ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[kelber at mindspring.com]

I agree that the history of NYC has been a history of ruination, with Robert Moses and Mayor Koch being particularly destructive, but the WTC towers sharply altered a famous view.  If they suddenly built some glass office towers next door to the Pyramids, it would be a final insult added to the cheesy tourism that has defaced the site.  Eventually, we'd incorporate it into our view/collective memory of the site, but it wouldn't make it less egregious.

Laura


-----Original Message-----
>From: Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net>

>
>I didn't feel any reluctance to criticize the towers aesthetically as a NYC
>resident from 1960 to 1991, nor do I now -- but let's not drape too much
>nostalgia over pre-WTC Manhattan, either. Sky-scraping scale had been the
>mode for more than 75 years when those towers went up, and filing-cabinet
>high-modern boxiness since Lever House.        
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>By my reckoning, the city was "taken over by the rapacious real estate
>industry" by the mid-19th century at the latest (cf the rise of the Astor
>and Vanderbilt fortunes). There were plenty of robber baronets and vulgar
>Trumpets behind the Woolworth building, Empire State, Chrysler, Carnegie (!)
>Hall, the Dakota, and most of the city's other iconic buildings. 
>
>Because "olde" is, of course, a moving target. Back when Rev. Beecher roamed
>Brooklyn, people lamented how one fine old tree-shaded manse after another
>was falling to rows of cookie-cutter buildings in that cheap "brownstone"
>barged down from Connecticut by the megaton. Now, of course, brownstone
>neighborhoods like Brooklyn Heights are traditional, atmospheric, the very
>soul of New York as it always was...
>
>-Monte <time to re-read "The Night the Old Nostalgia Burned Down">
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