Requiem for a bus station/community college/performing arts cetner
Moshe Safdie, the world famous architect who was supposed to design Renaissance Square has pulled out of the project. There are other problems as well:
Concerns over the project’s budget have prompted a major slowdown of the project, and it may not be built at all. A decision to build Renaissance Square won’t come until April 2009.
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“We’ve spent $15 million of the taxpayers’ money and we’re at ground zero. We still don’t know what we’re doing on Main Street,†said Democratic County Legislator Paul Haney, who attended the meeting.
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Mayor Robert Duffy is a member of the Main and Clinton board, which hasn’t met for months. He had a number of questions about the project design, sustainability, and whether retail would be included.
“What are we looking at?†Duffy asked. “There’s no way we can build what was initially proposed.â€
I never really understood how Renaissance Square worked without the performing arts center (which doesn’t seem to be a part of the plan anymore). Simply putting a community college and a bus station downtown does little to spruce up the area. Many people I have spoken with believe that Maggie Minarik’s plan here was to create an even greater concentration of poverty in the city than already exists. While such a plan would play directly into their larger strategy of pitting the white, affluent suburbs against the diverse, economically troubled city, I tend to believe that they wanted Ren Square to be viewed as a success. Certainly, the fact that they recruited a well-known architect for the project suggests this.
Perhaps, then, the Ren Square drama, which mercifully seems to be drawing to a close, has no villain. But it does have heroes. They are the members of our local media who asked tough questions about the project. Reporters at Channel 13 and the City paper took the lead on this front, but more recently, even the milquetoasts at the D&C editorial board have taken a tough stance on the project.
hmmmm…I wonder why they didn’t cuff Moshe Safdie and haul him in for failure to follow the directions of the dictator.
This project is DEAD. Nothing to look at - move along…
[...] written, numerous times about the lack of transparency and oversight-here and here and here (the list goes [...]
[...] doesn’t make sense without the performing arts center.ÂÂ WithÂÂ that seemingly gone and the lead architect off the project, how can this project possibly hope to be a [...]