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The western end of 71st Street isn't like other streets on the Upper West Side.
For one thing, it ends in a cul-de-sac. And instead of overlooking Riverside Park, West 71st ends in an oblong, sunken stretch of desolate land. Even the romantic sunsets over the Hudson River are blocked by the rusted elevated portion of the West Side Highway.
For those reasons, Leslie Armstrong, an architect who has owned a townhouse a block south on West 70th Street for 20 years, has been looking forward to development of that dark hole, known as the Penn Yards. She envisioned a project that would brighten the vistas down her street, bring some pleasant parkland near the water and increase the activity of residential life.
But Donald Trump's plan to turn the Penn Yards into Television City has Ms. Armstrong more concerned than ever about the future of her neighborhood. Instead of spilling into a new, open community built on a human scale, West 70th and West 71st streets will face a wall of giant high-rises that will all but block off the river and a tiny park she will probably never want to visit.
"It's a very greedy proposal," she says.
Her anger isn't directed at Mr. Trump; she understands that developers should seek the greatest profit possible from their developments. Her focus is the city, which has the final say on the property's zoning.
Indeed, what happens at Television City -- whether Mr. Trump's ambitious development is built as proposed or completely altered -- will be determined in the coming months as the project begins an approval process that includes review by the City Planning Commission, the community and the Board of Estimate, which will have the final vote.
It's unclear how each body will respond -- and on how much power each group will have in the final decision. But Television City, the most important project in New York in decades, will test the city's ability to manage both development and good planning so that the landscape of New York is enhanced.
Urban scholars, many of whom have criticized the city for having too narrow a vision of urban planning, hope that the city will substantially reduce and reconfigure Mr. Trump's plan.
"When...