What’s happening in/with/to Astor Place?

The site on 2-6-12, this image and others via EVGrieve.

The double-Starbucks vortex is long gone. The old Cooper Union building has now been totally demolished. A wide open space remains, vibrating with possibility. To many old-timers in the neighborhood, it’s less the possibility for cool new stuff and revitalization of aging office stock and more like the threat of the further destruction of a mythologized and romanticised East Village Bohemia. New buildings like this symbolize either proud human progress or the suburbanization and murder of the soul of the City, depending what side you’re on.

Live anywhere long enough and you get pretty attached and maybe you mourn even when things change for the better. Maybe in part because I have only lived here for ten years, I don’t view the City or the neighborhood as a museum or monument to be preserved and protected. I view it as a wonderful organism that is continually growing and changing as the needs and desires of the people in it change. Cities are supposed to change to reflect current realities. I tend to be accepting of those realities and cautiously optimistic, usually, about the gentrification of the East Village, so I’ve been watching the changes with interest.

Just this week, the new marketing website for the building went up at 51astorplace.com and I went on a spree of historical interweb-digging. Here’s some history of the site and the decade-long wrangling that had led up to the current plan: a shiny, new $200M Fumihiko Maki-designed office tower in cool black granite and clear glass. Buried in the building website is the tidbit that a new “urban plaza” will contain a sculpture by Calder and the lobby will contain “a major sculpture by a renowned artist.”

6-19-2001, Village Voice: Dis-Astor Place?

11-4-2001, NYT: NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: COOPER SQUARE; East Villagers Pull Out Their Magenta Hair Over Cooper Union’s Expansion Plans

7-28-2002, NYT: NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: EAST VILLAGE; Planners Wary of College’s Expansion, But Cooper Union Calls It Essential

2-28-2011, Curbed: Starbucks-Crushing Astor Place Office Building Will Open in 2013

6-8-2011, EV Grieve: 51 Astor Place demolition begins July 1; 17 months to build new black-glass tower

7-6-2011, TRD: Minksoff: 51 Astor Place will be “most advanced building built in NYC” since BofA’s 42nd Street HQ

9-14-2011, RE Weekly: Minskoff proceeds with 51 Astor on spec

11-3-2011, NY Observer: Construction Loan Locked Down at Minskoff’s 51 Astor

2-1-2012, TRD: Astor Master

2-15-2012, NY Observer: Minsikoff’s 51 Astor May Be New York’s Strangest New Building

Almost forgot to post this! Here’s what I read for fun in 2011. I wish I had more time for reading books, but I know where that time went: it went dancing, it went to the gym, it went walking. I read less than the last couple of years but was far, FAR more active. So, at least there’s that.

JANUARY
Lunar Park – Bret Easton Ellis
No one belongs here more than you : stories – Miranda July
The time traveler’s wife – Audrey Niffenegger
Perfume : the story of a murderer – Patrick Suskind

FEBRUARY
She Comes First – Ian Kerner
Villette – Charlotte Brontë
Sophie’s Choice – William Styron
The Notebook – Nicholas Sparks

MARCH
Snow Crash – N. Stephenson
Neuromancer – W. Gibson

APRIL
The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson – Mark Fisher (editor)
A Game of Thrones – G.R.R. Martin [reread]

MAY
A Clash of Kings – G.R.R. Martin [reread]

JUNE
A Storm of Swords – G.R.R. Martin [reread]

JULY
A Feast for Crows – G.R.R. Martin [reread]
American Pacifica – Anna North

AUGUST
A Dance with Dragons – G.R.R. Martin
A Reliable Wife – Goolrick
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest – Larsson

SEPTEMBER
The New Rules of Lifting for Women – Schuler
Pattern Recognition – W. Gibson
The Last Werewolf – Duncan
The Multi-Orgasmic Man – Chia
The Constant Princess – P. Gregory
The Loving Dominant – J. Warren

OCTOBER
The Golden Compass – P. Pullman
Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!: A Novel – Kenzaburo Oe

NOVEMBER
On a Pale Horse – Piers Anthony
The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins
Catching Fire – Suzanne Collins

DECEMBER
Mockingjay – Suzanne Collins
The Fermata – N. Baker

CURRENTLY READING
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – John le Carré

[goodreads] [2010] [2009]

I came across this website/art project called N SKY C a few weeks ago and have been visiting it periodically since. It’s one of those super-simple elegant concepts, like I wish I’d thought to do that! Great color inspiration.

N SKY C – The average color of the New York City sky, updated every 5 minutes.

