I believe the children are our future — oh, forget it ...

Photo by Derek Berg 

Inspirational signage — "The Future of the World Is in This School" — was spotted by the dumpster this morning on Second Avenue ...

Headline H/T

Second thoughts about the future

[Photo via an EVG reader]

Last Monday along First Avenue between East Fifth Street and East Sixth Street…

And today!


[Photo by Derek Berg]

Noted

A reader shared this from along First Avenue between East Fifth Street and East Sixth Street… What should we do with this information? Turn around?

The incredible plan to build 'Space Invader-esque residential towers' by the Williamsburg Bridge

A reader shares a link to a Wired article titled "Maps of Unrealized City Plans Reveal What Might Have Been."

The piece looks at city plans that (thankfully, in some cases) never came to be... all via Andrew Lynch's Tumblr called Hyperreal Cartography & The Unrealized City ... it's loaded with city maps "collected from libraries, municipal archives, and dark corners of the Internet."

Of some local interest... the above plans from the 1950s-1960s ... it was an idea hatched after Robert Moses didn't get his Lower Manhattan Expressway off the ground...

"[T]he Ford Foundation asked architect Paul Rudolph to envision an urban expressway that was better integrated into the city. Rudolph drew a futuristic city with soaring, Space Invader-esque residential towers around the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges. The highway would wind beneath a linear city, and modular housing units would be connected by a pod-like monorail system."

Apparently these plans weren't entirely serious, but entertaining nonetheless.

Sort of like the renderings for the Domino Sugar Factory.


[Via Curbed]

Thinking about the future

I took this photo about three weeks ago on Avenue A between 13th Street and 14th Street. I didn't think much of it at the time. It looks like a homemade sign. And it's hanging in front of a former beauty salon.



Now, after the shootings that killed Eric "Taz" Pagan one block away, I can't help but look at the sign differently.

Opinion: For the first time "NYC is going to struggle with questions about its reason for being"

From Peggy Noonan's column in The Wall Street Journal Friday:

In New York some signs of that future are obvious: fewer cars, less traffic, less of the old busy hum of the economic beehive. New York will, literally, get dimmer. Its magical bright-light nighttime skyline will glitter less as fewer companies inhabit the skyscrapers and put on the lights that make the city glow.

A prediction: By 2010 the mayor, in a variation on broken-window theory, will quietly enact a bright-light theory, demanding that developers leave the lights on whether there are tenants in the buildings or not, lest the world stand on a rise in New Jersey and get the impression no one's here and nobody cares.

The New York of the years 1750 to 2008 — a city that existed for money and for all the arts and delights and beauties money brings — is for the first time going to struggle with questions about its reason for being. This will cause profound dislocations. For a good while the young will continue to flock in, for cheaper rents. Artists will still want to gather with artists — you cannot pick up the Metropolitan Museum and put it in Alma, Mich. But there will be a certain diminution in the assumption of superiority on which New York has long run, and been allowed, by America, to run.