Modi Research Group / Columbia University | click image to access interactive map

MAPPING ENERGY USE IN THE CITY
In an effort to show the ways in which New York City dwellers consume energy, Vijay Modi, professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University, and his student Bianca Howard have generated an interactive map that demonstrates energy consumption throughout the five boroughs at the block level. The map invites its users to explore the differences in energy consumption patterns throughout the city. It’s no surprise that Midtown Manhattan is the biggest consumer in the city that never sleeps. But it is more than a little alarming when Modi explains that Manhattan uses more energy than Kenya, and that the entirety of New York State consumes more than the whole Sub-Saharan region, a statistic that he hopes will change as awareness grows.

STEVEN SIEGEL’S NEW YORK
For more than thirty years, Steven Siegel has photographed and filmed the changing streetscapes of the five boroughs of New York City. The folks at Gothamist have been diligently mining his photo and film archives and interpret his images as documenting a fundamental shift from “from utter destruction to Disneyfication.” Siegel promises to continue recording these changes, and we promise to keep checking out his body of work as it evolves.

Newtown Creek Digester Eggs: The Art of Human Waste | David Leitner from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.

FOCUS / FORWARD
For another series of artful and informative perspectives, check out this collection of short documentaries by leading filmmakers, each one spotlighting innovative people and projects addressing a broad range of challenges — a topic and approach near and dear to the Omnibus’ heart. Gary Hustwit — whom we interviewed about his urban design documentary Urbanized — is among the filmmakers, working with Jessica Edwards on a profile of the Delaware County Landfill in Upstate New York, an extremely efficient facility able to divert 70% of incoming waste through recycling and composting and able to convert the landfill gas it captures into enough electricity to power almost 400 homes. And among the projects featured is the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Facility, a place we’ve been following since we first visited the Nature Walk designed by George Trakas that rings the facility and provides a generous and beautiful public space as well as access to the water.

AS THE MILLIONTREES PROGRAMS EXPANDS, BURDENS GROW
As one of many PlaNYC initiatives, the MillionTrees program’s goal was to plant and care for more than one million trees across New York City in order to enhance the emotional and physical well being of city dwellers and the health of the urban environment that surrounds them. Although over 500,000 trees have now been planted, severe weather conditions and the challenges of ongoing stewardship have constrained the organization’s budget and plans for the program. Although MillionTrees has been successful in planting, the burden of maintenance has suffered from budget cuts. The New York City administration is preparing to plant another 500,000 and it is relying on many volunteers, community residents and neighborhood non-profit groups to help.

ARCHITECTURE ON SCREEN
This Friday and Saturday, the Center for Architecture in partnership with MUSE Film and Television will be screening international productions on architecture extracted from the 2011 Montreal International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA). Be sure to check out these innovative films filled with historical, political and poetic dimensions. For more information about the event, visit the Center for Architecture’s event page.

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

Current conditions on the Queensway | Photo: Neil Sullivan via Old NYC

WILL QUEENS GET ITS OWN HIGH LINE?
The High Line is in many ways unique, but it’s by no means the only disused urban rail line in New York in need of repurposing. In Queens, the 3.5 mile leg of the Rockaway Beach Branch rail line, out of service since 1962, runs from Rego Park to the Ozone Park Trailhead, over auto-body shops, through Forest Park and a number of residential neighborhoods. While the current proposals reference the success of the High Line, they differ in intended audience and scope. Friends of the Queensway, the group leading the effort to create a new public space, is prioritizing providing amenities for the surrounding community — such as much-need bicycle infrastructure and community garden space — rather than primarily serving as a tourist attraction. Read more coverage on Treehugger.

The George Washington Bridge in Heavy Smog. View toward the New Jersey Side of the Hudson River | From the Documerica collection.

WHAT AMERICA LOOKED LIKE BEFORE THE EPA
In the 1970s, one of the early acts of the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), was a documentary effort called Documerica, for which EPA photographers travelled the country to capture the state of the nation in ecological terms. Forty years later, the National Archives has released 15,000 of the 80,000 photographs the project produced, many of which portray the harsh reality of our national landscape prior to an overhaul in environmental regulation. Be sure to explore these powerful photographs on the National Archive Flickr database and check out more about the collection on Grist.

MetroChange

METROCHANGE
When there’s not enough money left on your MetroCard for a trip, do you toss it? Apparently, lost or discarded MetroCards account for millions of dollars in wasted funds. So, NYU students Stepan Boltalin, Genevieve Hoffman and Paul May have collaborated to create a charity donation platform, called “MetroChange,” intended to turn these losses into gains for the city’s neediest families. The project calls for MetroChange kiosks to be installed in the subway, where commuters can swipe their cards (and recycle them) to donate the remainder of the value left of the car to charity. Read more about this project on the MetroChange blog.

RETHINKING AMERICA’S PARKING CULTURE
For those commuters who don’t use a MetroCard to get around this city, the availability, price and logistics of parking your vehicle often determine driver behavior. In most of the rest of the country, however, parking is abundant and takes up uncalculated amounts of land. Eran Ben-Joseph explores the problems and possibilities of parking in Rethinking a Lot, a new book published by MIT Press, that advocates for a transformation of parking lots into appealing, environmentally sound and better integrated features of our built environment. Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for The New York Times, explores Ben-Joseph’s argument that parking lots need to be taken seriously by designers and urbanists. Accompanying the article is a fascinating slideshow that encourages a reconsideration of this ubiquitous form that has, until recently, somehow eluded critical investigation by scholars of architecture, urbanism and the American landscape.

