Tell me how I can serve you, O Optimus
(For that matter, the Transformer movies could simply be a clever robotic black-ops campaign to soften us up for an eventual robotic takeover.)
Yet those humans who have not accepted their subjugation by their manufactured superiors still resist, as reported in this The New York Times article:
Residents of East 94th Street, between Lexington and Third Avenues, never expected to see a private driveway among the row of tidy brownstones on the north side of their block.
The building in 2006, pre-garage.
But earlier this year, they discovered that the owners of No. 161, Andreas Gruson and Maria Negrete-Gruson, had built a nine-foot-wide driveway leading to their new one-car garage.
By such devious means do our robot overlords infiltrate what had heretofore been safe havens for humans. Yet we can still defend ourselves!
What would be commonplace almost anywhere else set off shock waves in Manhattan.
Bad enough that most of America has been swept under by these invaders. Now they are creeping into Manhattan, where owning a car is still seen (quite rightly!) as a stigma, a sign of lower intelligence and lower breeding, and a collaborationist acceptance of metal dominion.
The Grusons’ driveway was legal — they had sued the city for the right to build it, and won. But the decision in their case could have led to copycat driveways throughout Manhattan, if other homeowners got wind of the legal window opened by the judge’s ruling.
Like this?
Copycat driveways!
A driveway-in-progress at a new town house on 123 West 15th Street has generated neighborhood opposition.
As a result, said Richard S. Lobel, the Grusons’ lawyer, “the city acted so quickly, it was blinding.”
Blinded by the bureaucracy: Lobel
In April, the City Council passed regulations meant to tighten restrictions on curb cuts.
That so much havoc was caused by one driveway should not be surprising in a city where, according to Donald Albrecht, a curator of “Cars, Culture and the City,” an exhibition this summer at the Museum of the City of New York, more than 1.5 million cars compete for scarce street parking and a tiny number of private garages.
It’s a wary, I tell you, a war between those of us who have not taken the yoke of the choke, and those who have indentured themselves to speed.
In cities, people can live in the sky, but cars command the streets.
We’re safe up here
My God! They’re coming after us!
Not content with exiling us from the thoroughfares, the metal monsters are now seeking to move in with us:
At 200 11th Avenue, a new building in west Chelsea, apartments with private “sky garages” (click for YouTube animation) reached by car elevator are nearly sold out, at prices ranging from $5 million to more than $17 million, said Leonard Steinberg, a broker who represents the building.
At least bicycles knew enough to use the servants’ entrance:
They seemed so harmless at first.
Uptown, Madonna paid $32 million for a house with an almost-unheard-of (for Manhattan) two-car garage. And even a one-car garage, like the Grusons’, could add more than $500,000 to the value of a house, said Dexter Guerrieri, the president of Vandenberg, the Townhouse Experts, a Manhattan brokerage.
Does that look like an automobile wheel to you?
Assuming an average size of 14′ x 22′ for a one-car garage (at grade or below grade), those 308 additional feet are worth $1,600 apiece – more than the average price for human-residential space. Can there be any more damning evidence the machines are in charge?
I suppose you think we did this for human convenience
Which is why fights over driveways can get nasty.
Hey, I see you in court, buddy!
On the Upper East Side, there was substantial opposition to the Grusons’ driveway. In January, the community board voted 34 to 1 against it.
We have laws and zoning precisely so that the taste police cannot decide to prohibit something just because they dislike it – and that foolish adherence to principles and laws will be our undoing versus the machines.
Jacqueline Ludorf, the president of the board, said that to exit the driveway the Grusons “have to back up into the street. It’s a street where children play. We feel it’s a great safety hazard.”
This sounds like spluttering. East 94th Street is a street where children play?
Would you want your children playing in this street?
Are you living in the stickball era?
The streets were safe back when the aliens were scarce.
Mr. Gruson said at the community board meeting that he needed the garage for his father-in-law, who is elderly and needs to be driven directly into the house, which is not in a landmark district.
I’ll see you children playing and raise you an elderly father—in-law.
Mr. Gruson, who until recently owned a waste disposal company, and his wife, a portfolio manager, bought the house in 2007 for $4.15 million. (They had bought their previous home, on East 72nd Street, for $2 million, and sold it four years later for $4.6 million.)
We should have suspected they were infiltration agents …
Tell me about your curb cuts, tovarisch
Soon they had replaced a pair of ground-floor windows with an overhead garage door.
It’s almost a if they knew that announcing their plans would bring down a storm of opposition.
Then they filed plans to create the curb cut and driveway.
Their request at first appeared quixotic. In row house neighborhoods like the Grusons’, the zoning resolution, which governs what can be built, prohibits curb cuts for developments on zoning lots less than 40 feet wide. Their house has just 18 feet of frontage.
What evil plan did they have up their sleeves?
The city was so sure the Grusons couldn’t have a driveway, according to their lawyer, Mr. Lobel, that it declined to review their application and offered to refund their filing fees.
After the city resisted, [Mr. Gruson] said, “we realized the only way we were going to receive this authorization was if we mounted a serious legal battle.”
In early 2008, the Grusons sued the city for the right to build the driveway.
While anyone can sue anyone in this great land of ours, suing the government is seldom a winning proposition – you have to believe you are entirely in the right, and you have to mount the resources to sustain the campaign against an opponent that uses your neighbors’ (taxpayers’) money to resist you.
But Mr. Lobel believed the Grusons’ house, built in 1899, could not be considered a development — and, therefore, the rules about developments did not apply.
While researching the reasoning would take us off course [You're just lazy – Ed.], I shall speculate that ‘development’ is a term added to the zoning some time after 1899, and therefore that any structure extant before the ”development’ zoning’s enactment is grandfathered against such requirements.
[Editor's note: if any reader has a copy of the decision, please send it or its URL my way. – Ed.]
Late that year, State Supreme Court Judge Paul G. Feinman handed them a stunning victory, accepting their argument that a 100-year-old house could not be considered a development for zoning purposes.
Stunning?
We’re stunned that’s not a development.
The city appealed, starting a process that lasted about a year, before dropping the appeal in the middle of last year. On March 1 of this year, the Grusons were granted the right to build a driveway, and within a few weeks, part of the curb outside their house was gone. Then they positioned a pair of iridescent orange stanchions to keep people from parking in front of their driveway. The stanchions could be considered bastions in the fight for private parking in Manhattan.
161 East 94th Street. Stanchions that are bastions?
What can the humans do to fight the metal menace?
[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]
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