At the public space of the Citi building in LIC. Someone who looks astonishingly like but sounds nothing like the guy who plays Raymond in “Everybody Loves Raymond” seemed to greet me upon my entrance. He was talking to somebody else as his gaze stayed fixed on me.
Getting here meant passage through Queens Plaza and the apocalyptic noise of jackhammers and relentless erections. There remain a number of 2 and 3 story houses in the area, steadily being surrounded and engulfed by skyscrapers. The noise must be deathly for those people, whose property values have probably octupled in the last few years.
Someone told me he was talking to a Greek property owner who had a couple of stores in some part of AsLIC that is not being aggressively developed, and likely never will. (I forget where he said this was.) He also owned a number of properties in Greece. The conversation occurred around the time of the collapse of the Greek economy. The guy said that years earlier he had a choice of buying properties in Queens Plaza or in Greece. In his words he opted to invest in “SHIT IN GREECE.”
There are a couple of decent looking bars around Queens Plaza but I don’t know, the area has changed but I’m not sure it’s changed enough that I would want to get too blotto there. I would look like a tourist staying at one of the hotels. I would be abducted and held for a ransom which no one would want to pay, and I would be left to die.
The Beast Next Door is an interestingly-named bar. I stood outside it for a moment, feeling as if my vision was being disrupted by the artillery-like noise of jackhammers boring into the street.
I was imagining that if there was an upside to all this spasmodic Queens Plaza construction it might be that some of the new buildings will be forced to establish a quantity of public space, as they do at this Citi Building and several Manhattan office buildings. But I don’t think any of the new buildings are offices, nor have I heard anything about any of them making public spaces a priority. Considering the big money these developments are targeting it’s hard to imagine they would be interested in courting the unwashed public any favors.
I think Trump Tower might be the only public space in town that is in a residential building — not that anybody but the president and his clan live there full time. The TT is always dark at night. Almost nobody really seems to live there. I have not entered the TT in months, and I don’t know when I might. Its public spaces had been among my best kept secrets in midtown. It sounds like the place has become a shit show.
…
Walked back, again through Queens Plaza. Orgiastic is a word to describe the development over there. They have not even broken ground on the crown of the area, which will be the 70-tower structure next to the old clock tower building. I, for one, had no false nostalgia for the clock tower building. But public sympathies for that sort of thing are easily manufactured, and somehow the building was landmarked. If one’s sympathies for that building are genuine then you might be inclined to think that allowing it to stand and dwarfing it next to an ugly glass tower does nothing to maintain its dignity, instead impugning it.
That building used to be home to a bunch of dot bombs, among them AngryMan.com, which I regarded as a web version of the old alt.bitterness Usenet group. I only know they were there because they had a large poster of an angry face in one of their windows.
