Author: linked

Aaron Short says so.

Possibly related – the joint Transportation/Waterfront Committee scheduled for this evening has been cancelled (replaced by Transportation only). Reason for the cancellation? DOT was supposed to attend to talk about Kent Avenue, but backed out.

Design Glut, which is two young Bushwick designers, contend that there is a “gluttony” of design out there – “so many objects… and so little of it [has] a reason to exist”.

My first reaction was to was to say “No” and show a snarky photo. But on second thought, they might have a point:

Surely not news, but GM today confirmed that it is shutting down its Pontiac division.

Putting aside for the moment that GM’s entire lineup has been crap for a couple of decades, why Pontiac? Its a youth-oriented marque that has produced some of the most storied vehicles from GM’s past. Look around Williamsburg – a statistically significant percentage of the hot vintage cars you see are probably Pontiacs. Put another way, why not add Buick to the ash heap of history (along with Oldsmobile) – neither bring anything to the table that isn’t already covered the rest of the GM line up (and yeah, both made great cars in the past, but does an aging boomer demographic really need Caddy, Olds and Buick?). Drop the old-folks cars, make Pontiac the performance division, keep Chevy (which will no longer be siphoned off by Pontiac, Buick and Olds), and keep Caddy as the luxury division (but lose the Karl Fischer designs).

GM is also looking to sell Saturn. Brand-wise it was never that well defined, but its the only GM line that doesn’t make typical GM cars. And considering where “typical GM cars” have led the company, maybe they want to be keeping Saturn.

Saab, on the other hand, makes sense to sell off. It was a good company with a distinctive product. GM has only managed to homogenize all the character out of Saab.

Recession or not, things are not looking good for the daily print media in this country. Journalism, I suspect, will survive. But in what form is not clear. Newspapers need to figure out how to make money off journalism, as they’ve lost the market for just about everything else. Paying for content is an option, but it has to be done in a way that recognizes how the Internet works – not in a way that fights the Internet. Erecting walls, trying to dam up the flow of information and fighting content sharing (as in my link above) will fail for all but those with the most exclusive content.

(For what its worth, I have no idea why national weekly magazines (Time, Newsweek, USNews) are still in business.)

Seven students from a Baptist church in Topeka, Kansas traveled all the way to Bethesda, Maryland to launch a protest at Walt Whitman High School. Why? Because Whitman was maybe gay. The kids from Bethesda did a good job standing up for Brooklyn’s original literary hero:

At the 2:10 p.m. dismissal, 500 students issued forth from the campus and lined up, several students deep, along the police tape, across Whittier Boulevard from the congregants. They alternately chanted the school name and “Go home!” — drowning out voices from across the street.

From WPA, more ugly on the Southside.

One of Williamsburg’s nicest cast-iron buildings is looking a whole lot nicer lately.

A moment of industrial archaeology, courtesy of the ongoing demolition of the BRT Power Plant on Kent Avenue.

The new edition of the AIA Guide to New York Architecture is due out this Autumn, and it has room for Bob Scarano:

NORVAL WHITE, one of the great figures of New York architecture, was cruising around Long Island City a couple of months ago when he came upon an unexpected sight. On Jackson Avenue, in this still scrappy-looking section of Queens, stood a newish co-op sheathed in luminous squares of blue glass. Its designer, Robert Scarano Jr., is one of the less beloved figures among the city’s architectural cognoscenti, and much to Mr. White’s amazement, he didn’t actually hate the thing.

“It’s definitely a cut above his other stuff,” Mr. White, his lean, 6-foot-5 frame tucked into the front seat of a gray Subaru Forester, acknowledged in his plummy baritone. “It has some quality. We’ll have to include Scarano in the guide.”

Not sure which building he is talking about, but I can think of a few other Scarano buildings that deserve inclusion on design merits (and yes, there are certainly a few that deserve that deserve inclusion as poster children for the Architecture of Excess). That’s more that can be said (design-wise) for the Axis of Banal that is responsible for most what we pass by every day.

Several local merchants are railing against the second annual “Williamsburg Walks” event, saying that barring cars from a seven-block stretch of the avenue … every Saturday in June and July cuts into their earnings.

I’m skeptical, but Williamsburg Walks should be a boon to local business, particularly those on the avenue. If it isn’t, the organizers should make sure that it is.