Donald Trump, Poltergeists, and Disaster in 2030
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For the past six years my view of the outside world from my downtown New York office was of two parking lots with cars flitting in and out as bees in a hive. Then earlier this year I realized that was about to change:
CURBED, Trump Soho: 45 Stories for Hudson Square
You're looking live at a rendering for the proposed Trump International Hotel & Tower SoHo, a 45-story tower slated for Spring Street between Varick and Sixth Avenue. Architect David Rockwell envisions 400 hotel rooms plus the de rigueur spa and "high-end restaurant.
Coincidentally the 45 year old parking lot will be replaced by a 45 storey glass hotel and condo which Trump said he'd like completed by 2009. But then a few days ago I noticed that although hard-hats were still scurrying around, work seemed to have halted.
NY POST,
13 Dec 2006,
Skeleton Crew (PDF)Work was stopped on Donald Trump's new SoHo condo-hotel yesterday after remains recovered at the site were determined to be human - and from a 19th-century church graveyard, city sources said.
Workers discovered bones Monday afternoon while they were excavating part of the expansive site at Spring and Varick streets, police sources said.
Yesterday, an anthropologist from the Medical Examiner's Office determined the bones were human, according to Ellen Borakove, a medical examiner spokeswoman.
The remains are considered "historical" - dug up from an 1800s Presbyterian cemetery site, she added.
Police sources said a church was built at the site in 1894 and demolished in the late 1960s to make way for a parking lot. Another source said the bones may be from the cemetery grounds of a church built in 1810.
The "numerous bones" recovered from the site appear to be more than a century old, cop sources added.
"As a result of the discovery of human remains," the city Department of Buildings issued a stop-work order at the site, located at 246 Spring St., said Department of Buildings spokeswoman Jennifer Givner, who could not say how long the order would be in effect.
The white tarp you see is covering up the skeletal remains. Click on photo for larger image. Taken by my son with his Samsung T-609 Cellphone from the 6th floor of my telecom company.
There has been no shortage of community opposition:
Observer, Too Tall or Too Trump? Activists Wage Soho Battle
With a tall tower tucked among tiny office buildings and warehouses on the West Side in Soho, here comes Donald Trump, pricking the sky.
Mr. Trump’s proposed 45-story tower, which would be part hotel, part condo, at 246 Spring Street, next to Vandam and Varick streets, would be by far and away the most conspicuous symbol in the neighborhood.
...
But this dispute has a special wrinkle to it. No one is contesting whether a very tall building can go up in the area—in fact, the building, which is being constructed in a manufacturing zone, can legally be built.
The problem lies with whether the rather fuzzy combination of a condo and a hotel should be allowed to go up in this zone. The city’s zoning resolution says that transient hotels—like S.R.O.’s—are allowed in manufacturing districts.
Critics of the tower—which include the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation and officials like City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Congressman Jerry Nadler and State Senator Tom Duane—argue that the building might look and feel like a hotel, but residents will be living there, not visiting.
They said that this would lead to a troubling trend: Once Mr. Trump gets this building approved, developers everywhere will be eyeing manufacturing districts for large condo-hotels.
I suspect that since these are the remains of white people the hotel/condo will eventually be built. Some previous projects have been delayed because of historical findings include the discovery of the African Burial Ground downtown in 1991 and the remains of a Revolutionary War-era wall near South Ferry in November of 2005.
When the 45 storey Trump affair is finally finished I expect 500 sq ft condos to go for more than a $1.5 million apiece, with nary an eyebrow raised about the graveyard below. In fact, rather than having Poltergeist worries, that fact might even be a bit of selling point: your condo building has some history to it.
This type of development is what prompted Mayor Bloomberg to worry about New York in 2030:
The city must plan today for explosive growth or face unthinkable 12-hour rush hours and a crumbling infrastructure incapable of sustaining a million more residents by 2030, Mayor Bloomberg warned yesterday.
In what was billed as a "major" speech, the mayor offered a dark vision of where the city is headed over the next quarter-century if action isn't taken as he sketched the severe challenges awaiting New York and such world cities as London and Beijing.
"By 2030, our population will reach more than 9 million - the equivalent of adding populations of Boston and Miami to the five boroughs," Bloomberg told an invited audience of more than 200 in a multimedia presentation at the Queens Museum of Art.
"The result is a surge that is taking our population to new heights and our city into uncharted waters."
To prepare for such "undreamed of levels" of density, the mayor said the aging city has to upgrade almost every structure in sight - from streets to playgrounds to power plants to mass transit.
The city is distributing a booklet next week to warn New Yorkers that inaction isn't an option: "In 25 years, rush hour could last 12 hours every day".
12-hour rush hours? Poltergeists would be the least of our worries!
