The Pits.(The Talk of the Town)(construction pits)

Walking or riding along the avenues, you can imagine the storefronts without tenants. Bank branches, juice bars, shops selling electronics and scarves: all of them gone, unable to make the rent, and the landlords, verging on default, unable to lure replacements. It's a feasible scenario, if you consider the consumer-confidence and consumer-price indices, the wealth destruction, all the layoffs and trickle-down effects, and the allegedly unrelated possibility, as the Times reported last week, that "something funny is happening on the dark side of the universe." ("A better and more enticing explanation for the excess is that the particles are being spit out of the fireballs created by dark matter particles colliding and annihilating one another in space"--and here we were blaming Alan Greenspan.) A friend who worked in Southeast Asia in the nineteen-nineties, during the recession there, recalls visiting Bangkok and Jakarta to see the abandoned high-rises of the preceding economic boom. He found ranges of half-finished buildings, derelict superstructures occupied by tent shanties and with squatters gathered around fires. It may be no great leap from there to a vision here of burning garbage cans and jerry-rigged cardboard in Washington Mutual's cashless vestibules or the bare aisles of Circuit City.

"What will it look like?" is a question of the hour, as people try to visualize the ways in which life will change in New York as a result of the financial and economic crisis. In the mind's eye, we tend to populate our recessionary streets with squad cars painted green, cat's-eyed ambulances, and other anachronisms--"Fort Apache, the Bronx: The Remake." But, really, the city will probably just look the way it does now. After an extraordinary era of construction and renovation, demolition and replacement, there will almost certainly come a long period in which little to nothing gets built. Putting aside the long-discussed public projects that are endangered or doomed (the Second Avenue Subway, the West Side Railyards, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Moynihan Station, etc.), dozens of private undertakings have stalled or died. The calls go out to the architects: pencils down. We have inherited, from the good years, a glut of housing, almost all of it of the unaffordable kind--condos galore--and an increase in office space amid a sudden, steep decrease in the need for it. Throw in the high cost, or ...