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Atlantic and Hudson Yards Redux

by Sandy Ikeda
Mon, 31 Mar 2008

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Mr. Gehry conceived of this bold ensemble of buildings as a self-contained composition — an urban Gesamtkunstwerk — not as a collection of independent structures. Postpone the towers and expose the stadium, and it becomes a piece of urban blight — a black hole at a crucial crossroads of the city’s physical history. If this is what we’re ultimately left with, it will only confirm our darkest suspicions about the cynical calculations underlying New York real estate deals.

I think he’s right. Without the other structures to bring people to the arena on those days and nights when there is no game, it will act as a border vacuum that sucks the life out of the surrounding streets – a “black hole” as he aptly describes it. But what to do about it? Again, I would agree that “No development at all would be preferable to building the design that is now on the table.” The other options he mentions are less desirable. We could wage a public campaign to stop it. We could pray that Forest City Ratner comes up with more money. But given that the city approved the plan, we cannot prevent the developer from building the arena. Nor is there any way of preventing Forest City from selling off pieces of the property to other investors, who could then come up with any design they liked, as long as they abided by zoning and density guidelines. I would push Governor Paterson to impose a moratorium on the use of eminent domain, as he demanded when he was a member of the State Assembly. Working within that constraint might bring a smaller, more livable scale to these (and other) projects. Let’s not forget that this all began with the good idea of building Mr. Ratner’s New Jersey Nets a new home in Brooklyn. With government subsidies in the hundreds of millions of dollars and the questionable use of eminent domain, this private-public venture suddenly ballooned into a major urban revitalization project. The Atlantic Yards Arena was transformed into “Emerald City” – on Flatbush Avenue. *** In a similar vein, the MTA on Wednesday sold Tishman-Speyer will the development rights to the Hudson Yards on the Far West Side of Manhattan for $1 billion. After spending $2 billion to cover the existing rails that serve Penn Station, the plan is to construct a 26-acre business/residential district over them. You can read about the announcement here, see some nice pictures with all the architectural yada yada here, and read Peter Ouroussoff’s kvetching about it all here. In my first posting for CoC, “No ‘Wow Factor’ to Hudson Yards Designs, Please,” I wrote: “District-size developments like Hudson Yards, in order to successfully integrate into the urban ecology, require time for adjustments to economic and social trends that no one can foresee.” In his Times article on Thursday, Charles V. Bagli writes:

In the end, the project could take well over a decade to complete, and its look could change significantly from the current designs by Helmut Jahn and Peter Walker… “This will get built over a generation,” said Robert Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association, said of the railyards project. “It’s a 15-to-20-year build-out, and it’ll change according to market conditions. The buildings will look very different when they get built than the images we see today. And it wouldn’t surprise me to see the commercial towers get built later, rather than sooner.”

Taking the long view, then, these delays may not be such a bad thing.

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