In urban places like NY, do perfectly good inhabitated buildings get torn down so new ones can be built?
Or is it mainly vacant dilapidated buildings? Were do cities like nyc get the space for new buildings?
Sometimes. For example, when they built the original World Trade Center, they tore down a whole neighborhood to build it, and some folks were, and still are, very upset that they did so.
The same thing happened when they built Lincoln Center, too. In fact, if you’d like to see what the neighborhood that they tore down to build Lincoln Center looked like, watch the movie "West Side Story," it was filmed all around those streets!
The worst offender for so-called "urban renewal" was controversial never-elected "Urban Planner," Robert Moses (see link, below).
His critics claim that he preferred automobiles to people, that he displaced hundreds of thousands of residents in New York City, uprooted and divided traditional neighborhoods by building expressways right through the heart of them, contributed to the ruin of the South Bronx and the amusement parks of Coney Island, caused the departure of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants Major League baseball teams, and precipitated the decline of public transport through disinvestment and neglect.
He is also famous because most of the things that he did have built are generally considered to be just plain butt-ugly, in a very off-putting style of architecture, and NYC is still stuck with hundreds of his very ugly projects to this day!
See the link, below, for a fascinating article about Robert Moses…
September 17th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
All the time. Actually my lovely alma mater NYU just tore down a beautiful church from the 1800’s to build another freshman dorm. Either that or many times buildings will be bought and renovated for the buyer’s needs, leaving the facade intact but the interior completely different.
References :
Native New Yorker
September 17th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
Sometimes. For example, when they built the original World Trade Center, they tore down a whole neighborhood to build it, and some folks were, and still are, very upset that they did so.
The same thing happened when they built Lincoln Center, too. In fact, if you’d like to see what the neighborhood that they tore down to build Lincoln Center looked like, watch the movie "West Side Story," it was filmed all around those streets!
The worst offender for so-called "urban renewal" was controversial never-elected "Urban Planner," Robert Moses (see link, below).
His critics claim that he preferred automobiles to people, that he displaced hundreds of thousands of residents in New York City, uprooted and divided traditional neighborhoods by building expressways right through the heart of them, contributed to the ruin of the South Bronx and the amusement parks of Coney Island, caused the departure of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants Major League baseball teams, and precipitated the decline of public transport through disinvestment and neglect.
He is also famous because most of the things that he did have built are generally considered to be just plain butt-ugly, in a very off-putting style of architecture, and NYC is still stuck with hundreds of his very ugly projects to this day!
See the link, below, for a fascinating article about Robert Moses…
References :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_moses