Get ready for some hysterical nonsense...
http://nypost.com/2015/05/03/save-ce...ter-buildings/
Save Central Park from the attack of the monster buildings!
By Nicole Gelinas
May 3, 2015
Quote:
New, super tall towers along West 57th Street and Central Park South are casting the park below 72nd Street into deeper shadow.
If you don’t like this, who do you blame?
Not greedy developers or evil foreign billionaires.
Instead, blame the mayor and your city councilperson — because they could have stopped this a year ago if they wanted to.
Everyone who walks through Midtown — or peers at it from the park — has noticed One57, the 1,004-foot apartment tower between Sixth and Seventh avenues (the one where the crane fell off), and 432 Park Ave., the 1,396-foot tower at Park and 56th (28 feet taller than the old World Trade Center’s north tower).
Six to 11 more are coming. Extell, the One57 developer, is building another, 1,479-foot tower a block away.
There’s nothing wrong with tall. The old World Trade Center towers defined our skyline. And change is good, too.
But there’s nothing wrong, either, with government responding to change.
That’s what’s been happening in our city for a century: Just as developers figure out how to build new things, the city makes sure they’re building those new things under some rational rules.
As the Municipal Art Society — which helped save Grand Central Terminal as well as the Tweed Courthouse last century — points out, New York got its first zoning code in 1916.
That was a year after the 38-story Equitable Building “rose straight up from the sidewalk, blocking sunlight to surrounding offices.”
The new code forced developers to build towers set back from the street so as not to block out (too much) light and air.
Today, the same thing is happening that always happens: Technology is outpacing regulations. Just as Airbnb can turn apartment buildings into hotels, developers can use modern design and engineering to build ever-tallertowers into the sky on tiny, tiny spaces.
This is not entirely good.
The new Extell tower will cast a three-quarters-of-a-mile shadow along Central Park on a winter day — just when New Yorkers stuck in the city most need a little sun.
And yes, yes, each individual shadow is small. But all of them together, as Clayton Smith of Community Board 5 said at a town-hall meeting last week, “will wall off Central Park South.”
And as the Municipal Art Society’s Anand Amin added, “The fundamental problem here is outdated zoning regulations,” allowing for new buildings to have “a dramatic impact on . . . Central Park.”
Calling a timeout and deciding what’s more important in this particular circumstance — private construction and building-maintenance jobs, or the protection of a public asset that future generations will use — is perfectly reasonable.
And it’s not that hard. As Amin noted, “The city could issue a temporary moratorium on building permits for super-tall towers” . . . today.
Yet city pols seem content to talk about the matter without doing anything.
The community board has been studying shadows for more than a year.
Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer told the attendees that “we don’t want shadows on our park” — but didn’t say much beyond that.
City Councilmembers Dan Garodnick, Corey Johnson and Mark Levine, who all represent the area, are all deeply concerned, too — they make sure to tell their constituents. But they haven’t done anything, either.
Levine wants the council to think about passing a bill creating . . . another task force.
And Mayor de Blasio has been quiet.
As Amin of the Municipal Art Society told the concerned citizenry, “In the 18 months” since the society’s initial shadow report came out, “there has been no city action in response, while more towers threaten to overwhelm our parks and public spaces . . . [T]he de Blasio administration needs to take action.”
By the time the council and the mayor do something, all the new towers will be up, or far along — or the luxury real-estate bubble will have burst, and developers won’t be building them, anyway.
You can consider for yourself whether that’s corruption — the pols are afraid of big real estate — or incompetence.
Whichever.
But the next time you hear a pol complaining about foreign billionaires shadowing Central Park, remember that talk is cheap, winter is coming — and the shadows will soon grow longer.
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What an idiot.
http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article...ns-god-willing
Quote:
...Members of Community Board 5, which represents midtown, oppose the way super-tall towers are being developed in the area around One57, which will soon count as its neighbors a 950-foot building being developed by Vornado and another Extell project, the 1,400-foot Nordstrom Tower.
But there is not much they can do. Mr. Barnett has been simply shifting around the total amount of square feet that is already allowed on the block, and not actually adding any density, meaning he could build another tower without public approvals.
Moving so-called air rights around a block has long served as a crucial way for owners of landmarks and other buildings not built to maximum density to generate revenue by selling their unused development potential. The Chrysler Building was constructed in this way, and the city has created special districts, such as West Chelsea, where these rights can be transferred across neighborhoods, and is even studying a way to make exchanges easier elsewhere in the city.
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NEW YORK is Back!
“Office buildings are our factories – whether for tech, creative or traditional industries we must continue to grow our modern factories to create new jobs,” said United States Senator Chuck Schumer.
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