NYC Architecture and Development

New York City is dead forever
By James Altucher
August 17, 2020 | 4:16pm | Updated


Very disturbing piece written in the NYPost.

I just don't understand how all this could collapsed in 5 months after 12 years of an epic bull market on Wall Street?

There are always people who want to see NYC die. Fuck em all.
 
Because why not. The Roosevelt and governors island concepts are fun to read through. https://www.designboom.com/architec...allest-carbon-sink-tower-new-york-09-15-2020/
I wonder what the carbon "sink" to consumption ratio would be. Building an elaborate, materially intensive super tall tower with some potted plants on it.
I love speculative projects, but I'm tired of seeing sustainability being the headliner then the same repeated surface-level strategies used...

Also, a giant leg???
 
I wonder what the carbon "sink" to consumption ratio would be. Building an elaborate, materially intensive super tall tower with some potted plants on it.
I love speculative projects, but I'm tired of seeing sustainability being the headliner then the same repeated surface-level strategies used...

Also, a giant leg???

Yeah, I didn't know what to expect when opening the link, but they're really just proposing potted plants and trees all over the place. That, and including an office in every unit to encourage work from home behavior to decrease traffic emissions, which in reality would be turned into another bedroom for a lot of families/young roommates.

As they're vague about the numbers, they likely took the average carbon consumption of an average tree, not one in a pot, assumed high level efficiency in the units, and that nobody would drive to work to make this thing a "carbon sink"
 
Because why not. The Roosevelt and governors island concepts are fun to read through. https://www.designboom.com/architec...allest-carbon-sink-tower-new-york-09-15-2020/
yeah... sooo... that Roosevelt Island project is just rendering porn. Off the top of my head I can think of at least 2 landmarked structures an entire college campus that was literally just built, and the last constructed work by Louis Kahn which woudl all have to be demolished for that structure to be built. Never mind the transportation nightmare that would come from a structure that big on that island. The cherry blossom festival a few years ago brought a fraction of the people this tower would to Roosevelt Island and wait times for the subway and tram were hours long. Interesting to look and and think about but you might as well draw a 2,000 foot tower in the middle of the Public Gardens . Its never going to happen. Nothing remotely like this will ever happen there.
 
I flew right over Nyc Last night. I'm amazed at how well these shots came out... taken 9/25/2020 at 9pm on an AA flight from CLT to BOS.

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Living in a NYC supertall is not problem-free, and may never be.
The nearly 1,400-foot tower at 432 Park Avenue, briefly the tallest residential building in the world, was the pinnacle of New York’s luxury condo boom half a decade ago, fueled largely by foreign buyers seeking discretion and big returns.

Six years later, residents of the exclusive tower are now at odds with the developers, and each other, making clear that even multimillion-dollar price tags do not guarantee problem-free living. The claims include millions of dollars of water damage from plumbing and mechanical issues; frequent elevator malfunctions; and walls that creak like the galley of a ship — all of which may be connected to the building’s main selling point: its immense height, according to homeowners, engineers and documents obtained by The New York Times.

 
$15,000 per year minimum spend at the restaurant. Oof.
 
have y'all see this yet?

I'm in it for the new public space and how it pulls back to keep Grand Central visible. I can't quite wrap my head around the new interior public spaces including subway and passage upgrades but on principle I'm for them. The design seems ok and I'm interested in the structural engineering of the mega columns at the base but the building just looks soooooo damn phallic. Like, we aren't even trying to pretend tall buildings aren't dicks an more.

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images from here:
https://newyorkyimby.com/2021/02/16...75-park-avenue-in-midtown-east-manhattan.html
 
The collapse of the commercial office market in NYC, and the impact of substantially fewer riders on NYC's subway and commuter rail operations and finances.

But no city in the United States, and perhaps the world, must reckon with this transformation more than New York, and in particular Manhattan, an island whose economy has been sustained, from the corner hot dog vendor to Broadway theaters, by more than 1.6 million commuters every day.

Across Midtown and Lower Manhattan, the country’s two largest central business districts, there has never been more office space — 16.4 percent — for lease, much higher than in past crises, including after the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001 and the Great Recession in 2008.

