Easy-to-forget department:
The Recent York Times, reporting on the controversy over whether the term “ruined” really describes the bustling neighborhood around Penn Station, left the Times Company’s own chaotic history out of the annals of contentious denunciations.
Governor Kathy Hochul desires to raze several blocks around Penn Station and Madison Square Garden to make way for brand new office buildings that might allegedly pay for the “recent” Penn Station.
The Times cited among the fiercely contested uses of this distinguished domain previously—similar to Barclays Center in Brooklyn, Columbia University in West Harlem, and “parts of Times Square…as a part of a long-running effort to rebuild and clean up the neighborhood.”
But guess what the story didn’t mention? That a complete block on Eighth Avenue was condemned by the state shortly after 2000—when dozens of profitable stores, businesses, and residents were evicted—to make way for the brand new Times headquarters between West fortieth and forty first Streets.
These seizures were completely separate from the Times Square condemnations that preceded them.
Land grabbing was opposed by many landlords and tenants, although the Times, its development partner Bruce Ratner, and the state prevailed in court.
The various Times editorials opposing “corporate welfare” never mention the breaks that the corporate and Ratner benefited from—or the low price the Times and Ratner could have paid those that were evicted.
As I wrote in 2010, such omissions by The Times don’t smack of amnesia but of “a deliberate technique to keep readers at the hours of darkness.”