There’s much to love in Mark Krotov’s spirited response to my essay on Sunnyside Yard, especially the compliments, which I endorse emphatically. It is a pleasure to be read by a mind this lively; Krotov brings an amphibian agility and a father’s tenderness to his assessment of the shore of prehistoric Lake Sunnyside, which probably explains why he’s able to appreciate the beauty and mystery in Sunnyside Gardens where I see only suffocation, twee greenery, and low-ceilinged provincialism. Perhaps we need to meet in person and duke this out over a crappy coffee at Parrot, a steak at La Fusta in nearby Jackson Heights, or even—as Krotov gamely suggests—a plate of okra. (I’m happy to split the bill.)
Does it matter—to the response to the essay, to New York City, to my need to string this reply out into something more than just “thanks for the nice words about my piece, Mark”—that one of the main examples Krotov presents to make his case against the redevelopment of Sunnyside Yard now proves the opposite point? Things may of course change again by the time these letters make it to print, but Kathy Hochul has improbably come full circle on congestion pricing since the presidential election, and the city now looks set to slap every motorist south of 60th Street with a $9 toll. I recognize that decking has proved fiendishly difficult to pull off on any kind of viable commercial scale at Atlantic Yards, and I’m willing to concede that a father—an engineering one at that—Krotov met at his daughter’s school may be the final word on infrastructural possibility in New York. But “stupid shit,” to borrow my correspondent’s delightfully blunt expression, is always getting built in New York, and Sunnyside Yard might yet, one day, whether soon (unlikely) or far in the future (faintly possible), provide the perfect meeting ground between political need and developer megalomania. Skyscraper construction in this city was at an ebb through the 1990s and 2000s, but since the financial crash we’ve seen a dramatic new set of supertalls and superbores knife skyward in defiance of economic sense. Having exhausted the possibilities of the vertical, with the demand for housing throughout the city only growing, will developers not find a way to deck the undeckable and terraform the great fossil “lake” of northwestern Queens? It’s impossible to know, but speculation is what makes the conversation interesting.
In any event, I am pleased to see Krotov committing to the daily walk to school with his daughter, and I look forward to him buying her a NYRA subscription for her next birthday. The work of urban criticism, like dreaming and wandering through the city itself, can never start too early.