“The original Battery Park City design was about as banal as could be imagined—bland modernist towers in a Corbusian park-like setting,” architecture critic Francis Morrone is saying to his audience of some 25 attentive New Yorkers, who’ve signed up for one of his renowned Municipal Art Society tours. “Fate in the form of the 1975 fiscal crisis saved us, decreeing this could not be built. By the time it started up again, a whole new generation of architects—Young Turks—had replaced the old.” How lucky for New York, because the Battery Park City we’re about to see with Morrone is by universal assent superior to what would have been.
The post A Guide to New York City’s Urban Landscapes with Francis Morrone first appeared on Untapped Cities.