A richly detailed and lively account of a community victory against an unscrupulous real estate mogul.
The inside story of a New York community’s fight against the Trump Organization.
The subject of Robinson’s book is “Television City,” a 1985 proposal made by real estate mogul Donald Trump to turn the abandoned Penn Central Railyard on the Hudson River into a massive, 18.5 million square-foot building project that would feature luxury apartments, acres of parking, a lavish shopping mall, and the world’s tallest building as its centerpiece. The author, then a young architect, was outraged by this plan, which would have completely swamped the local communities. He banded together with local lawyers, journalists, artists, and civic preservationists in order to wage what he calls a “turf war” to thwart the Television City plan. (“Turf is a hard-wired connection,” he writes, “it is our home ground, personal territory, sphere of influence … its emotional value is determined by its qualities to sustain life, confer status, or provide security.”) With plenty of detail and long quotes from contemporary documents (the clash was widely reported, month after month), Robison tells the story of the coalition that fought against the development and of the allies they enlisted among activists—like Richard Kahan—and politicians, including New York mayor David Dinkins. He follows the story to the unpredictable victory the activists won against Television City, which eventually became the largely residential Riverside South area. Throughout all of this, the author works the minor miracle of turning largely procedural real estate wrangling into gripping reading. Robinson compellingly details how the Trump Organization swamped the city agencies with superfluous litigation and complained that the American Institute of Architects’ report against Television City was an unfair witch hunt—and how the community, alarmed by “a litany of the unacceptable environmental and social impacts” that Television City would unleash on the West Side, won in the end.
A richly detailed and lively account of a community victory against an unscrupulous real estate mogul.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2024
ISBN: 9781665763523
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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