gofeedthebears

I hate the building, although I kinda liked the little ones that were to be alongside it. Are those still to be built? With just one tall building sticking up in the Downtown skyline, especially a glass non-rectangular one, it looks so weird. I wish the tower itself was not so tall or unique. The Twin Towers, there were two of them, so from a distance it kind of made the image much less monolithic. In retrospect, the original towers look like gazillion carat diamonds compared to the Freedom Tower. Don't get me started on the name, it sounds like George W. Bush thought it up all by himself. Something like 8 World Trade Center would be appropriate, but kinda creepy. If they named the area like, Liberty Plaza after the nearby street, maybe like One Liberty Plaza would sound less kitschy because it makes sense in context of the city, and the world Liberty just in general sounds so much less propaganda-ish than Freedom. It was Give me Liberty or give me death, not Give me Freedom... and Statue of Liberty, not Statue of Freedom. Get over it Americans, we're not the only free country in the world.

Date: 12/1/2005 6:27:51 AM Author: louisville327 Date: 12/1/2005 3:30:30 AM I find it curious that you criticize New Urbanism when that is exactly what you are advocating. Here in Louisville there is a suburban New Urbanist development called Norton Commons being built as I type this. It is way out in the county in a sprawl zone, but it includes multi-family buildings, detached and attached homes, and a general density level much higher than surrounding subdivisions. It is precisely the suburban development you desire, and it is very much a New Urbanist design. quote> I do not disagree with New Urbanism, but I feel it's kind of misguided in trying to recreate an urban atmosphere--I'd imagine most people who choose to live that far from the city center would be looking for a suburban atmosphere. The houses I've seen in pictures of most New Urbanist developments look a lot more like Trenton, NJ than Flushing, NY.

All right, so as my previous post was trying to exemplify, neighborhoods suburban in character can actually be surprisingly dense (as opposed to New Urbanism, which purposely tries to imitate the urban character, thus rendering the development of suburbs in the New Urbanist style rather useless, since the point of moving to the suburbs is the character, regardless of density or walkability). I remember being in the eighth or ninth grade when I saw an modern-day sprawled suburb for the first time. I couldn't imagine how people could live like that (living in the country or a small town is one thing, but locating a wealthy suburb two hours from the nearest city center and thus invading rural areas and small towns with cookie-cutter houses is a different story). Then last year I saw an overhead photograph of a modern day development, and I noticed that there was a sort of primeval foresty area in the middle of the block--turns out this is quite common these days, and I didn't understand it either--that forest is separated on four sides from its ecosystem and pretty much worthless (the same amount of developed land closer together would result in the same amount of leftover forest--just in a more sensible location as part of the rest of the surrounding forest). What sprawl is resulting in is tracts of undeveloped land sandwiched between tracts of developed land, and I'm sure you didn't need me to tell you that. But what I'm curious about is why it seems so impossible these days for developers to build dense neighborhoods that are suburban in character like they used to. To me, it just makes more sense environmentally to keep sprawl limited to the areas immediately around cities (thus preventing wasted land in between that can barely be considered nature) and to develop neighborhoods as densely as plausible to prevent the land coverage of sprawl. I feel like I have a lot more to say, but I'm gonna pause here and see if anyone is interested in this discussion. So as an alternative to the wasteful (and anti-neighborhood) modern development and the good-willing but impractical New Urbanism, I propose densification of America's suburbs as a solution. I'm going to take pictures of my block and probably a few others in my neighborhood to show how a suburban character is maintained in a surprisingly dense setting. I feel what is needed are: construction of two- and three-family houses that are desirable to own, live in, and rent out; construction of more desireable attached properties mixed in neighborhoods with signle family houses; extreme reduction of backyard size in favor of more large nearby parks. I feel development in new suburbs and cities should maintain at least a block density (see my last post) of 12,000 people per square mile, and strive for numbers closer to 20,000. I also believe desireable apartment buildings should also be located throughout suburban neighborhoods (2-6 story brick or whatever standard fare) and integrated instead of separated with the single-family detached house neighborhoods so that young and displaced residents can have someplace affordable to live in their own neighborhood. Oh yeah, and I'm also all for the end of the cul-de-sac trend (any that result because of impossibilty of linkage on both sides makes sense, but a neighborhood entirely made up of them makes it impossible to walk from one place to another without taking unneccessarily long routes). Any thoughts? Opposition would be fun.

