The Gowanus Canal | Courtesy of Team NC State

The Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn was once a meandering tidal creek whose brackish waters produced oysters so succulent and sizable they were harvested by the Dutch settlers and shipped back to Europe by the barrel-full. With the growth of industry and the concomitant population explosion in Brooklyn in the middle of the 19th century, the old Gowanus Creek was channeled and deepened to create the 1.8 mile-long canal, finished in 1869. By 1906 there were over 85 barge trips per working day and the canal was a “maritime superhighway for barges bearing coal, sand, oil, and brick.”

Barge traffic on the Gowanus Canal in 1940, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, courtesy of the Brooklyn Public Library

Today the primary function of the Gowanus Canal is as a collector outlet for 14 of the combined sewer overflow points in Brooklyn. If you are ever by the Canal during the rain, an acrid stink reminiscent of Dante’s fumache lagoni will wash over you thanks to a mix of raw sewage, heavy metals, petrochemicals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in the deep sediments and waters of the Canal. The blocks immediately adjacent to the Canal have been left mostly to bus repair shops, industrial scrap yards, concrete plants, the vacant vestiges of past energy industries, and carting companies that lumber through Brooklyn at night.

And yet, the Canal has a certain sublime attraction. The F/G trains and the Gowanus Expressway cross overhead and at night the little lights emanating from the subway cars are beautiful. If you go there on the right night, watch the subway crawl along the tracks, see the distant skyline of Brooklyn and Manhattan, and notice the bats diving for insects against the dark silhouettes of the strange warehouses and factories, you will discover an entirely new side of New York City.

Of course, the Canal was not always seen in this light, and will not always be like this. With the slowing of industrial activity in the 1940′s and the ceasing of regular dredging operations by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1955, the lands and waters were left open for new agents who could find room to operate here, whether they be blue crabs and swallows or artists, the homeless, school teachers with a bivalve interest, or private developers. It is terrain vague, an “abandoned area, obsolete and unproductive… which represents an anonymous reality.” [sic]¹ And this terrain vague permits new uses to arise.  As such it is can operate simultaneously as an open sewer, ecological laboratory, and hipster playpen.

A member of the Canal Nest Colony team installs one of the first birdhouses along the Gowanus Canal

The Colony’s History
In November 2008, Urban Omnibus partnered with Bryan Bell, founder of Design Corps, to hold a design/build event encouraging designers to “make a difference in two days,” an exercise in design activism. Four intrepid designers living in Brooklyn got together and entered the event, deciding to create a small colony of birdhouses for the urban birds living along the canal. They called it the Canal Nest Colony (CNC). Most interesting, they liked what they were doing and decided to keep it going. Throughout the fall of 2008 and the next spring, they kept cutting up and painting pieces of scrap wood and turning them into little yellow birdhouses.

Courtesy of Thomas Ryan

The design of the houses is sophisticated and lovely. Scraps from local cabinet makers are fastened atop an old reject piece of scaffolding, which is then cast in a 5-gallon bucket partially filled with concrete. The cost per birdhouse is a couple of dollars and each house is a mobile unit that can be inserted or relocated into almost any crevice along the Gowanus. The benefit to the community is not limited to the strength of their design. Birds can be an indicator of ecosystem biodiversity and environmental health in urban areas. And people like birds — it is fun to see them hunt and fly and build, they have different colors and behaviors, and many of them migrate, marking the changing of seasons and passage of time.

In 2009, a few folks from the Gowanus Canal Conservancy (GCC) took notice. The GCC is a community non-profit group that works to address some of the legacy issues of the Gowanus Canal and to encourage community members from local businesses, schools and neighborhood organizations to engage in the clean-up and maintenance of the Canal and its surrounding environment.

The GCC began helping the CNC obtain materials and a workspace. In return, the CNC offered their birdhouse initiative as an organizing mechanism for the community volunteer days. Suddenly, volunteers had a wider variety of activities to engage in — bolting, painting, digging, hammering, and pouring concrete in addition to the weeding and picking up trash that dominated earlier events — and the “clean and green” days ended not only with an cleaned patch of ground along the Canal, but also with the construction of something interesting.

The Colony’s Activity
Over the course of 2009, the CNC’s collaboration with the GCC progressed and 25 new bird and bat houses were designed, built and installed. The delicate yellow boxes were beautiful by the oily blues and rusting browns of the Canal. The bucket-footing allowed for the houses to migrate season to season, slowly finding their way to the micro-habitats along the Canal that best suit different bird species. The CNC team fine-tuned the design and placement of the houses, thanks to suggestions of members from the New York City Audubon Society, and enhanced the habitats with plantings to provide cover and food for the birds and welcoming gardens for the neighbors.

