The most striking harbinger of transformation is the 10-story steel superstructure of the $324.7 million, two-block-long Bronx Supreme/Criminal Court complex, rising between Sherman and Morris Avenues.
The largest project under construction is Center City, a 320,000-square-foot, $130 million complex rising on former parking lots just off Main and Market Streets.
The 45-foot-wide track, part of the Barber Motorsports complex, rises and falls some 80 feet with the hilly landscape, and twists for nearly two and a half miles through 16 turns.
Instead, it has a vast sun-baked parking lot gathering dust -- dust from the furious earth-moving and pile-driving for Xanadu, the retail and entertainment complex rising on its edge in the Meadowlands.
Even now, as the oyster-shaped basketball arena that will anchor a 22-acre housing and office complex rises against the low-slung Brooklyn skyline, die-hard opponents are still resisting.
In a city where utility is so highly prized, they were beautiful for their crumbling uselessness, their stark contrast to the shining new complex rising nearby, and the fact that they had managed to survive demolition in this constantly self-regenerating metropolis.
The proposals, designed by architect John McAslan for the international investment firm Henderson Global, will retain the brick-and-stone perimeter buildings, and insert three blocks in the centre of the complex, rising up to 20 metres and providing over 21,000 square metres of office space and 5,700 square metres of shops.
That project is just across Route 3, the Main Street of the Meadowlands, from Xanadu, an ungainly 2.3-million-square-foot complex rising next to Giants Stadium that almost drove one developer into bankruptcy, fell more than a year behind schedule and has filled less than half its retail and entertainment space.
Audiences know that the new dance presented at the Hall, as it is familiarly known, is likely to be worth the trip to Convent Avenue and West 135th Street in Manhattan, where the red brick, three-theater complex rises up on the site of the old Lewisohn Stadium.