NYC HOUSING AUTHORITY TO CONSIDER SELLING AIR RIGHTS, RAISING RENT CAP
On Monday, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) released its five year plan, in which it announced the selling of air rights — the space that can be developed above buildings — as one potential strategy to redress its budget deficit. According to WNYC, NYCHA has also proposed raising the current $2000 rent cap and requiring all households to pay 30% of their income in rent.

BUS TIME
BusTime, the real-time bus tracking website, is now available for all of Staten Island. By allowing users to view exactly how far their bus is from their chosen stop, the real-time bus information “means more time at home with your family, relaxing with a cup of coffee,” according to MTA chairman Joe Lhota. Riders can access the information online, on a mobile phone (simply text a bust stop code to 511123), or — starting this spring — by scanning a QR code at the bus stop. Previously the MTA was having trouble reliably tracking buses through the tall buildings in Manhattan, but Bus Time’s opening up to all of Staten Island bodes well for the other four boroughs, all of which should have complete Bus Time service by 2013 . Read more on StreetsBlog.

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

Brooklyn Army Terminal | archival images via brooklynarmyterminal.com

One week from Saturday, on September 17th, the Architectural League will be hosting the 2011 Beaux Arts Ball at the Brooklyn Army Terminal. The Ball is a tremendous event with historical chops. Started in the late 19th century by the École des Beaux-Arts, this tradition has since become a staple of architecture schools around the country. The League held its first Ball in 1990, and it now serves as an annual benefit to support the many programs of our beloved institution. Each year, the Ball is held in a different, architecturally-distinct place — including the Seagram Building, the Synod House of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the Old American Can Factory , the American Academy of Arts and Letters — which is transformed for the event by an invited group of emerging architects (click here for photos from recent years).

This year, we’re heading to Sunset Park to party in the central atrium of the Brooklyn Army Terminal (BAT). The BAT has its own compelling history, one that is probably unknown to many of today’s New Yorkers. So, in anticipation of this month’s big event, we bring you a look back at the history of this sprawling waterfront complex. In addition to digging through the archives, we had a chance to sit down with Carmine Giordano, the BAT Facilities Director for the past 23 years and a lifelong resident of Sunset Park, to hear about the facility’s recent life.

Brooklyn Army Terminal, 2011 | photo by Varick Shute

In April 1918, the US War Department took over what was then the Langley estate on the South Brooklyn waterfront for the purposes of building a military depot and supply base. The architect placed in charge was Cass Gilbert, one of the founding members of the Architectural League, known for such works as New York City’s Woolworth Building, the US Custom House, the New York Life Building and the United States Supreme Court in DC. The utilitarian design of the BAT was an exception in Gilbert’s catalogue of projects in the Beaux-Arts and Neo-Gothic styles. Under Gilbert’s design, the original 97-acre site became home to two warehouses, three multi-story piers (two of which have since been lost to underwater termites), a rail yard and a network of tracks running between the buildings and through the atrium spaces. The central atrium — a massive, four million cubic foot space — is lined with concrete balconies, staggered to allow loading and unloading of goods from rooftop cranes. Covered sky bridges connect the complex’s buildings, and the installation of 96 centrally-controlled, push-button elevators was the largest of its time. “The military used Building B, which is 2.2 million square feet, just for supplies. People were stationed in Building A, which is 1.8 million square feet,” Giordano described. “When I first got here, the City hadn’t renovated Building A yet. There was still a bowling alley, a restaurant, their cots, a post office. It was amazing.”

After just 17 months of construction, at a cost of $30 million, the BAT opened on September 6, 1919. “They broke records,” Giordano noted. “This project was in the Book of World Records for how much concrete was poured and mixed in a day. And this was in 1918. Their equipment was a horse and wagon.”

Beaux Arts Ball 2011 Invitation | Brooklyn Army Terminal as photographed in October 1949 by Andreas Feininger. Courtesy of Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

Barely open in time to see soldiers returning from WWI, the BAT would wait another 22 years to see its peak of activity. 56,000 military and civilian personnel were employed at the BAT during WWII, and an additional three million troops and 37 million tons of supplies traveled through. The activity often spilled into the neighborhood’s streets and sidewalks. “My father used to say that, once workers began to go home in the evening, you couldn’t come near this area until 10pm,” Giordano recalled from his childhood. “It took hours for the cars and the people walking to pass through.”

After the war, the facility remained active. Supplies and servicemen again passed through the BAT during the Korean War. In July 1956, survivors of the collision between the ocean liners Andrea Doria and Stockholm were brought to the BAT, as were thousands of Hungarian Revolution refugees in 1957’s “Operation Mercy.” This legacy of the site, providing safe passage to survivors of disaster, was revisited ten years ago when the BAT’s sole remaining pier was opened to help ferry people out of Manhattan on September 11, 2011. “They diverted the Staten Island Ferry to get people here from Pier 11,” Giordano recalled. “People were lost, they didn’t even know they were in Brooklyn. I didn’t go home for seven days.” But what might be the BAT’s most famous entry into the nation’s historical memory came in September 1958, when hordes of fans and photojournalists turned up to see Elvis Presley ship out to Germany.

Brooklyn Army Terminal, November 1947 | Photo by Michael Rougier from the LIFE Magazine Archives. For more photos from this series, click here.

