The Ashokan Reservoir in the Catskills, a source of NYC drinking water | Image via Angelaelle

THE PAST AND FUTURE OF NYC’S WATER
The infrastructure that provides one billion gallons of fresh drinking water to eight million people in New York City every day stretches across 125 miles and represents one of the largest predominantly unfiltered municipal water supply systems in the world. The construction of the system required political maneuvering of an equally enormous scale, the destruction of towns, and flooding of thousands of acres, and the City must continually face new challenges in maintaining the system, from regulatory changes to the specter of fracking upstate. In a two-part interview with Gotham Gazette, historian David Soll, author of Empire of Water, recounts the history of the city’s water supply and the contemporary efforts to retain the purity and access to water we take for granted.

WORLD TRADE CENTER SECURITY PLANS
With One World Trade Center’s face to the world nearing completion, the NYPD released its plans for security at ground level this week, composed of a protective boundary of guard booths and road and sidewalk barriers. These barriers threaten the vision laid out for Lower Manhattan following 9/11, which sought to reintegrate the new center with downtown by reestablishing the street connections previously wiped away by the superblock that housed the twin towers. Under the plan, pedestrians and cyclists would be allowed free movement along the streets running through the complex, though car traffic would be restricted to vehicles with business at the Center through a series of inspection points. While the NYPD claims the measures will not dampen the street life needed to prevent the isolation of the site, many public officials and community members alike fear that businesses and people will shy away from the heavy security presence.

SEE/CHANGE’s soon to be rolled-out lawn and movie screen | Image via Howard Hughes

SEE/CHANGE AT THE SEAPORT
In a bid to bring life back to the South Street Seaport while many of its ground-level shops remain shuttered after Sandy, a partnership among the Seaport’s developers, the Howard Hughes Corporation, the City, and special-events organizers are launching “See/Change,” a summer redesign of the area that will include the installation of stores made from shipping containers, a stage for concerts and film screenings, and stands for artisanal food vendors. This temporary tweak of the Seaport will precede larger redevelopment in the area, with Pier 17 soon to house a new retail complex and the old Fulton Fish Market and a neighboring building set to become home to two public food markets. The size of the space offered in the development plan, however, disappointed advocates for a public market on the site, among them Robert LaValva, who shared his vision of the market with us last summer. LaValva’s bustling New Amsterdam Market, which currently brings many artisanal food vendors to the Fulton Fish Market it currently calls home, is now in its last season on the site, soon to be pushed out by the impending development.

A (SOMEWHAT) CLEANER CANAL
The Bloomberg administration announced this week that the activation of a new pumping station by the end of the year will reduce sewage overflow into the Gowanus Canal by 34%. Coupled with improvements to a flushing tunnel, closed since 2010, that pushes water from the bay through the canal, the station’s opening will mark the completion of the City’s $190 million effort to make the Superfund site a bit cleaner. The EPA team behind the separate Superfund cleanup plans has proposed the construction of two underground holding tanks for sewage that would otherwise flow into the canal, which has garnered local opposition due to their proposed siting beneath a public pool and park. The City, which would be on the hook to build the tanks, opposes their construction, part of ongoing wrangling between the administration and the EPA.

Renderings of the Santiago Calatrava-designed PATH Hub | Images via the Port Authority

THE PATH HUB: A HISTORY OF SETBACKS
At nearly $4 billion, the PATH Transportation Hub at the World Trade Center complex is set to be the world’s most expensive train station when it opens in two years, if a timeline that has suffered more delays than any other project on the troubled construction site holds true. The New York Observer charts the history of its construction, replete with cost overruns and changing administrations, and considers whether the unprecedented cost is worth the tradeoff in stalling other Port Authority projects vital to the region’s transportation infrastructure.

LITTLE BOXES ON THE COASTLINE 
The Department of Housing Preservation and Development issued a request for qualifications last week seeking developers to create plans for rebuilding one- to four-family homes in six areas of the city affected by Hurricane Sandy. Once in place, residents will be able to opt into the program and select from two to four different shapes and sizes of homes designed by the developers. The City touts the benefits of streamlining the design process, relying on a pre-selected group of six architect, developer, and contractor teams to navigate new building and zoning codes put in place following the storm. The program aims to rebuild 400 to 750 properties, consistent with existing neighborhood fabric, with part of the $350 million in Sandy aid earmarked for repair of smaller properties.

Flood Courts Gowanus, the winner in the Community Programming Category | Image via Gowanus by Design

EVENTS AND STUFF TO DO

WATER_WORKS COMPETITION EXHIBIT
In anticipation of the construction of the sewage holding tanks along the Gowanus Canal noted above, Gowanus by Design, a community-based urban design advocacy group, held its second annual design competition — Water_Works — to solicit ideas for how a new community resource could be built around this infrastructure aimed at reducing combined sewage overflows into the canal. (The team at Gowanus by Design shared the winners of their inaugural competition with us in this 2011 feature.) An exhibition of winning entries will be on display at the Old American Can Factory Gallery beginning May 22nd with an opening from 6:30 to 9pm.

UNIONDOCS COLLABORATIVE STUDIO
Applications are open for the UnionDocs Collaborative Studio (CoLAB), a 10-month program for a select group of media artists from the US and abroad. Based in Williamsburg, CoLAB offers a platform for exploring contemporary approaches to the documentary arts and a process for developing an innovative collaborative project. UnionDocs screenings, live programs, and CoLAB productions consistently offer sophisticated reflection on place-based explorations of urban dynamics, several of which we’ve reported on in the past. Apply to be a part of the program today.

PUBLIC ACCESS DESIGN WITH CUP
Our friends at the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) are soliciting applications from NYC-based designers interested in creating playful solutions to the challenges of design for social change to join its Public Access Design program as 2013-2014 Design Fellows. Fellows will work collaboratively with CUP and community organizations to create accessible visual tools on a complex policy or planning issue. The deadline for applications, which can be found here, is June 10th.

MAPPING COASTAL MEMORIES
WNYC invites you to add to its map of beach memories — from childhood to before Sandy — as part of its Life After Sandy series. Wade through others’ memories and add your own here.

SANDY: READY FOR THE NEXT ONE?
Join the City University of New York for a symposium on lessons learned from Sandy and the city’s readiness for the next storm on May 29th. The three sessions, running from 9am to 1pm, are free and open to the public.

The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

The goal of this series of articles is to illuminate the concept of a Naturally Occurring Cultural District, an urban area where creative individuals and organizations tend to cluster. Since Tamara Greenfield and Caron Atlas first introduced this idea to UO readers in 2010, they have co-led the NOCD Working Group, a collaborative effort to recognize the assets and best practices for sustaining local cultural activity. But while this effort highlights the shared challenges and similar origin stories of these neighborhoods, each NOCD — like each New York neighborhood — is unique. In previous months, Caitlin Blanchfield reported on the local cultural vitality and institutional partnerships at work in Corona, Queens, and Mercedes Kraus explored the cultural history of Fort Greene, Brooklyn. In the coming weeks, we’ll close out this series with a trip to St. George, Staten Island. But first, read on for insights into the organizations that are fusing art, education, and environmental justice in Hunts Point.

–C.S.

