Jay Weiser, an associate professor of law & real estate at Baruch College's Zicklin School of Business and a new contributor to Cities on a Hill sends in his observations on hypocrisy and foolishness in urban design, both in New York and St. Louis:

Landmarks Preservation Commission Chair Robert Tierney defends the turn-down of the proposed new Upper East Side apartment tower designed by architectural firm Norman Foster,saying of the building that inspired Tom Wolfe's recent screed against the Commission, "[Y]ou can’t just throw a glass building in the middle of a historic district.”

And so another effort to add more housing units and alleviate New York's sky-high housing prices is strangled in the Landmarks Commission's python-like coils.

Oddly, the Commission's concern for aesthetics doesn't extend to The Carlyle, across the street from the proposed Foster building. The Carlyle has a genteel, high-class aura in New York's imagination, thanks to its association with the late Bobby Short, but its mega-bucks cooperative unit owners have turned it into New York's biggest vertical slum. As can be seen in the picture below, the original windows of the 1929 facade have been ripped out and replaced with a random assortment of picture windows better suited to a window contractor's showroom. Not a peep from Landmarks about this, apparently.

So Landmarks turned down Norman Foster's proposal (where the windows would have at least lined up) in order to preserve, as the most prominent part of the East Side skyline, a building trashed so badly by its inhabitants that, had this occurred in a low-income New York City Housing Authority project, the tenants would have been evicted. That's how our aesthetic lords at Landmarks create regulatory snarls and raise housing costs.

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I agree with cultural and architectural historian Helene Lipstadt's praise of Eero Saarinen's Gateway Arch—but while the arch is an architectural gem, it's one of the worst planning disasters of the 20th century.

To make room for the arch, the city destroyed 40 blocks of warehouses, including the largest collection of cast iron buildings outside New York's Soho (they were then regarded as Victorian monstrosities) and replaced them with a large, empty park along the river. In keeping with the period's mania for arid neoclassicism, the planners also demolished a giant allee, running 1.3 miles west to Union Station, to provide an axial view of the arch.

This gutted one of the great 19th century U.S. cities (St. Louis was America's fourth-largest in 1900), leaving a modernist DMZ where there had once been an urban fabric. No wonder the city's population decline accelerated after the completion of the Arch (750,026 in 1960; 348,189 in 2000): it's the sort of attraction that locals will go to see once in childhood, and then only when accompanying out-of-town visitors. The Arch does draw 4.1 million visitors a year, but given its isolation, I suspect that most of them just drive in and drive out without spending time or money downtown.

If not for the Arch, St. Louis would probably have a booming downtown revival district today. (Philadelphia also wrecked its 19th century downtown -- including most of Frank Furness' best buildings -- to create Independence National Historical Park, but other older neighborhoods survived to come back into style.)

Notwithstanding Ms. Lipstadt, architectural monuments aren't worth much unless they add to the life of the city. That should be a concern here in New York, where plans are proceeding for Ground Zero's grim pit-memorial.