Yeah no. Architect here. ADA compliance is taken incredibly seriously. Oh, and it’s also the law. And it’s also a decent amount of what you get tested on for licensure. Seating availability though is not ADA regulated.

As NCreature mentioned, the lack of benches probably resulted from a conversation like this:

Architect: “we’re proposing seating along the main concourse” Client: “is it required? Is it ADA?” Architect: “No. Legally it’s not required and it’s not an ADA requirement, but as a major public space—“ Client: “Yeah no. Homeless people could sleep on them and scare away shoppers and ruin our image. We need those benches gone.”

This is it. I sent this form and they must've gotten in touch with my LL. At which point he must've started taking my threats to sue a little more seriously and returned my money.

Letitia James’ office scared my landlord into giving me back my security deposit. Thank goodness for dedicated public servants.

That's no mansion. That's a hulking pile of tacky, aspirational garbage.

Turns out it is

Leave it to the NY Post to come up with the dumbest sounding titles…Like yeah, if you have a component in your air supply system that isn’t functional, you won’t be able to move enough air through the space to keep it from feeling musty, gross and hot. Especially in a fully enclosed underground space like that with many people traveling though it, this is important. It’s not like they’re waiting on a some fucking plastic oscillating floor fan, this sounds more like a major HVAC component that needs calibrating or fixing before the building can open. This kinda stuff happens during punchlisting.

In my experience having lived in this city and known a lot of banking and finance people, it is easily one of the most toxic, destructive industries on the face of the earth. I mean I’ve literally been the fly on the wall on my SO’s zoom meetings where they talked about how to milk people with prescriptions for more money so, yeah. Not entirely shocked they’re calling the minions into mount doom every day for full time RTO.

I knew it was bad for art people when, as an architect, I showed my employment letter to the woman at the MoMA to get my creative workers’ membership discount and she gasped: “wow, you guys make all THAT coming right out of school?” And I was thinking “this big ‘ol salary nets me two roommates in Flatbush (at the time) and the interest payment on my student loans…god only knows what they’re paying you lol.”

I have conflicting thoughts. It's great that this place has been able to remain in the building. And it's also great that this building has had new life breathed into it. At the same time, the context that created this shop is mostly gone; Chelsea is no longer a hub for broke aspiring artists and musicians. It feels like yet another aspect of the city that has survived to become a mimeticism of itself. Like a free piece of cultural capital that the owners can show to tourists and say "See? This is an authentic place. Come to authentic Chelsea Hotel to experience authentic NYC culture. Look at our authentic guitar place with this authentic guy. Rooms start at $600/night."

Imagine running the bakery, offering your bakers wanting some of the bread a nice hearty bowl of sawdust instead, while pointing an unloaded gun and telling them it's the best you can do.

A moment of pearl-clutching for the steady stream of single-occupant SUVs from Nassau and Bensonhurst that will no longer have the chance to get stuck and block crosswalks between green lights. Oh, the humanity! Can we not think of the drivers?? Widen the roads! Just one more lane will fix traffic! Just one more lane bro, I swear!

Forest Hills is awesome, and super close to the city via express. I can 100% why people would want to settle down there.

>1 .Long Island City
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>2. Astoria
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>3. Sunnyside
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>4. Forest Hills
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>5. Ridgewood
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>The most searched neighborhoods in Queens are some of the most affordable.
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>Besides Long Island City, the other neighborhood on StreetEasy’s most-searched list for the last five years is Astoria. The median asking rent was $2,650, and the median asking price was $798,913.

I knew it. It's over for Astoria. Get ready for New Park Slope.

Those trucks are the fucking worst. Roll around at 5am to start making deliveries. They unfold that screechy ass platform thing and let it drop like a fucking hammer to wake up the entire damn street. I guess that wasn't enough for this guy, he was going for a decapitation on top of it.

Yes. It’s not that we can’t build them, like obviously we could if we really wanted to. But the techniques (both in terms of construction detailing/design and the actual, physical construction techniques of assembly) used to build them are not practiced anymore. You can produce buildings that look very similar, but won’t be identical. For instance, let’s build your 4 story brick tenement—back then they’d be built using solid masonry construction and wood framed flooring. Not flying today. Breakdown of why:

1.) You would not find many, if any, contractors skilled enough in building multistory buildings with solid brick walls and wood framed floors. More likely you will have a brick rain screen (1 layer of brick) supported on walls framed either in CMU block or metal stud framing. Already this will lead to a difference in the way the detailing in the brick facade is expressed. It becomes more economical and controllable to use pre-assembled brick masonry panels that are then installed on the facade on-site. Instead of wood framed floors, you will have concrete slab floors, which also ends up affecting the overall detailing, and therefore architectural resolution, of the building.

2.) Those ornaments you see on prewar buildings were once mass-produced believe it or not. For more upmarket or higher budget buildings, industries of masons and craftspeople existed that created ornament per architectural drawings. No longer. Custom ornament is expensive, which is why on so many “new classical” buildings you’ll see ornamental figures that are reminiscent of the ornament seen on older buildings, but with much flatter profiles and lower resolution. Example: compare the street-level facade of Carnegie hall tower with that of its namesake neighbor.Probably a bad example since it’s behind scaffolding right now but you can Google it.

So, in aggregate all of these factors (and more) mean that you can’t really make buildings that look pre-war, let’s say, without going through a lot of expense. They’re viable as one-offs, for big-budgeted institutions. And there are many “new classical” or “new traditional” buildings going up all over the place–but to any trained architect, and probably to anyone with a little aesthetic sense, all but the most carefully-made ones look REALLY BAD.

That’s why I don’t think it’s worth rebuilding Penn station to its exact historic design. It’s sort of papering over the palimpsestual process that is city-making. The act of it’s destruction is so integral to the foundational myth of late-20th century New York that to me, rebuilding it outright would almost feel stranger than preserving its memory with something new.

As an architect I’ll just say this one isn’t true by a long shot. It is far more expensive today to build Penn Station true to technique and form than it was in 1910. It can certainly be done, but to produce anything that doesn’t read as an awkward facsimile would require tremendous expense.

Todays building industry is optimized towards curtain walls, prefab masonry panels, metal rainscreens and dropped paneled ceilings, not intricate custom stonework and cast iron ceiling vaults. Ever visit any “new classical” buildings? Even a lot of the good ones look fake as hell, save for those faithful reconstructions in Europe. The techniques used for construction 100 years ago have simply been replaced and forgotten over time. It’s a little akin to saying we could easily turn on a dime and start mass-producing Model T’s again because of the huge advances in automative technology. Doesn’t quite work that way. Without tons of money and extensive retooling you’d probably end up with something looking more like a PT cruiser. Same idea here. Building/construction technique is a huge factor in the end aesthetic of a building.

It’s possible and it’s been done in other parts of the world (Europe), but doing it right isn’t cheap or easy. I for one at not holding my breath that this will happen. As cool as it would be—I think the time to reverse this crime against architecture has come and gone. I think something similarly artistically magnificent, technically prodigious and more adapted to todays infrastructure needs and building technology can be envisioned.