In 1964, the Brooklyn Army Terminal was identified by US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as one of 95 military bases deemed unnecessary for national defense and thus should be closed to cut costs. By the end of 1966, all cargo and passenger traffic had been diverted to Bayonne, New Jersey.

News of the deactivation of the BAT immediately piqued interest from the City of New York, which announced an intent to acquire the site for maritime development. But it was the federal government that leased much of the space through the 1970s. “It lay unused for most of the 1960s,” Giordano said, “but in the ‘70s it saw some occasional use. There was a big fire at the US Post Office in the city. They used the first floors of BAT as a post office for a couple of years until they could refurbish the damaged space.”

New York City bought the complex from the federal government in 1981, with the intention of finding a developer to refurbish the space for commercial and light industrial use. When that fell through, the City began a phased renovation in 1984 under the management of the New York City Economic Development Corporation. The final phase was completed in 2003, making a total of  2.6 million square feet available for use. Now, the BAT houses over 70 tenants from the arts, sciences, finance and technology. BioBAT, a non-profit partnership between the NYCEDC and the Downstate Medical Center, has taken over 500,000 square feet of Building A for life science research, development and bio-manufacturing space. Last year, the NYCEDC announced a call for proposals for a $10 million smart grid demonstration project that would install a 50,000 square foot photovoltaic panel array on the BAT roof.

The City’s efforts to reactivate light manufacturing and invigorate our working waterfront reach beyond the Brooklyn Army Terminal. Similar plans are in the works for the rest of the Sunset Park Waterfront, as outlined in the NYCEDC 10-year Vision Plan for the area. The Brooklyn Navy Yard has been the focus of an eight-building, 40-acre expansion and refurbishment. The NYC Department of City Planning’s Comprehensive Waterfront Plan, Vision 2020, highlights the support of waterfront industry as a crucial strategy in keeping our city vibrant, from improving regional freight rail to dedicating resources to increasing opportunities in industrial business zones. In pursuit of these goals — to develop and renovate pockets of our city to improve economic growth and revitalize neighborhoods, all while recognizing the value and longevity of well-designed, beautiful spaces — the story of the Brooklyn Army Terminal is one worth telling.

Brooklyn Army Terminal, 2011 | photo by Varick Shute

—Varick Shute

The PS90 building from a courtyard-facing window.

Facing both 148th street and 147th street in Harlem, mid-block between Frederick Douglass and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevards, is a majestic building built in 1906 as Public School 90 and recently converted into 54 market rate condos and 20 middle-income apartments. Earlier this month, the National Dance Institute (NDI), a non-profit that provides free dance instruction to 40,000 students in New York City public schools every year, announced it was moving to an 18,000 square foot “Center for Learning and The Arts” at the PS90 building, which means NDI will, for the first time in its 34-year history, have studio space of its own. And just last week, Curtis + Ginsberg Architects, the design firm responsible for the conversion, shared the Lucy Moses Prize with the rest of the PS90 design and development team*. The New York Landmarks Conservancy bestows this prize to honor excellence in historic preservation.

PS90 rooftop before construction.

Original 2nd Floor Plan of the 1906 building.

As a model of adaptive reuse, PS90 demonstrates that good bones can make for successful surgery. Coverage of the conversion on Curbed makes repeated references to the gargoyles that adorn the roof line. The site’s real estate developer describes the grand design of this building as “a textbook example of Collegiate Gothic-style architecture” that blends “functional muscularity and stately elegance,” calls the building “among the finest schools ever built in New York City,” and references the design choices and prolific career of the building’s original architect C.B.J. Snyder, including his choice of a through-block H-shaped plan for the building (see original building plan at right), which maximized the amount of natural light possible for a mid-block site.

C.B.J. Snyder was the superintendent and chief architect for New York City Schools from 1891 to 1922. During his tenure, he oversaw the construction of more than 400 public schools, of which nearly 300 are still in use. PS90, however, saw its last students in the late 1960s. In 1970, the building was declared obsolete and abandoned. But while it had to wait forty years to be reborn in 2010 as a residential building with a ground-floor community facility, in the early 1990s the building played a significant role in inspiring a group of young architects to make a case for incorporating evolving knowledge of how we learn most comfortably and most productively into the design of learning environments. It was one of six sites chosen for a landmark design study organized by the Architectural League and the Public Education Association called New Schools for New York: Plans and Precedents for Small Schools (1992). On the occasion of PS90′s rebirth as a residential complex and community facility, we thought we’d dust off the publication that documented the design study and check it out. What we found reminds us of how relevant the designs and development strategies remain nearly twenty years later.

Interior classroom before the conversion.

Towards the end of 1988, New York State established the Schools Construction Authority (SCA) to build new public schools and manage the design, construction and renovation of capital projects in New York City’s more than 1,200 public school buildings. At the time, over half of New York’s schools had been constructed prior to 1949, including the prodigious output of Snyder.

The prevailing thinking in the late 1980s – determined in the balance sheets of construction, building maintenance and human resources – held that to make a school economically feasible, it had to be the size of a city block. Yet, the economy of scale argument led to learning environments that were demonstrably failing New York’s children. With the SCA in place, and the city embarking on its first major school building program in many years, the League and PEA partnered to organize a design study that would challenge that received wisdom by producing designs for small schools that would demonstrate ways in which the building of small schools could employ a variety of different development strategies. The League worked with over 70 architecture firms and individual designers on six sites in four boroughs, including sites in Morrisania, Flushing, Sunset Park, Prospect Heights, Washington Heights and Harlem. The designs were featured in an exhibition and a publication. The New Schools for New York design study, along with an earlier Architectural League design study called Vacant Lots (1987), marshaled the energy and creativity of a community of architects and applied it to issues in the public interest of all New Yorkers.

