Hasta La Gadget!

In September 2001, just a few days after the World Trade Center was destroyed, I found myself outside a Broadway theater, looking up at what was, once again, the tallest building in New York. But it was a foggy night, and for a split second, part of the Empire State Building disappeared from view. Reflexively, I panicked.

Then the fog lifted, and I was fine. I needed to see the Empire State Building with my own eyes.

I still do.

But 13 years later, a spate of new buildings is getting in the way. The arrivistes, including a 60-foot-wide tower with one apartment to a floor, threaten to turn the iconic New York skyline into just another urban jumble.

New York is Gotham, Metropolis, and Emerald City, a man-made mountain range with Everest at its center. Its skyline is a kind of ziggurat, reaching its peak at 34th Street and 5th Avenue.

Countless films open with aerial shots of the Empire State Building. “Do we want to compromise that,” asks James Sanders, the architect and author of Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies, “especially in a highly visual, highly iconographic culture?”

The present skyline is “recognizable, familiar, and unbelievably alluring,” says Sanders. “And if it’s gone, it’s gone.” Indeed, with a spate of supertalls obscuring the Empire State Building, the only movies with shots of the Manhattan skyline will be vintage ones.

New York will have diminished its brand and hidden the most famous logo in the world.

Right now, at least four buildings taller than the Empire State Building are under construction in Manhattan, like tent poles that are higher than the tent. And, if present trends continue, more will follow.

The first of the new supertalls is 1 World Trade Center, which restores the skyline, more or less, to its pre-9/11 state. Because it is symbolically important to New Yorkers, and because it is three miles south of the Empire State Building, anchoring its own cluster of skyscrapers, it gets a pass. (Manhattan has been a bipolar island for most of the last 40 years.)

But the other buildings have no such raison d’etre. One of the tallest is 432 Park Avenue at 57th Street, a gridded concrete structure expected to reach 1,397 feet. Just to the west is 107 West 57th Street, with a stepped south façade; at 1,350 feet, it will be more than 20 times as high as it is wide. Further west, One57, with its curved blue glass façade, climbs to just over 1,000 feet. And 217 West 57th, the so-called Nordstrom Tower, is expected to hit almost 1,500 feet (not counting a 300-foot spire). Though they are slim, together they will make the Empire State Building (ESB) invisible from swaths of upper Manhattan where it had long been part of the scenery. If you do manage to catch a glimpse of the ESB, it may look like it has shrunk.

Most troubling is the planned 30 Hudson Yards, an angular 1,300-foot-tall building (far wider than the buildings on 57th Street), with a cantilevered observation deck. It is one of 16 skyscrapers planned for the Hudson Yards development, which is directly west of the Empire State Building. The phalanx will block views of the ESB from large swaths of the west side of Manhattan. (Because the ESB is narrower on its east and west than on its north and south façades, it appears to be a loftier, and perhaps more beautiful, spire from those directions.) From across the river in New Jersey, the iconic tower will be just one of the boys.

New Yorkers may be, literally, lost without it. Since 1931, the Empire State Building has been the city’s GPS. Do you need to go uptown or downtown, east or west — find the Empire State Building and you’ll know which way to turn. It is to New Yorkers what the North Star is to navigators: not only a help, but a comfort.

What can be done to avoid letting the foothills block the mountain? Assuming it’s not too late, the city should limit new construction for a mile around the ESB, to 1,000 feet. (It’s true that a building doesn’t have to be higher than the Empire State Building to hide it. When the fussy Republic Bank building at Fifth Avenue and 40th Street was erected in the 1980s, it was reviled, and rightly so, for blocking views of the Empire State Building from much of upper Fifth Avenue. A law that varies height limits according to distances from the ESB would be a more nuanced solution.)

Height limits have worked in other cities. In Washington, DC, no building can be taller than the Capitol dome (or be more than 20 feet taller than the street it fronts is wide). City leaders, who have defended the height limit against developer-led attempts to overturn it, understand the Capitol is the capital city’s crown. In Paris, restrictive zoning lets the Eiffel Tower retain its pre-eminence.

