Sunday, June 17, 2007

Building up on the Upper West Side

Not since Donald Trump’s Riverside South project in the early 1990s, said Mr. Fine, has a set of buildings on the Upper West Side aroused as much opposition as Mr. Barnett’s towers. Petitions circulated, gathering signatures by the thousands. Demonstrators took to the streets. None of this, however, did anything to stop the towers.

High Anxiety

Mr. Barnett is delighted. “We think they’re turning out to be two beautiful additions to the neighborhood,” he said. “We think we’ve got twin stars.” Miki Fiegel, a real estate agent who helped lead the fight against the towers and now sees them through her windows, has a different view. “I think they are two of the ugliest excrescences I’ve ever seen,” she said.

Photo from the NY Times

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

My friend's apartment was on the west side in the 50s on the 24th floor. I had an opportunity to look over the west side and get a good view of the development.

All the buildings were 5 stories, except for a handful of new building that stuck out - enormous buildings totally out of scale and over powering the community.

What used to be a community of people, with homes, shops, and churches, are becoming dotted with self contained enclaves that have nothing to do with the community, and add nothing, indeed, takes away from the neighborhood.

Reminds me of Hunters Point.

Anonymous said...

I have a perfect view of these two pieces of UWS crap from my apartment window. They are most definitely NOT the pretty little gems the developer makes them sound like.

Even overlooking for a moment how out of place they are, towering over everything else in the vicinity, they are just plain UGLY.