Longitudinal Slum

Overheard In My Deli

A man walks into my corner deli trying to sell a pair of size 34 pants. When asked what was going on he responds "I'm trying to get some bail money together, my baby got pinched last night."

Manhattan

The Cruise

Fulton Street Mall Keepin' It Real

The New York Times takes a visit to Fulton Street in Downtown Brooklyn, a half-mile outdoor strip that can be characterized as an outdoor mall. The Fulton Street Mall comes pretty close to what the contemporary Lifestyle Center aims to be, though you would be hard pressed to find black Santa's and flier guys with teardrop tattoos in the corner of their eyes at any Lifestyle Center.

It'll be interesting to see how Fulton Street changes in the coming years - it currently balances a few name-brand retailers with a host of mom & pops, but with the changing demographics of Brooklyn it shouldn't be long before the Banana Republics and H&M's that litter New York's other outdoor mall (Soho) make their way across the East River. And in a city that is continually evolving, maybe that's not a bad thing. I certainly wouldn't mind a Duane Reade popping up somewhere near in our Bed-Stuy neighborhood. Maybe one-stop shopping is in our blood.

New York (we can even isolate Brooklyn in this case) is full of shopping strip typologies. The Atlantic Terminal Mall is of the enclosed, multi-level model. The Fulton Street Mall takes care of the outdoor strip (steps taken in the '70s such as sidewalk widening and limiting vehicular traffic (control mechanisms) formalized the strip as a mall). And sections of Brooklyn thoroughfares are packed with small, local stores serving their immediate neighborhood & demographic. Fundamentally they are all very much the same, and at the same time very different. The organization and control of space helps to define each type. The larger and more complex the type requires greater control (levels of security) which ultimately define how sanitized a place becomes. For better or worse...

Step Right Up! Brooklyn Mall Is Oasis and Anomaly [NY Times]
top image by Richard Perry

Railyard Proposals "tired, generic"

Nicolai is spot on with his take on the five West Side Railyard proposals:

...the proposals embody the kind of tired, generic planning formulas that appear wherever big development money is at stake. When thoughtful architecture surfaces at all, it is mostly a superficial gloss of culture, rather than a sincere effort to come to terms with the complex social and economic changes the city has been undergoing for the last decade or so.

If anything was to be learned from the debacle at Ground Zero, its that these large scale developments have the potential to really suck if not handled carefully. Nicolai reserves some praise for the Extell / Holl scheme, which begins to display some smarts and innovative problem solving specific to this site in particular, and the architectural treatment of these projects in general, but at the end of the day you are still left with a secluded plot of open space surrounded by glass towers all of which are cut off from the surrounding context. Which is all we can expect from this type of development, especially with the constraints imposed by the working rail yards. Jane Jacobs version / vision of New York doesn't apply here, but there is an untapped potential of how these mega-projects impact the city. Currently there is too much focus on the architecture - as Ground Zero clearly showed, the smarts of a master plan shouldn't rely so much on the design of the towers framing the plan, as it's likely David Childs will end up being responsible for the architecture at the end of the day. Unless the towers are going to push the limits of skyscaper design that will have a more operational impact on the use of the site (OMA's CCTV, or some of the original Ground Zero proposals) then what the towers look like can be limited to simple massing that express FAR ratios and square footage calculations.

In Plans for Railyards, a Mix of Towers and Parks [NY Times]

The Image Is Everything...

In what otherwise appears to be a well thought through master plan for Hudson Yards (pdf here), a series of cold and gloomy renderings manage to set the tone for the early public reaction to Extell's proposal.

Degentrification in Red Hook

Red Hook degentrifying? Likely a gentrification slow-down. Or a less rapid gentrification than what New Yorkers are used to. It is still a shit-hole, isolated from the rest of Brooklyn due to lack of conventional means of public transportation. But the IKEA has yet to open, and that is likely to bring big change, for better or worse. Public speculation about the next hot-neighborhood is ill-founded and only propagates disappointments such as these. Give it time and let it come naturally. Red Hook will get there; it may not look or smell like Williamsburg or Greenpoint (two other big shit-holes), but it'll evolve in its own special way. Remember the urban kit-of-parts is different. Naturally it will evolve differently from the rest of Brooklyn's neighborhoods.

The Embers of Gentrification [New York]

Los Angeles Denser Than New York City?

Metropolis looks at recent allegations by Robert Bruegmann that Los Angeles is actually more dense than New York City.

Not so say a group of UCLA planning students who reveal on the Livable Spaces web site that a measure of density is dependent on how density is defined:

When discussing density it is important to distinguish between population density and housing density. Population density measures the number of people per unit of land and varies depending on the time of day. Housing density is the number of homes per unit of land.

Sprawl Brawl [Metropolis]

This Weekend In The Times

Nicolai loves on Tschumi's Blue in the old neighborhood, and Eliasson gets his first major survey in the states.

Thinking Glacially, Acting Artfully [NY Times]
image by Olafur Eliasson
A Ragtag Neighborhood’s Big, Blue Newcomer [NY Times]

Google Maps Adds New Cool Feature

The Internet just keeps getting better... Google Maps has added a new street view feature (select cities only) which offers 360 degree views. Demo here.