By Mark Chiusano
What the visitor to Bogardus Plaza sees is the welcoming kiosk selling pasteis de nata, the tables and egg-shaped seats, and the raised platform that hosts a dog show, one of 8-10 events in the plaza each year. The passerby may notice the elegant paving stones, the antique 17-foot cast-iron clock, and the way that this plaza carves some public recreational space out of what used to be part of Hudson … <Read More>
By Mark Chiusano
For obvious reasons I was recently revisiting a small controversy over the usage of public space in a certain midtown Manhattan building: Trump Tower.
In 2016, Donald Trump and New York City went back and forth over whether the building had to keep some public benches in the lobby. During construction decades earlier, the tower had been allowed to rise higher in exchange for a little bit of public space (some of … <Read More>