Hunts Point | Photo by Kaori Ogawa

I grew up on Evergreen Avenue in the Soundview neighborhood of the Bronx, four blocks inland from the Bronx River. At nine years old, I remember walking south on Bronx River Avenue, looking toward Hunts Point and seeing miles of illegally dumped industrial waste along the river’s edge. My family had been rooted in the adjacent neighborhoods for decades; my grandfather, following after his father, arrived from Puerto Rico in 1950 and, at the age of 13, worked in his father’s restaurant before opening a number of businesses in the area. He first owned and managed Cruz & Sons, a bodega on Prospect Avenue in Longwood; then he opened San Francisco Grocery Store and Lulu’s Barbecue, a rotisserie place named after my mother. In 1994, he sold these businesses and my family moved to Yonkers. I hadn’t been back to Evergreen or the nearby neighborhoods since his passing in 1997.

Hunts Point is a Bronx neighborhood located on a small peninsula that stretches into the East River. Though less than two square miles in size, it houses over 50,000 people. The community is predominantly Latino (75%) and black (22%), with the majority of its population of Puerto Rican descent. 27% of its total population is foreign-born, and just over 50% of foreign-born residents hail from the Dominican Republic [1]. Its borders are the East River to the south, the Bronx River to the east and the Bruckner Expressway to the north and west, although some regard the Longwood neighborhood across the Bruckner as “West Hunts Point.”

I first learned of efforts to improve the neighborhood’s riverfront in 2006, when Majora Carter of Sustainable South Bronx (SSBx) visited my undergraduate environmental studies class to deliver a lecture titled “Greening the Ghetto” on the processes her organization spearheaded to transform the Hunts Point riverfront from brownfields to public parks.

Many of the newer parks on the waterfront were vacant lots in the 1970s and ‘80s, originally planned for long-defunct Robert Moses road projects. By the ‘90s, after years of illegal waste disposal, these lots had become abandoned brownfields that were toxic and in desperate need of remediation. A number of environmental justice advocates, including SSBx, emerged around 2001. Their efforts have raised corporate, government, and private funding to develop Hunts Point Riverside and Barretto Point Parks, greatly improving the condition of the Hunts Point waterfront.

Barretto Point Park | Photo by Kaori Ogawa

Many of these organizations integrate artistic and cultural development into their programming, helping to cultivate a local arts scene. However, art production is not the exclusive priority of neighborhood cultural initiatives in Hunts Point; rather, it has served as a means to increase youth engagement, environmental justice advocacy, and community activism. In reaction to Hunts Point’s specific concentration of severe environmental and social challenges, committed educators, activists, community members, and arts practitioners have been able to work in concert, finding common cause in creating healthy, inviting, and empowering spaces in and around the neighborhood.

Hunts Point is also home to the Hunts Point Market, one of the largest wholesale food distributors in the world; the Vernon C. Bain Center, a floating prison barge built in 1992; and the Hunts Point Wastewater Treatment Plant, built in 1952. Environmental health concerns have been a problem in Hunts Point since 1926, when Con Edison established a manufactured gas plant that produced toxic coal tar. These problems were exacerbated in the 1940s with the building of the National Gypsum plant, responsible for asbestos poisoning in the area, and in the ‘60s with the creation of the Bruckner Expressway, which opened the neighborhood to industrial development and is, in its own right, a major source of air and noise pollution. In Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice, Julie Sze notes that with the sudden industrialization of the South Bronx came a sudden transformation of its racial and ethnic make-up. She writes that in 1960, 50% of the population was white, while 10% was black non-Latino and 40% was Puerto Rican; however, by 1970, over 90% of the area’s residents were black or Puerto Rican.

Clockwise from top left: Bruckner Expressway, Hunts Point Cooperative Market; Vernon C. Bain Center; Hunts Point Produce Market | Photos by Kaori Ogawa

Though both the Gypsum and Con Edison facilities have since closed, environmental and health hazards still affect the area. In 2004, an estimated 40% of students in pre-kindergarten to eighth grade at St. Luke’s School in the South Bronx suffered from asthma [2], a statistic that, when initially released, became fuel for activists and organized demonstrations in the area.

When I recently returned to the area, walking down Edgewater Road toward Hunts Point Riverside Park, I came across an incredible mural running an entire avenue in length. The depicted scenes show life on and around the river, including koi fish swimming beneath a lotus, kayakers and anglers on the water, young children cultivating flowers, a large painting of the word “community,” and so on. One portion of this mural is of a cityscape painted in sepias and browns with a blue river running through it. The outlines of various cartoonish profiles have been painted over the terrain in a way that places the neighborhood’s inhabitants at the center of its landscape. The relationship between inhabitant and place directly calls attention to the injustices facing the Hunts Point community. Given Hunts Point’s history of activism, the piece declares the community’s agency in pursuing neighborhood health and encouraging the area’s burgeoning cultural activity.

Photo by Burger International Photography

This meandering mural, painted on recycled sheet metal, is actually a map of the Bronx River. Carey Clark, Visual Arts Director at THE POINT Community Development Corporation, a non-profit dedicated to arts and culture, youth and community development, calls the mural “her baby.” She was the director of this specific project, in which she and a team of eight artists in partnership with Sustainable South Bronx were hired by Sims Metal Management to construct a mural on the fence surrounding their facilities.

“Sims actually bought us the sheet metal. They paid the artists well, which is highly unusual,” Clark says. The mural incorporates environmental consciousness into its design: solar panels water the verdant walls of ivy that punctuate the mural. “You might not have noticed those vertical green walls because they are all bare vines right now, but in the summer, it is honeysuckle and there are little birds everywhere.”

Clark, a self-proclaimed “downtown girl,” had grown tired of the preciousness of the art scenes in Lower Manhattan. She became invested in public art initiatives in the Bronx in 1990 when she received a grant from the MTA to paint murals at the Yankee Stadium subway station. This experience was the catalyst for her involvement in public art in Hunts Point. Clark’s favorite part of the job is the public aspect: getting art like the Sims mural out on the street. “We really try to combine the arts with activism,” Clark says, “So you will see a lot of murals in the area and a lot of the programming at THE POINT is about that; how we can use the arts in a way other than it just being beautiful.”

Photo by Kaori Ogawa

Much of what I discovered about the changes in Hunts Point over the past decade points to this kind of convergence: many of the community-based organizations in the neighborhood extend the idea of activism to include the making of public art — not just the installation of a final physical object — as a form of community mobilization.

Clark showed me Arts & Education Director Danny Peralta’s impressive proposal for the Barretto St. Bridge, based on Norman Rockwell’s iconic painting of Ruby Bridges. Large sheet-metal panels of different lengths, set apart at different widths, will each display an identical painting of young Ruby Bridges walking and clutching her books. This series will span the length of the bridge, thus breaking down the invisible barriers caused by the Bruckner Expressway between Longwood and Hunts Point. Sheet metal, as Clark described, is a fantastic material for exterior work “because it holds up so beautifully and it is really fun to paint on.” The use of sheet metal as a canvas also makes installing and relocating the piece a relatively easy process.

Much of the aesthetic encouraged by THE POINT and organizations in its consortium involves work that is in dialogue with the specific location and the people who occupy Hunts Point. The murals, installations, courses, and lectures they present are pertinent to issues facing this particular community, and, for that reason, they resonate with a wide audience. Their workshops and courses engage the public to cultivate a sense of civic responsibility while sharpening a student’s craft and technique, regardless of the medium. When I visited, acting classes were in session in THE POINT’s black box theater, and organizers were preparing for a video game-programming challenge. Meanwhile, the facility’s common space was filled by 80 members of City Year Corps, a program with a satellite office at THE POINT, through which young adults commit ten months to providing academic and social support to grade school children and teens.

