While Jacobs viewed New York City neighborhoods from a holistic view, taking on the policies and past events that governed the streets, Mitchell Duneier approached one neighborhood, in particular, Greenwich Village, in order to uncover a specific aspect of neighborhood life through a series of interviews. In his ethnography and documentary, Sidewalk, Duneier observed the African American men who filled the streets of Greenwich Village in the 1990s selling books and magazines. Duneier drew upon the idea of the sidewalk being “the site where a sense of mutual support must be felt among strangers” in order to live together and that it should be an area of limitations and intimacy between the inhabitants (Duneier, 55).
Rebuilding from “Inside-Out”
In Jane Jacobs’ book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs discusses the creation of public life and trust through the use of sidewalks and the common ignorance of “outsiders” or orthodox planners. Jacobs’ uses Bostons North End as an epitome of a neighborhood that is self-functioning yet still considered a “slum” in the expert terms of bankers and developers. Similarly, New York City’s Brownsville is commonly misconceived by outsiders and its image tarnished through untelling statistics. In WNYC’s ongoing feature Brownsville: No Label Necessary, the members of the Brownsville community have commited to rebuilding Brownsville from “the inside out” using public life and trust created within a community to create what Jane Jacobs calls a, “self-governing” neighborhood.
Robert Moses Vs. Jane Jacobs: The David-Goliath Dynamic
Continue reading “Robert Moses Vs. Jane Jacobs: The David-Goliath Dynamic”
The Development of Cities and The Needs of Residents
ITF Post: Google buys Chelsea Market for $2 billion
The 1.2 million-square-foot office-and-retail property at 75 Ninth Avenue is home to the popular food hall as well as Major League Baseball and the Food Network. Google is already the largest tenant at the building, leasing about 400,000 square feet of space. The company’s New York headquarters, at 111 Eighth Avenue, is right across the street.
The deal, which looks to be the first billion-dollar-plus trade to go under contract this year in New York, is slated to close in two months, according to sources familiar with the transaction. They said that Google is paying over $2 billion, or north of $1,600 a square foot. The transaction would give an early boost to the city’s investment-sales market, which saw only one single-building deal exceed $2 billion in 2017 – HNA Group’s purchase of 245 Park Avenue.
Definitely read the entire article by Mark Maurer who contextualizes the deal with a nice summary of Google’s presence in Chelsea and New York’s real estate market.