2010 brought efforts to expand the initiative through grant proposals, donations and partnerships. In May, the Department of Sanitation (DOS) granted use of a one-acre lot to the project team, a site situated at a bend in the canal where 2nd Avenue dead-ends, used during the winter for salt and sand storage but vacant throughout the rest of the year. Plant material was donated by Pleasant Run Nursery in New Jersey, mulch was donated by the Department of Parks and Recreation, a shipping container was donated for storage, and a small urban nursery was set up to store and care for the trees and shrubs until they could be installed.

Community volunteers paint and assemble birdhouses at one of the Gowanus Canal Conservancy's community Clean and Green days in 2009

The volunteer community began to grow. An event held at the end of May brought over one hundred people down to the canal to help install a new garden at the end of First Street. But even with the increased community participation, the expansion of both scope and area site coverage meant the participants’ efforts were spread too thin. Mid-season, the team decided to rein in the ambition and focus on site improvements near the Salt Lot. By clustering all of the services and activities in one spot, they created a destination along the canal. The Salt Lot and its sublime surroundings now offer one of the few places to observe and take in the canal and its rhythms.

The Salt Lot at the end of 2nd Avenue in Brooklyn

Work continued through the summer. Many of the plants at First Street died during the hottest days of the summer, and weeds and trash always return. But excitement is building. A large composting operation is getting started, more birdhouses have been installed and plantings have been established along the banks of the canal, which may draw more people and provide habitat and food for birds. The seasonal nursery has proved a great success logistically, piqued neighborhood interest and enabled the ecological initiatives of the CNC project.

The Colony’s Future
The future of the Canal Nest Colony must be seen in the context of the other initiatives birthed along the Gowanus Canal in recent years. In addition to the vestigial industrial uses — scrap yards, bus repair shops, concrete plants, and warehouses — the 00’s saw a wealth of endeavors by idiosyncratic communities emphasizing experimentation and education, labor, and hedonism. In addition to the Canal Nest Colony, the Dredgers, the Oyster Farm, and the Dumpster Pool, the Gowanus was also the site of the Sponge Park Study and the Oyster-Tecture proposal and was made an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund site. And the GCC has begun design work for a series of EPA and DEP-funded pilot projects in the vicinity to study strategies for stormwater retention.

Map via thiscityismine.com/gowanus

In its capacity to attract creative/scientific agents the Gowanus Canal is a testament to the enduring ability of post-industrial wastelands to captivate the contemporary urban imagination, at least of those fortunate enough to have a bit of leisure time. And that is a key point; livelihood is now divorced from hard labor, and the result is a massive portion of the population that no longer desires recreation solely in the form of repose and “healthful socializing.” While the consumption of public spaces and experiences — spectacle — is still the dominant mode of recreation, the efforts along the Gowanus Canal offer evidence that there is a desire for other types of recreation, ones that involve work, especially working with your hands.

As for the Canal Nest Colony specifically, this fall the team will be working with MillionTreesNYC to get new trees delivered and cared for until they are installed with volunteer help in October. Next year the composting operation will be fully functional, the seasonal nursery will be back, and new locations for better birdhouses will be scouted. Perhaps a study will be done of the plant communities that have colonized the banks of the Canal and their horticultural and ecological value can be understood and publicized. The energy and support of the Gowanus Canal Conservancy will surely influence the direction, and the GCC will be working on related pilot projects, and new volunteers and teammates will likely contribute new ideas.

The efforts on the Gowanus, nascent though they may be, are evidence of the potential good that can come from communities of different scales and motivations — city government, local organizations, engaged residents — working together, in even the most ghastly of locations, to improve their surroundings and do something fun together.

A vision for one of the new gardens along the Gowanus Canal

For a reminder of the origins of this project, check out the video below that we shot of the team designing and building the birdhouses during the Make a Difference in Two Days event:
[See post to watch Flash video]

¹ “Terrain Vague”, Ignasi Sola Morales, AA.VV. 1996

FASLANYC works as a landscape architect for an urban design firm in New York City. He also writes the landscape criticism blog faslanyc and contributes to other design journals with features focusing on urban projects in South America.

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.