Vacant Lots (1987) and New Schools for New York (1992) | Published by Princeton Architecture Press

Michael Manfredi, who participated in both design studies and worked on the PS90 site, described the period as one in which architects were “hungry to actively participate in socially minded projects.” Manfredi and partner Marion Weiss, whose firm’s portfolio now includes built projects such as Barnard College’s Diana Center and the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park, initiated their joint practice for work on Vacant Lots and New Schools for New York. He describes the opportunity that the League provided for young designers — to produce designs with real-world utility on urban in-fill sites, to engage the public sector, to foster fellowship with other designers interested in social justice  – as unique at the time.

While the historical moment was one of economic and architectural stagnation, the beginning of a new school building program created an opening for design innovation and, crucially, real collaboration between an education reform advocacy group, a cultural institution dedicated to nurturing excellence in architecture and urbanism, and a community of designers who wanted to put their talents to good use.

In addition to multiple site visits and neighborhood analyses, the League gave the architects a clear mandate. It reads as follows:

Task: Design an adaptive reuse of abandoned PS90 as a multi-use community center.

Site: Public School 90, a vacant elementary school on West 148th Street in Harlem was declared obsolete and abandoned by the Board of Education during the 1970s. Completed in 1906, PS90 is a five-story, masonry bearing wall H-plan school similar to many others around the city built during the term of innovative Superintendent of School Buildings C.B.J. Snyder. The Bradhust district of Harlem, in which the school is located, includes many vacant apartment buildings currently being renovated for housing for the homeless and for low-income families. The Harlem Urban Development Corporation and a number of community organizations and institutions have proposed the comprehensive Bradhurst Plan for this area as a way of addressing the economic, educational and social needs of the existing population and the new residents who will move into the rehabilitated housing.

Architectural Program: Architects were asked to propose how the existing structure of P.S. 90 could be renovated as a community center, including a small alternative high school for 250 students. Other uses to be included in the building were an auditorium/theatre and gymnasium for community use, a branch library, an infant and toddler care center for 45 children, an early childhood center for 60 children, social services offices, a senior citizen’s center, and a health clinic. Design issues of particular importance were how to create appropriate access, circulation and security within the building. The proposed program envisioned almost round-the-clock use of the building by a variety of groups, all of which would benefit from sharing amenities and facilities.

Each of the five teams who worked on this site developed an original scheme. The City College Architecture Center envisioned a Maison du Peuple where residents share cultural recreational and social services organized around an interior plaza carved from the basement, ground and second floor. Brett Boyd Steele posited that the school of the future is “no more than a transmitter,” meaning his abstract scheme, with its emphasis on mobility and circulation, prioritizes the social program over the container. Carlos Wolovick‘s scheme would preserve the historic exterior of the structure but replace the interior, using the crossbar of the “H” to connect the functions and spaces within the building. Francis L. Turner sought to encourage public use of facilities with a bridge/crosswalk to link new and existing buildings on a roof garden level. And Weiss Manfredi proposed an “improvisational, educational and cultural center” in an “agora” opened up between the two separate buildings, the high school and community center, created by removing the bar of the buiding’s H. In conversation, Manfredi describes the idea as ”an act of tactical removal” that took out the connection between the two arms of the H in order “to make a more porous connection to the community.”

The Weiss Manfredi scheme removed the connection between the two sides of the H to create a public open space that allowed passage between 148th and 147th Streets. Click to enlarge.

The New Schools for New York design study tested a variety of development strategies to deliver smaller schools. In Sunset Park, the task was to design a new complex that included an elementary school for 350 children and a public library, thus leveraging the resources of multiple city agencies in a shared capital project. (R. Darby Curtis and Mark Ginsberg, principals of the team that designed the PS90′s recent residential conversion, worked with Julia Doern on a scheme for this site for the design study). In Prospect Park, the task was “to divide a large high school into four distinct academies.” This strategy for decreasing school size within existing school buildings has been used often in the past decades, and remains difficult to do well; competition for space and other challenges of coexistence in shared facilities have often demonstrated the complexities of reshaping the physical environments of school buildings. Looking back, the benefits and possibilities of small schools has, over time, informed the ways certain New York City public schools are organized and built. But the important successes of the small schools movement has not removed the significant barriers to providing New York’s school children with ideal spaces in which to learn. Small schools themselves are no panacea to entrenched challenges in education and school administration.

The reuse of PS90 may have taken forty years, but it nonetheless reminds us that resources are available in the city that can be put to use. The New Schools for New York design study was one way to test specific ideas through collective research and design experimentation. It was one way to consider how to translate ideas about social organization, education, and implementation processes into physical forms. And the broader lesson, that the convening of designers to work on spatial solutions to social challenges has a role to play in improving urban life and landscape, is one we must continue to relearn. The New Schools for New York design study provides a powerful case study of doing just that. And therefore, it still has much to teach us. -C.S

.

* The PS90 development team is: Curtis+Ginsberg Architects, L&M Development Partners Inc., Harlem Congregations for Communit Improvement Inc., Goldman Sachs Urban Investment Group, Rodkin Cardinale Engineers, GACE Consulting Engineers, Old Structures Engineer, PC, and Starr Whitehouse Landscape Architects and Planners PLLC.

