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Kill All Normies
In Feral City, Jeremiah Moss writes about the salutary effects of lockdown, which, in triggering the exodus of so-called “normals,” restored New York to the “rough and disorderly” place it was in the 1990s, the halcyon days of his youth.
New Yorkers who remained in the city during the first few months of the Covid-19 pandemic are likely to remember a frightening, desperate time of rampant panic-buying, long lines at food banks, rumors circulating like wildfire—and, underlying it all, rapidly increasing numbers of illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths. Trapped in our apartments, we felt cut off, afraid to see friends and family, not knowing when we could safely return to our lives. The authorities, visibly unsure of themselves, appeared unable to respond to the multiple crises facing the city. As the streets emptied of people, an eerie, apocalyptic feeling set in. At least for a short while, it felt like the world might be coming to an end.
Jeremiah Moss’s recent book, Feral City, presents a very specific perspective on this period—that of a middle-aged East Villager who, for nearly two decades, has chronicled—and lamented—the loss of his neighborhood’s unique Bohemian character, first as a blogger and now as an author. Moss writes about the salutary effects of lockdown, which, in triggering the exodus of Manhattan’s and Brooklyn’s wealthiest residents, restored New York to the “rough and disorderly” place it was in the 1990s, the halcyon days of his youth. As though they had been trapped under rubble for twenty-five years, suddenly “deviants,” “homeless people,” and “the Black, trans, poor, and other Others” emerged to reclaim their right to the city. In this less regulated environment, it once again became possible to do many things that had apparently been unthinkable as late as February 2020: ride your bicycle in pedestrian zones, scream curse words in the street, wear loud pink clothing. Through the summer and fall, Moss ventured outside, witnessing the rebirth of the kind of urban street culture that ignites his imagination and ultimately discovering that the old, gritty New York had not died after all.
Benjamin Serby reckons with New York’s resident crank.
Crip Space
To borrow from critic Andrea Long Chu: everyone is crippled, all presidents, gun owners, and poets. Everyone who is sick. You, reader, are crippled, even—especially—if you are not disabled. Welcome. Sorry.
by Angie Door
The objects that people rely on daily—glasses, pills, adhesives, crutches, hearing aids—make up a kind of cabinet of curiosities. These visible aids are symbolic of the way the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) sorts disability by the impairments of mobility, cognition, hearing, vision, independent living, and self-care. According to the agency’s oft-cited data, around 20 percent of the US population is considered disabled. The Social Security Administration (SSA), on the other hand, categorizes potential impairment through the body’s mechanics. For example, its nested subsections shrink from the respiratory system to lungs, then from lungs to breath.
In spite of the stringent criteria used to categorize them, the needs that the CDC and SSA identify are often met with threadbare nets. The American health care system is plagued with high insurance premiums, gaps in coverage, and limited sick leave. People worry about falling ill, affected by the possibility of illness even when they are well. To borrow from critic Andrea Long Chu: everyone is crippled, all presidents, gun owners, and poets. Everyone who is sick. You, reader, are crippled, even—especially—if you are not disabled. Welcome. Sorry.
The Lord’s Estate
Detached now by time and adaptive reuse from the political economy that generated them, the aesthetics of the Tribune Tower don’t really matter. What matters is how the tower, ahem, buttresses the speculative capitalism that’s driving inequality.
by Zach Mortice
There aren’t many industries that have been stripped of their architecture as consistently as legacy media. A brief roundup covering just the last few years would include 30 Hudson Yards by KPF, which AT&T/Warner Media sold to developer Related Companies just a month after the 1,300-foot-tall tower opened in 2019, as well as CNN Center in Atlanta, the longtime home of the TV news network. Warner Media sold that 1976 brutalist structure to CP Group, a Florida real estate company, to pay down debt in 2021. And it’s not just a phenomenon in big-city media capitals. My hometown newspaper, The Des Moines Register, which has racked up seventeen Pulitzer Prizes since it began in 1860, decamped from its understated streamline moderne headquarters in 2013. The building was subsequently converted into lofts.
Architecture critics have been fretting over legacy media’s inability to hold on to its monuments for a long time. In 1990, Herbert Muschamp, in The New Republic, decried the lack of maintenance and loss of prestige of Eero Saarinen’s 1965 Black Rock, the New York headquarters of CBS. “A feeling of loss pervades the building, as though a center of power had become its own tombstone,” he wrote. “Office space is rented out to tenants, there are rumors that the building will be put up for sale.” It plopped on and off the market several times over the decades to insufficient fanfare, and a sale to Harbor Group International, a real estate investment firm that focuses on residential multifamily projects, finally went through in 2021.
Zach Mortice contemplates life at the top.
New York Review of Architecture reviews architecture in New York. Our Editor is Samuel Medina and our Deputy Editor is Marianela D’Aprile. Our Publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
To pitch us an article or ask us a question, write to us at: editor@nyra.nyc. For their support, we would like to thank the Graham Foundation and our issue sponsors, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and Thomas Phifer.
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