Article: ‘Rent is too damn high’ candidate facing eviction

NYC’s housing laws are a hideous labyrinth of insanity. If I didn’t live here I wouldn’t really believe it works the way it does.

Hundreds of thousands of NYC’s apartments are currently entangled in some kind of rent regulation, a disease which began to spread through the city like some Lovecraftian tentacled beastas early as the 40′s. “Rent control” applies to certain apartments that a qualifying tenent has lived in continuously. When the tenant leaves the apartment, the apartment is no longer “rent controlled” and becomes “rent stabilized”. Both programs have maximum rents and increases as well as terms for landlords.

Then we have “affordable housing” which are special apartments set aside for certain preferred groups within certain inclome thresholds. Of course, the good apartments that are set aside for “affordable housing” are highly sought after and sham lotteries take place, wherein the most savvy and well-connected examples of the preferred income classes are able to secure far below market rents in new buildings, often by working their personal government connections and hiding their true incomes.

Of course, artificially low rents in the most desireable real estate in the country create great incentives for people to hang on to their rent controlled housing at all costs, so we have plenty of people subletting their units for market rate on the sly, renting multiple units and claiming the most advantageous one as the “primary residence,” etc. The housing system in NYC (rent control/stabilization as well as “affordable housing”) is set up in such a way as to encourage and reward this gaming of the system.

I don’t think I will ever understand why we allow any of this to happen. No matter what your level of interest in assisting lower income individuals with their housing, it makes no sense to attempt to house the poor in the highest value neighborhoods in the country. To attempt to do so in a way that ensures that much of the assistance is not even going to “the poor” who are the intended recipients of said subsidies – to instead create a system that rewards dishonest hoarding of resources by well-connected mooches – just blows my mind to smithereens of rage and always has.

So, when I saw this article the other day featuring one of the City’s most loudmouthed of morons and biggest figureheads for the economic idiocy that is artificial rent-fixing, I felt a satisfaction and pleasure that I very, very rarely feel when I look at the New York Post.

OK Spotify. We need to talk.

I’m really enjoying listening to you and everything. You have a lot – a LOT – of great music of many different genres available. So far you’ve had about 90% of the stuff for which I’ve searched. Pretty great!

But your ads need some serious work. First, they’re awfully frequent. Pandora and Last.fm have some ads, but they don’t annoy me or interrupt every couple of songs.

Second and more important, Spotify, your ads aren’t relevant. Not even a little bit. I’m a savvy, modern, demanding, early-adopting consumer here. I’m used to being catered to. I am completely spoiled. Even worse for you, I work in marketing and spend 30% or more of my waking time thinking about social media and internet marketing. So I’m well aware that with every search I perform on your platform and every song I listen to, I’m providing you with lots and lots of data. You know I have nicely organized playlists, that I like really techno, electro, rap, industrial and rock music, that I also like french chanson, classic jazz and female singer-songwriters.

So tell me: Why in the world would you interrupt my witchhaus electro listening experience with a clip of the new Katy Perry song? And why would you interrupt it again, just two short songs later, with a long ad for your sponsored playlist of “Hot Country Songs of Summer”? In ten minutes you managed to spam me with the one pop singer I currently really, really can’t stand – which you would know is nowhere to be found in my extensive playlists – and the one genre that does not appear in my listening queue.

With all of the information that I have provided, I expect you to do better than this. I love advertising and I know we already have the technology to do better. There is simply no excuse.

I have been trying to understand what yesterday’s debt deal actually means. I know I am not a stupid person, but it’s still making my brain hurt, thus, this is not an essay, it’s a brain dump as I try to sort through it. Just looking at, for example, the defense budget and possible cuts, it looks like a bunch of bullshit that doesn’t generate real spending “cuts” at all. I read that the maximum amount of defense cuts over the next decade is $900 billion, which sounds like a nice big number to most normal people. But any savings percentages quoted in the news are calculated based on a percentage of planned spending, taken from Obama’s Feb budget, which does not include the wars. Which means there are no savings or cuts per se, just slightly smaller planned increases in spending. And somehow this is enough to make the warhawks scream and wail (I have literally heard things like “They want to destroy our military, this deal is a Muslim plot!”). What?!

To use an analogy I better understand, isn’t this so much ado about nothing, sort of like if I were to announce that I have cut $2000 from my household budget because I have decided I will decline to buy a new pair of YSL boots next year? I know I’m just a girl and all so I may not understand things like the defense budget but does this seem like the kind of radical austerity that would actually bring our spending back to reasonable levels and stave off a downgrade? It seems like the time is ripe for some actual tough and serious compromise between our ruling parties; both parties must give up a chunk of their most sacred endless money pits – defense and entitlements. The fact that they are both unwilling to do so for the good of all is pretty telling; neither party has the good of the country in mind, all they see is a potential lessening of their power. How are they allowed to call them “cuts” if the money was never spent and spending levels are still projected to rise? Am I stupid for not understanding this?

