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March 10, 2005
Ground Floor
It appears that every new Super Block apartment building going up in New York has planned for only 2 or 3 retailers to occupy the ground floor... This inevitably leads to Big Box retailing and all of its requisite banalities. Not to advocate 6 two-thousand sqft boxs set for DryCleaning/NailSalon/Starbucks, although some of the time it necessitates. But a rereading of the type of spatial designs that attract the type of businesses that the luxury developer should want, the type of places they're trying to associate the condo with in the first place. Which, if they acted with any intelligence, would upscale their investment regardless. Intimate, remarkable, designed spaces, of varying sq footage and frontage. But instead, I breeze by tower after block, and the faint sucking sound of another Duane Reade - or in a shrill move to appease the yuppies marginal interest in proper urban street fronts, a Whole Foods - extracts from a passerby the faint hope for something remarkable to the neighborhood, to the experience of that spot on the grid. But Murray Hill is, as Kips Bay does, as they would do...
Posted by jmarston at March 10, 2005 02:11 PM