Save the smokestacks!

Ultra recomended reading:
High Rise (1975) JG Ballard

really.

Oh my. the queenswest.com is pure delight :
"Wish someone would take some tools to the roof and install the HD dish already."

Fucking bastards. If they come north of 39th Avenue, we'll meet them with pitchforks and torches.

I dunno, to me those who fetishize the smokestacks as "authentic" reminders of the past are as annoying as those who want them torn down.

If there isn't smoke coming out of 'em, they aren't "authentic" any more. The people who want them there to add "character" to the neighborhood are just another species of gentrifier from the ones who want them gone for a better Rvr Vu.

Does having non-functional smokestacks make the neighborhood better for working people? No, they are just a precious accoutrement of post-industrial aesthetic that gives a thrill to a certain breed of newcomers.

(Having said that, I was sad/mad that they blew up the Greenpoint gas tanks. In that case, tho, there were actually proposals being floated to turn them into usable spaces of some kind.)

Also: Reading those boards, I found a little argument about whether or not fast food restaurants should come to the nabe. One vocal idiots thought that adding Dunkin Donuts and Taco Bell would be a sign of (I kid you not) "a progressive and thriving neighborhood." Another responded by saying that fast food restaurants are bad -- because "they attract a certain kind of people."

Like I said, they're all annoying.

Max, I think the Schwartz Chemical Factory should be preserved because it's architecturally and historically significant, not because the smokestacks are precious. I'm a bit of an absolutist when it comes to historic preservation, but I think that it's a particularly slippery slope when this sort of thing happens on the down low because the neighborhood is not recognizably "historic" in nature. The corporation that bought this piece of property is motivated only by money, as are the assholes who live in the highrises. If we depended on people like that to "do what's right" for every community, they'd have flattened all of the West Village by now to put in a highway.

New York is continuosly tear down and rebuild, there are no historic values anywhere around.
It is the most ugly collection of architecture attempts in the world. But personally I like the chemical factory and all things old industrial and busted. Did you get my movie???

Dana: I'm with you on the general shadiness of developers... I'm not looking forward to what is slated for L.I.C. (and the Greenpoint/W'burg waterfront) in the next several years.

I am generally pro-historic preservation. But the longer I live in NYC, the more I see affordable housing as the most important priority. Saving historic structures is definitely better than tearing them down; but the aesthetic/historic issues no longer gets me as personally fired up as the economic ones.

Of course these aren't usually conflicting causes. The developers (and their pals in government) are generally the bad guys in both cases.

So, saving the smokestacks is not a bad thing. It's just that L.I.C. could easily be completely gentrified with smokestacks or without.

Unfortunately, no one is building affordable housing in these cases -- they want luxury condos, and lots of 'em.

If developers want to no longer be seen as a scourge (except by their fatcat pals in the gummint), then they need to take a longer view and assess what their projects truly need to accomplish for the people living therein.

Not bloody likely, though.