According to Wikipedia, the 2009 U.S. military budget accounts for approximately 40% of global arms spending. Does that strike anyone else as insane? Do we need to be spending that much more than everyone else in the world? Especially when plenty of that spending goes toward sophisticated weapons systems that are useless against the kind of terror attacks we are most likely to face?

Wandering around the internet in search of information about what will happen to the country in the next ten years, I found an article about just this on HuffPo – “What if we actually cut the Pentagon budget?“  What indeed! Where is Obama? Where is the leadership so many of us voted for? Where is the president who was going to immediately close Gitmo and bring home our troops and stop getting us entangled in foreign wars? If Obama had any of the strength of his previous antiwar convictions, I’d expect him to have used this debt-ceiling crisis as an opportunity to have a real discussion about our cancerous military over-spending. Of course, I’d never have expected him to get into a nonsensical illegal war in Libya. GWB was not a good president – he was indeed a pretty awful one – but Obama is an astonishing hypocrite and coward.

Related:

When a Cut is Not a Cut – Rep. Ron Paul making some actual sense (which he tends to do when he isn’t talking about women, actually)

Recommendations of good explanations of the debt deal and related articles to read are welcomed in the comments.

Someone just sent me this article. This discussion makes me so TIRED. The problem with our relationships isn’t monogamy and “infidelity” won’t save anybody. The problem with most relationships is a lack of HONESTY – with ourselves about what we want and need, and with our partners about the same. An open marriage/relationship is NOT “infidelity.” Lying to your partner and yourself about wanting one thing (monogamy) while needing another (variety) causes the harm, not monogamy itself. Why is that so hard to articulate clearly?

The article itself is fine and, as a young Seattleite, I got much of my sex ed from Dan Savage, but the slant of the language in the article just kind of made me fume as I thought about all the times in my life I have tried to have a conversation with someone about the difference between open relationships that were honest and fully consensual vs. infidelity/cheating. I just do not see why it’s a difficult concept for people to grasp but it is.

My romantic ideal has always centered on total honesty–the idea that you could find someone in the world with whom you could be completely yourself and trust them completely with that and they would do the same. It’s a tough standard but way easier and more rewarding than monogamy.

["Married, with infidelities" - NYTimes]

Rest in peace, MJ.

August 29, 1958 – June 25, 2009

…

MTV: Michael Jackson’s Legacy, Two Years Later, By the Numbers

CBS: Michael Jackson’s music emerging as true legacy

HuffPo: Two Years After Death, Best Videos Remain (–nice roundup though I totally disagree with their top 10 selection)

Michael Jackson: King of Pop Was Also King of Compassion

Quietly and without the need or desire for recognition, Jackson visited orphanages and schools across the globe, paid the cost of funerals for those who could ill afford the expense, and supported so many charities and good causes that he was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most charities donated to by a pop star.

Indeed, the entire proceeds of his 1992/1993 Dangerous Tour went to charity, as well as his cut from the 1984 Victory Tour. Whilst the tabloid media busied themselves in tearing him down, Jackson was using his time to give to the needy, sick or deprived, visiting as many orphanages and hospitals as he did concerts.

From a very early age, Jackson was moved to tears by the suffering of others, and especially the plight of children. As a child watching images of starving African children, he told his mother he was going to ‘do something about that one day’. And, he kept to his word.

“Flaming Cactus transforms lampposts with fluorescent colored cable ties. By carefully wrapping a lamppost in two brightly colored cable ties, we can make it appear that one color is literally fading into the other. By linking cable ties (or zip ties) together you can go around the circumference of the pole. This done close to 5,000 times will cover about 25’ of pole. The end effect is a brightly colored whimsical lamppost with thousands of little “hairs” (the ends of the cable ties).

By putting up Flaming Cactuses in many different neighborhoods we hope to hit a wide range of audiences. From Upper West Side shoppers to Chelsea gallery hoppers, these posts will be “sightings” all over the city. We also want to hit deeper parts of the outer boroughs in neighborhoods that might need some “beautification”. Our hope is to show that adding art to your community doesn’t require a lot of resources, formal education, or even money. Creativity is something we’re all capable of.”

– ANIMUS arts collective

FIGMENT 2011, originally uploaded by IreneKaoru.

Tree sweaters at Figment!