O, Canada: Paper Sniffs at NYC Mega-Projects

Yesterday the Globe and Mail, Canada’s paper of record, weighed in with an assessment of Atlantic Yards and the state of NYC’s big developments in general. Basically, our neighbor to the north doesn’t seem all that impressed with what it sees. The story’s got a zinger about B2, the first non-arena building on tap for AY (“a red-and-pink agglomeration reminiscent of a hillside shantytown”), and it notes the “stark” contrast between a $15-a-head Atlantic Yards fundraiser held at Southpaw last week and the unveiling of the luxury boxes for the Barclays Center (“you could pony up $540,000 a year for one of 12 ‘elite’ boxes, which, in an illustration that rich people operate in a different sphere of logic, are actually bunkers, located under the bleachers, with no view of the action”). The article ends by sticking it to the Bloomberg administration’s various grand and doomed plans:

Atlantic Yards isn’t the only large-scale development in trouble. At the end of March, the developer Tishman Speyer was granted the rights to build office space, parklands, and residential towers on Manhattan’s West Side Railyards. But two weeks ago, when it couldn’t change the terms of the billion-dollar deal it had just agreed to, it walked off like a spoiled child. The Bloomberg Administration now has two failures to its credit in that one spot, after its ill-fated plan for a football stadium died with its Olympic bid. Still, the administration, which doesn’t seem to grasp that New York is a city of people who live at street level, continues to push these sorts of high concept developments. Up in Harlem, city council has just approved a rezoning that will see skyscraping office buildings and luxury condos consume historic 125th Street. The local community was opposed to it, of course. Not that it mattered.

Not Mr. Gehry’s Neighbourhood? [Globe and Mail]
Railyards photo by masnyc; unhappy face by Cubtracker.