(This is just a preliminary background thingy--you can just skip to my next post) So the other day I used factfinder.census.gov to find out the population density of my census tract, but it turned out a nine-hole golfcourse bigger than my immediate neighborhood was located in the tract, effectively cutting the density in half. So then I picked the option where you can check the denisty of every single block. I did so, and it turns out my block in a highly suburban part of Queens, NY has a density of 53,000 people per square mile! (nearly 400 people on however big a block so it would come to that number). This intrigued me, so I started checking the blocks in my town outside my immediate dense neighborhood (the neighborhood is a small area of about 7 blocks from 65th to 70th Avenues--the densest block was nearly 70,000 people per square mile--and none of those townhouses are more than 3 stories!), and so here's the numbers: Typical detached single-family house block (Levittown era): around 8,000 per mi. sq. Typical two-story garden apartment block: around 20,000 per mi. sq, courtyards are the equivalents of backyard space With these numbers in mind, I'd assume a block of semi-detached houses or narrow houses approaches 11,000 and a block of two-family houses approaches 16,000. I'm still astounded by the fact that my block of mostly townhouses and semi-detached two-family houses (we call them four-family houses for short, although it's technically an incorrect description) with fairly high real estate (my family's rent for 900 sq ft. is 1,700 a month--and this is 11 or 12 miles from Manhattan) could be so dense, but numbers don't lie, I guess. If anyone else has the time, and if you live on a developed block that forms a definite polygon with little wasted space, I'd be interested what block densities in your suburban/outer-urban areas are. I'd also like to know what decade your neighborhood was developed in. I'm trying to compare the development of old American cities, which are defined as small densely populated areas (Boston, Brooklyn, Newark, and especially Hoboken--the mile-square city with a population of 40,000) whereas new American cities seem to me to be overly large low-densely populated areas (Los Angeles proper average is only slightly more dense than the undisputably suburban Town of Hempstead, NY [pop 750,000], which itself is nearly twice as dense as the average density of city propers like Houston and Phoenix). It seems that the definition of urban and suburban character differs greatly based on where you live (most Queens residents, for example, consider themselves to live in suburban neighborhoods, despite an average denisty of over 20,000--and a small number of people I know in my area even consider where they live a small town). NOTE: Downtown areas such as Manhattan are irrelevent to this little argument of mine, because what I'm advocating is denser sprawl, and obviously you can't expect sprawl to imitate inner-city areas. And on to my argument in my next post....

Hey, just posting to let you know I've been following this one. I really like it. I noticed that most of your commercial zones are low-density strips along main roads, which is something I've always done since back in the SC2K days, probably because the only neighborhoods I've lived in are in and around NYC (I'm in college and I still don't know how to drive). I think popular belief these days is that suburban living is healthier because you're farther away from dirtier urban centers, but it's probably the opposite because I'm in pretty decent shape considering I never work out and rarely play sports, but I walk everywhere I go (and even riding the bus or taking the subway requires a signficant amount more walking than hopping in the car sitting in your driveway). I still don't see any difference between New Urbanism and plain old traditional urbanism that is characteristic of most American cities and towns circa pre-1950s, aside from the fact that New Urbanism talk contains lots of propaganda and traditional American urbanism is merely the way thing were done back then.

I don't know much about architecture in general (though I do have a fairly certain idea of what buildings I do and don't like). And looking through these pictures, I would guess I'm anti-starchitecture. (80 South Street is gonna be the death of me, if they have to build something like that, do it elsewhere, not the first thing you see next to the absolutely gorgeous Brooklyn Bridge). Also, starchitecture seems to me to me to be large bland pieces thrown together at goofy angles, as if I couldn't think of that myself. What seems to be absolutely gone is little detailings, like on many old buildings. The building I live at in Manhattan for school is in the Tudor style (16 story built in 1929), and every time I look at it I notice some small little detail here or there that I never noticed before. With most Starchitecture, I look at it, say oh that's obnoxious, and proceed. Nothing to keep me interested and looking. I remember all the hype about the new MoMA and that it was going to be a work of art in itself, but then it just turned out that it was a big rectangular thing, and when you went inside, all it seemed to do was have randomly placed walls that obstructed my vision and made the place feel smaller. Also, there was only one main escalator way, funneling all the traffic through one relatively narrow hallway and making it unpleasant to go up or down a level because of how crowded it is. Although I have to admit, the Guggenheim Museum in NY seemed innovative to me.

Have you ever heard of Cambria Heights, a neighborhood in Queens, NY? I thought it sounded cool, so I was about to name a city after it.. but now that you got dibs on 13 of the letters, I better go find some different inspiration, haha. By the way, nice start. Like the rebirth motif going on.

GrandCentralParkway, I live really close to the parkway of your namesake. Here's an interchange about a mile south of my house, where the GCP crosses the Cross Island Expressway. It's about as assymmetrical as interchanges get.

My roommate at college is from Islamabad. He says it's very unexciting.

I think this picture looks really cool. Inner-city (Midtown Manhattan in background) vs. outer-city (Long Island City in foreground). I'm gonna need to take a picture of the Brooklyn skyline as seen from between the two bridges myself. I can't find one on the internet.

The Hillside Ave line has express tracks, so I think the city was planning to extend it farther orginially.

For realistic purposes, for the sheer cost of subway construction and maintanence makes it sensible to limit its underground portions to extremely dense populations and switch to overground lines (open-cut and elevated subway) for medium and low density areas. They're like the symbol of the urban experience as much as skyscrapers are. And as a few-times-a-week rider of an elevated subway line, I can vouch for the fact it's nice to have sunlight and stuff to look at.