“Fountain” | Photo by Lizzy Alejandro

Lizzy Alejandro, a young artist based in Mott Haven, first came to THE POINT as a high school student with an interest in photography. She learned of THE POINT’s free photography workshops through a friend’s grandmother and took classes until 2006, when she enrolled in Lehman College, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in studio art and photography. “THE POINT heavily influenced me; it made me realize photography was not just a hobby for me, but something I wanted to do for the rest of my life,” she said. Alejandro’s education at THE POINT exposed her to artists from all over the world, she commented, but it also provided an outlet for creative expression and substantive constructive critique, which students curious about the arts may not otherwise have the opportunity to experience.

A lot beside Hunts Point Riverside Park was once home to a fur factory. It burned down the same day that THE POINT purchased the plot of land. A little brick house was the only structure to survive. After purchasing the land, THE POINT remediated the soil and named the space The Hunts Point Riverside Campus for the Arts and the Environment. The Campus, as it is colloquially referred, provides community access to the Bronx River and environmental and arts programs. It houses an urban garden, the Brick House Gallery, which was part of the original structure, and public art projects, including American artist and biologist Brandon Ballengée’s “The Love Motel for Insects: Actias Luna.” His project, one in a series of large outdoor sculptural installations, uses ultraviolet lights to attract biodiversity and serves as a teaching resource for educators eager to excite youth about New York’s ecosystems.

The Campus | Photo courtesy of THE POINT

Soon after acquiring the campus property, THE POINT rented space to Rocking the Boat, a non-profit organization that offers wooden boatbuilding classes, on-water training, and environmental education programs to empower young people challenged by economic, educational, and social disadvantage. “Part of what we offer to the Hunts Point community is an idyllic experience of the neighborhood, because we work in this amazingly beautiful space — the park and the river. And it’s green; there isn’t the same kind of grit you find in the industrial part of the neighborhood. It smells like cedar,” said Adam Green, the founder and executive director of Rocking the Boat.

When Rocking the Boat acquired their own facility, public art-making organization Groundswell — in collaboration with The Majora Carter Group — painted a 110-foot-long mural on the façade of Rocking the Boat’s facilities. Rocking the Boat provided the content. “A lot of the murals we are talking about are not spontaneous efforts. They were scenes that a bunch of people with a bunch of priorities came together to create,” Green said. He’s correct; these types of projects require months if not years of planning, and require coordination and communication between organizations whose priorities are often vastly different. The result is a painstaking process that, I would argue, prevents many public art pieces from demonstrating a sense of urgency.

Photos by Joaquin Cotten, courtesy of Rocking the Boat

Green added, “I would say that Rocking the Boat is not ‘naturally occurring.’ It was very intentionally started in response to a specific need identified in the community.” The combination of social need and accessibility to the rivers is what brought Rocking the Boat to Hunts Point. The work they wanted to do falls into a very specific niche, which the geography of the area was conducive to.

Rocking the Boat is currently preparing for a large June 1st celebration, when they will launch boats built by their apprentices for the first time. Grammy Award-nominated percussionist Bobby Sanabria will play live for event attendees to honor the first launches of a 29-foot whaleboat on commission for the Mystic Seaport Museum and a 17-foot Whitehall rowing boat, which they will name during the ceremonies. “It is like a birth,” said Green, explaining that the idea behind the launch is to invite and empower community members, apprentices, and their families to utilize the resources Rocking the Boat offers.

The Riverside Campus’ shared use exemplifies how local groups frequently operate within a consortium to design community development, public art, and environmental initiatives. But the campus is only one example of diverse coalitions of community-based organizations working together and sharing resources. A few blocks away from THE POINT’s main facilities stands the historic American Banknote building complex. Its tenants currently include Sustainable South Bronx, The Arthur Aviles Typical Theater, and The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD!). Most recently, New York City’s Human Resources Administration and Urban Health Plan, a not-for-profit healthcare provider, each signed leases to rent office space in the buildings.

Banknote Building | Photo by Kaori Ogawa

In 1998, the Banknote building had been abandoned for nearly a decade when Bessie Award-winning dancer and choreographer Arthur Aviles decided to transform the space for a weekend performance. With help from THE POINT, Aviles garnered community support, borrowing a floor from another dance company to cover exposed concrete, chairs from a restaurant, and sound equipment from a local disc jockey. Following that performance, Aviles and his partner, Puerto Rican author and playwright Charles Rice Gonzalez, worked with real estate development partners to convert the 9,000 square feet of warehouse space into a performance venue and rentable artist studios.

BAAD! hosts a number of performances and festivals each year, including the Boogie Down Dance Series, their annual spring dance festival, and “OUT LIKE THAT!,” the Bronx’s only arts festival designed to celebrate emerging and established creative work by LGBTQ artists. Much of BAAD!’s programming is designed to provide opportunities to artists who may not otherwise have venues to showcase their work, including Latinos, African-Americans, and other underrepresented demographics in the fine arts. To generate interest in alternative modes of storytelling and foster safe spaces for individuals interested in the arts, most of their performances are offered at discounted rates to individuals in the Hunts Point community.

Fish Parade | Photo courtesy of THE POINT

The annual Fish Parade is another example of how local organizations and businesses come together to demonstrate place-based pride. The summer parade began in 2003 in response to the Fulton Street Fish Market’s relocation from Lower Manhattan to the Hunts Point Industrial Park, raising concerns over yet another large enterprise entering a community already on the front lines of environmental and health risks. In addition to generating business for local mom-and-pop shops, the parade showcases murals and performances by local artists and students, as well as the efforts of local social justice organizations including food justice activists and urban farmers.

Carey Clark and her colleagues at THE POINT are currently working to line the Fish Parade route with public art. They have named this initiative the “Village of Murals,” the intention being to place public art pretty much anywhere imaginable in the community, to serve as a bridge between the industrial and residential areas of Hunts Point. THE POINT recently received a grant from the Department of Transportation toward this goal.

Not everything has been easy. THE POINT has faced various challenges transforming all of the area’s residents into appreciators of art. Once, Clark had her artists work with a group of local children on a piece of art displayed at a bodega. “I went by there one day and the whole façade had been torn down and replaced with metal,” she said. “I walked in there and asked, ‘Hey, what happened to the paintings?’ And the owner said, ‘Oh we threw them out.’ That was a terrible lesson for me. I was devastated.”

“It is a long distance between idea and reality,” Clark said. “We are not there yet in terms of having a critical mass.” However, the neighborhood has radically transformed in the past 20 years through the combined efforts of community organizers and private enterprises. Hunts Point’s difficult history with environmental racism and its geographic isolation have resulted in the creation of a local identity and a sense of place-based pride, as well as an enclave community that empowers activists and artists to unite under common cause. “We used to be in the West Bronx,” Adam Green said. “When we asked somebody what neighborhood they were from, they’d say, ‘I’m from Jackson Ave.,’ or ‘Willis Avenue, or ‘138th Street.’ But when you ask someone from Hunts Point what neighborhood they are from, they say, ‘Hunts Point.’” Hunts Point serves as an example of a creative economy that has been produced through the combined efforts of environmental advocates, cultural producers, and many who are both, empowering the public to work with larger government and industry bodies in order to determine the course of their own neighborhood’s future.

Photo by Kaori Ogawa

NOTES

[1] 2010 Bronx Community District 2 Census
[2] Julie Sze, Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (The MIT Press, 2006).

Joey De Jesus is a poet living in Ardsley, New York. His work has appeared in various journals online and in print.

