Park Slope Crest Improves Fouth Ave. Streetscape
The fencing around The Crest in Park Slope has come down. The mindboggling results are above. We will refrain from a long diatribe about how such architecture is the equivalent of saying "screw you" to the streetscape and how people that design residential buildings this way should be held up to professional ridicule for designing walls at street level. (Though we love the big vent effect.) We simply can't understand why anyone would make the entire first floor of a condo being pitched to a high end market into a wall. Ironically, it is across the street from this gem at the Con Ed building, which we called "The Great Wall of Gowanus." It looks like Brooklyn's "Park Avenue" is off to a shaky start architecturally speaking.
Labels: Architecture, Park Slope
posted by rsguskind at 8:15 AM
9 Comments:
you cut off the picture ...not showing the huge air conditioning apparatus on the top floor ... with is about one storey tall and is basically a giant silver -FUCK YOU- to those up the hill in PS.
The ground floor is ugly with vents because it's a parking garage, right? It's hard to make a parking garage level look all that great. Aesthetics aside, it's much better for the community if all these new developments include parking garages. Traffic is terrible in Brooklyn. Dangerous for pedestrians and pets, and bad for street parking. Plus all the driving around looking for parking, and traffic slowed by congestion creates huge amounts of pollution. Think about those priorities too, when critiquing a new building. Not just does it look pretty.
missmouse -- how does building parking garages help with traffic? Parking garages just encourage car ownership. People with cars drive them. Ergo, more traffic. If this building had been built without a parking garage and instead with retail on the ground floor, perhaps local residents could meet their shopping needs on foot rather than by car. We should be building sustainable urban environments, which means ones where walking, biking, and mass transit are the primary modes of transportation. Highly local retail is an essential part of this. Parking garages are not. Street design like this -- a blank wall -- makes 4th Ave. a street for driving, not one for walking.
Missmouse clearly is Misguided.
What about the fact that these walls will make 4th ave into a tunnel .
It is obvious that we have learned nothing . Eyes on the the street promote safety , if anything happens on this block who will see it ?
We herald Jane Jacobs and build this .
We are doomed !!
Cars are anti-urban.
What 4th Avenue needs is a requirement that the ground floors include active retail use. it's done in plenty of other nabes in NYC, why not here?
Is it me, or did 4th Avenue look more attractive when it was all gas stations, auto repair shops and car washes?
Thanks, New York City Department of City Planning, various visionary elected and appointed officials, and wonderful mercenary real estate developers, for unleashing on 4th Avenue the ghastliest collection of butt-ugly buildings ever.
As for those traffic-jam-hatching parking garages, the zoning should be changed so that they all have to be turned into mushroom caves or grow-light-equipped hydroponic hothouses.
At the very least, they could have planted some trees!
All the hate on a building?! Might it be perhaps because none of you can afford to live in these new residences that are sprouting up on 4th Ave?
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