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I got lost in Jersey City or Hoboken or Perth Amboy (I was lost, don’t know where I was.) So frustrating being able to see the lit-up towers of Manhattan (channeling lech) & not be able to get to them.
I’m back. Man, I could really get used to this…being driven around in a new Mercedes by a hot Chinese guy who’s playing french songs on the radio as he weaves in and out of park Avenue traffic.
Most of Queens is a nightmare to navigate unless you grew up there and know your way around and know that there are some main roads that stretch the entirety of the borough either from North to South (like Francis Lewis Blvd/Springfield Bldv) or East to West (like northern blvd or Jamaica avenue)
Lunch was fun; whittled down from original crowd but very nice. M4L, don’t know why you didn’t show up, nobody said it was canceled. Attendees included Scott, Denton, Mrs D, Snappy and me.
Attendees all agreed that next lunch will be downtown. No voting from the midtowners in absentia allowed.
OK, here are some more moderate remarks from me on R. Moses, compared with what I might otherwise say. I think he painted better on a blank canvas than when he had to work with existing densely populated areas. I also can’t imagine that we will ever hand one person so many levers of unchecked power and discretion. You take an extraordinary risk on whether that person’s planning will be good or bad. The Ric Burns New York series contrasted the early and late R. Moses by suggesting that the early Moses amassed power to build and the later Moses built to amass power. How you enable good large-scale planning with the necessary inputs and the follow-through to get it built is really a complex question.
AY is an excellent case in point. You can blame Goldstein all you want, but in my mind it really was a planning failure. If MTA sold to a developer who did not require condemnation of land beyond the MTA footprint, there would undoubtedly have been much less opposition. And if there had been an actual planning and approval process for the development, issues could have been vetted and real compromises could have been reached. Any remaining opposition might have had much less to litigate about and it might not have seemed worth doing. I suggest project success can be forecast with a simple formula:
(project size x neighbor affluence)/(planning + process) = amount of opposition and delay.
I got lost in Jersey City or Hoboken or Perth Amboy (I was lost, don’t know where I was.) So frustrating being able to see the lit-up towers of Manhattan (channeling lech) & not be able to get to them.
I’m back. Man, I could really get used to this…being driven around in a new Mercedes by a hot Chinese guy who’s playing french songs on the radio as he weaves in and out of park Avenue traffic.
Most of Queens is a nightmare to navigate unless you grew up there and know your way around and know that there are some main roads that stretch the entirety of the borough either from North to South (like Francis Lewis Blvd/Springfield Bldv) or East to West (like northern blvd or Jamaica avenue)
Lunch was fun; whittled down from original crowd but very nice. M4L, don’t know why you didn’t show up, nobody said it was canceled. Attendees included Scott, Denton, Mrs D, Snappy and me.
Attendees all agreed that next lunch will be downtown. No voting from the midtowners in absentia allowed.
OK, here are some more moderate remarks from me on R. Moses, compared with what I might otherwise say. I think he painted better on a blank canvas than when he had to work with existing densely populated areas. I also can’t imagine that we will ever hand one person so many levers of unchecked power and discretion. You take an extraordinary risk on whether that person’s planning will be good or bad. The Ric Burns New York series contrasted the early and late R. Moses by suggesting that the early Moses amassed power to build and the later Moses built to amass power. How you enable good large-scale planning with the necessary inputs and the follow-through to get it built is really a complex question.
AY is an excellent case in point. You can blame Goldstein all you want, but in my mind it really was a planning failure. If MTA sold to a developer who did not require condemnation of land beyond the MTA footprint, there would undoubtedly have been much less opposition. And if there had been an actual planning and approval process for the development, issues could have been vetted and real compromises could have been reached. Any remaining opposition might have had much less to litigate about and it might not have seemed worth doing. I suggest project success can be forecast with a simple formula:
(project size x neighbor affluence)/(planning + process) = amount of opposition and delay.
did you post flyers when you got lost?
haha, indeed.
DH, I see we’re back on the same page again.
longest day ever