A top real estate executive from Brooklyn is proposing a high-speed sky gondola between the Brooklyn waterfront and Manhattan — a back-to-the-future form of mass transit that could ease congestion on ferries, subways and bridges.

The so-called East River Skyway would be comprised of high-speed aerial cable cars, moving New Yorkers to Manhattan in less than four minutes. The cars could accommodate more than 5,000 people per hour in both directions. — nydailynews.com

“The project does not provide the storm damage mitigation and storm-surge protection that is promised, or at least the U.S. Geological Survey comments on the plan question the science behind those proposed benefits.” [...]

“A project like this, where the science is being questioned by government scientists and the environmental impacts are clearly negative, it’s a poster child for where we shouldn’t do this. This stretch of Fire Island is a park, for goodness sake.” — nextcity.org

To many designers, the manual became an exemplar of the form—and a design classic in its own right. [...] When Hamish Smyth and Jesse Reed, who work at the New York design firm Pentagram, stumbled across a copy a few years ago, it was buried under old gym clothes in a locker.

They digitized the manual, and now they’re reprinting it with the blessing of the MTA. A complete reissue, which includes a new essay on the manual’s history, is being sold on Kickstarter starting today [...]. — qz.com

A new development, 42 Crosby Street, is pushing the limits of New York City real estate to new heights with 10 underground parking spots that will cost more per square foot than the apartments being sold upstairs.

At $250,000 a tire, the parking spaces in the underground garage cost more than four times the national median sales price for a home, which is $217,800, according to Zillow. — New York Times

When Ground Zero was finally cleared after the fall of the twin towers, New Yorkers trusted that thoughtful, ambitious urban design could make the city whole again. Why have they been so badly let down? — theguardian.com

Execs of the Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center have officially shelved the starchitect’s design planned for Ground Zero. Gehry drew up plans for the art center over a decade ago and very few moves were made to bring the project to fruition...The snub, which actually wasn’t communicated to the architect directly, seems to not have affected him much, and he had some choice words for the board’s President, Maggie Boepple. — 6sqft

We cannot rely on visionaries and authoritarians to generate more, and better, housing. They might deliver, with enormous risk and perseverance, through personal connections and their willingness to invest their own equity or to defer their developers’ fee, as BHC has done. But visionaries and authoritarians are few and far between. Rather, we need to formalize ways of rethinking and requantifying net-to-gross, studio-to-three-bedrooms, block-and-plank formulas. — urbanomnibus.net

The facades of his 515 Highline, a 12-unit condo at 515 West 29th Street in West Chelsea that will almost touch the elevated park, will be rippled like the surface of a sea.

And Soori High Line, a 27-unit condo across the street at 522 West 29th, will have not only rooftop pools [...]. More than a dozen lower-floor apartments will also come with private pools to allow residents to float above it all while contemplating the brash buildings that increasingly populate the surrounding blocks. — nytimes.com