1940 aerial view of Floyd Bennett Field, part of the Jamaica Bay Gateway National Recreation Area

Most parks in New York City bear the mark of those two great progenitors of public space: Frederick Law Olmsted and Robert Moses. Thanks largely to their influence, City parks tend to be either a “pleasure ground” or a “recreational facility,” according to theorist Galen Cranz [1]. Floyd Bennett Field is neither. Situated at the edge of the city on a former airfield constructed on marshland claimed from Jamaica Bay, Floyd Bennett Field looks more like TS Eliot’s Wasteland than a typical park [2]. And yet, as part of the Gateway National Recreation Area, it offers an unmatched variety of recreational activities to New Yorkers and a valuable glimpse into future possibilities for our city parks.

Gateway National Recreation Center

History
The codification of public recreational space in New York City famously began with Central Park and the Greensward Plan of Olmsted and Vaux. As a democratic interpretation of the European aristocratic pleasure ground, this new park typology was necessarily large in scale and naturalistic in style, meant to offer aesthetic, sanitary, and psychological contrast to the filthy and cramped industrial city. In The Park and the People, Rosenzweig and Blackmar describe how the design of the park allowed visitors to “admire the artistically composed scenery, enjoy the spectacle of the crowd on the promenade, and engage in the wholesome exercise of driving, riding, walking, skating, or – for those who played cricket – competitive sports” [3].

Robert Moses began the next great period of park building when he was appointed commissioner of the City’s Park Department in 1930. Park design efforts emphasized providing sports facilities and were extended into every corner of the city and its suburbs concurrently with new transportation infrastructure. With this focus, the standardization of park elements and operating methods became paramount and a new aesthetic characterized the parks: expansive parking, asphalt ball courts, and extensive playing fields. Often these parks were built on reclaimed or filled land and were located in the outer boroughs. While certain areas of the city still lacked open space, this effort succeeded in making parks accessible to most New Yorkers.

During this same period, Floyd Bennett Field served the city and nation as a technologically advanced civilian and military airport. Opened in 1931 and intended to compete with the Newark airport as the regional hub of commercial aviation, it offered electric lights and concrete runways at a time when most airports were dirt strips in the dark. The Field, named for Brooklyn resident and Naval aviator Floyd Bennett [4], hosted many of early aviation’s spectacular flights and notable names including Amelia Earhart, John Hughes, and John Glenn. Commercial aviation, however, never flourished here. As a result, hangars were leased to the NYPD and the Naval Air Reserve Force and a 10-acre parcel along Jamaica Bay was leased to the US Coast Guard in 1936. Commercial operations completely ceased during World War II and the air field was conveyed to the US Navy.

Today
In 1971 Floyd Bennett Field was turned over to the National Parks Service and became a part of the Gateway National Recreation Area. Due to its unique historical provenance, location, and maintenance operations the Field now exists as a mashup of the historic New York City parks. It is expansive and primarily open green space like the historical pleasure ground, but the phragmites wetlands and ruined runways evoke a dystopian nature, not “artistically composed scenery.” Like the recreation facility, the Field provides areas for organized sports and parking and much of it is fill reclaimed from Jamaica Bay, itself a huge piece of infrastructure. But here it is an obsolete version; beautiful ruins of old airport hangars and intersecting runways with sports fields and parking areas scattered about.

Recreation, instead of relying exclusively on the consumption of images and experiences, becomes process. At Floyd Bennett Field one can find space to enjoy the activities envisioned by Olmsted and Moses – strolling, cycling, and picnicking as well as organized sports. Two of the airplane hangars were refurbished as a concession in 2006 and house indoor facilities for basketball, soccer, rock climbing, and ice skating. But, there is also a different kind of recreation flourishing here. In this forgotten expanse, New Yorkers find space for their most creative and idiosyncratic of recreational pursuits.

Arriving at the Field, one is immediately impressed with the old American Airlines hangars. Two of these now house the recreation facilities. The control tower houses the National Park Service offices and a small museum about the history of aviation and Floyd Bennett Field. Two of the old hangars still stand dormant. Ruined and beautiful with cavernous insides, they connote a rich past yet offer no current prescribed use. Immediately behind these vacant hangars is Brooklyn’s largest community garden. The garden is more a miniature ramshackle city, with structures, pathways and circulation all derived from the particular tastes of its growers and builders. In addition to gardening, a rich array of activities — including birding, building, and picnicking — are supported by two twenty foot shipping containers that house materials and equipment and form the social hub of the garden. Here, everything from generators to lawn chairs, loppers, and power tools belonging to the garden are stored to be lent to members, who have devised a system for sharing the responsibility and keeping them open according to an agreed-upon schedule.

The runways are slowly being colonized by weeds; in the distance the former infield is slowly turning back to a wetland. Photo: FASLANYC.

This historic hangar still stands dormant. Photo: FASLANYC.