Contemporary photos courtesy of L&M Development Partners. Historical diagrams from New Schools for New York, by the Architectural League of New York and the Public Education Association, published by Princeton Architecture Press, 1992.

Paul Rudolph, Isometric drawing of overall project showing the HUB including people-mover, c. 1967-1972, Color slide. Courtesy of the Paul Rudolph Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Few figures invoke the tensions of urban planning in New York City like the larger than life Robert Moses. But it is another iconic figure, Paul Rudolph, who may have the last word on the project that Moses hoped would seal his legacy — the Lower Manhattan Expressway. An important new exhibit at Cooper Union, organized by the Drawing Center, provides a much-needed reminder of Rudolph’s breadth of vision for Lower Manhattan.

In 1967, following Rudolph’s tenure as dean of the Yale School of Architecture, the Ford Foundation commissioned him to do a study of the Lower Manhattan Expressway project. The idea for an expressway connecting the Holland Tunnel with the east side of Manhattan was, of course, nothing new. City planners had conceived of such a project in the ’30s and Moses, with his broad brushstrokes across the New York City canvas, envisioned three major expressways in Manhattan: the Lower Manhattan Expressway, using Broome Street as a corridor; an elevated midtown route that would punch through skyscrapers; and a third expressway uptown coursing through Central Park. Moses attempted to break ground several times throughout the next three decades. By the 1960s, however, with a trail of condemned lots, razed blocks and miles and miles of new highways behind him, the City and Governor Rockefeller had finally grown tired of his particular brand of public works and, perhaps, his hubris. In 1961, Jane Jacobs published her famous tome about preserving the social fabric of the city, very much in reaction to Moses, and this contributed to and reflected his waning influence. In 1968, Moses was removed from his position and his LoMEX project was demapped and eventually canceled.

Into this atmosphere of Moses disfavor and a nascent, outspoken preservation movement entered the Gropius-trained, modernist Paul Rudolph. From 1967-1972, with the continuous financial backing of the Ford Foundation, Rudolph devoted himself to this study.

Paul Rudolph, Plan of overall project prior to the HUB development, 1970. Ink and graphite on mylar, 36 x 68 inches. Courtesy of the Paul Rudolph Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Rudolph was known as one of the best architectural draftsmen, and it is through his drawings that the Lower Manhattan Expressway has come to life, at first to Brett Littman, director of the Drawing Center, and then to us, in the exhibit Littman organized with Cooper Union and Ed Rawlings’ architecture office.

It is only recently that any attention was paid to Rudolph’s original drawings for the study and it is their “rediscovery” that fueled this exhibit. In 2008, after years of fermenting curiosity about the LoMEX study, Littman went to the Library of Congress to look at Rudolph’s drawings. According to Rachel Liebowitz, a curator at the Drawing Center, “It was the first time anyone had looked at the drawings and until we came, the Library of Congress hadn’t catalogued and photographed [them].” It is because of Littman’s interest, and the work on this exhibit, that the Library of Congress has now catalogued, scanned and uploaded this portion of the archive.

View looking west toward the HUB showing depressed roadway with Broome Street corridor in the background. Photo by Barb Choit / The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union.

Using 31 reproductions of drawings found in the archive, the curators, Ed Rawlings and Jim Walrod, recreated the vision of Lower Manhattan Rudolph developed over those four years. The drawings on display range from skeletal sketches that he must have used as notes to himself, to immense, colorful perspectives of the project that don’t seem to have possibly been made by a human hand. At the center of the room, anchoring the exhibit, is an amazing 33’ × 16’ model built by the curators and students from Cooper Union and based on the archive material and on some pictures of a film Rudolph made of his project (the script of the film is also on display, though no copy of the film could be found). You can spend a long time surveying that model, and, after understanding the project further by studying the drawings, you will surely return to it with renewed curiosity. If you have lived in New York for any significant amount of time, the moment you fully comprehend what it is you are looking at in the exhibit, the drawings become utterly jarring. There is one drawing, just in front of the model, that looks east across Manhattan Island with the Williamsburg Bridge in the distance. For some reason that image, possibly because it is the most contextualized, makes Rudolph’s vision seem most real.

Paul Rudolph, Perspective rendering of vertical housing elements at the approach to the Williamsburg Bridge, 1970. Brown ink on paper, 29 x 30 inches. Courtesy of the Paul Rudolph Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Rudolph’s conception of the LoMEX took some inspiration from Moses’ plan but mostly used it as a point of departure for his own vision of tomorrow. His study consisted not just of a super expressway and a massive central HUB, like Moses’ plan, oriented by traffic flowing to and from the Holland Tunnel in the west and the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges to the east. His was a completely integrated world where the flow of cars existed in tandem with life in the residential towers above. This included monorails, people movers, and a surreal vertical expanse of multilevel parking lots that are likewise integrated into the buildings, leaving space surrounding the structures. The basic unit composing this megastructure was Rudolph’s “20th century brick,” which can be added infinitely and in various ways, unifying the whole structure while also providing variety, like a large modernist Lego.

Paul Rudolph, Final rendering of the interior of the HUB including people mover, c. 1967-1972. Color slide. Courtesy of the Paul Rudolph Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Rudolph’s design differs from Moses’ in another significant way. Moses planned his expressway to career down Broome Street and, as he had made plain before, buildings and neighborhoods in his path posed no obstacle. Simply condemn and raze. Perhaps as a token gesture to Jane Jacobs and other preservationists, Rudolph’s expressway would use the back gardens between Spring and Broome as its corridor, though the scale of the project would still disrupt the street life of any neighborhood it passed through, even if one block removed. Like Moses, and many other utopian modernizers of the post War era, Rudolph designed with the automobile in mind. As the curators described the HUB in their wonderful essay, “It is automotive transit fetish at its most decadent.” The other mid-century modernizer’s imperative – slum clearing – also characterizes Rudolph’s approach and he designed his tall towers to house a mass of people and also provide each one with an outdoor terrace.

