Editor's Message From The Editor
A New City of Towers
“In 10 years, I can’t imagine what Williamsburg-Greenpoint is going to look like,” City Council Land Use Committee Chair Melinda Katz said of the area’s rezoning the other day. But as stated in both the same front-page Times article in which Katz was quoted as well as a recent piece in the Voice, there is an obvious comparison. The area was first threatened by power plants, and now it stands to become another Battery Park City. Either way you slice it, the neighborhood’s creative energy will diminish.
Affordable housing is the project’s main selling point, and there’s been much fanfare over the possibility that 33% of the more than 10,000 slated new units would qualify as affordable. “We’re obviously pleased to see such a high number,” says Stephanie Thayer of the North Brooklyn Alliance’s Height and Bulk Committee. “But it’s important to remember that it’s all incentive-based.” Depending on the specific site, buildings could reach upwards of 33 stories without having any affordable housing at all; with it, the new buildings could reach 40 stories.
The incentives to include affordable housing apparently are so great that everyone from the mayor to housing advocates treats the 33% as the major innovation of the plan. Call me a naysayer, but I don’t believe in any deal that’s nonbinding. Jobs for the local community in the Ikea deal in Red Hook? That’s not in writing. Construction jobs for black and Latino workers in the Jets Stadium deal? Show me the fine print. And now an “irresistible set of incentives” to build (middle-class) affordable housing in Williamsburg and Greenpoint? The developers are laughing all the way to the bank.
—T. Hamm
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72. (Various walls around the city)
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One day in 1986, more than a dozen years after Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Jordan, Yvonne Brathwaite Burke and Cardiss Collins have been elected to Congress, a group of artists, activists and art historians who keep their identities secret by donning gorilla masks surreptitiously plaster the walls of the city with a poster noting, in thick sans serif type: “Only 4 Commercial Galleries in N.Y. Show Black Women. Only 1 Shows More Than 1.”
Van Eyck to Mondrian: 300 Years of Collecting in Dresden
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The recent exhibition, Van Eyck to Mondrian: 300 Years of Collecting in Dresden, follows in the spirit of this change, although it is drawn from the brilliant depositories of the Kupferstich-Kabinett in Dresden. These collections are largely focused on drawings produced during the Northern Renaissance and Baroque period, although they also include more recent works.
Motor City Underground: Leni Sinclair Photographs 1963–1978
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Unlike so many other exhibition monographs—which are often treated as something between a program guide and show souvenir—Motor City Underground presents detailed reproductions of Sinclair’s photographs, often blown up to full-page, alongside a wide variety of testimony. The range of dates and sources across which these statements are culled suggests years of research combing through a decade’s worth of underground missives—the type of ephemera that does not often make it into digital archives.
My Beautiful City
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In the spring of 2020, as the plague was sweeping the city, I found myself several times a day staring at an Instagram page dedicated to the furniture and household goods New Yorkers were tossing to the curb. Amongst the flotsam and jetsam were steamer trunks, benches of reclaimed lumber, numerous upright pianos, boxes upon boxes of books, a fainting couch with flower upholstery, glass vanities, bar stools, two Noguchi coffee tables, stand-up globes (I counted at least three) that hatched open at the meridian so you could store liquor inside, seemingly every fiddle leaf fig tree in the five boroughs, and other bric-a-brac and impedimenta and whatever else could be quickly discarded in a desperate effort to get out of New York as fast as possible.
