Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
If we preserve 100% of old buildings, then, yes, you will create a museum city like Venice.
The fact is that the vast majority of Manhattan is prewar architecture, and most of these older buildings aren't going anywhere.
What's wrong with having a few new buildings in the city? Why do we have to preserve everything old, when we want a dynamic, growing city? If we had this mentality decades ago, the Empire State Building would have never been built. It replaced the very attractive original Waldorf Astoria.
And some postwar buildings will be replaced, but not all. Some postwar buildings are landmarked too, many are more valuable than the prewars (because of better floorplates and ceiling heights), and many are already built to maximum zoning.
Again, the vast majority of Manhattan is prewar, so if your rule is "no destruction of any prewars" you will basically get a museum city with little to no development. Manhattan has very few parking lots (and there are essentially none in Midtown), and prewars outnumber postwars by probably 5-to-1.
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Just because prewar outnumber postwar doesn't give it the okay to tear them down. We have have a lot of new buildings going up their is nothing wrong with that but these new buildings can be built in places where they don't have to tear down historic buildings that add to the character of the city. All glass new buildings makes for a dull dead street front if the whole city was that. Just because old buildings in the past where torn down doesn't make it alright to do it as I will say again. You don't need all new buildings for a city to grow. There is nothing wrong with a museum city as you like to call it because you can still have a extremely nice business districts and commercial districts like london but preserve most of your old buildings. Its the problem is where is it stop? Oh this one is okay because it is a nice new tall building then the same argument will be brought up over and over again until we finally see the loss of historic buildings and the effects on the city.
I am not anti-new development but i realize that our old buildings should be preserved and redone to give the city a sense of character. While places where historic buildings aren't which there are plenty can be made room for new development. If you want a all new district with all new developments there are huge amounts of land in manhattan with projects on them that don't add any character that can be bought and utilized.