Bernardo Fort-Brescia, founding principal of Arquitectonica
It’s not Las Vegas’ City Center. It’s not Novartis’ corporate campus in Basel. But in my own home town of Fort Lee, NJ, we’ve got a high-profile, fallow site of almost 16 acres, chockablock with the George Washington Bridge (which empties into our borough). Four developers are now vying to build a mixed-use project there—possibly including some combination of residences, retail, offices, hotel, museum, cinema…you name it.
Do I have an opinion? Am I CultureGrrl?
I spoke out last night at the public hearing held by the Mayor and Council to allow the community to vent. Today, I scored two soundbites—on the website (and tomorrow, in the hardcopy) of The Record, our region’s newspaper; and on NY1 television news.
UPDATE: You can see my brief moment of TV and community stardom in Tuesday’s video clip, which was finally posted online this morning (Wednesday). They chose the moment when I ranted against potential overdevelopment, not my more positive comments, which constituted the bulk of my statement. Again, a reporter gets a taste of her own medicine!
Here’s the soundbite I would have liked:
A site which has been an eyesore could become a cynosure.
[Cynosure? What’s a cynosure?]
I’m interested in the project not only because it has the potential to either enhance our quality of life or mire us in vehicular gridlock, but also because one of the developers, Richard Tucker of Tucker Development, has engaged a world-class architect—Bernardo Fort-Brescia of Arquitectonica, who crossed the GW Bridge to give us a detailed presentation, with various alternatives, at the developer’s recent meeting with our community. Tucker told us that his firm not only owns half the site, but has funds already set aside for development—no small consideration, given today’s difficult financial climate.
Our well-located expanse of land also caught the eye of World Trade Center honcho Larry Silverstein (who showed up for his project’s community presentation, but never spoke). His team wants to encumber us with a mega-mall, which Silverstein Properties would develop in concert with the Taubman Company (best known by CultureGrrl readers for having been headed by Sotheby’s disgraced former chairman, A. Alfred Taubman).
Speaking of disgrace, most jaw-dropping moment in the four developers’ presentations, which were held on separate nights, occurred when New Jersey’s former U.S. Senator, Robert Torricelli, who had dropped out of his 2002 reelection race under an ethical cloud, took the podium as chief spokesperson for another of the proposals. Does he really think our memories are that short?
Wouldn’t it be fun, though, if the NY Times‘ Nicolai Ouroussoff, who loved Fort-Brescia’s addition to the Bronx Museum of the Arts (as did I), came to apply his critical eye to Fort Lee?
And doesn’t this sound like it was meant to be: “Fort-Brescia’s Fort Lee,” home to your trusty blogger, “Lee of Fort Lee”?
But wait a minute! I’m not done pushing for Fort-Brescia’s selection yet. If all goes according to plan, I’ll have more than soundbites to link to—coming quite soon.