Comments jimpharo has made

Pile of Hooey

I have lived and worked in the WTC neighborhood on and off since 1982.

What's being re-built is nothing like what's described.  Try buying groceries, going to a movie, dropping off your laundry or taking out a library book.

This is a myth.  What's being built in lower Manhattan is basically downtown Newark, J, which is essentially a horizontal office park.

Sure, there's a surge in very-high-end housing, and a new Chanel store, but this neighborhood is following all the bad design principles cities have foolishly followed for the last 50 years: open "plazas" no one will use; non-existent or inaccessable street-level retail walls; huge traffic thoroughfares at street level slicing things up; and an excess of "dead" zones (i.e., areas that are not conducive to actice street life, which was Jacobs' great insight), to wit, about a dozen memorials (WTC, Irish Famine, Vietnam Vets, Holocaust, 3/4 of Battery Park (WWII Airmen, Merchant Marine, Coast Guard, Korean War Vets, etc.)

Tourists will be the main population after office workers, and they'll sheepishly follow the signs for where they are supposed to go.  But they will have no sense of the urban environment that thrives elsewhere in NYC, and that once upon a time, before Austin Tobin (sp?) and David Rockefeller, flourished here.On Rebuilding the NYC financial district has resulted in a walkable residential community posted 2 years, 2 months ago 4 Responses