don't get the logic relative to the surrounding buildings

oh yeah. well, all those buildings down there look like they were just sort of pushed around a chess board and left there.

i don't hate the interior space, but yeah the exterior is completely out of context. you have to go too far to make various transit connections, but there's not a lot they could have done about that. mostly i resent that it's just a nice mall that you *have* to walk through and that it cost $4 billion

tbf it's not as bad as penn station

morbs, you gotta fight for life up in this dumb motherfucking city! keep hunting!

also mookie otm

the slanting ribs of the Oculus which pretty much have to be a direct quote of the famous shafts of light that used to fall in Grand Central before the buildings on either side blocked it out

I like that idea but I don’t think it was intentional, given the architect.

Also for some reason Manhattan doesn’t feel like the right environment to encounter an “alien” or Kubrickian structure. I have to meditate on why I feel that way.

mostly because i gotta get to fucking work!

it'd be cool if the atrium was either not a mall or was a totally functionless space adjacent to the mall, for just going and breathing and looking at the light. a secular church, idk. as it is, it feels so much like the mall that it is that the things that are special/fancy or potentially-breathatking fall into the background (for me) - just feels like i'm in a mall.

the High Line is really nice early in the morning before it fills up with tourists

agreed w Treeship, I really do like the building but it's a square peg, it flirts with overreach the conservative abeyance of which for better or worse made the city look and feel like the city

it doesn't feel like "new york" but whatever that's a lost cause I guess

it's not even a USEFUL mall, it's a fucking apple store and high fashion storefronts. no arcade! NO ARCADE!?!?!?

I don’t get why the mega powerful developers seem to think that New York needs more upscale malls. Doesn’t Hudson Yards have a mall too? Don’t they know that malls never did well in the city even when the rest of the country loved them?

Does anyone who really lives in ny actually go to these malls to buy things? Or even to brick and mortar retail stores regularly? All this stuff is for tourists.

Like, how many times a year does one really need to go to uniqlo (it's 2 for me). I guess maybe it's a cheap pastime for all the NYU students.

"This place is the worst" / "This place is better than all other places"

being a NYer is the ability to hold these two thoughts simultaneously, ime

― One Eye Open

this kind of thinking is literally how certain forms of clinical depression work

I lived in NYC from '99-'11 in every borough save SI. Longest run was in Bushwick but my fondest memories are from the South Bronx in 2004. Got robbed by kids for groceries and accosted by cops thinking I was lost/buying drugs but it was super cheap (900/month for a 1200sf loft) and pretty convenient via the 4/5/6. My spot was 112th and Liberty (near Bruckner). I don't even want to look up what it's like now.

It's the repertory movie theaters and the restaurants that are keeping me here

Still Sh1tty, nothing to worry about

I have fantasized about living in New York since college years ago, but every time I get down to the details it seems like too much and I lose interest. It's great to visit though

I love my goddaughter and her parents. They live in a fantastic apartment on one of the High Line blocks in West Chelsea, but it still feels kind of industrial to me - no trees and lots of galleries and storage businesses. My friends who have apartments on Sutton Place on the East River are living in the best version of NY imo

chose terrible shops to go inside it not including the Cole Haan shoe store who's interior signage and window displays are produced very well considering the extremely tight turnaround given no doubt due to an extremely capable team of production artists with excellent mechanical skills and print knowledge.

I feel no need to kvetch about present-day NY anymore. I’m well through the several stages of grief. But the NY I started visiting in ‘75, age 11, and then throughout the late seventies into the eighties, was an indescribable metropolis beyond dreams. NY is definitely not dead now, far from it, but it’s certainly more prosaic, more commonplace, cleaner (in more ways than one), and tamer... not just a matter of degrees, but really a profound qualitative difference; a separate ontological plane dare I say.

lol dan

Being real, if this was 1980 there is a zero percent chance I would live in Williamsburg and maybe a 10% chance I’d lcie in the city at all.

Which makes me part of the problem.

