Manhattan downgraded to stripmall

[Earlier in the quoted entry, the author discusses the ommission of a planned "Drawing Center" (a museum of historical drawings, essentially) from the Ground Zero site, as well as the planned "Freedom Center", a kind of feel-good entertainment geared exhibit about the globalization by way of the shiny-side-of-the-coin, as well as uncontroversial achievements of America, like the Civil Rights movement.]

Still, it was unsettling to open the New York Times last Friday morning and read—right next to a bittersweet piece on Truman Capote that evoked an earlier Manhattan, a lost Manhattan of Breakfast-at-Tiffany's and Black-and-White Balls—that just one day after Gov. Pataki gave the heave-ho to the cultural group, his chief of staff announced plans for a half-million square feet of retail spaceat Ground Zero, and that the business-community breakfast where the plan was discussed—held at the un-Tiffany-like Sheraton Hotel—was attended by "a table full of Wal-Mart executives," eager to emphasize "their commitment to building in New York City." The chairman of Port Authority, which owns the site, denied that the agency was "planning a big Wal-Mart"; but disillusioned observers of Ground Zero—and aren't we all?—might still wonder whether the biggest store on the planet will prove demonically persuasive. Talk about the high cost of low price."

Link to ArtsJournal's architecture weblog, Pixel Points

I've always enjoyed living in cities far more than living in sprawl. But I fear the economies of scale of the big box stores may rot-out our metropolises. It only took them ten years to do it everywhere else.
Retail is about to be promoted from a major symbol and past-time of America, to the status of its only important edifice. Is urbanism, threatened by a vastly improved transportation and communications infrastructure, in its death throws? I say, "Yes."