Vincent Price as ruined landmark: Before the remains were Christoishly covered up.
Steven Roth, the New York real-estate mogul who gave us the Hole, told an audience of Columbia architecture students last week that he deliberately pulled a similar stunt in New York in the hopes of gaining concessions from the city:
Why did I do nothing? Because I was thinking in my own awkward way, that the more the building was a blight, the more the governments would want this to be redeveloped; the more help they would give us when the time came.
And they did.
Of course, nothing gets Tom Menino's Boston up quite like a New York developer pulling stuff like that. The Globe reports Hizzonah has directed the BRA (which, remember, can do pretty much anything it wants) to start looking at taking the whole site over by eminent domain. Sure, the city's supposed to at least have some pretense it's taking the land for some greater good - maybe they can finally build that downtown swimming hole. Wonder what Roth's Boston partner on the deal, John Hynes, thinks?
