Hacker News Reader

Comment by StefanKarpinski | Hacker News Reader

This is a long rambling article without any clear point, except that the author doesn't personally care for the tower as much as he might have (if he designed it?). I was deeply skeptical of the "Freedom Tower" (everyone I know in NYC still refers to it by this ridiculous name) design before it was built, but as the thing has been built, it's actually grown on me. The inclined side panels look almost like two towers when the light hits them, reminiscent of the old towers, which I still miss as part of the skyline. It's not my favorite building in the New York skyline – that would be the Chrysler Building – but it's not bad.

View on HN

It's not so bad as part of the skyline, but it is horrible from street level. I'm not sure there is much you can do when building a blast resistant base, but man it feels like a bunker. No stores. No windows. Few entrances. It makes that entire block dead.

That's a good point. I've spent almost no time near the building base. Maybe that was what Kimmelman was getting at? His writing is so roundabout that it's not really clear what exactly he's complaining about.

It's a bit buried in the article, but I think that's one of his main points:

>Stripped of prospective cultural institutions, as well as of street life and housing, the plan soon turned into something akin to an old-school office park, destined to die at night — the last thing a young generation of New Yorkers wanted.

America has something of an obsession with single-use areas. Everyone lives in one zone. Commerce goes on in a different zone. Industry somewhere else. It's a big contributing factor in why a lot of places have ended up as dangerous wastelands at night; no one lives there, no one shops there, no shopkeepers keeping an eye on the street, no one out walking the dog or going out for coffee.

So when a new landmark building goes up on a piece of valuable real estate in Manhattan, it's a bit disappointing that the conversation ended up along the lines of "You know what'd be nice here?" "What, a coffee shop and a neighborhood grocery store?" "Nah, a giant bunker."

Not to say it's the worst thing ever, but we could have done so much better.

And it's a shame, especially because Manhattan is likely one of the few U.S. localities with sufficient population density to make mixed-use areas thrive.

When I spend time in Asia, I find it remarkable how well cities like Tokyo [1] and Taipei function.

[1] http://urbankchoze.blogspot.tw/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

In all fairness, large parts of Manhattan do thrive as mixed use to greater or lesser degrees. The financial district is something of an exception.

I learned when buying a condo that mixed commercial/residential buildings are hard to get loans for because Fannie/Freddie won't buy them from banks. NYC is probably its own beast, but in the rest of the US it's a problem.

People claim it's due to historical racism as Blacks tended to be the ones living above commercial spaces.

In my own city, historical mixed-use buildings were run as apartments by slumlords until vouchers allowed low-income people to move out. Then they were vacant, bought up, and redeveloped.

And the banks funding the redevelopment loaned to home buyers (in an attempt to make their original investment pay off) and the subprime lending spree also helped many people get financing. After the credit crash, most of the new developments were as apartments.

Anyhow, were this not a historical district, any new development would have probably followed single-use zoning.

"everyone I know in NYC still refers to it by this ridiculous name"

Funny - Everyone I know in NYC refers to it as the World Trade Center.

I was just about to say this. In the last few years the only people I've heard call it the Freedom Tower are people who are NOT from NYC.

I mostly call it The World Trade Center, but sometimes I use Freedom Tower in a sort of pejorative way.

I've been in NYC for about 10 years and I've lived in the financial district for about 7: I hear both pretty regularly.

I guess that works but the term seems overly broad – WTC 3-7 are also part of the "World Trade Center". So what do you call that building specifically? WTC 1, I guess?

I usually hear people here in NYC refer to it as "One World Trade Center" which at the same time covers its building number in the complex, and the fact that it is a single tower as opposed to two.

Kinda like when people say they're going to "the city", they mean Manhattan. If you're going to Brooklyn, yes, that's part of New York City, but then you say you're going to Brooklyn, you don't say you're going to "the city".

Typically, I've heard "World Trade" when referring to 1 WTC, and "One World Trade" when needing to disambiguate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com