The David Childs Admiration Society

The panelists, and audience members, at the Municipal Arts Society’s event on Wednesday night, lamented the loss of the “potato chip”—the dramatic arched skylight that would have risen up from the middle of the proposed Moynihan Station. But it turns out that the potato chip’s designer, David Childs, has returned to the project. In August, when The Related Companies and Vornado Realty Trust won the contract to transform the Farley Post Office into a retail-hotel-office complex, with a nice train station thrown in, they had replaced Childs, hired first by the state, with James Carpenter and Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum. We must have missed the press release, but a state official at the event confirmed that soon afterwards, the developers fired that team and brought Childs back. Nonetheless, he has been put on a low-carb diet and no snack forms are expected to creep back in the picture. -Matthew Schuerman