half-wild swimming holes

At the New Yorker:

Keep an eye on the construction pits that developers dug to make way for the foundations of new buildings. The town is pocked with them. The real-estate boom fostered grand schemes, which, though they are in many cases now stillborn, began with holes in the ground. The expiration, earlier this year, of a tax-abatement law, 421-a, encouraged residential builders to dig quickly, to achieve grandfather status and thus better financing. Hence a sudden spate of new pits, some that builders may have had no intention of filling soon anyway. In some cases, if a developer hasn't already paid for the steel, he will be inclined, or forced, to walk away. Buildings that are halfway built tend to get finished, although they may wind up being what are called "see-throughs."

What will become of the pits? Can we turn them into half-wild swimming holes, like the granite quarries of New England? Ring them with barbed wire and convert them into debtors' prisons or internment camps for the culprits who structured synthetic C.D.O.s? They'd make excellent ha-has, for livery horses or livestock. Corn mazes. Extreme-cockfighting arenas. Or perhaps they could serve, over time, as urban tar pits, entrapping and preserving in garbage and white brick dust the occasional unlucky passerby for the scientific edification of future generations, if there turn out to be any. Or they could become parking lots.