« Facelift: Nets Step Back to Step Ahead | Main | Atlantic Yards Report Sunday Double-Espresso »
October 26, 2008
More Discredit of Bloomberg as Qualified Financial Crisis Leader
Noticing New York
This blog entry examines the myth that Mayor Michael Bloomberg is the only person on the planet capable of leading New York City through the coming financial hard times. It's clear that he didn't make any preparations for lean years during the good times.
A discussion of how Bloomberg's policies failed to preserve and reuse valuable industrial properties includes a mention of the Ward Bakery. This beautiful, historic building is being demolished to make way for the third phase of the proposed Atlantic Yards project. With the entire project in doubt, it's likely that this demolition will result in nothing except empty lots.
We don’t want to sidetrack into the question of whether so much land associated with the industrial sector of the city’s economy should have been decommissioned. Certainly it was important to make a shift but it is important to do these things intelligently and not reflexively. The elimination of a sorely needed graving dock (dry dock) in Red Hook to create an IKEA parking lot was a mistake. It eliminated high-paying jobs while replacing them with a similar number of much lower-paying jobs. If it was essential to have IKEA (with its parking lot), we could have had both IKEA and the graving dock. The city is now looking at spending a billion dollars to replace the sacrificed dry dock. (See: Brownstowner’s June 23, 2008, IKEA Dock Destruction: 'Billion-Dollar Boondoggle'? And the New York Post’s IKEA Berth Pangs, City Dock Deal a $1b Blunder, by Rich Calder, June 23, 2008) This reflexively silly sacrificing of assets is, of course, a concern, but it is not our foremost concern in terms of the approaching budgetary perfect storm.
We could also mention, as we have before, the wonton failure to preserve for adaptive reuse historic worthwhile former industrial buildings like the Ward Bakery Building. (Sunday, October 19, 2008, Building the Right Landmarks Case; Wrong Building)
Posted by steve at October 26, 2008 10:20 AM