••• B. sent over a photo of the topper under construction on the little building at 35 Walker. “I’ve been watching this massive project for a long time—plus all attempts to do something with the building for the past 38 years!”

••• Nice to see Google do a bit of community outreach, donating $90,000 to sponsor two upcoming exhibitions at one of its soon-to-be-neighbors, Children’s Museum of the Arts.

••• The reader known as Hudson River has a mall report: “Venus et Fleur has opened (smells good) at the World Trade Center; Suistudio (which is what they seem to call the women’s part of Suitsupply on the second floor at Brookfield Place) is ‘expanding’ and papered over—they may mean the men’s store is expanding into the women’s store space. Also at Brookfield Place, Vilebrequin has closed (papered over). And Beer Table in 4 World Trade Center has closed (the sign is down) and Choza Taqueria hasn’t been open for awhile (maybe before Christmas?).” I’m amazed Vilebrequin lasted as long as it did. An elastic waistband doesn’t flatter anyone but the very thin.

••• Opening today at Alexander and Bonin: “Roman Cochet’s first exhibition at the gallery takes its title [A dog named Robòt] from the animal who first discovered the Lascaux cave paintings: a dog whose name was Robòt. In the Summer of 1940, four children were exploring the woods of Montignac in Southern France when their dog ran ahead, drawn to a hole in the ground that led to the prehistoric cave paintings. Cochet takes a similar temporal leap in his work, albeit into a posthuman future, as he maps a series of contingent realities devoid of the human subject.” Below: “Untitled” (detail).

••• “A friend who was binge cleaning gave me a 1990 issue of Architectural Digest with the attached articles on Tribeca and Battery Park City,” emailed M. “How things have not changed. I thought they might make amusing reading.” Indeed! The Tribeca one was what I expected—about the drive to save the area’s architectural from wanton redevelopment—but the Battery Park City one was a surprise. Critic Paul Goldberger, known for his writing in the New York Times and the New Yorker, raved about the neighborhood. If you don’t feel like reading these images, he covered similar ground in this Times review in 1986. P.S. That first page is atrocious design: Two captions above the lede? (Update: Now with page 3.)