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March 31, 2009
Noticing Noticing New York
Michael D. D. White explores the history of Frank Gehry's buildings and leaks. In Cambridge, MA, Gehry blamed the leaks on "value engineering," which doesn't bode well for two Forest City Ratner projects — Beekman Tower (or "Stump," depending on where it tops out) and Atlantic Yards — both of which are currently getting the value-engineering treatment.
Here is prediction that somebody should perhaps be making about the Beekman. Have you watched the way water runs down mountainsides in a heavy rainstorm? Look at how the Beekman facade has channels that will collect rivuleting water into expanding streams, especially when pushed around by wind. We really can’t help ourselves; we are expecting that there may be water problems at the Beekman. As water cascades down the side of the building where will the water go? Leaks into the building’s interior may not be the only problem.
That’s what we were thinking before word came out that the Beekman may be redesigned and built at only half its originally planned height. Where are we now? All we can say is happy value engineering!
Commentary on AIG, Barclays and the Nets arena naming-rights deal:
What makes this a windfall paid for at U.S. Taxpayer expense is the fact that, in a self-dealing fashion, AIG executives routed substantially more money to Barclays than it deserved. We said in our previous article:
As people closely following the scandal know, AIG has been routing federal bailout money around the world and to Wall Street, essentially buying favor with big firms and banks by unnecessarily paying 100% on the dollar to extinguish collateral obligations which should have been extinguished with much lower negotiated discount sums. This has turned into windfall infusions of cash, a counterintuitive reward for financial companies who (foolishly?) placed their bets on AIG’s unregulated derivatives and CDO division being sound.
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Adding our two cents to the points [Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn] made, we found, with respect to those [retention] bonuses, another analogy with respect to Atlantic Yards (like the AIG scandal, also a product of New York’s “FIRE” sector- Finance, Insurance and Real Estate culture). We asked why the executives who steered AIG into the mess thought they were entitled to be retained (through bonuses) to clean up that mess. This, we said was the same thing as the financially teetering Forest City Ratner executives expecting that they have some sort of propriety right to clean up the mess they very consciously created in Prospect Heights and Fort Greene.
Posted by lumi at March 31, 2009 5:02 AM