For months Pratt design students worked with community groups to gather the information necessary to fabricate the elaborate multi-media display. The exhibition showed at the school's Brooklyn and Manhattan campuses through April 26.
The Coalition's display began with a comparision of the group's Alternate Plan and the Queens West plan. After walking under a backwards Pepsi sign, one finds the Manhattan skyline obstructed by Queens West. A video revealed the Coalition's dialogue with former Governor Cuomo, at the project's first groundbreaking. The video also included Diego Feraru's interviews with residents from the Hunters Point Historic District (45th Avenue).
The Coalition would like to congratulate the exhibition curator Jennifer Faqua, and the Design students, for their excellent work in constructing this powerful exhibit. We are grateful for the opportunity to participate in the exhibition.
The following excerpts are from Tom Paino's speech at the Pratt exhibit opening reception:
From our first activity in 1990, which was to testify in the then-smoke-filled back rooms of the final Board of Estimate meeting to today where the Coalition is the generating force behind a 197-a plan, we have struggled to raise the standards and expand the vision of the often myopic forces that shape the city's future development.
Once the combined powers of elected officials, quasi-government development agencies and real estate interests are working in concert, the last thing to be considered, if at all, is the existing community that the development is slated for. In the case of Hunters Point that force was and still is formidable: Empire State Development Corp., Port Authority of NY & NJ, and the Economic Development Corporation all working in concert with a private developer never subjected to a formal bid process...
The new development should be designed in such a way that it extends a sense of invitation to the waterfront from the existing Hunters Point community, as well as all of Queens. Likewise, the new residents should feel invited in to the upland community.
An example of how that statement gets ignored is Lefrak City, like Queens West, was plunked down with little planning into a typical Queens neighborhood. Renowned for its 30 years of social unrest, its lack of planning for the existing community has resulted in edge conditions more typical of the urban sprawl of a developing country rather than one of the world's most cosmopolitan urban centers. The western edge, where wood frame house meets high rise, has turned into a mishmash of mercantile extensions projecting from gable roofs. To provide security the Cape Cod houses have been turned into wrought iron fortresses and to this day, there is a plethora of "for sale" signs in the neighboring blocks.
Lefrak, with its 20,000 residents, is a project smaller than the full Queens West build-out, and is in some ways superior to Queens West in planning: underground parking, 3 times the open space ratio, 1/3 the building height.
If you want to see what Hunters Point would be like with full build-out, go to Rego Park.
That is why we do not give up. It is community groups that bring common sense into planning. We will continue to try to restore vision.
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Last Update: June 1997