The David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center

Does Lincoln Center aspire to eat the entire Upper West Side? As part of the ongoing, billion dollar expansion and restoration of its campus, Lincoln Center has extended its tentacular reach to include public spaces that are not properly part of that campus at all. The most famous of these is the multi-venued Jazz at Lincoln Center in the Time Warner Building. But just recently, it has taken over the Harmony Atrium and reconceived it as the David Rubenstein Atrium, the gateway, according to press releases, of the entirety of Lincoln Center. The new David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center, whose dimensions are identical to those of the older space, represents one of the more successful examples of the roughly 500 privately-owned public spaces, or POPS, that have risen around Manhattan and, to a far lesser degree, the other boroughs over the past half century. Most of these spaces, created and kept up by developers in exchange for permission to build taller residential and office high-rises, are a cynical blight upon the urban landscape, the ugly, uninviting barest minimum that defies the spirit and often the letter of the 1961 law that created POPS in the first place. [more]

200 West, at 200 West 72nd Street

There are few corners of Manhattan as ill-served by architecture as the northwest and southwest corners of Broadway and 72nd Street. In the 1990s it saw the emergence of the Alexandria, a well-intentioned exercise in classical contextualism which, through a combination of weak design and poor construction values, resulted in a pallid eyesore at what should have been the focal point of the Upper West Side. As for 200 West which has just sprung up across the street at 200 West 72nd Street (with an alternate address of 2075 Broadway), the best that can be said is that, if anything, it makes the Alexandria look almost good by comparison. Its mongrelized aesthetic, devised by Handel Architects, is basically art deco in the heavily geometric and vaguely Chrysler-esque flanges that make up the staggered set-backs, starting around the 14th floor. But such adornments do little to enliven or relieve the sense of value engineering and general tedium of this 19-story development, undertaken by the Gotham Organization. The rest is a boxy mass that rises out of nowhere, curving, in true art deco fashion, round the corner where Broadway turns into 72nd Street. More

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