New York City’s crown deserves no less. To visitors, it’s what makes New York New York, the true top of the heap. To locals, its meaning is more complex. From my rooftop in Brooklyn, it still serves as the reassuring presence I needed in the wake of 9/11. Somehow, the building is both anchor and beacon, pinning the city to the earth while helping it reach the stars. Nothing should stand in its way.

The back of your smartphone or tablet probably has a series of symbols meant to inform you about what not to do with your device as well as who’s approved it for your pocket. Now, new legislation has been signed into law to move those etched or printed symbols into the software. The E-Label Act, signed into law today by … Continue reading

Today only, Amazon is knocking $50 off the brand new HTC Nexus 9 tablet, and throwing in a $50 Google Play credit to boot. It’s a good (if not spectacular) tablet , but a great deal at effectively $100 off. The promotion applies to the 16GB and 32GB models, in both white and black. [Amazon]

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 Mophie has a new Powerstation Plus backup battery, and it aims for compact, all-in-one design that should reduce bulk and complication when you’re searching for supplementary power. The new design builds a cable right into the power pack, which holds a battery powerful enough to charge your iPhone up to eight extra times, depending on the capacity you choose. Our review unit has enough… Read More

As school districts work to prepare students for careers, education and life beyond high school, teaching and using technology in schools has become increasingly important. This doesn’t mean simply purchasing and using new devices in school. For example, it can also mean sending “literacy texts” to parents with tips about reading. Regardless of how we do it, our obligation as educators is to determine what uses of technology work best to meet educational goals for students.

Here in New York, we now have an important opportunity to fund education technology initiatives through a $2 billion bond, the Smart Schools Bond Act, approved by voters on November 4. Broadly, the funds must be used for plans submitted by districts and approved by the state, for equipment such as whiteboards and computers; Internet connectivity; high-tech security; or facility renovations for prekindergarten programs. In my own district, the City School District of New Rochelle, our expected funding is just over $3.5 million.

Even prior to the bond’s passage, we have been working to meaningfully address technology issues this fall, most notably at our first district-wide digital media summit October 23. As New York’s 11th largest school district, we offered free technology education focusing on the social/emotional/educational landscape of children’s digital lives to all parents of the district’s 11,000 students, K-12. The evening was highlighted by an in-depth, interactive presentation, a student performance, and expert panel discussion featuring special guests, including “America’s Psychologist” Dr. Jeff Gardere, KidzVuz Co-Founder Ms. Nancy Friedman and moderator Mr. Mike Gilliam, FiOS1 News Anchor.

To be sure, we will also continue to embrace the opportunity to provide more specific technology lessons to students and additional training for teachers in using technology as part of everyday instruction. Significantly, both of these components also require the presence of an up-to-date technology infrastructure, one of the needs the bond funds are meant to address.

Our challenge and opportunity is not unique, as school districts across our country are faced with the need to upgrade technology infrastructure as they simultaneously work to teach students the latest technology information and best incorporate technology into daily learning. As an example, the Common Core English Language Arts standards, adopted by 43 states and the District of Columbia, state that students must learn to “use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and to interact and collaborate with others.”

And just because you’ve included technology teaching and learning within a district’s curriculum doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve finished the job. In 13 states, including New York, online Common Core Standards assessments in a variety of subjects will be required beginning in spring 2015. Districts in these states, which are participating in the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), are gearing up to meet all of the associated technology infrastructure requirements for testing.

Clearly, no matter where you live, educators must recognize that teaching and using technology in schools doesn’t mean merely hiring and/or training teachers to do so. It involves deciding upon and then implementing:

1. What to teach at each grade level;

2. What learning standards must be met and how students will be assessed;

3. How to find funding to invest in teacher training and the necessary physical technology infrastructure;

4. How to effectively integrate technology as part of teaching and learning in all subjects.

School districts nationwide are working to meet these challenges. Our students deserve nothing less than to be as well prepared for the future as we can make them. As the late writer, professor and management consultant Peter Drucker stated, “Since we live in an age of innovation, a practical education must prepare a man for work that does not yet exist and cannot yet be clearly defined.”