Dan Witz has been a busy little boy lately, covering NYC with his eerily realistic and freakishly twisted “Ugly New Buildings”, a commentary on well the ugly new buildings being erected all over the place.
Dan explains to Wooster Collective:
This year’s series, “Ugly New Buildings”, addresses how in the past few years much of my neighborhood in Brooklyn has been torn down to make way for luxury housing. Personally, I can’t say I like the new modern architecture very much. For the most part it’s sterile and alienating and so arrogantly disconnected with its surroundings sometimes it seems like giant alien space ships have landed in the night. But resenting gentrification in New York City is futile, like complaining about the weather or other forces of (urban) nature. For this year’s project I decided to work with it.
These are photo-based, heavily re-painted stickers, mounted on plastic and glued to the walls of the Ugly New Buildings. In May I put up around 30 and about half are still there.
This is def something I am feeling and appreciating after seeing the death of Williamsburg and other parts of BKLYN!
NYC is really starting to suck! It is bad enough that you can’t walk down Broadway in SoHo, because of the millions of tourists that flock to the strip, that is now nothing more than a Long Island shopping mall, but even the streets off Broadway are being killed by “designer” stores. For years now every damn corporate designer from around the globe has pushed out the small boutique owners and affordable places to eat, with their over priced and gaudy apparel. The “Dirty Deli” aka SoHo Natural, on the corner of Spring and Greene is the latest victim. Sure the places nickname makes it sound less than appetizing, but all the food was always fresh and pretty tasty. Due to no longer being able to afford their lease, the deli will be closing its doors for good, after decades of service to the neighborhood. No longer will we be able to get a drink and some fruit while sitting on the tagged up benches that line the outside wall off the deli, as we take in the sites of NYC. SoHo Natural is the deli on the corner from this office, so I join in the pain of the community as we are displaced from the our morning coffee and mid afternoon snacks. The rumor is that the lease has been given to yet another Italian designer. Just what the neighborhood needs, another place to buy overpriced sunglasses and bags!!
First I must say that I love playing Tetris as much as the next nerd, but I prefer to keep my block building challenges in the arcade and not on the streets. However, the folks at Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov, LLC disagree with me and brought the Ruski video game style to Hell’s Kitchen with this hideous example of style wars. Check out the way the glass and cheap metal just blend naturally into the classic brick and cement styling of the existing building, that is being given a virtual noogie by this monstrosity. I can’t even put how horrid this is into words other than WTF?!? On that note, I will let this image do the talking for me…
My good friend (hahahah) Peter Vallone is back at it again. Having failed miserably in his fight to curb graffiti in NYC (including a huge rise in graffiti in his own neighborhood - which he blames on Arizona Ice Tea!) and after being humiliated on the Colbert Report after a 6 year old was fined for writing on the sidewalk with chalk, Vallone is now going after what may be an even easier victim than a little child - your occasional dabbler of vandalism. Vallone is proposing a requirement for all construction sites to clean any vandalism from their wooden barrier fences or face steep fines. Perhaps it is Petey boys connection to Michael Bloomberg that has caused him to conjure up this idea. You see, often construction site graffiti is commentary by those in the neighborhood on the horrible yuppie welcoming, gentrification mega condos that are destroying NY, and we all know Bloomers wants his legacy in NYC to be the death of the working class and elimination of your right to protest or speak up. Jeez, is it 2009 yet, so we can oust these poor excuses for representatives of the people?!?
The National Trust for Historic Preservation announced today that Manhattan’s Lower East Side has made their list of “America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places“. The Lower East Side has long been a home to immigrants and their families, many of whom entered through Ellis Island and later moved all over America, but is now falling victim to over development and the same gentrification policies that are killing all of NYC. Now that SoHo and other parts of downtown Manhattan have been destroyed of any character the money hungry, soul-less developers have moved on to the L.E.S., with the help (and hand in pocket backing) of the Bloomberg administration, who issued permits to level a dozen buildings last year, compared with just one in 2006. No one wants the crack heads and violence of old NYC back (see video below) but a Gap and Starbucks on every block is not what NYC is about or needs either!
Just one week after the $1 billion dollar deal with Tishman Speyer to develop the West Side Rail Yards collapsed, the MTA has reached a tentative deal with Related Cos. to take on the project. With the City committed $2.1 billion to expanding the 7 train west to the Javitz Center, this deal was top priority for Mayor Bloomers. (Maybe the 7 line will be expanded less than 4 decades from now, unlike the still non-existent 2nd Avenue line).
