The Atlantic Yards project is officially an "unraveling" and "pathetic"
"fiasco;" Nick O. has deemed it so in his denunciation of the winning
bid for Manhattan's Hudson Yards:
Profit
and Public Good Clash in Grand Plans
By Nicolai Ouroussoff. NY Times.
The bitter battles over reconstruction plans for ground zero. The unraveling
of the Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn. And now this.
Given current economic realities, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s
selection on Wednesday of a team led by Tishman Speyer to develop the West Side
railyards seems like a wishful fantasy. Yet even if the project takes decades
to realize, it is a damning indictment of large-scale development in New York.
Like the ground zero and Atlantic Yards fiascos...
...In the Atlantic Yards project, Forest City Ratner acknowledged last week
that it would delay building most of the elements of Frank Gehry’s design
for that eight million-square-foot development because it is short of financing.
If built, the project would be a pathetic distortion of the
original design. And the developer already has city approval**...
We come from a different starting point than Ouroussoff, but that's okay.
Ouroussoff's predecessor, the late Herbert Muschamp, had originally
and infamously called Atlantic Yards a "garden of Eden." Oh how
the grossly out-of-scale, financially infeasible, promotionally overblown have
fallen.
(**No city approval. As Norman Oder dutifully points out, on his Atlantic
Yards Report, this is the
second instance of this error by the Times architecture critic
in less than a week.)
