It is, but then also it isn't really all that amazing if you sit down an examine the entire system. People being "fine with a government with zero transparency and zero accountability" isn't surprising, because these problem derive from the structure of the system itself, not any one individual politician operating in it. One could Google up plentiful examples from history of all politicians leveraging the opaqueness of the particular political system they operate in (all systems on Earth are flawed in this manner, to varying degrees) - but at the individual level (politicians and voters), they all realize that "these things are inevitable", and that even though technical wrongdoing has occurred, from the aggregate perspective, the ends justifies the means (which is a perfectly reasonable position to hold in my opinion, if we assume that the individuals in question are not aware that their perception of reality does not match objective reality, which is ~always the case).

I believe that to fix the problem, these systems must be completely redesigned to accommodate the obvious shortcomings. But then to do that, it would require buy-in from both politicians and the media, who both likely enjoy the amount of power in their possession and wouldn't be too keen on giving it up, so I wouldn't hold my breath on anything improving, ever.

That area of NYC had been completely derelict and run down at the time. Midtown East was NYC's red light district up until the 1950s when it moved across town to Times Square. It still is the area to this day where most of the asian brothels in the city are.

Anyway, the Grand Hyatt project completely revitalized that neighborhood.

Then Trump put his (rejected) bid in for the Javits Center project and was the project's biggest salesman to the public. His proposal for which streets to develop nearly exactly became the Hudson Yards project 30 years later...