Here’s a look at some of the most inspiring parks the city has started building on some formerly industrial or otherwise unlikely sites.

Bushwick Inlet

“The only place left to build new parks is on the former industrial waterfront. Developers are benefiting from the upzoning to build parks as amenities, and the city is committing public money to develop 28 acres at Bushwick Inlet, with the brownfields included.” - Adrian Benepe

Ground was broken in early July for this 28-acre space on Greenpoint/Williamsburg’s waterfront. By winter of 2010, the athletic field, multi-use building, and playground should be completed. Wetlands will follow as part of the second phase of development for the northern portion of the park, expected to be completed by the summer of 2011.

View of East River from N. 9th St. and Kent Ave., Williamsburg. Photo courtesy of Will Fernia.

Facing north at river’s edge, East River State Park, Williamsburg. Photo courtesy of Will Fernia.

Calvert Vaux Park

“PlaNYC includes [long-mapped] parks that were never developed or semi-developed. We’ve done community visioning sessions and construction has started at Calvert Vaux Park, near the Coney Island inlet.” - Adrian Benepe

Calvert Vaux Park, originally named Dreier-Offerman Park after a home for unwed mothers that stood on the land, was rededicated in 1998 for the architect Calvert Vaux, whose body was mysteriously found in nearby Gravesend Bay. The 77.98-acre park is bounded by the bay on one side and Shore Parkway on the other, and stretches from Bay 44^th to Bay 49^th Streets.  Completion of phase one of project construction, which includes two synthetic turf soccer fields along with wetlands construction, an entrance garden, and additional trees, is estimated for January 2010. Further phases of construction will bring three baseball fields, six soccer fields, a recreation center, an amphitheater, and a playground along with picnic areas, nature trails, and a bike path.

facing northwest from western tip of Dreier Offerman park, photo courtesy of Timothy Vogel

facing southeast at the souther side of Calvert Vaux Park looking across Coney Island Creek towards the Coney Island parachute jump, photo courtesy of David Hogarty

Facing north from the southern corner of the soccer field at Bay 44th St. and Shore Parkway. Photo courtesy of Joe Brown.

Concrete Plant Park

Concrete Plant Park: “The Bronx River, when you get up north, gets quite bucolic. Our idea, with the Bronx River Alliance, is to have a continuous greenway. Concrete Plant Park incorporates old silos like architectural follies and around the bend in Hunts Point is a five-acre park on the lot of a former paint factory.” - Adrian Benepe

Recently opened, this former concrete batch mix plant has been re-established as a 2.7-acre park of salt marshes on the western shore of the Bronx River between Westchester and Bruckner Boulevards, along the Bronx River Greenway.  This new amenity for Crotona Park East retains some of the plant’s silos and mixing bins, integrating the industrial relics with new benches and green space facing the waterway.

Taken from the elevated 6 Whitlock Ave subway station, facing east. Photo courtesy of Maestro5ive

facing north from the north side of Bruckner Blvd between the railroad and the river, photo courtesy of Jacob Mason

Fresh Kills

Fresh Kills: “It will be open soon, certainly the southernmost section, where they’re building a series of athletic fields. This is a magical moment, the biggest expansion of parks in generations. It’s never a bad idea to acquire land for parkland- they’re not building any more of it.”

“Design ideals for the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, some are still valid, but people now want to do skate parks and mountain biking and surfing and kayaking…so we throw caution to the wind about lawsuits and put up signs that say ‘play at risk.’ We have an obligation to get kids more exercise, to build facilities for people in wheelchairs…the more we can do to engage kids in one sport or another, the happier they’ll be.” - Adrian Benepe

