“The centerpiece of the scheme, the 150-story erection, is Trump's third go at the 'world's tallest building.' ... Was ever a man more preoccupied with getting it up in public?”
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Great cities find their forms through compact. New York entrusts its destiny to deals. Donald Trump will direct the future of 77 acres of our most vital territory not because he’s in any way earned the privilege but because he’s paid for it. This is the urbanism of the shooting gallery: put your money down and take your shot.
I refer to the young masterbuilder’s recently announced plans to build a “Television City” on the old Penn Central rail yards stretching from 59th to 72nd Street along the Hudson. In case you missed the hype, Trump intends to put up the following: one 150-story (“world’s tallest”) building, six 76-story buildings, one 65- story building, and one 15-story building. These are to be filled with condos and offices and would sit on a titanic “podium” that would contain the eponymous TV production facilities as well as department stores, shops, parking, and other mall-style amenities, all topped by 40 acres of what the press release describes as “parks.” The architect for this scheme is Helmut Jahn of Chicago, a designer of particularly primitive sensibilities whose shallow insights and unfettered esprit de glitz must have struck Trump as especially congenial. I can almost hear the conversation between them. “Helmut, I like your style,” says Trump. “And Donald, l like your style,” says, Jahn.
The scheme is so stupid, my initial reaction is to think it’s a phony, a stalking horse for some marginally less barbaric proposal Trump is willing to trade down to. Even in shrunken form, though, we haven’t been treated to a towers-in-the-park proposal for quite some time. There’s a reason for this. The architectural profession has — over the past 20 or so years — woken up and smelled the urban bacon, come to the realization that most of what we prize in our climax metropoli, like Manhattan, comes from formal strategies in which the urban ground is favored over the architectural figure. This privileging is the compact of character that makes such cities singular. Over time, certain means have emerged as central to the particularity of these great cities. In Manhattan, for example, the skyscraper, the brownstone row, the hard-lined, even-topped avenue, are among the keys to our urban specific.
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