As a slavishly geeky, record-collecting Upper East Side teen in the early 80's, Astor Place was my subway station of choice. I'd just hop on the downtown 6 train at 86th street and cruise down to Astor. As goofy as it sounds, I always felt a twinge of excitement when my train pulled into that station. I loved climbing up those stairs into the wide open sunlight, immersing myself in my own fanciful projections of downtown Manhattan's urban bohemian playground. To the east lay the still funky & credibly punky St. Marks Place. To the west lay the record shops of 8th Street. South lay the Bowery, Soho and beyond.
It's a different city nowadays, of course, but I still love Astor Place. The influx of shitty Kmart, Starbucks and the open-space-eviscerating, big blue shampoo bottle that is "starchitect" Charles Gwathmey's "undulating" tower notwithstanding, it still feels like the epicenter of all that I geographically hold dear (for whatever ridiculous reason). Of course, it's only slated to change even further when they tear down the already-rotting 51 Astor Place in order to build another shiny rubic's cube of a building for Cooper Union, but I addressed all that a while back on this post.
The other day, however, I stumbled upon a site operated by those folks who re-designed the stretches of Broadway that intersect Times Square, Herald Square and Madison Square, replacing once-busy traffic arteries with Euro-styled plazas festooned with lunch tables. NYC Street Renaissance seeks to re-imagine Astor Place in a similar fashion, bumping the oft-spun Cube sculpture up a block to make way for a more pedestrian-friendly esplanade. I'm not sure how I feel about that, honestly. The `Place has gone through so many changes already, but I bristle at the notion of it becoming entirely unrecognizable. Coinciding with all this, I recently unearthed a couple of old photos from the late 90s that were taken in Astor Place. Here I am -- looking much younger & fresher -- posing with two friends from the Firewatercircus (an online cabal of fervent Firewater fans... Colleen the brunette, it should be noted, is an accomplished photographer whose site you should check out). These were taken in about 1998, I'd say. Anyway, they're a brief, fleeting glimpse of what the `Place looked like before Gwathmey erected that eyesore. I wonder what it was all look like in another ten years.
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