LETTER FROM NEW YORK.

As the great economic boom in the United States continues to roar on, American cities, particularly New York, are being transformed, and not usually for the better. What had been one of the few American cities with a delicate downtown is being radically altered in scale, mix and quality of detailing. Michael Sorkin explains how one of the most desirable parts of Manhattan is being transmogrified and degraded before his eyes.

Today is the first day of autumn and the city is lovely, the air crisp and clear and the pace everywhere quickening -- our best season. As I write this I'm sitting in my studio in groovy Tribeca, rapidly becoming the city's most covetable neighbourhood. My building -- a sturdy, 30s vintage, high-rise loft has, until recently, been home to a wide and delightful variety of art and industrial uses (printing has a long history on lower Hudson Street) but is now largely vacant, we remaining tenants living on borrowed time. Not that no one wants the space but the go-go regime on Wall Street is spreading new money around like manure on downtown's fertile soil and the 'demand' is for residences. My landlord, sniffing this inevitable, has decided to cash out and convert the building into deluxe multi-million dollar condos (a million bucks no longer even gets you a conversation with a broker these days). As a result of this enormous bubble, a lovely, very mixed, neighbourhood is undergoing the throes of homogenization, rapidly becoming just another yuppie paradise.

Among the distinguished avatars of this transformation (over on North Moore Street -- the hottest block in the city) -- were JFK Jr and Caroline Bessette. I saw them occasionally (and even writing this, I know I join the ranks of the 'saw them occasionally' crowd and wannabes -- every merchant in the neighbourhood having been quoted in the media about Kennedy buying a cup of take-out coffee, being a regular guy and a good tipper, several boasting black-framed photos of the deceased behind their cash registers) and am still halted in the street by tourists looking ('John John Junior, please?') for their doorway. This was not difficult to find in the weeks immediately after the crash as their entire block was cordoned off by police barricades and composted shoulder deep with flowers, messages, and other tributes of celebrity grief, our own mini-bit of Di madness.

More recently, there's been a proposal to rename a tiny neighbourhood park in Kennedy's honour. Although I like the idea of naming local civic spaces for local heroes, I do wonder what's being commemorated in this case. To be sure, JFK Jr was incredibly good-looking, a nice neighbour, and the author of that iconic salute at his father's funeral. Professionally, he was an indifferent lawyer and the progenitor of a not particularly interesting magazine. He was, it appears, a poor aviator. He was, however, enormously famous. Naming the park after him would certainly affirm the celebrity vibe that pervades the local sense of value. This, after all, is a neighbourhood in which Robert De Niro is a leading restaurateur and Harvey Keitel can be spotted buying a quart of milk.

The park that is candidate for renaming sits catty-corned from another prime neighbourhood site, a triangle of land that for years housed a garden shop and nursery. That plot was wonderful in its potential, its apex pointing south and its short side facing a fabulous inhabited mesa built for the phone company by Voorhees, Gmelin, and Walker, the greatest, most geological, of New York's Deco-era architects. To the east of this inhabited mesa lies a row of small nineteenth-century commercial buildings and to the west -- along the hypotenuse -- is a funky range of very low structures of somewhat more recent vintage running down a slight grade. It was a singular space, an important moment of relief in the density, and a viewing armature across which these wonderful buildings could be seen from far away in rare perspective.

Unfortunately, the rising real estate tide is swamping all sites and a hotel is under construction on the triangle. Recently topped out and now nearly skinned, it's a dreadful piece of work, ersatz as all get out, swaddled in phoney-baloney allusions to nearby cast-iron construction. The hotel's being erected by a developer who, several years ago, built a much larger version a couple of blocks to the north in Soho that has proven highly successful commercially but which -- enormously overscaled -- is a continuing affront to the fine-grained neighbourhood fabric. Like the earlier flop-house, the new one can be expected to generate the queue of idling, air-fouling, limousines that are the emblems of success in the current cultural regime. Although there were citizen efforts to stop both of these structures, they were to no avail as both buildings fell within the letter of the zoning laws which take no position on the value of such serendipitous open-spaces.

Given the leading role of celebrity and entertainment in the new urbanism of downtown, there's nothing that meaningfully could have been counterposed to the hotel to attract real support on the part of the civic weal. Except perhaps a higher version of celebrity. One project that could surely have stopped the hotel in its tracks would have been a proposal to make the site into a park in honour of JFK Jr. The iconic oomph and reach of dead Kennedys is irresistibly sacred to us Americans and even the aggressive commercialism of the new hotel would surely have been humbled by the necessity of this national project of commemoration and fraudulent grief. Kennedy, however, simply perished too late.

Open space is at a premium downtown and we are rapidly losing all those accidental sites of uneven development -- our stock of vacant lots -- that have, until now, been uneconomic to build on. Nervously, I await the consumption of an impeccably scaled, might-be piazza that currently serves as a parking lot behind my building which the landlord hopes to turn into yet another mindless condo tower. The mindset behind such serendipitous space-amenity is threatened not simply by this gap-filling surge but by the opposition of the merchant class to civic improvements, even in legitimately public spaces. There has, for example, been a years-long to-do about the so-called 'Greening of Greenwich', a plan to convert a lane of an unusually wide stretch of Greenwich Avenue into a linear park-space. This marginal reduction in the territory of the car is perceived as threatening to the idling limousine constituency -- our hoteliers and restaurateurs, who, fearing the loss of their double-parking privileges have opposed the project tooth and nail.

Much as I love the signs of construction and physical improvement that currently abound in the city, there are certainly days when I think that the most useful contribution to the quality of life here would be a, shall we say, 5000 point drop in the Dow. That should get me a decent extension on my lease and keep a few of our wonderful accidental plazas around for a while.

Michael Sorkin is an architect, critic, teacher and writer who lives in New York.