Moving further into the Field the expansive runways are mostly quiet, their long vistas merely pointing quietly toward the sea, the city, or out to Long Island. Here, people practice driving and riding motorcycles and come to fly their radio-controlled airplanes. In keeping with national park programming, a campground and hiking trail along the northern edge enables visitors to camp by permit, and there are small boat access areas for boating and fishing in Jamaica Bay.

On the eastern edge of Floyd Bennett Field the Historical Aircraft Recreation Project (HARP; see also William Maloney‘s informative site about HARP) is housed in Hangar B. Aficionados and volunteers have full run of a giant hangar housing drill presses, metal routers and welding stations. They work to restore old aircraft that have flown at Floyd Bennett Field and the fueling trucks and maintenance vehicles that kept them flying. The effort is a part of the National Parks Service Volunteer in Parks program. It recognizes the latent desire for people to engage in meaningful, educational, and productive activity as a form of recreation, a desire not usually met in today’s urban parks. The same can be said for the building and growing efforts of the community in the garden at the other end of the runway.

The shipping containers provides storage, equipment, materials, and utilities and serve as the social hub for the community garden. Photo: FASLANYC.

The large and open nature of the community garden space offers a range of activities. Photo: FASLANYC.

Future
At Floyd Bennett Field the recreational possibilities open to New Yorkers have expanded beyond the traditions of the pleasure ground and the recreation facility. While including traditional forms of active and passive recreation, the Field also allows for the pursuit of recreational work through the provision of facilities including storage, power, water, materials, equipment, and programmable space. Recreation, instead of relying exclusively on the consumption of images and experiences in a commoditized environment, becomes process: the cultivation of a garden plot, the construction of new birdhouses or fencing for a garden, or the restoration of an historic airplane. This layering of work-recreation and traditional forms of recreation is a diversification in the possible, accepted programmatic activities in parks. And it offers a tantalizing glimpse at how our future parks might better serve the urban public.

Providing for more possibilities, specifically allowing for the joys of leisure-work, promises to create more livable cities. It allows for the fulfillment of a basic human desire for meaningful, enjoyable work, and this may help more people to accept urban living at a time when professional consensus urges just that. Community gardens are the most publicized example of integrating work-as-recreation into public parks and can serve as an established model. However, the desire exists for other forms of work in urban parks [5]. Floyd Bennett Field offers a glimpse into what such a park might look like with its diversity of activities and the invested visitors who come here every week.

The Consolidated PBY Catalina was a flying boat that first flew in 1935; this one is having the paint stripped and is being treated for corrosion; in cases of major degradation the aluminum panels are being fabricated. Photo courtesy of William Maloney.

At Hangar B aircraft exist in various stages of decay and repair; the Lockheed P2V-5 Neptune is largely repaired. Photo courtesy of Willam Maloney.

This Grumman G-21 Goose is almost fully restored; it first flew in 1937. Photo courtesy of William Maloney.

Notes

1.These terms come from Galen Cranz and her 1982 landmark study of public park typologies The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.)

2. TS Eliot’s The Wasteland, published in 1922, deals with the devastation and historical mashup of cultural mythologies giving rise to a dystopian society post WWI (see Nick Mount’s lecture at Big Ideas for further discussion)

3. The stated design intent for the Greensward Plan by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, as summarized in The Park and The People, p. 136.

4. Brooklyn resident Floyd Bennett was the first person to successfully fly over the North Pole in 1925 in an expedition from Greenland. He was later seriously injured when planning a flight over the Atlantic Ocean, an occasion which opened the door to Charles Lindbergh. He died in 1928 and was buried in the Arlington National Cemetery.

5. The work of Robert Grese (Restoring Nature: Perspectives from the Social Sciences and Humanities, p. 17. 2000, Island Press, Washington, D.C.) at the University of Michigan and Janette Kim’s “Beyond Recreation” study at the Columbia University Urban Landscape Lab are indicative of this desire, documenting new ways that park users are working and engaging with the landscape in public parks.


FASLANYC works as a landscape architect for an urban design firm in New York City. He also writes the landscape criticism blog faslanyc and contributes to other design journals with features focusing on urban projects in South America.

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 first issue, the insecurity of the landscape/architecture professions, is a relatively recent phenomenon, beginning with the fallout from Modernism. In his seminal essay “Whatever happened to Urbanism?” Koolhaas gave voice to an unsettling feeling that had been haunting practitioners since it became apparent that modernist architecture was not the panacea it claimed and not as important as it supposed. Forced to confront superfluity in a single generation, the critical discourse within the profession took up defensive positions to weather the storm.

