YES!
Readers of Design Observer may be sick of the High Line by now. I know that I sort of am. The product of a design competition with over 700 entries, designed to within an inch of its minutely cultivated life, and surrounded by some of the chicest real estate in town, the half-mile southern stretch of this elevated New York City park has been so deliriously popular that crowd control has become a serious problem.∞
Nearly as popular, but much less celebrated by design cognescenti, is an urban intervention about two miles north. At the beginning of the summer, New York Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan closed two sections of Broadway to traffic, including five blocks at Times Square, creating new pedestrian malls overnight. Then, Tim Tompkins of the Times Square Alliance, realizing that people might want to sit somewhere, bought 376 rubber folding chairs for $10.74 apiece from Pintchik’s Hardware in Park Slope. Done and done, and instantly — without the High Line’s international design competition, logo, $170 million budget, and five years of painstaking deliberation — millions of people have a new way of enjoying the city.
This raises a question: when it comes to fulfilling simple human desires, can design get in the way?