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.

Bleacher seats in the West 53rd Street Branch design | © TEN Arquitectos

NEW LIBRARIES
In 2008, the Donnell Library Center on West 43rd Street was sold to a hotel developer and closed. This week, after much delay, the New York Public Library (NYPL) released plans for the new library designed by TEN Arquitectos, including wide bleacher steps that open up the ground floor entrance to the two subterranean floors of the library, set to be completed in 2015. Architect Enrique Norten describes the design of the branch as a shift away from an exclusive focus on housing books and towards providing space for congregation and digital access. The unveiling comes in the midst of continued debate over plans by the Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) to sell two branches to developers who would replace them with new library facilities nested within large new developments on the sites, a model similar to the the Donnell branch’s sale. Opponents point to the reduced size and long delays of the Donnell replacement as a cautionary tale. At the BPL’s main branch in Grand Army Plaza, the shift from book storage to digital access manifests itself in the new Shelby White and Leon Levy Information Commons, which provides space for laptop users, classroom and meeting rooms, and a digital studio with green screen, microphone and video equipment, open to anyone with a library card. According to Linda E. Johnson, the president of the Brooklyn Public Library, “The business of being a public library is much more complicated today than it was when it was conceived… We’re still trying to level the playing field. It’s just not about books as much as it is about access to the Internet.”

HIGH RISES AND GREEN SPACE FOR GREENPOINT
The rezoning of the Williamsburg-Greenpoint waterfront in 2005, which paved the way for high-rise development on the formerly industrial shores of the East River, came with promises from the City to expand parkland in the North Brooklyn neighborhoods. Eight years later, the proposed Box Street Park and expansion of Newtown Barge Park are finally back on the agenda in connection with two new large private developments. In the first, a residential tower at 77 Commercial Street, developers purchased $8 million in air rights from an adjacent MTA parking lot. The money will be used to turn the parking lot into a new Box Street Park. The second deal is part of the renewed plan for the 22-acre Greenpoint Landing project that would add ten high-rise towers and a school to the neighborhood. Both projects will likely enter the public review process this summer.

Rendering of the New Lab interior | Image via New Lab

NEW LAB AT THE BROOKLYN NAVY YARD
The newest addition to the industrial ecosystem at the Brooklyn Navy Yard was unveiled this week. The “beta space” of the New Lab, a manufacturing cooperative to be housed in a redeveloped shipbuilding facility set to be completed in 18 months, will operate in a neighboring building for the time being. The larger facility will house a full metal shop, a wood shop, and 3-D printers for making and honing prototypes of new products meant to provide the tools to support a new sprout of manufacturing already happening in the borough and become what Sarah Krasley of FastCompany calls “a non-denominational MIT Media Lab, where cross-pollination between green manufacturing startups, R&D teams, academia, designers, technologists, and digital fabricators will run rampant.”

DECODING UTILITY MARKERS
New Yorkers tend to view construction projects, be they marked by a traffic cone-rimmed hole in the middle of 2nd Avenue or the scaffolding surrounding another glassy tower, as part of the native environment. With so much of the city’s infrastructure running beneath our feet, how this construction manages —  for the most part — to avoid rupturing a gas main or snipping a fiberoptic cable is critical to the smooth functioning of the city. Check out the Smithsonian’s peek into the coding of infrastructural graffiti tagged to our streets and sidewalks andlearn another language with which to read the city. For more on the city’s subterranean infrastructure check out our feature on the city’s fiberoptic systems, “Pulses of Light Beneath the Streets,” and our interview with urban explorer Steve Duncan.

NYCxDESIGN
Starting today and running through May 21st, the City is hosting NYCxDESIGN, an inaugural showcase of design with exhibitions, installations, trade shows, talks, launches and open studios. The festival features architecture and urban design, product design, graphic design, fashion, and furniture-making and initially grew out of a 2011 report by the Center for Urban Future (CUF), “Growth by Design,“ exploring how the City could better support its design sector, which we discussed with researcher David Giles. CUF is now calling on the City to go further, suggesting eight ways to grow New York’s design sector beyond the festival in the city with the more designers than anywhere in the nation.

Cricket underway in the city | Image via Rawle C. Jackman

CRICKET AT HOME IN THE BRONX
With a burgeoning South Asian population, demand for proper cricket facilities in the Bronx has grown. Responding to local desires, the Parks Department recently completed a renovation of a former parade ground in Van Cortland Park, creating ten new cricket fields for local leagues. An example of how a neighborhood’s built environment reflects its demographic makeup — and when they change, they change together — the new fields give the Bronx a city-leading 18 dedicated cricket pitches.

POST SANDY INITIATIVE
With the City’s proposal for federal Sandy relief spending approved, a coalition of planning and design groups — spearheaded by the city’s chapter of the American Institute of Architects — released a report detailing recommendations for making the city more resilient in the face of future disasters. The strategies featured in the report cover changes to zoning and building codes, communication channels when the lights go out, and urban waterfront management. The exhibition Future of the City presents designs of potential resiliency projects and will be open at the Center for Architecture through June 29th and a symposium featuring a panel on the initiative is scheduled for tomorrow, May 11, at 1:00pm.

Red, Yellow, and Blue in Madison Square Park | Image by Kaori Ogawa

EVENTS and STUFF TO DO

RED, YELLOW, AND BLUE
Vibrant and wavy walls molded from 1.4 million feet of recycled lobster rope, 3,000 gallons of paint, and 9,000 hours of labor is the latest public art piece commissioned by Mad. Sq. Art, the contemporary art program of the Madison Square Park Conservancy. The work, by Brooklyn-based artist Orly Genger and entitled Red, Yellow, and Blue, will be in place through September 8th. ”It’s for the people. It’s meant to be touched and used and sat on. The interactivity with the public, that is what she wants,” say Debbie Landau, president of the Conservancy. Happy interacting!

THE AMAZING BRONX RIVER FLOTILLA
Join the Bronx River Alliance for a 5k canoe race, free community paddling, and guided tours of the estuary to celebrate the newest park on the Bronx River Greenway, Starlight Park, tomorrow from 11am to 4pm. For more on the revitalization efforts along the Bronx River, read our conversation with Amanda Schachter and Alexander Levi, principals of SLO Architecture, who have worked alongside the Alliance to help the surrounding community access the banks of the Bronx.

NEWTOWN CREEK ALLIANCE TOURS
Newtown Creek Alliance, a community-based organization dedicated to revitalizing, restoring, and revealing the industrial waterway separating Brooklyn and Queens, announced its summer slate of tours by foot, canoe, and water taxi on topics ranging from the Creek’s history and working waterfront to Creek ecology and pollution. Head out on the first tour of the season, “Parks and Petroleum,” this Sunday.

The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

Photo: Fran Parente

Last Saturday, the Architectural League team spent a beautiful spring day at the IDEAS CITY StreetFest, part of the New Museum’s biennial festival exploring the future of cities around the globe with the belief that arts and culture are essential to the vitality of urban centers, making them better places to live, work, and play. At the StreetFest, we hosted a pop-up exhibition showcasing the first stage of the League’s long-term project Typecast, a research-based study seeking to refresh thinking about architectural typologies that have come to be seen as outdated, starting with the much-maligned housing typology “towers-in-the-park.” The booth presented photographs from the five photo essays we commissioned for Typecast, and offered an outline of the project’s research agenda.