In an estimated 30 years time, Fresh Kills Park will cover a mammoth 2,200 acres, an area three times the size of Central Park and one big enough for the planned “fives parks in one.”  The Confluence will be the center of waterfront and cultural activities, with 20 acres of waterfront land at Creek Landing and 50 acres of athletic, event, social, and artistic program space at The Point. Natural wetlands, meadows, and creeks will cover much of the North, South, East, and West Parks, with additional recreation space, trails, and the natural wetlands and Plans for the North, South, East, and West Parks offer vast tracts of natural settings, with trails, scenic routes, and recreational space throughout.  The West Park will be finished last and will include a 9/11 memorial.

photo: Alex Maclean; courtesy of the City of New York

photo courtesy of Michael Falco

Highland Park/Ridgewood Reservoir

Highland Park/Ridgewood Reservoir: “We have outreach coordinators who do listening sessions and conduct opinion polls. People say: you didn’t listen. Well no, we did listen but we had to make a choice that we hope will satisfy 51% of the people. Everything we do is in the public realm, but you also try to go beyond to incorporate things that people want to do in the 21^st Century.” - Adrian Benepe

Situated high on a plateau between Brooklyn and Queens, Highland Park has afforded views of both boroughs and the ocean for over 100 years.  The Ridgewood Resevoir was drained a decade ago and a young forest has grown up in its place. Infrastructure for this 50 acre site is currently in the works, which will include perimeter lighting and path restoration. A master plan will follow.

facing a children’s farm operated from 1907 to the 1960′s by the Board of Education on what is now the site of the Highland Park Children’s Garden by Jamaica Ave and Warwick Street, photo courtesy of NYC Department of Parks and Recreation

facing the southwest edge of the central reservoir basin looking northeast, photo courtesy of Greg Bugel

“Unless you get beyond putting in a bench, parks won’t succeed. It’s an old saw that good uses drive out bad. There’s tremendous psychic reward in knowing that even our scut work goes to making people happy. There are very few public services that focus on happiness.” - Adrian Benepe

Alec Appelbaum writes about how cities can become greener and fairer for the New York Times, the Architect’s Newspaper and others. He lives on the Lower East Side.

Additional reporting and image research by Nick Buccelli and Rachel Aland.

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.

New York City’s plan to close Times Square to vehicles looks like a triumph. The chaise-lounges [or chaises-longues, depending on whom you ask - Ed.] the city dropped at the Crossroads of the World on May 24th have stayed popular throughout the week, like day-glo brigadiers in a battle against delivery trucks. (I saw two tourists taking pictures of their feet on the pavement on May 26.) At the same time, the luxuriant plans that Gehry Partners concocted for developer Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project are failing to keep the project financially credible – and the latest rumor is that a no-fuss plan from Ellerbe Becket for the project’s focal basketball arena may bump Gehry’s bundle of crumples.

So: plastic chaise-lounges win a wave of rear ends, while titanium arenas leave the court with a hobble and nary an ovation. What’s the takeaway for urban design? I say it’s an axiom: people want to be together. If they come together under a roof shaped like a hoopoe bird, fine. But in an era of lean government budgets, the plan that gets people together quickly and cheaply should guide policymaking.

A New York that depends on fickle corporations, part-time residents and private partners for big chunks of its tax base should make itself a fun place to be. Happily, fun translates intuitively to ‘free of car fumes,’ ‘planned with clear sight lines,’ and ‘open to the public.’ Most of the city will necessarily remain a web of conduits for goods, executives en route to wherever, and musicians looking for a gig. By bracketing parts of the city as pure public space, the Bloomberg administration has made a pithy argument about why global corporations and jetsetters should stay here. They should stay here, the chaise-lounges say, because they can tinker with what “here” is. That’s a more democratic premise than the ones driving light-rail in Denver or ersatz Mayberry in Florida. It’s also a more replicable strategy than the one behind Atlantic Yards.

Mind you, the Times Square project also succeeds for having a narrow writ. Nobody will blame the chaise-lounges for failing to trigger consumer confidence or to inspire a rush of mixed-income housing. But they do reinforce an urban-design principle we can see shining through all the stunted construction sites: if you reconnect people without obliging them to shop or watch jocks, you can make a convincing start toward reinventing a city.

