(2005-04-30) Andersen West Side

Kurt Andersen on the West Side Stadium. But even as Urban Renewal of this heedless, grandiose, ultimately unloved and failed kind was reaching its apotheoses in Lincoln Center and the World Trade Center, a smarter countertrend was emerging. Perhaps Mike Bloomberg, as he commuted from the East Side to Wall Street, didn't notice what was happening in between. In 1961, Jane Jacobs published The DeathAndLifeOfGreatAmericanCities and spent the decade leading the fight to stop the demolition of her neighborhood, the far West Village... But why not, as the transmogrified HighLine helps propagate the TriBeCa-fication of the adjacent blocks, imagine a tightly woven extension of the southern and eastern neighborhoods into the rail-yards site? Why not build apartments and hotels and theaters, a better, funkier Battery Park City? Or a big park? Or the second Guggenheim Museum? Or a campus for New School University? Why can't this city assemble a brilliant team of designers and entrepreneurs to dream up a thrilling new piece of New York - people with as much visionary gusto as, say, the man who started a new kind of digital data and news company a quarter-century ago?