The booth also served as a home base for visitors to find information about Little Free Library/NYC, the League and PEN World Voices Festival project also launched at the StreetFest. On Saturday, ten design teams selected in a jury process built and installed small book exchanges across Manhattan’s East Village and Lower East Side in coordination with local community partners. The libraries will be installed through September, when they will be reevaluated to see if they can remain on site into the fall. For more on the project, the individual designs, and photos of the installations on Saturday, check out this League feature on Little Free Library/NYC or, even better, use this map to visit the libraries in person.

We enjoyed talking with lots of great folks, explaining our ideas and listening to theirs, which we will incorporate as the project moves forward. Keep an eye out for developments as the Typecast project continues and check out some photos below of the StreetFest, the Architectural League / Urban Omnibus booth, and a selection of images of Little Free Libraries (more of which can be seen here). We’re already looking forward to 2015.

Photo: Fran Parente

Photo: Fran Parente

Photo: Fran Parente

Photo: Fran Parente

Photo: Cameron Blaylock

Photo: Cameron Blaylock

Photo: Fran Parente

Photo: Fran Parente

Photo: Varick Shute

Photo: Varick Shute

Photo: Varick Shute

Photo: Varick Shute

Photo: Varick Shute

Photo: Alexandra Hay

Photo: Shannon Harvey

Photo: Alexandra Hay

Today, we are pleased to publish one of two runners-up: “Little Metrics,” by Malaika Kim. In a personal narrative that follows her from childhood to motherhood, Kim traces how the intangibles of her life — the passage of time, acquired knowledge, and changes in lifestyle and family — have shifted her perception and experience of the physical environment in very measurable ways.

Stay tuned for another runner-up from the Fuzzy Math writing competition, to be published in the coming weeks. But first, enjoy “Little Metrics.”

—V.S.

The metrics of a young urban family are new to me. As a child, living in a suburb in Indiana in the 1980s, I could wander the local woods freely or drop in at a friend’s house on a whim to play. My surroundings were open to me. I was free to be a kid, going unsupervised wherever I chose so long as I followed some rules. I could establish the dimensions of my environment by telling a grown-up where I was going. Once I got there, the metrics of my behavior — by which I mean the personal measurements and rules by which we assess and move through space — relied on guidance from my older brother. He taught me where to turn in the woods before getting lost; passed on the childish lore of the terra forboden; and reminded me when it was time to go home. Our careful study of our surroundings empowered us. We discovered that spaces could be manipulated, imagined, and used in different ways to play and grow. We came to know ourselves as the scale, measure, and limits of our world.

My children are growing up in a radically different environment of a major urban metropolis. They are watched and guided from moment to moment; they do not wander or explore on their own. Yet the same principles of environmental metrics I learned in childhood endure. Even now, as an adult — and more so as a parent — I measure my now-urban environment by the same ideas of safety, physical ability, maturity, and a little bit of homespun lore. I am responsible not just for passing on my knowledge of the city and how to navigate through it. I am engaged in a dialogue with my children, through which we reveal to each other a city landscape that would have gone otherwise unseen.

For my children, the city is a normal, even natural, physical environment. For myself, city living required a prolonged and sometimes harrowing transition. When I moved to Manhattan after college, two things captured my imagination and determined my measurement of the city: narrative and safety. I was a newly minted architect with a fascination for New York’s exotic-sounding places and salient history. Knowing my enthusiasms, my parents prepared me for my new life with a stack of laminated pocket-sized subway and street maps. I studied them endlessly in an attempt to define the city by neighborhoods, names, and places. I took long meandering walks looking for distinct boundaries that delineated areas in real or philosophical terms. What was Broadway? The Lower East Side? Beige? Or Century 21? All the while, my tourist-like enthusiasm to know New York was tempered by underlying feelings that I was young, female, and unsure if this city was for me. My peripheral vision took note of dark alleyways and vestibules I had seen featured sensationally in film and television about “the Big City.” If I felt uncomfortable somewhere, for whatever reasons, I made sure not to return alone. I was measuring urbanity in broad strokes as good or bad, with a hope it was weighted toward the former.

Later, I would walk with my husband, traversing endlessly long crosstown blocks as if in a race to see who could reach the waterfront first (usually he would, the much taller of us). We committed to memory the island of Manhattan and its parts, measured by our stride. When we moved to Brooklyn, we looked for Ebbets Field and we found the Gowanus Canal. On weekends, long walks were a frugal therapy to clear our minds after the work week. Measuring the city with a companion gave me motivation and fearlessness about investigating previously murky, far-flung geography. Crossing from Flatbush into Prospect Park, past the Maryland Military Monument, I finally understood why General Washington chose Brooklyn to survey his options for holding the New York Harbor. These “aha!” moments helped me mentally put together the pieces of the map and physically sense the larger connectivity of the city. Having both spent much of our lives in car-dependent places, we embraced the pedestrian’s ability to go anywhere unencumbered. Owning a car was no longer imperative to live well. When our feet were tired, we’d hop on the nearest train back home.

I no longer measure the city with my bodily strides. Five years ago, my first child was born. Now I move through the city at a deliberate and measured pace. My focus is mostly low, below 48 inches, and local, within a radius of a couple miles from home. This is the space occupied by my young children. The stride remains the yardstick, albeit the stride of their little legs. While this little metric lengthens slightly with each passing month, as with any yardstick, there is always a limit: one that is reached audibly with a sharp whine signaling the start of physical exhaustion. It is then we have gone too far.

I have developed a remarkable catalogue of space below 48 inches, the zone I consider to be the urban ground plane. I know how to read the tilt and cracks of a sidewalk to avoid trapped stroller wheels or how to guide a newbie on a scooter around metal basement doors. I have opinions on curb cuts. Urban infrastructure is rarely well crafted, but I know that if it is textured with raised dots, it will be reliably sloped. Above the curb level, I size up fences or low walls, and within seconds I can tell if a child’s natural desire to scale or climb them are beyond his or her proven abilities. I’m skeptical of the efficacy of new pedestrian refuge islands or other such traffic-calming devices intended to reinvigorate the old neighborhood streets. My focus being low, slow, and close, I’ve become the natural enemy of those who move through the city at faster speeds with head-up visual perspectives. Large cars make me nervous. I scorn cyclists who ride through red lights illegally thinking the coast is clear. They don’t see my toddler, a touch taller than a fire hydrant. It is not great for the back, but my role now is to look low and to act with parental vigilance for my children’s safety and best interest. I’m the protector of the lower 48 inches of urban space.

This new way of seeing the city landscape consciously and subconsciously informs the way that my children and I navigate and live in our environment. I can’t recall why we always go to the store the same way — until I glance across the street to see the appealing candy machines outside the newsstand. These, I have learned, are best avoided. I prefer one park over another because it has low walls for sitting and is free of nearby idling cars. The big London Plane tree that the last storm took is dearly missed because it broke the wind so well while waiting for the crosswalk. Unlike the macro-measurements of the city I made as a young adult, the little metrics naturally seek the micro-environment. And by our micro-calculations, we find the parts of the city most suited to us.

Not all behavior can be rationalized. We are also guided by a sense of lore, the myths and superstitions about places that are readily created in a child’s mind and become personal rules and patterns. Our family superstition holds that every time we pass the big fountain in the plaza, it shall be circumnavigated twice before moving on. The origins of certain myths are known. I know where my daughter nearly knocked out her tooth, and we slow reflexively to step over that store’s threshold with care. Years ago I read a story about a tragedy at a nearby playground. My children don’t know the story, but know that we don’t play there. These evolving narratives about places that shape our behavior resonate in my memory. They are not unlike the stories and fables told between children about the abandoned house near my childhood home.

