is New York City dead?

“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*

stoked for when greenpoint/east williamsburg is designated a superfund site https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0203407

(tbf, it's not the waterfront part it's the industrial part further in)

Hey Chinese character, where do you live?

industrial maspeth sucks for public transportation but i know artist types in ridgewood who have studios there, easy bike ride. rust avenue is a wonderland.

this is a very enjoyable book about the history of landfill and building thereon in NYC, like all of laguardia and jfk are manmade land, plus most of lower manhattan.

Meeker Ave Plume is where my printshop was for a few years. Don't worry, my contribution was minor. It was also the site of the Xi'an Famous Foods factory/warehouse. Which later moved to Woodside. And is on the same block as my current printshop/office is. I walk 10 minutes to work, first I pass a halal live poultry slaughterhouse. Then I pass Xi'An. The smells can be a real trip.

Xi’an is good shit

OMG DAYO!!!!

Missed you here—I was gonna put you on ILX Milk Carton (again)

hullo! i was just reminiscing about shanghai the other day

Battery park city was built on landfill

― calstars, Friday, January 14, 2022 2:40 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

battery park city is the rock and shit from the WTC construction

let's just fucking invade Connecticut already

ugh, why

we could use them for parking

Seems like some kind of indicator that first-person tales of being mugged are now featured in the NYRBlog.

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2022/01/07/notes-on-a-mugging/

yeesh

https://i.imgur.com/bVFFPVt.jpg

Who can explain these shards of ice that have appeared on the street at every household garbage spot

rain that collected in the folds of garbage bags, froze, then fell off and shattered when DSNY picked up the host bags?

or on the cans, yes

WECIB?

are all danes like this

You never see old people in the streets of NYC. In Copenhagen you do. It's a real city, not just some romcom dream for 20-somethings.

— Paul Hünermund (@PHuenermund) February 5, 2022

Idk man everyone in the nordic countries are hot

that is not true.

I know the bar for this is high, but is Eric Adams the most cringe NYC mayor ever?

Mayor Eric Adams says he’s going to hold a meeting with high profile rappers to address drill rap music, a contributor to gun violence in New York City. The mayor said he asked his son about the music, and he sent him some videos.

— Emma G. Fitzsimmons (@emmagf) February 11, 2022

The fuck

they're using rahm's chicago playbook, which worked out oh so well for everyone

I asked myself for eight years how an incompetent clown becomes mayor of the largest city in the most powerful country in the world. Guess it's four more years of that.