Everyone is getting ready for next week’s City Council hearing on New Domino (Monday, 10 a.m., City Hall) – the last public hearing of the process, you’ll be pleased to hear. Churches United is holding rallies in East Williamsburg and handing out fliers at the L train; Steve Levin and Vito Lopez have an op-ed in the Brooklyn Paper saying why the project is wrong for the neighborhood; Susan Pollack of CPCR has an op-ed in the Brooklyn Paper saying why the project is right for the neighborhood; and opponents of the project are set to rally on City Hall steps next Monday.

So where do things stand? Well, Domino is still big. Despite the objections of Community Board 1 and Marty Markowitz, the City Planning Commission unanimously approved the project without any residential density modifications. There was a small reduction in the number of parking spaces, and 50′ was knocked off the height of the office towers next to Grand Ferry Park, but these are really marginal changes. New Domino is still substantially bigger than any waterfront rezoning approved to date – it will still result in a significant and deleterious impact to transit and other infrastructure in the neighborhood – and it will still result in a untenable reduction in per capita open space (in a neighborhood that already ranks near the bottom Citywide, we are heading in the wrong direction – fast).

Domino, for its part, continues to argue that it is special and therefore deserves special treatment. They continue to claim that “providing 660 affordable units and extraordinary public amenities comes with a significant price tag”, and continue to refuse to provide the public with any actual accounting of how those costs balance with the very significant revenue that will be derived from thousands of new market-rate units. CB1 and City Planning have rejected similar density-for-affordable-housing swaps in the past, doing so in the future will be much, much harder.

Make no mistake, Domino will permanently change the character of the Southside. No amount of affordable housing (or low-wage, service-sector jobs) will change that. When the City Council takes this up next week, they should listen to the whole community and change this project for the better. The Council should reduce the density to 2005 levels, add new open space to the neighborhood using City-owned sites to the south of Domino (which Domino should foot part of the bill for) and eliminate the shadow impacts on low-rise housing and Grand Ferry Park.

Brooks of Sheffield has decided to shut down his excellent blog, Lost City. A shame, because his was one of the better written, better researched blogs on ephemeral New York.

And he’s not going out on an optimistic note:

Most of the City is lost after all — the good parts, anyway… It’s like writing a volcano report from Pompei; you know the communiques are going to end sometime.

As it happened, I did a lecture at NYU last week on New York City, its ephemeral nature and its enduring qualities, so I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about these issues lately. And while much is certainly lost, I disagree with Brooks’ pessimism. New York is a city that is defined by change and reinvention, and it has gone through an inordinate amount of both over the past 15 or so years. But the alternative could be worse – a city that stagnates is a dead city. That is why I think that all that change and reinvention – cliched as those terms might be in talking about New York – is good. Though it sure could be managed a bit better.

Brooks is leaving the site and almost 3,000 posts intact. If you’ve never read Lost City, I strongly suggest you spend some time with him.