Livable Streets Part III : Where They Are Headed
By Barry Benepe In the earlier part of this series, I pointed out how our former Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan advanced the design and use […]
Livable Streets
By Barry Benepe Part I: Suffering the Grid Manhattan is uniquely blessed or cursed, depending on your point of view. The rigid uniform rectangular street […]
Looking Back from Life
By Barry Benepe I once asked my therapist, Alice Gerstman, how many people who had returned to life from death were grateful and how many […]
No to Wall, Yes to Bridge
By Barry Benepe In a gracious retreat from a misguided proposal to build a 20-foot high concrete wall enclosing a parking garage over the railway […]
Safe Streets for Walking
By Barry Benepe “A city should be built to the convenience and satisfaction of those that live in it and to the great surprise of […]
16 East 16th Street: An Illusion of Stone and Old Lace
VIEW FROM 16TH STREET. Image courtesy of BKSK Architects. After reading a two-part series I wrote on the redesign of the former Tammany Hall overlooking […]
Planes or Bombs? 9/11 Revisited
By Barry Benepe In May 2018, the New York Times published a report by Elizabeth Williamson in which she told readers how Alex Jones, “an […]
Bike Lanes
Interesting stuff in the August issue of WestView News. The letter from Bill Pullano on the bike lanes on 12th and 13th Streets was especially […]
Lamenting the Loss of Our Lady
By Barry Benepe We have traveled to Paris every year for a month in the early autumn, staying on the west end of the Ile […]
Jane Street Garden Fence Finally Installed: Fence Me In (Not Out)
Who remembers the old cowboy ballad, Don’t Fence Me In? Thanks to a generous grant provided to the Parks Department by City Council Speaker Corey Johnson […]
La Propreté de Paris
Mary Chandrahasan wrote an inspired piece in the September issue of WestView on Designing Waste Strategies for NYC. She did overlook, however, that the City does not […]
Calvert Vaux and Frank Lloyd Wright: Two Architects, One Vision
By Barry Benepe Art is a form of searching where artists sometimes independently reach a common form or truth. I found this to be the […]
Cities Are for Walking
By Barry Benepe When I was but six years old, I accompanied my father on Saturday morning walks from Gramercy Park to Madison Square Park; […]
Praising George Vellonakis and Washington Square Park
By Barry Benepe With all due respect to Geoffrey Croft, I feel that we are fortunate to have George Vellonakis in charge of the design […]
PLANES OF LIGHT AND COLOR
These elements, in both Cezanne’s Montagne Sainte Victoire and COOKFOX’s 2633 Broadway (a 31-story building), reflect and intersect the sky in a transcendental array of […]
Meeting the Sky
By Barry Benepe I have often referred to the sky in earlier articles. This is because we could not define architecture, the City, or even […]
Natural History Embraces the Park and the Sky
By Barry Benepe The power of architecture is revealed to us through light, sound, and passage. New York City is destined to birth one of […]