While some of our natural ways to size up our surroundings remain the same regardless of specific place or time, other urban metrics are more difficult for me to evaluate. It is a truth that the more crowded a place is, the closer proximity we retain to our group. In urban life, this truth is ingrained and natural. My children are apartment dwellers, and all their time outside has thus far been within eyesight of a grown-up. City life breeds attachment parenting. My own parents were loving and emotionally close, but this is different. As someone who could freely cross her neighborhood alone as a kindergartener, I often wonder if these restrictions are maddening to a child in her search for independence and personal discovery.

Despite my occasional questioning of these facts of urban family life, the intimacy of observing a child grow is not lost on me. Because we stick together, my children have, with varying degrees of success, learned to exist in predominantly grown-up environments. At restaurants, the baby of the family quickly and calmly sits down, places a napkin in his lap, and waits for his food. As a trade-off, I make sure we spend a great deal of time in places where they can be kids. Together we discover new spaces. We evaluate the best spots to test the new bicycle. We find spaces where I can sit while they can safely wander farther away than usual and pretend to be alone. I realize that, like my older brother was to me, I’m a guide teaching my children to navigate their environment and to find the space they need. They were born as urbanites. Having experienced both rural and urban living, I know that city life is inherently more complicated and demands skills I learned as a young adult that involve more negotiation and attention. This close proximity to my children provides an opportunity to pass on my skills and experience.

As my children near school age, they now teach and guide me anew through the city landscape. Children are perpetually in a state of mind with no steadfast rules, where space is always adaptable and interactive. They will find new interpretations of urban spaces whether in a formal botanical garden or a tired concrete plaza — they will be kids. Any flat surface over ten feet long, which five years ago I would have passed without a glance, becomes a stage for impromptu performances involving the latest mastered physical feat: a skip, a pirouette, a cartwheel. A child’s use of space is a constant reminder of how the city landscape shifts, morphs and evolves. Children cannot resist the urge to linger and inspect even the smallest changes to their environment. A fallen tree branch, a spilled bag of chips, a newly painted fence are endless points of interest that must be picked up, crunched, smelled. The city landscape, in their perception, is not simply to be viewed and navigated, but manipulated and used. My toddler once stopped the narrow flow of all tourists on the High Line to thoroughly investigate the noisemaking potential of a metal paver underfoot. I took a deep breath and apologized while my inner New Yorker calculated the extra five minutes this would add to our trip. We always have the option to take a bus, subway or taxi, but that would deny them the joy of discovery and time.

With fascination I witness my children master my metrics and then adapt, interpret, and augment them. I am learning to see New York again. And I am increasingly aware that the little metrics of this urban family are definitive in time and space. Slowly, as little legs and minds expand and as inhibition wanes and self-awareness develops, our perceptions of the city landscape will diverge and the dialogue between us will change. I must prepare myself. I feel an urgency to know the nuances, to build a catalogue so that I remember to integrate my current understanding of the city with the way I will soon see it anew. Soon I will need to let go of hands, drop a step behind, and let my children be the navigators and wanderers, measuring the city with their own being. For now, I try to see the city as they do: not a series of striped crosswalks, but a giant hopscotch board.

All images courtesy of Malaika Kim. Malaika Kim is an architect, design educator and mother of two. Her interest in cities and the built environment was affirmed early on, upon first seeing the open plains of the Midwest at age six. She has taught at Parsons and Virginia Tech, and currently practices residential architecture in New York City.

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.

tree wood by Toshihiro Oki architect

Now in its second season, Folly is a competition held by the Architectural League and Socrates Sculpture Park that invites emerging architects and designers to create contemporary interpretations of the architectural folly, a small-scale structure created to draw the eye to specific points or views. Although their purpose is often not immediately clear, follies allow designers to explore materiality, spatial interaction, and concepts about our urban and natural environment.

This year’s winning entry — tree wood — is by Toshihiro Oki architect, with team members Toshihiro Oki, Jen Wood, and Jared Diganci. The winning architects received a grant and two-month residency at Socrates Sculpture Park in addition to the opportunity to build the full-scale project in the park. The installation will be unveiled this Sunday, May 12th, at a picnic at Socrates from 2pm-6pm and will be on display through August 5th, 2013. Sunday’s event marks the opening of Socrates’ summer season. For a closer look at the winning design, four finalists’ proposals, and some of the recurring themes in this year’s submissions, check out the League’s recent online feature on Folly 2013.

Time & Place
May 12–August 5, 2013
Opening picnic: Sunday, May 12, 2013, 2:00–6:00pm
Socrates Sculpture Park
32-01 Vernon Boulevard
Long Island City, NY 11106

Tickets
Free and open to all; no reservations necessary.

For more information about the event, visit archleague.org.

tree wood by Toshihiro Oki architect

The 2011 StreetFest | Image via André-Pierre du Plessis

IDEAS CITY STREETFEST
The Omnibus team has been busy this week enjoying the many exceptional speakers, workshops, and events that make up this year’s IDEAS CITY Festival, a biennial exploration of the future of cities around the globe with the belief that arts and culture are essential to the vitality of urban centers, making them better places to live, work, and play. If you missed the two-day conference, videos of the talks and panel discussions are already available on the IDEAS CITY website. And luckily, there is still more festival to come. The IDEAS CITY StreetFest will take over Sara D. Roosevelt Park and the surrounding parts of the Lower East Side on Saturday from 11am-6pm and will showcase the work of architects, poets, technologists, historians, community activists, entrepreneurs, and ecologists, all of whom will be exploring this year’s theme of Untapped Capital.

Come visit us at the Architectural League of New York / Urban Omnibus tent at the corner of Chrystie and Stanton Streets, where we will be presenting a pop-up exhibition of photographs and information that outline the research agenda of Typecast, our new long-term investigation into building typologies — starting with towers-in-the-park. You will also be able to pick up a map of the outdoor library sites installed through the League and PEN World Voice Festival’s joint project Little Free Library/NYC. The designers of the book shelters will be constructing their installations at ten sites in Lower Manhattan on Saturday, and festival-goers are encouraged to visit the sites and meet the designers over the course of the afternoon.

Little Free Library/NYC and Typecast are just two of more than one hundred projects and installations planned for the StreetFest. You can sift through the complete list here, or take a look at a few highlights below:

•  Terreform ONE will depict the false distinction between waste and supply in their sculpture Babel Waste Capital, representing an extension of the city constructed from its own trash.

• Trust Art, which may sound familiar if you caught our conversation with co-founder Jose Serrano-McClain, will bring together a network of artists whose work share the common thread of cooperation as they launch a funding platform for art projects jointly owned and controlled by active participants.

• Community Solutions and Alexander Gorlin Architects will propose public space improvements to invigorate housing developments, demonstrated through a masterplan for Brownsville, Brooklyn, at their booth in the exhibition Reimagining Housing Developments in Lower Manhattan.

• Check out prototypes of some of the winners in the City’s Reinvent Payphones design contest, launched to spark ideas of how to utilize the existing payphone infrastructure while adapting it for the future.

Clockwise from top left: Babel Waste Capital by Terreform ONE, Sewer in a Suitcase by CUP, Change of State by NBNY, and Brownsville Proposal by Alexander Gorlin Architects and Community Solutions | Images via IDEAS CITY

• The Center for Urban Pedagogy, the fine organization behind Fast-Tracked, the Predatory Equity Survival Guide, and Vendor Power, will showcase another one of their visually enticing tools developed to teach the complex systems of the city: Sewer in a Suitcase.

