Minds in the Gutter Exhibiting Designs

The jury recognized the top designs in the following categories: professional firms with comprehensive or prototypical streetscape designs, specific treatments for sidewalks, designs generated within city agencies, designs submitted by groups of classmates or collaborators, designs generated by collaborations between ongoing community initiatives and technical allies, and finally, an outlier submission involving public education that peaked the jury’s interest enough to warrant an honorable mention. Click on any image to launch a slideshow of the selected designs.

THE FIRMS

ARUP | A phased transition from existing conditions to “shared city” goal of multi-modal streets for Chambers St. in Manhattan
Recognizing the city’s capacity for change, ARUP developed a phased approach to bring our stormwater system from passive conveyance into active resource. Starting today, in “Phase 0,” the design rolls out on Chambers St. from Centre St. to the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan, through Phase 1: Porous City, Phase 2: Botanical City” and finally Phase 3: Shared City.

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dlandstudio | Gowanus Canal Sponge Park
The Sponge Park™ plan from dlandstudio proposes a “strategy of urban stitching, connecting the public and private lands adjacent to the water, to create a continuous esplanade with recreational spaces” spanning the Gowanus Canal. This design calls attention to the complex site control aspect of stormwater management.

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Robin Key | Minetta Creek Revisited
Robin Key Landscape Architecture selected Carmine Street as their Minds in the Gutter site for its historical hydrologic significance to the island of Manhattan. An overlay of a 1609 Townsend MacCoun map of Manhattan reveals Minetta Creek as it once flowed south and west along modern day Carmine Street eventually entering a tidal wetland on the banks of the Hudson River. “Minetta Creek Revisited” aims to restore elements of the natural hydrological system that once existed on Carmine Street. Using a matrix of load bearing modular structures that create voids for uncompacted soils below sections of the sidewalk and street, rainwater is captured, filtered and recharged locally.

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W Architecture and Landscape Architecture, LLC | A LIVING MARINE EDGE: a new street prototype for NYC
W Architecture and Landscape Architecture identifies the underutilized street ends along 25% of the city’s shoreline as an opportunity to apply their prototypical “marine streets,” a new edge typology that would mitigate both the upland urban runoff and climatic tidal surges.

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SIDEWALK GROUP

Brooklyn Greenroof | Permeable corridor in sidewalk on DeGraw Street in Brooklyn
Brooklyn Greenroof proposes retrofitting a percentage of sidewalks with a permeable patchwork of cobbles and various patterned steel grates. With almost 700 million square feet of sidewalk surface in NYC, modifying just 25% of the city’s sidewalk area could capture three hundred million gallons of water annually.

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eDesign Dynamics LLC in collaboration with Sustainable South Bronx and Drexel University | Capturing stormwater with enhanced tree pits on a sloped street in Hunts Point
In collaboration with Sustainable South Bronx and Drexel University, eDesign Dynamics designed this street tree pit to capture 100 cubic feet of runoff, the quantity of runoff that flows by this gutter during a 0.25 inch storm. Water that has entered the tree pit will spread out virtually unrestricted to cover the entire planting area, allowing for maximum infiltration and evaporation. Currently, runoff generated from street and sidewalk surfaces rushes down this steepish hill along curbside gutters and into two catch basins located at the lower end of the block, where it enters the combined sewer system.

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NYC Department of Environmental Protection with The Gaia Institute | Enhanced tree pits and street-side swales stormwater demonstration project in the Jamaica Bay watershed
The Department of Environmental Protection worked with The Gaia Institute on this project as part of a three-year pilot study program to implement and monitor several stormwater management techniques within the Jamaica Bay watershed. The results of this pilot study will be used by the DEP to develop design guidelines.

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AGENCY WORK

Greenstreets | Two sites from this inter-agency entity’s roster, one that is built in Brooklyn and one designed for Queens
Greenstreets is a citywide greening and urban beautification program created by the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation that converts unused spaces within the right-of-way into small gardens. Several Greenstreets actively collect stormwater runoff while providing safe thoroughfare for pedestrians and improved urban habitat. This site, on Church Avenue in Brooklyn, contains a bioswale in the north bed, while the south bed is mounded and planted like a standard Greenstreet.

Previously, the intersection of Church Avenue, 14th Avenue, and 35th Street in Kensington, Brooklyn contained a large striped triangle in the roadbed. The intersection was being used as a makeshift parking zone for idling MTA buses, making it difficult for pedestrians to cross.

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NYC Department of Environmental Protection with Biohabitats/HydroQual/Hazen and Sawyer | Shoelace Park stormwater demonstration concept in the Bronx
This design, by the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and a joint venture of consultants, brings water from catch basins along Bronx Boulevard and 224th Street in the Bronx to a series of bioretention areas in Shoelace Park, to direct peak flow from a trouble spot on the road into this permeable area.

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THE CLASSMATES

HAKA team | An elevated greenway on Highbridge that irrigates itself from a group of former classmates
Former classmates on team HAKA retrofit the Harlem River span Highbridge with a design that repurposes the former aqueduct as a self-irrigating greenway and a stormwater management system that would capture approximately one million gallons of water per year.

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Sang-ayunan Team | Rockefeller Plaza ‘Curbolution’ from a Cornell student team
Team Sang-ayunan, classmates from Cornell University, calls their design a “Curbolution.” They create a pedestrian-friendly new curb for Rockefeller Plaza that tucks a compact bioswale right into the gutter.

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THE ENGINEERS

Joseph G. and Nicholas Lione | Mini sand columns for catch basins from a father-son engineering duo
Joseph G. and Nicholas Lione observed that stormwater is presently collected through storm drains into catch basins, where it rests before flowing into the sewers. The father-son engineering team asks, “what if, at the bottom of these basins, there was a hole through which the stormwater could enter the soil beneath?”

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COLLABORATIONS

WE Design with Regional Plan Association and Brooklyn Greenway Initiative | A comprehensive look at West Street in North Brooklyn
When complete, the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway will be a 14-mile route connecting neighbors and neighborhoods to four major parks and over a dozen local open spaces on Brooklyn’s historic waterfront. WE Design, together with the Regional Plan Association and Brooklyn Greenway Initiative, propose pairing the greenway with “treatment trains” that mimic natural hydrology, capturing and treating rainwater. The design focuses on the northernmost section of the BWG, along West Street in Greenpoint.

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North Brooklyn Compost Project in collaboration with NYC Soil and Water Conservation District | A tree lawn retrofit and subwatershed delineation along the edge of McCarren Park
The North Brooklyn Compost Project proposes a tree lawn retrofit that will allow stormwater to enter the lawn and infiltrate through a rain garden on N. 12th Street in Brooklyn.  Partners at the NYC Soil and Water Conservation District delineated the site’s subwatershed and estimated the garden would need to gulp down 5,000 gallons of stormwater during a 1-inch storm.

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HONORABLE MENTION

Connecting.nyc | A special nod for this concept for an education program targeting the Flushing Bay community
This design took Minds in the Gutter figuratively, proposing a way to get people thinking about stormwater and the pollution it triggers when it matters most. Connecting.nyc seeks to organize a “Flushing Community” (starting with Flushing, Queens…of course) to stop pollution at its source by creating awareness of the consequences of flushing during periods of rain, when combined sewer overflow delivers the contents of your toilet bowl directly to your local waterway.

Kate Zidar is an Environmental Planner working on soil, water and food issues in New York City.  She coordinates the Stormwater Infrastructure Matters (S.W.I.M.) Coalition, teaches at Pratt Institute’s Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment, and runs the North Brooklyn Compost Project.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

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