Date: 12/17/2004 12:03:47 PM Author: kmannkoopa What we need is to go back to the old pre-World War II planning. Housing everywhere, and then commercial on major streets and especially at the major intersections. Queens, NY is the best example in the country of development this way. quote> I felt I'd elaborate on the best example of pre-war development, since well... it's the best example of pre-war suburban development and doesn't purposely try to imitate urban areas like New Urbanism does, even if Queens does have trappings of urban life such as subways and apartments: Queens, America's first sprawled middle-class suburb(developed the same way today's sprawl did--developers buying massive tracts of land, developing them quickly, and naming the resulting communities after themselves), is home to 2.2 million people, has an average pop. density of over 20,000 per mi. sq. (4th most dense county in the country behind New York, Bronx, and Kings counties... see a trend?) and is widely considered the most ethnically/culturally/etc. diverse county/city in the world (in the US it definitely is), with immigrants from every single country on the planet making up nearly 50 percent of the residents (and much of the rest of the number are those born in the US to immigrant parents) and dozens of languages can be seen on storefronts. Its crime is most likely the lowest out of US cities over the 1 million mark, it's population isn't necessarily poor (10% under the poverty line and the single family houses are even more expensive than Long Island houses of similar size) or lower-middle class as often perceived, its streets are tree-lined, its residential neighborhoods absolutely beautiful (though quite a few commercial strips tend to be a bit run down and covered in graffiti). The subways and buses, though not as good as in the three urban boroughs, are still adequate to allows nearly everyone to not be car-dependent... and when you do drive, traffic is even less congested and roads less wide than in Nassau County to the east due to the wider availability of convenient mass transit (the big exceptions are Queens boulevard which leads into Manhattan, downtown Flushing and Jamaica Center). Parking lots, a major symbol of modern commercial development, are never the size of your typcial ones, even in the most suburban areas--and creative measures have many times been taken to ensure this. St. John's University has a parking lot underneath their football field, Douglaston Plaza has stores like Macy's and a movie theatre located underneath the parking lots, etc. Also, the Queens Center Mall (most profitable mall per square foot in America) is located centrally in the borough along one major subway line and fairly close to the other one, which encourages people to drive or take a bus to the subway to avoid having to park there. It's also built vertically over four stories, thus avoiding mall sprawl and making it indistinguishable as a mall on Google Earth. Slightly more households are renter-occupied than owener-occupied, but not to the extent of the three urban boroughs. And since so many houses were built to house multiple families, it doesn't suffer from the illegal housing problems that faces Long Island (I once lived in a neighborhood on Long Island where probably 40% of the single family households rented out floors or individual rooms... and it wasn't an immigrant issue like in many places, it was a not enough apartments exist so young people and displaced people who wish to stay in the neighborhood can't afford to buy problem, and the taxes are too high so you need to rent to pay them problem). I think the developers had no choice but to make everything the way they did because of large demand and limited space to begin with. With Queens being located on an island, the fact that Queens lost more than half of its previous area when it was annexed by NYC (and hence future annexations are impossible because it's obvious Nassau wanted nothing to with NYC back then and today Nassau is more urbanized than many cities like Houston and Phoenix), and a lot of people in Manhattan and the Bronx looking for a less-urban setting, led to this dense course of development. Queens isn't overly griddy or lacking in parkland like Manhattan and Brooklyn, and only two small neighborhoods contain ridiculously serpentine roads that characterize many modern developments. The biggest urban trapping Queens has is its street naming and addressing system. Streets go as high a 271, Avenues go as high as 165. Two of the communities where numbers aren't used have alphabetical names (Austin St, Burns St, ect.). Also, every house number contains a hyphen and the number of the last cross-street or avenue, which seems kind of mechanical like a highly urban city would have. What is cool, though, is that even though Queens is entirely within NYC limits, local neighborhood names are used, so on your license it says Flushing, NY instead of Queens, NY or New York, NY. My avatar is a typical semi-detached Queens house (or rather a pair of them...) in a suburban neighborhood. The vast majority of neighborhoods in Queens consist of a balanced and mixed development of low through high densities, attached through detached properties... although towards the east it tends to be limited to low and medium densities, where two-story garden apartment complexes share the same neighborhood as post-Levittown houses. I've already rambled long enough, but I'd like to add that one of the main contributors to Long Island being a successful suburb (with nearly 3,000,000 people between Nassau and Suffolk counties and some of the highest real estate in the nation) is its long skinny quality, so expansion can only progress in one direction. Also, only three rail and highway lines are needed--southern, middle and northern lines. Over 200,000 people use the simple Long Island railroad to commute to work every day. Manhattan also benefits from the long skinny quality with is mass transit network. All right I'm done.

I've been on a bus on that thing in Weehawken so many times now but I never noticed it went under the baseball field, haha. Anyway, this is where the Long Island Exressway crosses the Cross Island Parkway in northeastern Queens NYC. The LIE has service roads, and the way they handled this (see all that green? That's an environmental center haha) was by making the northern side (westbound) service road cross over, merging with both a north-south road and the eastbound service road to create a two-way road that stretches south around the interchange and then crosses back over the north side (neither of these things are depicted) because of size limitations. That massive parking lot doesn't seem to have any stores because they're located underneath it. Every big-brand shopping center (this particular one has a Macys and a supermarket) should employ such a strategy. I got my house in the shot. It's in the lower right hand corner. Five bucks to whoever guesses right.