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When Laura Benson moved into her ninth-floor apartment on West 57th Street, it was a light and airy retreat from the pressures of teeming Manhattan.
Fifteen years later, her building is a dwarf in the shadows of the steel-and-glass towers that surround it, and Benson's once-pleasant home seems more and more like a cave. She can't even read during the daytime without turning on her lights.
"It's not fun to be in the apartment," Benson complained. "I go crazy."
If Los Angeles' struggles with growth are defined by its clogged freeways and choking smog, Manhattan's are most evident in its dwindling patches of sunshine and open space.
Explosive Growth
New York's strong recovery from its fiscal crisis of the 1970s, combined with the explosive growth of the financial services industry, has sent Manhattan into one of its most prolonged building booms ever. Demand has driven land prices to astronomical levels. Developers have nowhere to go but up: There are more than 60 buildings of taller than 15 stories under construction in Manhattan.
Air and light are scarcer than ever, and these days, a host of sophisticated and well-organized neighborhood groups are fighting to save what remains. Such luminaries as actor Paul Newman, violinist Itzhak Perlman and former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis have lent their names to the efforts to stop or slow various projects.
"Maybe 20 years ago, New Yorkers would say, the bigger, the better, because that's what distinguishes us," said state Sen. Franz S. Leichter. "Now, there's concern for quality of life, and a realization that bigness isn't necessarily goodness. . . . Throughout the city, you are finding a revolt against developments that do not harmonize with the community."
`Beginning of Tragedy'
Not everyone sees it that way. George Sternlieb, head of Rutgers University's Center for Urban Policy Research, described the growing influence of development opponents as "the beginning of a tragedy. . . . It is a desperate rear-guard action against the city of the 21st Century."
"Nobody can remember the bad times, when New York and New Jersey were competing to see which would have the highest unemployment rate," Sternlieb said. "When we were scared, anybody who wanted to do anything short of a toxic waste disposal site...