“The most precious commodity people have is time, and they value the efficiency of having robust resources in their vertical community,” Mr. Lansill said. “If you don’t have to leave your home to host a party, or your kid’s party, or go to the gym or see a movie, that’s truly valuable.”
And then there’s that major commitment of many Manhattan women: hair. Lauren Witkoff, executive vice president of Witkoff, one of the developers of 111 Murray Street (another Kohn Pedersen Fox tower on the edge of TriBeCa), has invited the blowout chain Drybar into the amenity spaces there.
“It’s the only private Drybar in the city,” Ms. Witkoff said, adding that she was working with Creative Art Partners, an “art concierge service” in Los Angeles, to help residents build their own art collections. “We’re always trying to do something a little different. It’s not just, ‘What amenities are we going to put in the building?’ But ‘how are we going to activate them in a way that’s meaningful?’”
The Vertical Suburb
In “The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of Community,” which was published in 1989, the sociologist Ray Oldenburg wrote about the importance of the “third place”: that which is not home and not work, a ballast in a society where home life is increasingly isolated.
If there is no informal public life, he wrote, if the “means and facilities for relaxation and leisure are not publicly shared, they become the objects of private ownership and consumption.”
That’s not good for cities. So many buildings have devoted so much interior space to what used to be public places — hair salons and gyms and theaters and food courts — it may begin to feel like the city is turning inside out, ringed by walls of glass as smooth and blank as Kim Kardashian’s skin.
from Best News Viral http://bit.ly/2EmkGNy
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