January 10, 2004: Projects
I've always been interested in housing projects, probably because the Dobkin family is so involved with housing issues and housing law. I think that housing projects are widely misunderstood. One misconception is that all orange brick buildings are housing projects for the poor. Not so- some projects are very much middle class, such as the Seward Park development, while others, like the projects along Cherry Street, are much more working class in character. In general, I tend to think of the projects as a poor solution to the problem of housing for the underprivileged, but I acknowledge that they were probably the best solution available at the time they were built. My main criticism? Something along the lines of Jane Jacobs' famous line: "promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders." That is, the sterility and irreversible ugliness of the projects destroys the possibility of urban renewal, and traps the poor in dead neighborhoods.
Comments
i also think that the projects have been widely ignored in the new york city photoblogs. i'd like to challenge each of my colleagues to visit a nearby project and try to capture what life and beauty there is there. WWBD- what would bernice abbott do?
no comments on mangled puppies?
that looks exactly like stuy-town. i know three different dot com, middle class women who, at some point, all lived in stuyvesant town, off of 14th and A-ish, and I always thought it was cool that you could escape into a burby, Northern Virginia apartment complex right in the middle of Manhattan.
but, i must say, no matter how many times i went in, i always got lost coming out. man, those places are huge, tedious mazes!
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