Nearly half a century ago, somewhere around 7,000 residents were displaced from their homes on the Lower East Side to make way for an urban renewal project. That area still sits empty today, home to no one except some parked cars and trucks. Years of contentious proposals have defied approval, but that is on the verge of changing. A master plan for the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, lovingly known as SPURA, has survived nearly all the gauntlets of NYC’s approvals process, awaiting now only the approval of the City Council and the mayor. The seemingly permanent hole in the middle of the LES may actually get filled, perhaps re-knitting together the areas above and below Delancey Street.

Read the rest of SPURA and Urban Design: Why Settle for a Near-miss? testing

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