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Originally Posted by Amanita
It's full of businesses catering to people who aren't rich, is what I suspect. That and tourists staying in the area.
Gotta get rid of everything that isn't luxury retail or high end dining.
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Originally Posted by TonyTone
Thats what im wondering why are people calling a place dumpy with multiple ethnicities of people and guess what...
This place has more culture and good people then a tourist location like 42nd.
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Originally Posted by BK1985
Ground level retail high end and lower end are part of the lifeblood of the city. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean that it’s disgusting. I can tell you that once these are wiped out it will be replaced with a bank branch or Walgreens/Duane Reade.
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All perfect points. My problem with the area stems from the lack of density. The busiest transit center in the country should be the center of a dense environment. But New York isn't
only about office space, retail has a large part in the show as well. Vornado, which is in the retail business, knows this. It's why sites 7 and 8 (Hotel Penn & Manhattan Mall) will have nearly double the retail that is there now. It's why nearly all of the office towers on Manhattan streets have required retail.
The best aspect of New York is it's streetlife, and a mix of cultures on those streets. You have office workers (and other workers) mixed in with shoppers mixed in with tourists mixed in with students and just plain ordinary people going for a walk. The "hum" of the taxis and buses, the "blaring" of the horns and sirens. It's that mixture that makes the atmosphere so great. We have to be smart about how we redevelop areas, and how much of the atmosphere that makes New York, New York we could lose is not done properly. To this day, people still complain about what Times Square has become, and many people don't like the Hudson Yards (even though one was a dangerous and seedy place, the other a desolate and out of the way wasteland).
Yeah, we can put modern infrastructure (skyscrapers) to support office growth in the area
without erasing what draws New Yorkers to the area in the first place. And that's what you want to keep, people who go into the area because they
want to be there, not just people who go because it's where work is. We don't want a sterile environment. We want it to be everything that New York is, so New Yorkers don't feel like strangers in their own city.