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Old Posted Jun 8, 2012, 2:20 PM
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Duck From NY Duck From NY is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2011
Location: Staten Island, "New York City"
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JSsocal View Post
Fortunately, (correct me if I'm wrong), it looks like the building directly facing grand central will stay.

Also, the argument that we are just losing these one or two buildings shouldn't be looked at in this local scale. We are losing a pretty big wave of buildings here, forgive my absent mindedness but there have been 2 recent reclads of large prewar buildings on madison-avenue, the infamous reclad of 1775 Broadway, and destruction of the drake so far. Already in the Grand Central Terminal City there have been 2 reclads of beautiful old buildings, the Grand Hyatt (by trump in the late 80s), and the Bank of America office tower right across the street from this one (totally gutted like 25 years ago). Now there's talk of demolishing this pair of buildings, the destruction of the former MTA headquarters a couple blocks away, 15 Penn Plaza, 516 5th avenue, and now talk of rezoning eastern midtown?

It boggles my mind that so much fight is put in to save redundant row houses and single family homes in other parts of the city, when so many pre-war office towers and hotels are being put on the chopping block with no care given by anyone. New York must grow but there are already so many office proposals on the west side, (which by the way none have tenants yet) and yet we want to put more here as well? New York is gonna set itself up for a bust if so much space is allowed to come online at once in the next few years, and we will also manage to lose some really nice architecture in the process.
Exactly! People don't realize what we're losing over-all in the course of a few decades.

I'm not sure I agree about future vacancies, though. I know that a lot of businesses are looking for more-modern office-space for tech reasons. If there's a huge swatch of vacancies in the future, I would imagine they would be in older buildings.