Dear Readers: I sent this to New York Magazine in response to their article with images you must check out about Cooper Union's new buildings for our beloved neighborhood. Looks like a virtual unreality, a techno-bad dream. I gave the magazine permission to publish any of this they wanted but it is poetry and I am not waiting for anyone to publish it....that is what this blog is for!
re: your article on Cooper Union.... The good, the bad and the ugly....
The header for your piece should read "The bad, the ugly, the neighborhood's unreality!"
What ever Cooper Union's high paid p.r. people tell you about the community loving "their new developments" is untrue. My guess is the majority of the community if asked would tell you they do not welcome the development.
We do not like it. The fact they can tear down their Science building, supersize and lease it for office space for 99 years is ludicrous. If they need money than sell the property. Could you imagine if NYU and Cooper Union had to pay real estate taxes? Cooper Union claims they are not as bad as NYU and that is only because they can't be as bad...yet. The "new studio" looks like a fractured glass aquarium and it is next to Dubai on the Bowery that looks like a spaceship. None of these buildings fit in with the neighborhood unless you include the sea of NYU megadorms and the Cooper Union mega dorm that line 3rd Avenue but the attitude of the pro-development movement is we don't belong. I thought I lived in the East Village not a bad xerox of mid-town, Dubai wanna-be most of all our virtual unreality. Welcome to the "new" hideous New York.
p.s. For those who use to go to Madame X when it was very dark and there was a very provocative poem in the skylight -- that was my art installation poem which also ended with the term "virtual unreality". The poem is on my archive page www.suzannahbtroyartist.com and the bad muse that inspired it tried to suck the soul out of me...in this case the tsunami of futuristic dubai wannabe development is sucking the soul out of our neighborhood as if NYU mega dorming the East Village to death was not enough. The East Village is home to a massive amount of NYU mega dorms and various other forms of NYU student housing, a Cooper Union Mega dorm (as hideous), The New School Mega dorm, New York Law mega dorm, SVA (mini mega dorm). Welcome to the the bad reality make over of the East Village I have renamed NYU-Las Vegas ville where there are never too many bars and banks and you can party like a wannabe rock star! CU is just so elitist cool -- oh yeah...the statement they are making says it all. CU's message is the same as NYU's message to the community. The only thing they have not done is provide buses, NYU trolley's and trains to move us out. See you!
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