The loss of workers has caused the market value of commercial properties that include office buildings to plunge nearly 16 percent during the pandemic, triggering a sharp decline in tax revenue that pays for essential city services, from schools to sanitation.

Real estate and commercial buildings contribute almost half of the city’s property tax revenues. For the first time in more than two decades, New York expects property tax receipts to decline, by an estimated $2.5 billion in the next fiscal year.

The amount of office space in Manhattan on the market has risen in recent months to 101 million square feet, roughly 37 percent higher than a year ago and more than all the combined downtown office space in Los Angeles, Atlanta and Dallas. “This trend has shown little signs of slowing down,” said Victor Rodriguez, director of analytics at CoStar, a real estate company.

Only 15 percent of workers have returned to offices in New York City and the surrounding suburbs, up slightly from 10 percent last summer, according to Kastle Systems, a security company that analyzes employee access-card swipes in more than 2,500 office buildings nationwide. Only San Francisco has a lower rate.

A year ago the pandemic drained the subway of nearly all its riders, sickened thousands of New York City transit workers and plunged North America’s largest public transit agency into its worst financial emergency ever.

Today ridership on the subway has crept back up to about a third of its usual levels, from an all-time low of 7 percent last spring.

The M.T.A.’s long-term survival depends on the return of riders and their fares, which make up the agency’s largest funding source. Nearly 40 percent of the agency’s operating revenue comes from fares, a higher percentage than almost any other major American transit system.

public transit officials are confronting a sobering reality: a growing consensus that ridership may never return entirely to its prepandemic levels and that the agency will have to reshape and reduce service to reflect new commuting patterns.

The confluence of factors causing riders to turn their back on mass transit risks stalling the region’s recovery, transportation and economic experts warn. A surge of car traffic into Manhattan would cause gridlock and the loss of productivity and higher air pollution that come with increased congestion. And if ridership does not bounce back, the transportation agency could sink back into a financial crisis.
 
The collapse of the commercial office market in NYC, and the impact of substantially fewer riders on NYC's subway and commuter rail operations and finances.















Belongs more in the post-COVID Urbanism Discussion thread, and the first article, in particular, is one of the more sensationalized and unbalanced pieces of journalism I've read on this topic thus far. Of course changes will transpire due to COVID, but the "manhattan is dead" alarm is quite tired at this point already.
 
I lived in a 700+ footer, maybe not quite the same, but here are the problems (all first of the first world, top of the food chain totem pole problems):

- Creaking as the building sways in the wind (usually in a violent storm). I used to call our place the "pirate ship". Scared the heck out of my wife.
- Swaying building - I did not notice it, but had a family member feel dizzy when visiting.
- Cloudy days shrouded the apartment in a thick fog and had zero visibility. Go down to the street level and can see everything around you perfectly.
- Running the tub and waiting 10 minutes for hot water in the morning, because the water travelled 600 vertical feet to get to me through a series of pumps.
- Ears popping and getting headaches from the express elevator that first stop was on the 35th floor. Every time it passed the 40th floor.... pop pop pop, oof that hurts. We had friends in the building that would start the shower, then go back to bed for 30 minutes until it warmed up.
- When the power went out a couple of times (city thing, not the building), you are stuck hundreds of feet off the ground. Or you can walk 40, 50 or 60 flights of stairs.
- SUPER windy at all times. A breeze at street level is very intense when you live up high. A constant dull whistling / howling sound as the wind passed over the windows.
- Elevator sensors being thrown off, taking the elevator out of service from the above mentioned high wind coming in from the roof. Take out an elevator, reserve another for moving, now you have 1 elevator for 40 floors of apartments.
- Wealthy international college students and tech bro's getting lit and destroying the private resident's only roof club. Literally get fined on the regular and laugh, pay the fine, destroy the place some more.

Living in a NYC supertall is not problem-free, and may never be.


 
Can we get one of these? Maybe in the Seaport, Charlestown, or East Boston?


All of our parks are going to float if we don't start directing investment towards curbing sea-level rise instead over blowing wads on optics novelties geared directly to attracting fluff pieces w/ panorama shots on the front page of the paper's Lifestyle section.

Coincidentally enough, also a lesson NYC should be heeding.
 

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