• Listen to and add your own stories to the collective history of the city with two oral history installations: StoryCorps’ walking tour Hear and There will guide you through the LES with selections from their archives, and SDR Coalition’s Oral History Booth will give you the opportunity to record your own impressions of the neighborhood and Sara D. Roosevelt Park.

• Stop by the Genspace NYC booth where the Brooklyn citizen science organization will lead two workshops on strawberry-DNA extraction and painting with bacteria.

• Share your ideas on how to improve the Lower East Side and see them displayed on an eight-foot interactive billboard installed by Neighborland, an online and street-level platform for sharing and organizing around local ideas for change.

• Research from three architecture courses at Columbia, Cooper Union, and Princeton dedicated to reimagining the Bowery will be on display in workshops and demonstrations throughout the afternoon.

• The Endangered Language Alliance will be on hand to record your language and language experiences (endangered language-speakers especially are encouraged to participate) at the Record-a-thon.

• Contribute to OpenUrban’s user-generated web map and wiki focusing on current and proposed urban development worldwide in their Map-a-thon.

• Join the Museum of the American Prison and founding members of the Civic Duty Initiative, a group of prisoners committed to giving back to their communities, for a discussion on how prisoners can contribute to solving current social problems. For more on the relationship between the justice system and the built environment, see our conversation with Laura Kurgan on redesigning Department of Probation waiting rooms into resource centers.

• Once the sun goes down, check out NightFest! The façade of the New Museum will be transformed through the projection of twelve designs by artists and architects in NBNY’s Change of State, an hour-long program starting on the hour and running from 8pm to midnight; art/architecture/performance collaborative Snarkitecture will present a 90-minute performance involving a roll-out of 25 illuminated spheres; Double One Design will build a light installation out of traffic control and construction safety materials; and Skate Truck NYC will set up a mini roller rink on Mulberry Street. Or head to the Old School from 6pm to midnight for SCHOOL NITE: a series of exhibitions bound by the theme “Wish Meme” that will explore “ideas of wish fulfillment, fiscal dependency, self-entitlement, and the agents working against these phenomena, which accounts for the push-and-pull within a generation raised in an economic bubble, and growing up or old through its sizable burst.”

The East River Blueway Plan’s components | Image via Curbed

EAST RIVER BLUEWAY PLAN
Last night, in a program hosted by the Cooper Union, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh released the final version of the East River Blueway Plan. The plan, which we discussed here on UO in an interview last May with Adam Lubinsky of WXY Architecture + Urban Design (one of the plan’s designers), calls for a series of kayak launches, beaches, pedestrian bridges, and wetlands to provide public access to the East River from as far north as 34th Street to underneath the Brooklyn Bridge while mitigating future storm surges. For more information about the plan and to check out updated renderings, see coverage on Curbed, DNAinfo, and Crain’s.

UNDER THE ELEVATED
The Design Trust for Public Space has announced its next major research/design/planning initiative, Under the Elevated. The project will produce design guidelines, programming, and policy recommendations that “maximize the function, use and spatial qualities of the millions of square feet of space underneath New York’s bridges, elevated highways, subways and rail lines.” The Design Trust is seeking three fellows for the project — in urban design, policy, and graphic design — as well as a photographer for the 2013 Photo Urbanism Fellowship, which will also focus on “life under and around elevated infrastructure in New York City.” The application deadline for all four fellowships is May 23, 2013.

SANDY: SIX MONTHS AFTER
Half a year after Hurricane Sandy initially displaced thousands of New Yorkers from their homes, many families are still looking for permanent housing. The 488 families who have jumped from evacuation shelters to hotel rooms funded by federal aid since the storm will have another month on the hotel shelter plan, an extension from the plan’s original end date of April 30. Their lack of options stand as a testament to the need for better planning to address the needs of low-income populations in future disasters.

The extent and quality of rebuilding from the storm at this point varies widely, as only about 16% of federal aid funds have been approved for particular projects, not all of which has actually made it to the end user. Although the federal government also approved New York State’s application for $1.7 billion in community block grants, $838 million of which would go to housing rehabilitation, the City calls the amount earmarked far from adequate, leaving many homeowners to rebuild but without the changes necessary to mitigate future storm damage.

In addition to rebuilding housing infrastructure, repairs to other systems continue. Water treatment plants, sited near the water by design and tasked with handling wastewater as well as stormwater thanks to the city’s outmoded combined sewer system, were particularly hard hit in the storm: an estimated 10 billion tons of sewage overflowed into waterways, streets, and homes in New York and New Jersey. Questions also remain about the future of communications infrastructure, all but knocked out by the storm, at a time when many people have abandoned landlines for cellphones that proved unreliable in the hardest hit areas.

Amidst the hardship, the last six months have also been full of stories like IceStone’s, a factory in the Brooklyn Navy Yard that, through the combined efforts and human capital of its workers, has landed back on its feet after every one of its 70 motors and 5,000 electrical relays had been submerged under five feet of water.

The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

This Saturday, May 4th, the Architectural League of New York / Urban Omnibus tent at the IDEAS CITY StreetFest will host a pop-up exhibition that sketches the project’s broad research agenda in terms of five examples, one in each of the boroughs, of a particular housing typology, “towers-in-the-park.” The exhibit will include photographs, figure-ground drawings, and a preliminary set of research questions. This year, the festival’s theme is “Untapped Capital,” and Typecast seeks to make visible the under-recognized spatial and social capital in these developments, to recast them as assets rather than liabilities, and to illuminate some of the ways in which social activity and physical form influence each other. In so doing, we hope to support efforts to modify and improve elements of our shared built environment in accord with citizens’ needs and desires for sustainable and generative urban living.

Be sure to come visit us this Saturday — the Architectural League / Urban Omnibus booth will be located on the corner of Chrystie and Stanton in Sara Delano Roosevelt Park — but first, take a look at some original photography of our initial study sites here and read more about the thinking behind the project below.

— C.S. & A.W.

Co-op City, Bronx | Photo by Amani Willett

On Typecasting
Sometimes actors become pigeonholed into a particular genre of film or a particular character, repeatedly cast based on how they look or the roles they’ve played in the past. The set, story, cast, and crew may change, but the typecast actor seems predestined to play the same part again and again.

Buildings can fall prey to the same tendency. Specific and recurring approaches to site planning, building form, use, and materials manifest themselves as shared physical attributes. And these come to signify, in the public imagination, shared social characteristics. We cease to see the variations between projects, and instead apply the same label – and the same connotations – to different kinds of built projects with similar traits. We typecast them.

Typecast is a long-term, research-based study into building typologies that seeks to refresh thinking about architectural typologies that have come to be seen as outdated, urban leftovers from bygone eras. While technologies progress and policies and priorities shift, our understanding of building typologies tends to remain static and unresponsive. Rather than allow them to slip into the background, Typecast attempts to bring new perspectives to existing types, rethinking how they can best nurture contemporary ways of living in the city.