As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Alec Appelbaum writes about how cities can become greener and fairer for the New York Times, the Architect’s Newspaper and others. He lives on the Lower East Side.

Like most of my colleagues, I tip my hat to Mayor Bloomberg and the City Council for devising a plan to make landlords retrofit older buildings. And like the cleantech advocates who stood beside me on a Rockefeller Center terrace to hear the mayor outline the plan on Earth Day, I shrugged when I tried to gauge which engineering recipes will help landlords meet the requirements. And now, I’m biting my nails a bit.

Landlords tend to hate mandates, in part because it’s bedeviling to legislate engineering: no two buildings respond optimally to the same efficiency fixes. A building’s optimal tune-up depends on what its tenants do, how frequently they move in and out, where the building faces, and so on. But the Greener, Greater Buildings Plan requires energy audits and upgrades from all  landlords in big buildings, and lighting fixes from all their commercial tenants. Bold and properly so. But maybe we would get greener sooner if the mayor had offered incentives to a subset of landlords whose huge portfolios make investing in efficiency a surer bet than nitpicking over why they shouldn’t have to.

“It speaks volumes to see who isn’t standing with the mayor,” a City Hall staff member confided on Earth Day. The landlords’ lobby has clamored for slow-track changes to their buildings since the mayor’s focus turned green in 2007. I now worry that the mandates in the new plan – five year paybacks, full benchmarking, code compliance after even minor upgrades – will embolden the small landlords to cry “oppression in a Depression!” and swoop us all into a political Punch and Judy show. Hey, it happened with congestion pricing.

So what do urban enthusiasts do about it? Focus. The audacity that brought us Rockefeller Center, Dumbo and the High Line crackles through the mayor’s plan – except that the stakes are much higher. Before the mayor spoke on Earth Day, I turned and paused to geek out at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The next few years will ask us to choose economic constraints to free us from a flood of climate-related disasters. If we tell our landlords, our pension funds, our architects and our mayors to keep thinking big, we will build something as sublime as Rock Center. If we listen to the silence of landlords who worry about short-term costs, the bright cheer of recent days will fade to a painful echo.

Alec Appelbaum writes about how cities can become greener and fairer for the New York Times, the Architect’s Newspaper and others. He lives on the Lower East Side. Photo: Spencer T. Tucker / City of New York, Office of the Mayor

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.

The nonprofit where my wife works had a stake in the hearing, and I’d wanted our daughter to sense the excitement of city politics, so I brought her out on the elevated J train. When she got restless, she asked: “Why am I here?” I told her she should clap along with the chanting, which she cheerfully did. Parents and politicians came to this dreary room, as they reliably do, to state their case and then hunt for an equitable resolution. I hope one day she feels how profoundly such meetings matter. But what will she understand about my work?

You’d expect those of us who “see” urban design to highlight projects that foster dialogue and blunt climatic calamity. Yet too often we acclaim renderings that airbrush conflicts out of urban scenes – like Rem Koolhaas’ mischievous new midrise, or Steven Holl’s constellation-like Shenzen experiment. Who will flag insidious design choices — like the temperature in that basement — and challenge them?

Urban design is “good” when it makes public space vibrant and makes efficient engineering seem exalted. 20 years from now, my daughter may ask why we let storm surges swallow Coney Island or let the Bronx’s waste-burning dumps shackle a generation with asthma. So I want to highlight designs that guide city residents to face each other and reuse natural resources. I’d hate to tell her that architects’ sublime renderings or elegant wording let me forget why we’re all here.

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This is the third in an ongoing series of posts that ponders the state of architecture criticism. To read all posts on this topic, please click here.

As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Alec Appelbaum writes about how cities can become greener and fairer for the New York Times, the Architect’s Newspaper and others. He lives on the Lower East Side.