The second issue is more ingrained; the mystification and resultant inaccessibility of the intellectual aspect of the landscape/architecture professions. Design pedagogy is defined according to processes of exclusivity: design methods and forms are understood as too sophisticated to be either fully comprehended, funded, or implemented by its constituents. And academic discourse is presented as too complex and profound to be undertaken or appreciated by the plebeians. For this reason, the majority of practitioners have abdicated their responsibility to contribute to the contemporary discourse within the professions. It is currently dominated by writers and theoreticians with no foundation in praxis.

As a result, the critical discourse has become a series of self-catalyzing memes and hyperbolic metaphors characterized by a forced focus on concept and cult of personality. Only projects deemed exemplary according to a conservative set of values (standards of beauty, economic viability, social popularity) are discussed and then largely in a laudatory tone. This is not healthy criticism.

The landscape does not need an apologist. The implicit meanings do not need to be spelled out and given voice, and we do not need to know if the design decisions meet the approval criteria of the author. In recent decades, a generation of design practitioners and writers have taken to conceptualizing a site, wrapping it up tightly in a metaphor (or series of them), and then narrating the argument to us. Marc Treib argues the impotence of this stance was argued persuasively in an essay titled “Must Landscapes Mean?”*

Meaning accrues over time; like respect, it is earned, not granted. While the designer yearns to establish a landscape that will acquire significance, it is not possible to use pat symbols alone as a means to transmute syntax into semantics, that is, tectonics into meanings… differences in culture, in education, in life experience, in our experience of nature will all modify our perception of the work of landscape architecture… We cannot make that place mean, but we can, I hope, instigate reactions to the place that fall within the desired confines of happiness, gloom, joy, contemplation, or delight.

After addressing these two issues, the question becomes what should contemporary criticism focus on? If the purpose of professional criticism is not to explain a project but to make the work better, then there are four areas of focus of contemporary criticism: political process, cultural context, a focus on criticism through time, and polemics.

First, the political process; instead of remaining enamored with the cult of personality, the designer’s thoughts and views should always be presented within the larger context of all of the players in a project. Without exception the significant designers of our time are experts at negotiating the political intrigues inherent in public agencies, affluent clients, vocal constituents, and marginalized communities. This dynamic will always influence a project and the criticism should acknowledge and examine this.

Second, the cultural context – historical, scientific, technological, social and popular – should be present in criticism. This can be implied or explicit but it should be present. It is this perspective that will help to frame the discussion around sustainability, changing it from a tactic that is essentially a marketing tool for designers, developers, politicians, and manufacturers, to a logical argument and thoughtful discussion. If the intellectual context surrounding the implementation of an initiative were more thorough and critical the project could be examined more honestly for effectiveness and appropriateness.

Third, criticism for a project should take place through time. How a place changes over the course of a day, through the seasons, and across a number of years should be considered. The conventional approach is largely the fault of shortsighted editors placing a focus on narrow definitions of timely and relevant in order to drum up readership for their publication. Criticism of a project should absolutely not be limited to opening day, a date set by political and economic agendas. Andrew Blum stated this sentiment in his essay “In Praise of Slowness” and Elizabeth Meyer’s essay “Slow Landscapes”* is a good example of a more thoughtful type of criticism.

Fourth, all landscape/architecture criticism should be polemical. The High Line is an exceptional project — extremely expensive, complicated, and high profile. That it has gotten a free pass from the critics, Jacky Bowring’s critique notwithstanding, is a huge disservice to the professional community. Every project, at various stages and according to metrics deemed appropriate by different editors, should be examined and questioned. As a profession, we gain nothing by constantly patting the same people (and by extension, ourselves) on the back for a job well done. Designers know that no project is perfect. Self-righteous celebration is not the job of criticism within the profession. There is a place for that, and it is with the lobbyists, apologists and at times the popular media.

Ultimately, criticism exists to make the work better, always better. If the discourse can include more voices — practitioners, writers, and academics — all questioning and examining thoughtfully and professionally, we can get at the interesting aspects, stories, intrigues, and facts. If we can get past our fixation on metaphor, concept and style, landscape/architectural criticism will function as a feedback loop with the design process to better the work of designing the built environment.

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

* “Must Landscapes Mean?” by Marc Treib Landscape Journal. 14(1):46-62 (1995)

** “Slow Landscapes: A New Erotics of Sustainability,” by Elizabeth K. Meyer, Harvard Design Magazine, Vol. 31, Fall/Winter 2009/10, p. 22-31.

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.

FASLANYC works as a landscape architect for an urban design firm in New York City. He also writes the landscape criticism blog faslanyc and contributes to other design journals with features focusing on urban projects in South America.