SeaRise, Coney Island, Brooklyn | Photo by David Lang

In many ways, New York City operates as a laboratory of ideas for dense urban living. The city is home to a diverse array of housing typologies that range from single-family ranch homes and split-levels to brownstones and apartment buildings of all shapes and sizes. As distinct as these types are, what all of them share is their relationship to the street: no matter how tall or how far apart they are, the majority of our city’s building stock is oriented towards our greatest public space, our streets and avenues. One particular type of housing that diverges from this pattern is what is commonly referred to as “towers-in-the-park.” The term refers to an architectural and urban design typology of multi-family, high-rise housing complexes located on a “superblock”: a dedicated area of open space disconnected from the street system. The deficits of this typology are well known, such as the perceived association with concentrated poverty or the absence of street-life integration. However, their particular assets — including opportunities for productive ecological planning, convenient elder living, minimal site coverage and the uniform access to light and air that comes with it, and open space programming — are not broadly understood or thoroughly explored. Previous Urban Omnibus features, such as “Making Connections: Planning for Green Infrastructure in Two Bridges,” ”NORCs in NYC,” ”Starrett City: A Home of One’s Own — With Party Walls,” and “A Few Days in the Bronx: From Co-op City to Twin Parks,” have chronicled the environmental, social, and architectural potential of towers-in-the-park. Typecast will marshal this body of analysis and move it forward, introducing visual, ethnographic, and sociological lines of inquiry into a conversation about the relationship of use and form, design and experience, and urban history and urban futures.

On a more immediate level, the tower-in-the-park type is currently attracting newfound attention in planning, housing, and real estate circles. Towers-in-the-park are particularly prevalent among New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) projects. As NYCHA struggles to find ways to meet operating and maintenance costs for its projects in the face of declining federal subsidies, the development potential of the open space within NYCHA sites has come to be seen as an opportunity to leverage an asset that the Authority already owns.

Electchester, Queens | Photo by Cameron Blaylock

But the typology is by no means exclusive to public housing. Labor unions and large-scale private developers have also, at various times, seen the towers-in-the-park model as an efficient and effective way to house large numbers of people. How these buildings’ communities of residents – as well as their tenancy and financing models – have evolved over time is just as central to their story as their architecture and urban design. Close reading of the realities behind the apparent homogeneity of building type can reveal important spatial as well as social distinctions and make vivid the specificities of the residents who use and inhabit these sites. These nuances are key to understanding not only the history of each site but its future potential as a productive landscape.

With this need for a closer look in mind, the first phase of Typecast delves into five very different towers-in-the-park: Co-op City (Baychester and Eastchester, The Bronx); Sea Rise and Sea Park East (Coney Island, Brooklyn); Todt Hill Houses (Castleton Corners, Staten Island); Electchester (Pomonok, Queens); and Alfred E. Smith Houses (Two Bridges, Manhattan). Each of these sites occupies a completely distinct urban geography. They vary widely in scale, population, and demographic make-up. Co-op City and Electchester were developed by unions. Sea Rise and Sea Park East were developed by New York State’s Urban Development Corporation. Todt Hill and Smith Houses are NYCHA projects. And all of them have undergone significant changes in the decades since they were built, either in their own internal make-up or in the urban conditions surrounding them.

Fraternity Temple, Chicago, IL, 1891. Adler and Sullivan, designers. | © The Art Institute of Chicago, Richard Nickel Archive, Ryerson and Burnham Archives

Evolution of the tower-in-the-park
The evolution of the tower-in-the-park as a typology progressed in fits and starts, beginning as unrealized projects on paper and touching the ground decades later as public housing projects in American cities. Many tower-in-the-park schemes assume a cruciform building plan, dating back to Louis Sullivan’s design for the unbuilt Fraternity Temple project in Chicago in 1891. While Sullivan fills out the urban block, Le Corbusier and Auguste Perret isolate the building from the street, leaving only a cleanly extruded cruciform plan surrounded by green fields. This concept reached its formal pinnacle in Le Corbusier’s “La Ville Contemporaine” in 1925, in which a vacant, flat ground plane is punctured by repeating, 60-story, equally spaced cruciform skyscrapers. Characterized as an alternative to the endless street canyons of Manhattan, this diagram became the tool to introduce a radical departure in planning. The street wall and urban disorder of pedestrians were gone; green fields and the dominance of the highway had arrived.

The Plan Voisin, Paris | Image via Density Atlas

When this diagram was applied to an existing urban context, it didn’t so much integrate with the existing city as obliterate it. As the accomplice of this new planning diagram, automobile manufacturer Voisin sponsored the exhibition in which it was unveiled and lent its name to the plan. Le Corbusier’s “Plan Voisin” placed this newly conceived urban form in the center of Paris, erasing the past for the sake of the future. As the first and most extreme incarnation of the tower-in-the-park typology, the scheme not only emphasized the purity and height of the towers, but the lushness of the landscape surrounding them — something that is more apparent in Le Corbusier’s drawings than in his models.

Stuyvesant Town, Manhattan | Photo by Wendel Fisher

The tower-in-the-park typology, originally conceived as applicable to a wide range of income levels, became the default form for public housing in the United States. Projects widely regarded as failures, such as Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, dominated headlines, and the architecture was held responsible for the social challenges that followed post-industrial shifts in urban economies and labor pools. Meanwhile, the attention focused on more successful projects, such as Stuyvesant Town on the East Side of Manhattan, did not cite the form of the building as a determinant of positive potential. Thus, the dominant public perception of the towers was as physical containers of urban blight, their parks desolate, crime-ridden landscapes. The reality, as usual, is much more complex. The typology has been modified in many ways, with tower-in-the-park buildings and sites morphing in scale, building height, shape, orientation, site coverage, ownership models, and open space programming. Moreover, this model can and does host vastly different communities with a similar set of planning assets. An immediately noticeable difference between sites is density: with 121 dwelling units per acre, the highrise Plan Voisin is much less dense than mid-rise Clinton Hill Co-op in Brooklyn at 195 dwelling units per acre, but much more dense than Co-op City — the largest cooperative development in the world — at 48 dwelling units per acre.

Pomonok Houses and Electchester, Queens | Graphic by Andrew Wade

Form and Experience
Figure-ground diagrams — a kind of drawing that architects and urban designers use to understand the relationship of buildings and open space — demonstrate that, despite the diversity in detail among various projects described above, there are common traits that towers-in-the-park projects share. By representing built space in black and open space in white, the diagram distills the “grain” of the city. The relative size and mass of buildings becomes apparent, as does the space between them. While the figure-ground of a traditional urban form shows buildings clearly lining both sides of streets, filling in solid blocks between street corners, the figure-ground of a tower-in-the-park development shows how it disrupts this pattern, revealing buildings that float in space rather than shape it by defining roadways and sidewalks. Le Corbusier lined up his cruciform towers in an immediately legible orthogonal grid, but the realities of building in an extant city meant not all towers-in-the-park adhered to such precision or predictability. Nonetheless, the type’s perceived advantage was its independence from existing urban grain, allowing it to function — in theory — as a tabula rasa thought experiment, free from the accretive constraints of previous generations of citymaking.

But constraints, of course, also present opportunities. And while contemporary perspectives might disapprove of single-use building complexes divorced from their immediate urban context, towers-in-the-park are an undeniable part of our built environment. The figure-ground diagram, so useful in describing the relationship between buildings and open space, fails to describe the ways the buildings’ users weave together the activities of the tower with those of the park. How users navigate and negotiate these spaces offers clues to how we can identify assets in our existing building stock. Typecast aims to do just that — to identify assets hidden in plain sight — as our city strives to adapt the urban landscape to meet contemporary needs.

Stay tuned for updates on Typecast in the coming weeks and months.

Cassim Shepard is the editor of Urban Omnibus. Andrew Wade is the Mills Fellow at the Architectural League of New York.