I had to go to IKEA for some furniture during a hotter period in the summer. The amount of people just hanging out and preventing us from actually trying the sofas was really annoying. So yeah, you can do it but it’s a bit of a dick move to actual shoppers.
(also fuck IKEA for making their store into a huge maze where you almost have to go through the entire thing even if you just want a single item)
I’ve only ever been to one IKEA, but at least for that one, there were somewhat subtle but definitely visible holes in the walls and displays to allow you to cut through the maze.
ETA: Also - again, for that one - if you know what particular item you want, you can find that item’s location on the website and go straight to the warehouse to grab the item off the shelves.
I don’t know about other cities, but the ones I’ve lived near were simply too irregularly shaped. NYC was able to be built like a grid, but a city like, say, Buffalo (go Bills!) is both too wibbly wobbly as well as too cold to envision a park being used as a centerpiece.
As a New Yorker, let me just assure you that it wasn’t really designed with crosstown traffic in mind. If you’re going from West 69th and say, 10th Ave, to East 69th and 2nd, you’re in for a shitshow no matter what you do. This includes walking (try not to be ran over by an Uber walking through Central Park late at night). Taking the subway(what subway line goes from upper east to upper west?? Hahahah you’re fucked!) Or taking a crosstown bus (Takes almost an hour to go from 10th avenue to 2nd avenue cause you’re gonna have to go all the way up/down to the cross park street).
Multiple smaller parks would probably be much better, or just, y’know, having space for trees outside of the designated tree infrastructure.
I think having both large and small (and tree lined streets) are good ideas. But there’s something appealing about a large park that you can really immerse yourself in.
I don’t disagree with you, but due to the geography of New York, midtown smack above the meeting point of the busiest bottlenecks in the nation becomes literally the worst location for it. They could have buried FDR drive near south street seaport like in Boston and just turned the whole southern tip of the island under Houston into a huge park. Or maybe the whole northern tip up near inwood.
Some cities did, like Vancouver. But others thought it too expensive to the taxpayers and are now kicking themselves decades later. Or the taxpayers didn’t want to support it back then.
Something seems odd with the idea that high rises were ‘natural’ :-)
For me, the “concept” is terribly wrong.
A park itself is fine, but you can’t use one park as an excuse for not having other parks, green areas etc. anymore in a big city.
New York has 5 times more people than Munich. But Munich’s biggest park is about the same size as New York’s Central Park (a little bigger even). And if you count all the green areas, parks etc. in Munich together, they are 6 times larger (counting only the ones that are publicly accessible and listed in wikipedia) than that Central Park.
So, give your New Yorker’s 30 central parks and lots of other green spots, and you got a concept.
Something seems odd with the idea that high rises were ‘natural’ :-)
They are better than spreading single family homes and ground floor commercial spaces over a huge swath of land that would inevitable need clearcutting and plowing under to be suitable for development.
Which is why government typically rubberstamps every developer request to clearcut new forests and turn under new grassland, to build a new poorly built development of McMansions that will probably have to be extensively rebuilt within 5-10 years due to the apalling build quality.
Same reason no one builds affordable homes. Why develop homes for the poors, for 100k, when they can make McMansions on the same land, and sell them for 1mil+ a pop.
If Central Park was proposed today, it would be decried as a waste of valuable property (and probably liberal wokeism)
They spent billions to fix traffic issues and failing infrastructure.
The greenspace was a byproduct. That was only allowed to happen because buildings along the former elevated roadway would see a massive increase in land value with the roadway gone that was more valuable than shoving more buildings into the strip of land.
“naturally surounded by high rises” nothing natural about that. Its callled urban planning and in this case complete control was given to one guy, the one that made prospect park too, i saw a docu on it. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t but the bearucracy and corruption with funding usually takes its place. A lot of cities simply weren’t planned for that, central park is designed pre-automobile. Many new cities are post-auto, so they dont care about walking spaces like they used to, a lot of cities have decided that the public is dangerous and hard to control, they dont want them to gather or loiter in any space and why should they give something for free when a business can profit from their need? NYC came from a place where they the populace was accustomed to dealing with the public in person on a daily basis.
People are giving examples of parks that are way off in the boonies. I’m trying to say located centrally, heart of the city, you know where the high rises are.
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