What a shame. Central Park is one the the jewels of NY. Plants are very light sensitive. It doesn’t take a lot of change and existing flowerbeds will start dying off. I struggle with a shaded yard and it limits what I can plant.
It also is already changing life for people in apartments that are now in shadows. The streets are often in shadow. The NYTimes has a good article on the problem. Eventually I hope our laws catch up with Japan.
It’s been about 30 years since I lived in New York, but I agree Central Park is worth saving.
What is the name of the highway that runs alongside New York Harbor? Is that called the Garden Parkway?
The highway alongside the harbor could become a beautiful garden with lots of sunshine too is why I asked the name of it.
I love New York so many different people … I took a short cut one time through an alley in my van and saw a long line of people all nicely dressed standing in a line that led all the way up to another landing via a fire escape. So I stopped and asked what was going on and the nice dressed black man said, “Were standing in line for a job man”
The park isn’t going anywhere. But I hope there’s some thought at work in development of the area around the park.
The par is not going anywhere. But it won’t be nearly as beautiful if the flowerbeds and shrubbery die off from less direct sunlight.
It’s amazing how even a hour or two difference can effect plants. I’ve never had success growing tomatoes. The plants grow to about half height and never set any fruit. I tried several places in the backyard. I get maybe 4 hours direct sunlight and its just not enough.
I have the same problem with flowers. I get too much sun for shade loving plants and too little for the ones that need direct sun.
I feel bad for the apartment owners in NY. Especially with the high prices. You have 700k invested in a sunny apartment and then watch helplessly as some mega skyscraper gets built a few blocks away. Eventually you’re living in the shadow.
Do you realize how enormous the park is? It’s 840 acres of land stretching from the equivalent of 59th Street to 110th Street and Eighth Avenue to Fifth Avenue. Some of the buildings proposed could cast large shadows that affect some plants and I hope they are being smart about the management of that development instead of just giving the builders whatever they want - which would be par for the course. But saying this is a threat to the park is just insane. It’ll cast shadows over a fraction of the park a fraction of the time. Points to the egomaniac who named with building The Enormo, though. It’s cartoony and uncreative at the same time!
That - and not the park - is what the first article is about. And not that many people in New York City have invested $700,000 in their apartments.
I’ve never been lucky enough to visit NY. Someday, I will and Central Park will be on my list to visit. Prospect Park is huge too at almost 600 acres.
The parks employ professional landscapers. They’ll figure out something that will grow in the different lighting conditions created by the new mega skyscrapers.
Yes, presumably they will. So the park is probably not “threatened.”
By threatened they were referring to the experience. Going out to the park and enjoying the sun. All the activities people enjoyed for over a hundred years.
The next generations will still have the park. It won’t be quite as nice an experience. Laying in the grass and seeing skyscrapers instead of the sky. I guess they won’t realize what they are missing.
It’s the US that is behind in protecting the sky. Japan has regulated and protected access to sunlight for many years. We probably will too when the problem gets bad enough.
Who is “they?” I was talking about what you wrote in your thread title.
…you think the skyscrapers are going to block out the view of the sky entirely? The park is not being lined with skyscrapers. It’s about buildings near the park that will cast shadows over parts of the park at certain times of the day or the year.
The sun does move around during the day, and as mentioned, we are talking a few minutes here and there.
Perhaps we should chop down trees that get too big and cast shadows over meadows?
The first article about the neighbor bitching about losing view and light - gee, too bad.
However, for ANYONE who buys property, be it on the beach or near the mountains or in the city or by the lake - unless you own the surrounding property, there is no guarantee that you will have your light and view forever. When we first bought our house, we had a great view of The Strip. Then trees started to grow in yards around us and, bingo - view all gone.
I love Central Park, but his is hardly worth getting into a tizzy about - and it sounds to me more like disgruntled neighbors who spent $2 million for a studio with a view, and now their lovely view is about to get blocked. I think they are less concerned with having fewer dandelions by the footpath than not being able to keep those panoramic views that added value to their apartments.
I’m pretty sure I saw threatened in one of the articles I read this morning. <shrug> Some verb is needed. Maybe encroached upon would be more precise.
The loss of direct sunlight is just one of many annoyances of urban life. There’s the noise, light pollution at night, annoying people, smog … It’s the cumulative effect of all of them that gradually diminish our way of life.
A aerial photo that shows the current shadows on the park. There are some interesting projected graphs how things will change. They even show it by time throughout the day. I had no idea how much of the sun those skyscrapers block out. I’m so thankful Little Rock doesn’t have anything that tall.
And both parks were designed by the same two guys, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. They considered Prospect Park the better one. The wife and I have been to Central Park but not Prospect Park.
I, too, have a hard time imagining Central Park drying up and dropping dead.
I’m not surprised the system for putting up these buildings is so warped, and those are some big shadows. (The same graphics appear in the CBS story.) Still, it’s daft to say it’s a threat to the survival of the park. It’s poor design and an inconvenience brought on by the entitled.
Of course developers are going to want maximum number of units (thus maximum height) that front the park. Though having a block of luxury pied-a-terres for the 0.001% be taller than the iconic ESB or the functional part of New WTC sounds so… I dunno… vulgarian. But that’s just a matter of taste.
But FWIW the park’s environment has changed over the years as the city has evolved so I’m sure the people in charge will figure an adaptation. Meanwhile the city and the developers will come up with something to appease tempers moving forward, it’s really a zoning matter and we’ll see what the newly elected city leaders have to say.
Y’know, this reminds me that back in the early 20th century, NYC was a pioneer in establishing setback requirements and built-mass parameters lest the streets become completely boxed in. Eventually this was relaxed as architects came up with creative alternatives and it became obvious that not everyone was going to build one massive 60+story tower wall to wall against one another filling in the blocks solid (not everyone could afford it nor the market bear it).
(As for me, like Hell I’d want to live in any floor of a 90-story condo anywhere.)
I didn’t read the NYTimes article, but I skimmed the Daily Mail one and it’s very melodramatic (isn’t everything in The Daily Mail?). They compared the shadows to being like a solar eclipse which is ridiculous. While I agree that it’s a lousy design and the city should have planned better, it’s not like the park will be plunged into complete darkness. It’ll just be slightly dimmer and people who want to go tanning will go somewhere else. Right now there are two towers at Columbus Circle that are casting shadows over the park and it’s barely noticeable. Sky scrapers are also currently visible from Central Park at virtually all points anyway.
I’ve been to Prospect Park as well and it’s less touristy than Central Park so it’s nicer in that sense. There are also less buildings around it so it feels more like being in “nature” than in a park in a city.
Quoted in the OP:
I wonder how much money was required to reach that conclusion.
My solution is to use camouflage/invisibility technology to allow the sunlight to “pass through” the buildings and come out the other side. No shadows. Or even some programmable mirrors that move along with the sun, placed in strategic locations.
Living out west, I get a chuckle at the idea that 840 acres of open land is considered “huge”. 