Why Are Men Who Build Skyscrapers Afraid of This Woman?

“She’s gone beyond her level of expertise,” Dranoff says of the lashing. “I’d call it tabloid press. I wasn’t surprised, but I was appalled by the language. The terms she used were not architectural terms. I could take the criticism if it wasn’t personal. I think it was meant to ridicule.”

The next day, he called Inquirer editor Bill Marimow to vent. Marimow says he understood Dranoff’s disappointment. “I thought the language in Inga’s review was unusually harsh,” he says. “I was sympathetic that someone spent all that time planning and dreaming, so I felt badly for him. I like critiques that are done with a scalpel, not an axe. But Inga has an absolute right to her opinion.”

In his letter to the editor that ran five days later, Dranoff defended his creation while reinforcing Saffron’s suggestion that the city’s usual suspects would rally around it. (“Should I assume,” Dranoff wrote, “that the zoning officials … our governor, senators, mayor and other high-placed civic officials who have called the project ‘visionary,’ ‘brilliant’ and ‘magnificent’ also all have bad taste?”) His point of view received unusual treatment — a teaser on the Inquirer’s front page for his letter declared, “A step ahead for Broad Street,” and its headline on the editorial page read, “Taking Exception: Defending a beautiful building.” Saffron says she was surprised to see a front-page headline slanted in support of Dranoff, who’s been advertising in the paper for 25 years. “People [in the newsroom] were a little taken aback,” says food columnist Rick Nichols. “We run rebuttals all the time, but when a critic goes out on a limb and takes a risk, you don’t want to even have the impression that somebody back there is going to saw off that limb.”

But it’s a new day at the Inquirer. In the wake of deep cutbacks, and further blurring the line between critic and reporter, Saffron, like everyone else, is required to work an occasional Sunday shift covering breaking news. So her story last August on a local man murdered in the Virgin Islands was bylined “staff writer,” while her column the next day identified her as “architecture critic.” When zoning board chairman David Auspitz stepped down in January, she was afraid she’d have to write a news story about it. How could she mute her critic’s voice to report on a public official who’d been her whipping boy for years? “She writes with an agenda,” says Dranoff. “She stops being a critic and becomes an advocate. That’s okay for blogs, but not when you’re the architecture critic for a major newspaper.”

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