For various reasons, projects of this scale and vision, at least in New York, might be a thing of the past. Futuristic utopian solutions have fallen out of favor (indeed they had already fallen out of favor when Rudolph created this) and the public does not have the appetite to appropriate public funds for such large scale projects. Ratner’s Atlantic Yards is minuscule in comparison. However, Norman Foster, who studied with Rudolph, just recently unveiled his own megastructure in Abu Dhabi, the same week this exhibit opened. It even includes people-movers, elevated buildings and an underground world, much like the LoMEX. And as one of the curators pointed out, Mayor Bloomberg’s demapping of streets in the heart of the city is very much related to Rudolph’s vision of our world.

Several interdisciplinary projects, like MoMA’s and PS1’s Rising Currents, have recently attempted to address New York’s 21st century infrastructural needs. The time seems ripe for novel approaches to New York’s urban fabric, and this exhibit is a brilliant way to further tap into that creativity and stoke the imagination.

Paul Rudolph, Plan diagram of the HUB area showing transportation networks, 1970. Graphite and color pencil on paper with taped overlays of the same, 24 x 32 inches. Courtesy of the Paul Rudolph Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Paul Rudolph: Lower Manhattan Expressway

On view: October 1 – November 14, 2010

Yael Friedman writes about art and culture, and often about sports. She lives in Brooklyn and grew up in Tel Aviv and Rockaway (Bauhaus heaven and unapologetically homely beach town, respectively). You can check out more of her stuff at Ida Post.

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.

Sometimes taking a look at how we used to see and imagine the city is as valuable as looking ahead to its future, and we often do both. With SepiaTown, a user-generated map of wonderfully washed-out historical images from around the world, looking back in time and reflecting upon the city’s past has become much easier. Anyone who visits the site can contribute vintage photos, mapped to the places they depict, creating an expanding visual archive that includes the collections of libraries, historical societies, and mementos from your attic scrapbooks. Or you can just waste hours looking around at how your frequented spots looked over a hundred years ago.

While we’re still waiting for a historical sonic map of the world, many are looking ahead to how our cities will sound in the future. As we discussed last week, going on a slow walk through the city can make you attuned to just how noisy it really is. Enter design for a “vibrant calm,” as proposed by acoustic engineer Trevor Cox. With the possibility of very different sounding streets as internal combustion engines are phased out, Cox proposes we work out what we want to hear, rather than continue to simply abate noises. We tend to like a bustling city full of activity, so crafting our soundscapes in a similarly “vibrant” fashion — with attention to the aesthetic and affective dimensions of sound — could make for a better urban experience for all.

Studio Mumbai Architects, Mumbai, India – In-between Architecture from Victoria and Albert Museum on Vimeo.

The current spill in the Gulf of Mexico is on a scale of its own, but New York City does have its under-acknowledged comparisons. Oil and other contaminant spills in and around Newtown Creek, estimated at 17 to 30 million gallons over the past few decades, have had a subtle but major impact on the waterway and industrialized area between Brooklyn and Queens. With Superfund status for the area in sight, as reported by the New York Times, a cleanup of the area in its entirety could last for up to a decade. In the name of ongoing industrial clean-ups, yesterday Bloomberg announced the nation’s first municipal brownfield cleanup program, as part of PlaNYC. The program will enable the recovery of thousands of acres of contaminated land, coordinated for the first time by the City rather than the State Department of Conservation and the EPA.

On the brighter side of reclamation: dumpster pools! Next Saturday, as part of the third annual Summer Street initiative, you can dive into one of three long-awaited ‘deluxe’ versions of the water-filled dumpsters that premiered last summer. The portable (and clean) pools will be found on a car-free stretch from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park.

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

1985 was also the year that Chemical Bank (now a legacy institution of J.P. Morgan Chase) launched a television ad campaign that spotlighted some neighborhoods of New York. The image of the city to which these commercials pay homage is the kind of cliché that is both comforting and timeless. For this reason alone, they are worth checking out. But, they are also worth considering because they portray the relationship between banking, city and community as empathetic and mutually supportive. Viewed in 2010, this rosy view seems surprising, if not specious. We just don’t think of banks that way nowadays. The wistfulness of the Chemical Bank ads makes us wonder: in a financial landscape of securitization and globally distributed risk, is it possible or desirable for banking to have a place-based, local connection?

Each of the three videos above is an installment of the “The Chemistry’s Just Right at Chemical” 1985 television campaign, produced by Della Femina, Travisano and Partners.

Up until the end of the 19th century, all retail banks were local enterprises; most states prohibited banks from branching in an effort to maintain small banks’ competitiveness. In 1898, New York became one of the first states to allow banks to open branches. This legislative change coincided with a huge expansion of the urban population and the political consolidation of New York City as the political entity we know today. When the New York City Subway opened in 1904, the first bank to see this system as a blueprint for where to locate branches in the outer boroughs was the Corn Exchange Bank, which Chemical acquired in 1954.

