| and one thought the likes of DUAC and INTACH were unique to us!
| The Bureau of the Walking Dead, we like this expression...
CHIN up, tummy out, Aby Rosen, the 46-year-old German developer, owner
of the Seagram Building and Lever House, was posing for pictures in
front of 980 Madison Avenue barely one month ago when he grew so bold as
to boast: “I have zero fear. Fear is not something I have.”
Easy for you to say, braveheart! The courage-crowing tycoon knows very
well that in the current battle over 980 Madison, a five-story Art
Moderne building stretching from 76th Street to 77th Street, the contest
is already completely snookered in his favor.
On top of this block-long low-rise he intends to build one of his Aby
Rosen jumbo glass boxes full of commercial space and condominiums,
rising straight up a sheer 30 stories. His big problem — or, to be more
accurate, “problem” — is that 980 Madison is in the heart of the Upper
East Side Historic District, and it would be hard to dream up anything
short of a Mobil station more out of place there than a Mondo Condo
glass box by Aby Rosen.
The writer Tom Wolfe and other neighbors have taken to lobbing
objections in the direction of the Landmarks Preservation Commission,
the city’s official watchdog for landmarked areas. The commission has
already held a hearing and could stop Aby Rosen dead in his tracks at a
moment’s notice, just like that.
But what, him worry? Like every major developer in town, he knows that
the Landmarks Preservation Commission has been de facto defunct for
going on 20 years. Today it is a bureau of the walking dead,....
cont'd....
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/opinion/26wolfe.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1