You can bet that whichever is the horrible choice, is the one that will be chosen.
Tear all the grand old hotels down. Snuff out all the elegant townhouses. Put up new Kaufmans, O'Haras and Kondylis' in their place. Stop the Nouvel MOMA tower. Only an SOM glass box will do for that spot.
Water and scale down everything that is attractive and dare to stand out from the rest of the junk. From now on only the ugly, cheap and anonymous will be tolerated in this city. Only the bottom line matters.
Slowly but surely all of this will be achieved. Be patient. Progress!
Nope, not a Child's in that building -- but there was a Bickford's automat in the building next door to the south at 488 Eighth.
Those sinks in the window were from the short-lived McD experiment with donut making.
Interesting how the scales have been tipped in favor of this building's preservation at least in the short-to-medium term. Surprisingly, I'm very okay with it. I think that area is a long way from supporting brand-new, Class-A office space. Needs to be cleaned up in increments.
As for the hotel: I'll give it 6-8 years before the next serious redevelopment plan comes along.
I give it 18 months, and it won't be a new plan. I think it will be Merrill. They are supposedly only negotiating a very short-term lease extension.
Fire broke out this afternoon in a laundry storage room. There were no injuries and all guests were allowed to return.
NY1
Updated 6:19 PM
Hotel Pennsylvania Evacuated During Fire
Midtown Manhattan's historic Hotel Pennsylvania had a second-alarm fire in its laundry closet this afternoon.
Guests in the 1,700 rooms of the 23-story hotel said they were alerted of a smoke situation around 11 a.m. and were asked to evacuate. Workers and guests said they smelled smoke throughout the building.
No injuries were reported.
After about two hours outdoors, the guests were allowed back in.
"I was on the fourth floor and the maids were told go down the back stairs, so they took me down the back stairs with them, for which I was very thankful," said an evacuated guest. "Then we could just smell smoke, but they had been told that it was on the ninth floor in a chute."
"We heard an announcement that there was the possibility of a fire and to please take the stairs," said another.
"They told us there was a fire on the eighth floor. First we were waiting in the lobby and then they told us to evacuate the whole hotel," said a third.
The extent of damage is still unknown.
The hotel is situated across from Madison Square Garden and Pennsylvania Station.
This image has been on the Neoscape website for a while, but only now I've realized that this is the site of the Penn Hotel.
Though it's most likely off the table, it's criminal that they could even consider replacing the building with an Ikea.
Neoscape
http://www.neoscape.com/
Would be ok if the tower was still built on top of the IKEA.
I wonder how close that sickening proposal came to becoming reality.
What's scary is that, that kind of thinking still exists in this city, in 2008 (and in all likelihood, well into the future).
They could do something like they did with the Hearst Building here, and it would probably be nice, although I would just leave it the way it is. I like the idea of building on top of existing historical buildings as a trade off to just tearing them down.
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