The straphanger branches were just one of several instances in the history of Chemical Bank that demonstrate its ability to identify new markets and mechanisms for service delivery in a metropolitan context. In 1969, Chemical installed the first prototype cash-dispensing machine in America. And in 1983, it introduced “Pronto,” the first major full-fledged online banking service using a home computer, modem and software (1983?!). As ATMs became the norm over the course of the early 1980s, however, the relevance of bank branches was uncertain. In a letter to the Times in 1988, Fraser Seitel, a Senior Vice President at Chase, concedes “large banks, lobbying for parity with other financial competitors, have been closing neighborhood branches… [because] many customers prefer other ‘delivery systems’ – automated teller machines, the mails, telephone, credit cards.” The prospects of a face-to-face, local connection in banking were starting to dim.

Print ad for the Chemical Cash Machine. Image from "A Short History of J.P. Morgan Chase"

These commercials, launched on local TV stations in late February of 1985, capitalized on one of New York’s abiding obsessions: its neighborhoods. Each neighborhood has its own sense of place, the bank ads told us, its own chemistry. Such essences may be singular and ineffable, but these ads nonetheless suggested that knowing your community means being able to reduce it to a concise visual shorthand that intones the nostalgia of localism against a backdrop of metropolitan grandeur. Greenwich Village is a saxophonist in a jazz club. Harlem is a neighborly feast. Midwood is boys playing street hockey. The neighborhood angle fit nicely with the bank’s existing slogan, “the Chemistry’s just right at Chemical,” while signaling a shift in marketing strategy. Previous campaigns promoted bank products and services. This campaign, created by advertising agency Della Femina, Travisano & Partners, emphasized the bank’s overall brand identity as a large financial institution with deep roots in local communities.

Do locally familiar banks offer more locally relevant loans or savings advice? One of the legislative responses to the deterioration of the American city throughout the 1970s was the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), passed in 1977 to assure that “regulated financial institutions have [a] continuing and affirmative obligation to help meet the credit needs of the local communities in which they are chartered.” Intended to protect low-income neighborhood from such discriminatory practices as redlining, the CRA – and its corollaries like the Home Mortage Disclosure Act (HDMA) – ended up demonstrating to banks that communities with limited access to bank services and credit constituted a huge market. The data unleashed by the HDMA allowed regulators to ask new questions about how much banks were doing to make credit and banking services available to the underserved. Not only did they start to ask “for whom?” but also, crucially, “where?” Location, after all, matters.

Three views of the Manhattan skyline, from "The Chemistry's Just Right at Chemical" #3

Rather than protest the new CRA regulations, Chemical Bank was one of the large national banks, along with NationsBank and Bank of America, that willingly started to “set up community development divisions and pledged billions of dollars to low-income communities.” The 1985 ads were not about proving the bank’s commitment to social justice and economic opportunity for all, however. They were about celebrating its intimate familiarity with – and inextricability from – its urban landscape. In 1985, Chemical Bank had 260 branches in the greater New York area. The ads highlighted a few specific branch locations and detailed, in a voiceover equal parts affirmation and mirth, the ways those branches tailored services to meet the specific demands of their customers: a teller window dedicated to senior citizens in one branch or special programs for first time homeowners in another. Chemical Bank knows its customers and their needs, the ads told us. And it understands the way these needs are determined by geography: the senior-only window is in an Upper West Side branch; the homeownership program is in Yonkers. The needs of New Yorkers are the needs of New York’s neighborhoods.

The roots of Chemical Bank, and its branches, reach back to its Greenwich Village founding as a producer of camphor and saltpeter in 1823. Over the next 150 years, it grew to become one of the largest bank holding companies in the country. But its advertising, at least on New York area TV stations in the mid-80s, emphasized that the bank itself was a native New Yorker.

Left to right: the first three shots of "The Chemistry's Just Right at Chemical" television commercial #1

The first ad to air (#1 above) begins in black and white with a classic montage of three iconic images that establishes New York’s majesty and scale in seven seconds flat: a close-up of the Brooklyn Bridge, a medium shot of a crowd of pedestrians bustling through the financial district at Nassau Street and Maiden Lane, and a long shot of the harbor, the skyline and the Staten Island Ferry (an image sequence that refers to the opening montage of Manhatta, the first ever city-symphony film made in 1921 by Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand) The voiceover comes in over the second shot to tell us that New York has “always had a chemistry all its own.” Just as this particular idea of New York’s chemistry – massive, impressive and imposing – is planted firmly in viewers’ minds, the commercial turns to more light-hearted pop-cultural references and idiomatic quirks from the nicknames of Duke Snider and Babe Ruth to the urban alleyway games of sewer-to-sewer and Johnny-on-the-pony. What makes New York unique can be found in its languages, foods, pastimes and heroes. The Chemical ads recall these traditions to imply that this bank, too, has long contributed to New York’s essential character.

Left to right: depictions of Chemical branches in Flushing, Grand Central Terminal and Huntington, L.I.

The second and third commercials move away from New York’s history to focus more specifically on how Chemical sees the metropolitan area of New York as a collection of small towns, where branch managers make it their business to understand and tailor services to the unique demands of each community.

Taken together, the ads seem to suggest not only that the bank branch is a neighborhood institution, whose staff is as familiar as the chemist and the barber and the soda jerk, but also that the bank branch is uniquely situated to understand the importance of relationships at scales both local and urban: the stickball game and the stately skyline.

