is New York City dead?

i will take my incentive in one (1) ticket to watch the new york knicks play basketball

got my booster at duane reade. was a nightmare. wife got hers at Elmhurst aka covid ground zero and got a crazy goodie bag of swag.

Maybe I should head over there.

She didn't get 100 bucks. Just a t-shirt and bracelet and booklets and stickers and stuff.

https://gothamist.com/news/photos-nyc-says-goodbye-east-river-park/

RIP the East River Park Amphitheater, original site of Shakespeare in the Park; scene of the climactic hip-hop concert in WILD STYLE; & site of countless graduation ceremonies & music/dance/theater performances, restored after 9/11 but razed by the city... https://t.co/LKNVraSLRY pic.twitter.com/b7I1tWDe4H

— Mike Rubin (@rubinbooty) December 28, 2021

This some sad shit

I spent so much time over there. Took a lot of pictures too because of rapidly accelerating Old Weird New York attrition awareness.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/09/nyregion/eric-adams-mother-photo.html

Anyone have a photo like this ( in a brandy snifter?)

https://i.imgur.com/c7ewC1g.png

Coming to NYC this December, Airbnb for comfort, got to start saving (but it's always nice when you're looking forward to something). Doing XMAS, will probably come back before new year though. Hyped. Pandemic levels withstanding of course.

Goodbye to the R32 subway car, 1964-2022.

The first stainless steel NYC subway car, and the last to have a front window for passengers.

Rest in scrap.

Oh no is that the car that runs on the A and C trains??? Are they going away? That's too bad, I love riding in the front car and looking out the window.

You're probably thinking of the R46 trains (orange seats). The R32s have grey seats.

The A/C line now I think is mainly R179 trains, which have blue seats.

no I think you're right, the R32s were used on the A,C,J, and Z lines

Yeah on second thought you may be right, but when they last ran on the A/C lines I'm not clear on

wikipedia says: "With the R179 delivery completed, the R32s were gradually phased out until the last train made its final trip on the C on March 26, 2020."

it's a bummer, but a long time coming - they were originally going to replace them years ago! I like to think I got the most enjoyment out of them that I could while they were around.

Ah well that explains it, it was early covid and I wasn't in the city at the time. Pour one out for the R32 front window. I lived on the C from 2000-2003 and on the AC from 2011-present, so I got a good bit of use out of them.

yep I was definitely dreading the day, but at least was able to make peace with the pending loss. (though tbh, it's been awhile since I've ridden one now since I'm now firmly lodged up in the bronx.)

ffs

As big-box retailers reduce their brick-and-mortar presence in New York City, an emerging class of tenants is proving to be just what the doctor ordered.https://t.co/hpvvMqTKTg

— The Real Deal (@trdny) January 10, 2022

can't wait til these close after the pandemic and become weed dispensaries

and / or walk-in gambling parlors like they have in the uk

They are all totally going to become dispensaries

“After the pandemic”

15 minute groceries delivery joints.

on a block near me THREE of these things opened side by side more or less simultaneously; they are all pretty much packed.

Well this is quite the proposalhttps://t.co/HMvZekXzzo pic.twitter.com/T1Ps2Od1YF

— Samantha Maldonado (@sssmaldo) January 14, 2022

lol that's so terrible

Real Estate: They're not making any more of i...

it's good but they should do more

amateur hour compared to

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FJFHaW5X0AA4lLW?format=jpg&name=large

oh wow, now i wanna read up on that.

I mean I don't know if that's a "good" idea or not. It's certainly an out there idea, and it seems so grandiose and expensive that I can't imagine it ever actually gets done.

USA!

should be a quick and easy job, definitely not worth looking at how well we're using our existing land

Building new land in a tidal estuary is probably easier than dealing with that tbf

absorbing governor's island must be part of the government's "hammocks for all" initiative

I mean go for it I guess, it would be a good thing. I guess so much of new york seems just kind of underdeveloped and half empty when I walk around (not in manhattan)

oh but an extension of a single local train plus a couple new g train stops is not gonna cut it

i suppose the other argument for this is: you've got to do *something* to protect lower manhattan, so you may was well go for it.

it's not a totally insane move fwiw. most of the urban land in hong kong is on reclaimed land

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reclamation_in_Hong_Kong

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/Hong_Kong_Reclamation_Map.png

huh, battery park city is in fact built on reclaimed land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_Park_City

Battery park city was built on landfill

land reclamation has a long worldwide history, for sure. but wasn't HK dealing with more fundamental issues finding available sites, due to much more dramatic topography and to the nearby border with the PRC? and doing reclamation like this at scale in NYC is basically impossible at this point; the last realized efforts of this kind were Waterside Plaza (which is a platform on steel piles) and Battery Park City (on landfill from the WTC excavations among other things). then after that comes the Westway scheme of the 70s and 80s; that got tanked for many reasons but the silver bullet was the new regulatory regime of environmental impact review. the effect of this project on marine habitats and the hydrology of the entire Hudson and harbor system would blow Westway out of the water (ha ha).

and would this scheme actually solve any problems at all? for once the comments on that NYT story are pretty decent - reading through the first 10-20 should start to give the contours of what could be wrong here. the main thing for me is would be unspeakably expensive and take forever, versus changing policy and infrastructure to resolve the given list of problems using land that already exists, and solutions that activists are already calling for. if you have the the trillions of dollars lying around to build vast new territory all over the harbor, then it sounds like you could just acquire land to build a bunch of new public housing, incentivize developers to build middle-income stuff (through Mitchell-Lama type programs, say), and run a bunch of new transit all over the place. instead, we have a boondoggle that, based on recent experience of things like Hudson Yards, would obviously be structured such that the tax base fronts a huge amount of the cost (or at least the financial risk), while the benefits accrue to the developers of the skyscrapers and luxury condos that would actually get built here.

people maybe forget how many single family housing-based neighborhoods there are in nyc outside of manhattan too? just loads of car dependent low density places. plus loads of no-longer-super-useful declining post-industrial sites (some which would be expensive to clean up, to be sure).

I can find you 200 acres of useless golf course in the southeast bronx for starters.

oh haha that's built on a garbage landfill, I dunno if that works so well for housing then

I've often talked about how surprisingly busy light industry is around east williamsburg, woodside, maspeth etc, small companies needing to be on the island and have warehouse space but close to manhattan. Many are "Industrial Business Zones" which makes sense and there should be more cheap industrial spaces where there's a desire. But maybe it's the pandemic but even just before I started seeing them empty out. Big printers and other firms. Huge empty buildings on an industrial street just adjacent to very nice residential Woodside here where I live. I'd love to see some of these broken up for affordable small industry or replaced with apts for affordable apts but they're likely just going to sit empty aren't they.

now they are used for underground super speeder events parties

spreader*