June 2024 | Eyesore

Commentary on architectural blunders in monthly serial.

Behold, a rendering of New York’s new city jail, to replace the foul, ungovernable monstrosity on Riker’s Island, which the city voted to shut down in 2019. The site is in Chinatown where another old city lockup called “the Tombs” once loomed. The late Tom Wolfe memorialized “the Tombs” in The Bonfire of the Vanities, as a place where incarcerated hookers quaintly yelled affectionate epithets to passers-by down on the street from their tiny windows on high. The new city prison is going to be a whole lot higher: 300 feet high or as tall as the Statue of Liberty. Neighborhood denizens are calling it the “Tower of Doom.” According to The Guardian newspaper, the TOD will offer “new quality-of-life features like recreation centers, health clinics and visitation areas with children’s playrooms – all things that residents, family members and staff requested during ‘hundreds of hours’ of focus groups.” Sounds a little like a low-grade resort for perps and convicts.

Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood has been hurting for decades. First, the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 isolated the district for weeks, vaporizing its garment industry. Then, Hurricane Sandy in 2012 shut down electric service for weeks all over again, driving many residents out.

Most ironically, New York City — indeed all giant “metroplex” cities — face the quandary that high-rise buildings are going obsolete all of a sudden — at least since Covid-19 told the whole vast corporate office workforce to work from home. Commercial real estate never recovered in terms of building occupancy rates, and many Manhattan office skyscrapers are not able to cover their mortgages, taxes, and maintenance costs. And, it happens that residential skyscrapers are accessories to the office towers. So, if people aren’t working in the office towers, fewer people will be living in the apartment buildings. All this augurs a systemic failure that will bring down banks, leave the city with a thousand or more mega-structures with little more than salvage value, will destroy the tax base, and create a massive contraction of the once magnificent pulsing symbol of “the American Century.”

Farewell to all that. And so the last megastructure to be completed will be this monstrosity of a skyscraper jailhouse. It might not even be completed before the city runs out of moolah. And in the unlikely case that it ever opens for business, I predict it will operate for no more than a few years before the city loses the ability to maintain it. Oh, and one last thing: it will be ugly as a mofo.