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144 chapter six Far West Side Stories If Lower Manhattan is haunted by office towers that once were, the far west side of Manhattan is haunted by office towers that are yet to be. The area west of Eighth Avenue between roughly Thirtieth and Fifty-ninth streets has long been targeted by New York City elites as a site for the expansion of the midtown Manhattan cbd. From the 1920s onward, the city’s most powerful real estate developers and brilliant planners have churned out proposals for the commercial development of an area once labeled by prominent real estate family scion and Giuliani-era cpc Chair Joseph Rose as “our birthright . . . our future, our growth potential” (2000). As of the mid-1990s, these visions remained unfulfilled . The westward expansion of the midtown Manhattan cbd reached Ninth Avenue only after a long and halting process that left the far west side littered with the corpses of failed commercial development plans. However, during the late 1990s a number of elite planning efforts came together to make the long-heralded redevelopment of the area once again seem imminent. Of these, nyc2012’s was the most important, associating the development agenda of the city’s real estate elite with the internationalism, cosmopolitanism, and celebration of competition represented by the Olympics movement. This effort, it was hoped, would vitiate the political opposition that had scuttled other efforts to redevelop the far west side. By making the redevelopment of the far west side of Manhattan its “first priority” (Bloomberg 2003b), the Bloomberg administration was entering dangerous territory. The far west side had been the site of both the most grandiose plans and the bitterest defeats of the real estate elite. For any number of developers and planners, nyc2012’s push for far west side development, now taken up by the administration, represented an opportunity to fulfill the decadesold vision of a bustling, contemporary, and profitable midtown Manhattan cbd stretching all the way to the Hudson River. For local community groups, housing activists, and residents, this push represented the latest in a series of incursions into their neighborhood. Former efforts swathed the area with transportation infrastructure and left the prospect of high-end commercial and Far West Side Stories • 145 residential development looming, literally, in the shape of new skyscrapers on the eastern edge of Times Square. To better understand the situation inherited by the corporate, antipolitical Bloomberg Way, this chapter outlines the history of far west side development and its discontents. It also describes in some detail the overlapping plans produced by nyc2012 and the dcp that together formed the basis for the Bloomberg administration’s Hudson Yards plan. the long development of the hudson yards plan Midtown was originally centered on the east side of Manhattan along Madison and Park avenues from roughly Fortieth to Sixtieth streets. It moved westward in three great bursts of office construction during the late 1920s, the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the 1980s. With the aid of a mid-eighties downzoning of the east side that forced commercial development westward, along with the richly subsidized redevelopment of Times Square and its environs , the last of these booms resulted in office towers appearing for the first time west of Seventh Avenue.1 The last of these booms left in its wake a copious amount of unoccupied office space that was not absorbed until the late 1990s when construction began again and development reached what had long been considered the eastern boundary of the far west side, Eighth Avenue.2 This halting and difficult colonization of speakeasies, porn shops, low-scale residential buildings, industrial lofts, and low-rent entertainment districts belied the long-made claims that the development of the far west side was imminent . It took decades of plans, foundation studies, relocations, condemnations , developers’ machinations, and public subsidization to achieve what had been treated for decades as a fait accompli: the expansion of the cbd westward to Eighth Avenue. This history began with the rpa’s seminal 1929 plan and continued into the 1960s, when both the rpa and the Lindsay administration targeted the far west side for development.3 The Lindsay administration’s 1969 plan was the most fleshed out and ambitious of these—and indeed of any plan for the far west side until the development of the Hudson Yards plan three decades later. It proposed the intensive commercial and residential development of the far west side, particularly the area west of Eighth Avenue between Forty-second...

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