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
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Spaces Together: Alternative Sites for Bay Area Arts
By Sophia WangNOV 2017 | Critics Page
I moved to the Bay Area from New York City in 2000, and went straight to the places producing underground music as entry points into arts communities where I’d feel most at home. In New York in the ‘90s, I’d found these communities at techno parties downtown, escaping the New Jersey suburb where I’d lived as a teen and the Morningside Heights dorms where I’d spent my years at Columbia.
Joe Andoe: Jubilee City
By Eleanor HeartneyAPR 2019 | ArtSeen
Painter and writer Joe Andoe offers another glimpse into this alternate reality. In his 2007 memoir Jubilee City: A Memoir at Full Speed, Andoe draws on memories of an unsupervised childhood and drug-fueled adolescence in Tulsa, Oklahoma filled with car wrecks, petty crimes, and maniacal substance abuse.
Bay Watch: A Snapshot of the Visual Arts in the Bay Area
By Constance LewallenNOV 2017 | Editor's Message
I have observed the art scene over the many years I have lived in the Bay Area, most of the time as curator at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Following is a very brief overview of its modern history.
New Leadership, and Work, at New York City Ballet
By Susan YungMAR 2019 | Dance
After many months under an interim leadership team of dancers who replaced the ousted Peter Martins, the company announced that Wendy Whelan, who retired from the company in 2014 after 30 years, will be associate artistic director, and ex-principal Jonathan Stafford—who had become the de facto leader—will be artistic director.
