Proposed is a single platform from which rise all the various structures of the 16 acre site.

Eighteen feet above the ground, this expanse envelops all the buildings. Their portals and shop-windows look out onto this elevation. It is landscaped. It is a pedestrian street.

The roadway below has no sidewalks. It is bare of all but structural beams. There are no pedestrians.It is entirely devoted to vehicular traffic.

The ground level walls of the buildings are perforated by thru-streets and entries for ramps to parking areas. Escalators rise to the sidewalk.

CONSIDERATIONS:

  1. The Keystone

  2. The Results

  3. Why Here

  4. The Future

  5. The Memorial

      Addendum

1. THE KEYSTONE     

Cities began with Jerico well over 10,000 years ago. They have vastly changed since then. Not so the streets. Buildings have changed fundamentally, but the streets, however improved, remain fundamentally the same. Could New York's first governor, Peter Stuyvesant, see Manhattan today he would find the buildings, the infrastructure, the transport incomprehensible. But the streets would be familiar. The streets his wooden leg hobbled over four centuries ago are still here, enhanced yes, yet at bottom the same.

For a very long time that did not matter. The new world rode the old roads well enough. They served electric trams as easily as they had ox-drawn carts. For a long time it was enough to improve the pavement material, give it a sand/gravel base and a grade, raise up sidewalks, put down storm and sewer lines, erect street lamps, innovate traffic lights. But no longer. One way traffic, and alternate parking rules have ceased to be the species of solutions the mounting problems require. There is no more ignoring the glaring reality: the streets can no longer accommodate modern traffic. They no longer provide easy access to buildings. They are no longer a convenient way to get about. The streets we have can no longer do what we need done.

With mass transit not providing a solution, the city has become an invalid, both endlessly constipated and incontinent. Until new streets are devised the city will remain bogged in horrendous traffic, impossible parking, grotesque bags of garbage spilling across sidewalks. It will remain wreathed in roadbeds forever potholed and under construction, a town forever dirty, noisy, deadly, with a population sentenced for life to exist amid bricks, asphalt and grime. The old streets trap New York. She must break out.

The idea of a city is convenience and liberation. It is endless variety, the latest, the best, and right away. Everything is available and practical and handy. The city slicker is freed from the constraints of distance, time and monotony. He flatters himself on talking faster, thinking quicker, doing more living. But he is in fact in the boondocks. For his evenings are spent looking for a parking space, his lunch time means feeding the parking meter, and he sits endlessly in traffic while pedestrians amble by.

The dream of a skyscraper city shatters when people are unable to move conveniently between buildings. It turns into a nightmare when a brutal mass transit becomes their sole option.

The city is caught in the web of its most limiting structure, its streets. They are a barriers to its future. New York needs new streets to be free.