May 9, 2007
Newspaper Condos Headed to Park Slope
Will metal and plastic newspaper boxes be a thing of the past? Gowanus Lounge reports that the Park Slope Civic Council will test a new "modular distribution box" at the corner of Seventh and 9th Street.
The PSCC is working with Brooklyn based company City Solve, which has designed newspaper distribution boxes (pictured). PSCC and City Solve are splitting the cost of the $2,000 box, and Gowanus Lounge writes:
Each box holds eight papers, including free ones. They are designed with sloping tops so that people can't leave things on top of them and with graffiti-proof surfaces. Given the First Amendment issues involved, publishers are asked beforehand to participate in the demonstration project. The ultimate goal is to get the city to fund placement of the newspaper condos as a streetscape improvement measure. Could be a winner.First bus shelters and newsstands getting spiffier, now newspaper boxes? Will garbage cans and mail boxes be next?
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you can still put a sticker on one of those things.
They look worse than what they are supposed to replace.
as long as they really replace the existing boxes
they look pretty cool and take up less space than a long row of racks... garbage cans are already in the process of being upgraded:
velvet-sea.blogspot.com/2007/03/supersized-garbage-cans.html
hopefully they will stop the rain getting in and ruining all the L magazines..
Am I the only one who thinks they're garish? They look poorly built, sort of like something asymmetrical that a mall puts up in order to look "edgy" for the youth.
Does anyone remember the street furniture brouhaha a couple years back, when Clear Channel was going to put up these boxes throughout Manhattan? There are two problems. Firstly, they limit the number of papers that can be distributed. Secondly, whoever owns the box controls the selection of news sources. Avoiding the Clear Channel example, let's say a BID (and not the PSCC) ran the boxes. If a neighbohood paper ran a negative investigative piece about one of the BID's leading businesses, it wouldn't be hard for them to pull the paper's distribution, which could shut a small news outfit down.
Then again, screw Park Slope