Cassim Shepard
Cassim Shepard is the project director of Urban Omnibus. He makes non-fiction media, especially films and video, about architecture and urbanism. He lives in Brooklyn.
http://urbanomnibus.net
Rights and Freedoms, Bricks and Mortar

45-47 Park Place. Image: Google Street View.

Tuesday morning, I attended the final vote of the Landmarks Preservation Commission hearing on whether or not to confer historic protection to 45-47 Park Place in Lower Manhattan. The commission voted unanimously (9-0) against protecting the site. For this…

Postópolis: Urban Portraiture

I recently spent the better part of five days sitting on a cinderblock in the courtyard of Museo Experimental el Eco, listening to various creative people, mostly from Mexico, talk about their work. I am not entirely certain why I did this, but I am glad that I did. The event…

Conversations on New York #2: Dan Doctoroff

A recap of the second of the League’s Conversations on New York, with Dan Doctoroff, former NYC Deputy Mayor for Economic Development, and Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New Yorker.

Rebuilding a Sustainable Haiti

In a disaster-prone world, to say that crises present opportunities has become a morbid cliché. Yet, nonetheless, the impulse to help requires context, planning and understanding. In the past few weeks, we’ve heard how the low-density sprawl that encourages a high reliance on oil has led to the Deepwater Horizon Oil

The Omnibus goes to Postópolis

UPDATE 6.9.10: Check out the complete Postópolis! schedule and watch a livestream of the event on both Domus and postopolis.org.

It should come as no surprise that I love to talk (some might say, can’t shut up) about cities — problems…

A Sky without Planes

Front Page of the London Evening Standard, Thursday April 15th, 2010

For the past few days, something has been missing from the urban landscape of London. A quick scan of the city’s streets – red busses, black cabs – shows nothing amiss. Beneath…

The Chemistry’s Just Right at Chemical

Join us on a nostalgia trip: check out three 1985 TV commercials that suggest a different relationship between banks and the neighborhoods of New York than the one we see today.

, , , ,
The Blizzard of 1888 – and what it means for mass transit

New York Times Headline. March 13th, 1888.

122 years ago today, on March 11th 1888, it started snowing. When the snows finally came to a stop three days later, over forty inches were reported in New York and New Jersey and some snowdrifts grew as high…

03 11 10 • by Cassim Shepard, , ,
Gowanus gets Superfunded

Since the Omnibus crew decamped from our previous digs on the banks of the Gowanus Canal this past fall, we’ve tried to hold ourselves back from reblogging every time its tortuous path to cleanup makes the news. But today that path became a little clearer – the Canal has been designated a Federal Superfund site. According the New York Times,

Field Trip: Roosevelt Island Tramway

As Steven Dale’s piece “Off the Road and Into the Skies” shows us, aerial gondolas offer more than meets the eye. And his local case study, the Roosevelt Island Tramway, is not just for tourists. But this spring it will be closed for maintenence – so take a field trip before it’s too…

Search