I felt Williamsburg was slightly more exciting when I’d visit in 2009/2010 but that could have just been youth.

I was apologizing for living in williamsburg back in 2003. I should've saved a lot of them up.

I felt Williamsburg was slightly more exciting when I’d visit in 2009/2010 but that could have just been youth.

― Trϵϵship, Saturday, May 11, 2019 8:41 AM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nah it's practically unrecognizable from what it was then

feels like an extension of manhattan now

you don't have to go toooo far out of the bedford/driggs stop bubble to get back to something that looks not too different than it has for a long time.

I live off grand

There are good bars around. I like greenpoint a lot too and its close—my brother lives over there

you don't have to go toooo far out of the bedford/driggs stop bubble to get back to something that looks not too different than it has for a long time.

― dan selzer, Saturday, May 11, 2019 10:14 AM (eleven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is also true enough!

i miss Domsey's :(

i got mugged coming back from Galapagos

/90s

an in-law lives in that Kushner building on Kent and there is no deeper pit in hell. apart from what they're planning to go right next to it, which looks literally like it belongs in Dubai. that building on Kent isn't even nice. yes there's a gym etc but the reception area, hallways, all the unavoidable PUBLIC SPACE of even a place like that has the same shitty lack of attention that typifies every other public place in New York. the corridors feel like JFK.

Galapagos was cool

Now I'm reminiscing about Williamsburg. Anyone remember Kokie's. That must now be an Amazon locker.

Still the Levee I think.

https://youtu.be/uuxE5ZA4WPM

Does anyone who really lives in ny actually go to these malls to buy things? Or even to brick and mortar retail stores regularly? All this stuff is for tourists.

I guess you're right. Time Warner Center is another one. I was there today. For all the local character of the place, you could be in LA or Dubai or anywhere. It's probably reassuring to the rich tourists who just want to have all the high-end shops collected in one convenient place.

I went to the Metropolitan Club in NY for dinner with friends a few weeks ago, after a lecture on Hoyle and a miniature book exhibition at The Grolier Club (a truly fantastic place). it was a very "old NY" experience, the rooms at both locations were incredibly evocative and the food was really good. I don't have any illusions about who would belong in places like this (not me), but I kept thinking I wouldn't have any experiences like these anywhere else in the world

One thing I learned when I briefly lived in New York is that the places in New York that, when I was a tourist, I rigorously avoided as being "for tourists only" are, in fact, filled with New Yorkers who were less uptight than I was.

i also miss galapagos. interviewed there once!

Lol Kokie’s. I’ve read about it.

The Levee is, or was, functionally the same as Kokie's though Kokie's was clearer in its intent. They sold only the finest laxatives that helped one talk out of turn.

Having never lived in nyc proper but been a frequent visitor over the last 20 years, i've definitely noticed a change over the years in the way people I know there (older and younger, different walks of life) talk about the city and their relationship to it... a gradual transition from a sort of fun-cynical "this city is fucked up and everything is hard and all the good stuff is gone and i love it" to depressed-cynical "this city is fucked up and everything is hard and all the good stuff is gone and i wish more than anything that i could leave but i am stuck here".

Last time I was there it was almost surreal, everyone I spent time with, inevitably at some point they would circle around to the universal topic of how badly they wanted to leave, "we're thinking about in the next year or so", etc... wistfully telling stories of people they know who've left in the same way folks talk about survivors of risky operations: "she's doing FINE now, I just talked to her the other day and she says she's NEVER FELT BETTER, honestly!" Definitely some kind of slow psychic change that has not been super fun to observe from a distance.

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard
live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft

Last time I went to NYC was 2005. Stayed with my sister who was on a business trip at some fancy hotel near Grand Central, visited friends in Astoria & Park Slope, saw Jonathan Richman play (!) somewhere in Williamsburg. W’burg felt measurably busier than when I was last there in 2002, but everything still seemed cool and New Yorky as a tourist might want to experience it. Has much changed since then?