¶ New York City (1)
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Index Entry
New York City:
"Viewed from a ship entering New York harbor or from a plane coming in over the city, New York appears as an enormous complex of hard, permanent towers–crystalline asparagus. But these ‘permanents’ are as impermanent as women’s hairdo’s. New York City’s permanent-wave architecture is in fact a progressively rippling dynamic wave system. The last half-century has seen three successive replacements of would-be-permanent New York City buildings.
"New York is a continual evolutionary process of evacuations, demolitions, removals, temporarily vacant lots, new installations, and repeat. This process is identical in principle to the annual rotation of crops in farm acreage–plowing, planting the new seed, harvesting, plowing under, and putting in another type of crop.
“New York’s dynamic pattern of continually accelerating transformation was entirely unpremeditated by its static-minded, permanence-intending designers and their patrons. Up to the time when its earliest skyscrapers were built (the first was the Tower Building at 50 Broadway, completed in 1889 and demolished in 1914), its stone buildings, fine”
