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Originally Posted by Crawford
The problem with the NIMBYs is that they aren't for historic preservation, they're just reflexively against any and all change.
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That's true as well. Take for instance a building like the Tower Verre. As much of a future icon/landmark that tower will be, the NIMBYs fought with all their might against it. The building could have been half the original height, but because it had to go through the city's ULURP process, they sought to stop it, and made enough noise that we ultimately saw a head chop (though Burden insists the top needed more work).
That's not to say there aren't treasures in New York that should be saved, but instinctively insisting everything that gets demolished is worth saving just because is just another cover for NIMBYism.
And then there is this crowd, who somehow think multi-million dollar penthouses in the sky are a bad thing for the city. I find this article laughable and insulting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/13/ny...here.html?_r=0
Rizzoli Bookstore May Be Better Off Elsewhere
APRIL 11, 2014
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
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On Wednesday afternoon, two days before its scheduled closing, Rizzoli Bookstore was crowded with the sort of people who, never especially populous in Midtown Manhattan, appear even more like icicles in the desert: gray-haired women with Mohawks or turbans, students, men with indifferent facial grooming, older citizens. Some of them did not know that the building, which has housed the bookstore on West 57th Street for the past 29 years, was slated to be demolished, along with two adjoining buildings. When they were told by a salesperson they expressed the requisite shock and lament.
Rizzoli is above all a beautiful place to shop for very rarefied things, but the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission has deemed the building, over 100 years old, inadequately significant to keep in perpetuity. This has prompted outrage in various forms. A petition asking the commission to reverse its decision bears more than 16,000 signatures. In early April, the Manhattan borough president, Gale Brewer, led a rally outside the store demanding that the entire landmarks process undergo reform. “We must avoid more Rizzoli-like ambushes on our history,” she proclaimed.
Another demonstration by members of the local community board was planned for the morning of the store’s closing to decry the broader encroachments of rapid superluxury development along 57th Street.
The most visible legacy of the Bloomberg era surely will be the slender, glass and steel residential towers now going up 70, 80 and 90 stories over this reach of Midtown. In all likelihood it is one of these buildings that will eventually stand in Rizzoli’s place, a building intended to lure the wealthiest internationalists, who will rotate in and out of the city from Singapore, São Paulo, Mumbai, never staying long enough to pay local income taxes and turning the area, essentially, into the world’s costliest time-share.
Ironically, One57, perhaps the most audacious of these projects, lists Rizzoli on its website as among the area’s attractions, alongside the restaurants Daniel and Petrossian and the jewelers Bulgari and Van Cleef & Arpels.
The story of Rizzoli’s exit from Midtown is obviously not the narrative of a mom-and-pop operation shut down by corporatized mass-market interests. Although it would have been unthinkable in the 1990s, we mourn now even the diminished presence of Barnes & Noble in the city, to the extent that it signals the displacement of a cultural elite (a term itself so benighted) at the hands of an aggressively colonizing plutocracy. Among the books being sold at a 40 percent discount at Rizzoli on Wednesday was a mammoth compendium devoted to the work of the Italian architect and designer Gio Ponti. A decade ago, a familiarity with his work might have bestowed on one a certain status. Today it seems to matter little knowing who Gio Ponti was unless you can afford a $35,000 Gio Ponti chandelier. Cash is the only currency.
Rizzoli is owned by an Italian media conglomerate, which plans to relocate the store in Manhattan. The Rizzoli company was founded in the early 20th century by Angelo Rizzoli, who was orphaned at a young age and went on to make a fortune as a printer, publisher and producer of the sort of postwar Italian films shown in the sort of movie houses that have also vanished from New York. Like the oligarchs of the 21st century he had his vision set on the city’s most glamorous real estate and in accordance, the first Rizzoli store here opened at 712 Fifth Avenue in the 1960s.
Wherever the new Rizzoli lands it will be karmically better off away from the global epicenter of $90 million penthouses, renderings of which seldom seem to include a single bookshelf or any indications of a settled life. (When I visited Rizzoli I was moved to buy a book, “New York Interior Design 1935-1985: Masters of Modernism,” in part to be reminded of what luxury really is, or was — layered surfaces, found objects, rich textures — rather than the acquisition of city views so imperial they’re meant to convince you the world belongs exclusively to you.) Rizzoli should be in a place where actual New Yorkers live and shop and read.
Nine years ago another fixture on West 57th, the Ritz Thrift Shop, a purveyor of used furs, also had to move. The owners set themselves up in the garment district where one of them, Jeffrey Geters, told me recently they’ve attracted a more serious shopper who, making the trip to a store nine floors up , arrives with a sense of purpose.
“When I was on 57th Street, people walked in and said, ‘How much is the sofa?’ ‘How much is the rug?’ They thought we sold everything because the word ‘thrift’ was in the name of the store,” Mr. Geters told me.
Had the store remained, no one would be coming in now looking for a bargain.
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Meanwhile, somebody tell these idiots that once the air rights are gone, there will be no more towers.
http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/2014...tores-last-day
Locals Demand Protections for 57th Street on Rizzoli Bookstore's Last Day
State Sen. Liz Krueger at the Rizzoli Bookstore on its last day on West 57th Street.
By Mathew Katz
April 11, 2014
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As deal-hunting customers streamed in and out of the Rizzoli Bookstore on its last day, neighborhood activists and politicians said they fear its closure could lead to a "canyon of glass and steel towers" along 57th Street.
Preservationists and politicians failed in their efforts to protect the bookstore's historic building at 31 W. 57th St., which will likely be demolished. Opponents worry the building's owners, the Lefrak Family and the Vornado Realty Trust, will replace it with a tower that will cast a long shadow over Central Park.
"These buildings will be demolished to make way for glass and steel towers," said Community Board 5 Landmarks Committee Chairwoman Layla Law-Gisiko at a Friday morning rally outside the bookstore organized by the board. "CB5 is very much in favor of development, but development has to be curated."
The city's Landmarks Preservation Commission decided the building did not qualify for protection last month, and on Thursday LPC rejected another application to landmark just the building's interior since it was renovated when the bookstore moved into the former piano showroom in 1985.
"Our review concluded that because there are few remaining elements from the piano showroom era, particularly in comparison with other intact interior landmark spaces like the Steinway Piano showroom on West 57th Street, the site no longer retains the integrity of its original design, and the ca. 1985 redesign of the space does not rise to the level of an interior designation," the commission said in a statement Thursday.
On Friday morning, Community Board 5 members, joined by state Sen. Liz Krueger, called for reforms to the landmarking process and zoning changes that would protect other buildings along 57th Street, including the neighboring Chickering Building, which is also owned by Lefrak and Vornado and likely faces demolition, and the Cavalry Baptist Church.
"There won't be anything left to love if we don't stop this kind of development," Krueger said. "It's a sad day because we've already lost this one."
LeFrak and Vornado have said they plan to demolish the Rizzoli Bookstore building but they have not disclosed their plans for the site.
The store was buzzing Friday morning with buyers hoping to scoop up books at 40 percent off. The bookstore is known for hard-to-find, oversized art and fashion tomes. The owners have said they will reopen at a yet-to-be-disclosed location.
"When I was a kid, I'd come in here every weekend and look at the art books," said Miles Ladin, 45, who attended the rally and wanted to take one last look at Rizzoli before it closed. "These books aren't really at Barnes & Noble — we're really losing something."
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Somebody tell that last moron that the store is moving, not falling off the face of the earth.
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NEW YORK is Back!
“Office buildings are our factories – whether for tech, creative or traditional industries we must continue to grow our modern factories to create new jobs,” said United States Senator Chuck Schumer.
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