If the ads were arguing that an intimate knowledge of both scales is what informs Chemical Bank’s particular brand of face-to-face relationships and geographically specific convenience, then these days, our notions of both relationship and convenience – networked, distributed and on-demand – are strikingly different. When was the last time you thought of your bank branch as a neighborhood institution? When was the last time the notion of banks inspired nostalgia on par with lime rickies or Mickey Mantle?

These days, the thought of finance in the big city is more likely to provoke questions about the bailout or calls for regulatory reform than to make you imagine a summertime afternoon in your grandfather’s youth. American political discourse on both the left and the right has often pitted the interests of global finance (symbolized by Wall Street) against those of small town, working America (symbolized by Main Street). To relate the banking industry to the small town flavor and values still present within the big city requires an increasingly large mental leap. And, rightly or wrongly, the sight of non-bank financial service providers, like check cashing places and payday lenders, evokes far more about the specific economic circumstances of a given neighborhood than an FDIC-insured bank branch does.

Left to right: depictions of Freeport, L.I., Midwood and the Upper East Side

Whether or not banks take the pulse of the communities in which they are located, whether or not they are a part of their community’s chemistry, they are an undeniable part of our urban landscape. Increasingly, the effect banks have on the built environment of New York is  homogenizing, especially in terms of the sheer amount of street level real estate banks take up in Manhattan. In April of 2007, Amy Cortese reported on a “building binge” for bank branches in urban areas across the country. Earlier this year, Diana Lind of The Next American City found that bank branches and ATM kiosks command more street-level retail in Manhattan than Starbucks, Duane Reade, Subway, Dunkin Donuts, McDonalds and Rite Aid combined. And whereas in 1985 the FDIC insured 14,417 banking institutions nationwide, which were responsible for a combined total of 43,739 branches, by 2008 (the most recent year for which statistics are available, before the collapse of Wachovia, Washington Mutual, Commerce and others), the country had half as many banks and nearly twice as many branches: 7,086 banks and 82,547 branches.

This week the banking committee of the United States Senate will present its bill for an overhaul of the industry that will introduce a new consumer protection agency and give Washington, and the Federal Reserve specifically, sweeping new powers over large bank holding companies. Will banks’ reaction to this increased centralized oversight reintroduce them to the lure of the local? Or will demographically and geographically specific financial products – like mortgages – continue to be more about inflated promises of alchemy rather than a nuanced understanding of a neighborhood’s chemistry? It seems long ago and far away that a bank could plausibly try to sell itself on its close connection to a specific place.

Further reading:

- A Short History of J.P. Morgan Chase (click here to download pdf).

- “To Save America’s Finances, Bring Back Community Banking” by Phillip Longman and Ellen Seidman. November 20, 2008

- Testimony of Ellen Seidman before the Committee on Financial Services, Unites States House of Representatives. February 13th, 2008

New York Times Headline. March 13th, 1888.

122 years ago today, on March 11th 1888, it started snowing. When the snows finally came to a stop three days later, over forty inches were reported in New York and New Jersey and some snowdrifts grew as high as 50 feet. All major cities between Washington and Montreal were completely isolated from each other. The damage was so severe – collapsing wires caused fires, melting snow caused floods, at least 400 people lost their lives – that as soon as New Yorkers dug themselves out of what came to be called “The Great White Hurricane” they went about ensuring that no future weather event would cause as much injury, death or destruction to property and livelihoods. One of this legislative regime’s longest-lasting legacies is its effect on mass transit.

The Great White Hurricane of 1888. The New York Historical Society

Among the laws enacted that year, one prohibited catenary in Manhattan, meaning no more overhead lines were permitted to transmit electricity to trams, trolleys and buses. Some argue that the storm is what pushed Northeastern cities to finally move ahead with plans to start building public transit underground (Boston’s subway, the first in the nation, opened nine years after the storm). That law is still in effect, which still hampers the City’s ability to install light rail or certain kinds of electrical bus systems.

Over the past few months, the City has been looking at a number of different options – including light rail and streetcars – for improving mass transit service in Midtown Manhattan. And in last week’s roundup, we relayed the news that the DOT plan for Midtown includes dedicating a bus lane, or transitway, along 34th Street river to river. By invoking the precedents of Curitiba and Bogotá, we implied that this move signifies Manhattan’s first foray into the world of Bus Rapid Transit, or BRT. Yonah Freemark at The Transport Politic has a comprehensive analysis of why, for better or worse, BRT is not the most accurate way to characterize the transitway, and he also makes reference to the 1888 law about overhead wiring. To be sure, the plan will speed up the journey considerably. But the project says more about the priority DOT places on improving pedestrian experience of the street than it does about the DOTs willingness to experiment with more efficient modes of transit. “Despite the fact that the DOT has been on an all-out crusade to improve bus service, has no money for more subways, and has demonstrated little interest in light rail or streetcars, it evaluated all four in its recent study for the 34th Street corridor.” Its recommendation to create a dedicated bus lane, which is cheaper than the alternatives (“between $30 and 125 million, versus $250 million and up for light rail or several billion for a full-scale subway line”), is not about making bus service rapid. “With 13 stations end to end — roughly every 800 feet — buses will average a miserable six miles per hour, hardly faster than a person can walk the route.” It’s about improving “the streetscape for pedestrians, who until recently have been put in last place by New York City decision-making.”

Earlier this week, the Omnibus continued its look at how standards and codes, inflexible by nature – such as the code prohibiting living units in cellars – may be developed in the public interest but are often enforced at the public’s expense. In other words, if we don’t continuously evaluate how technological, cultural and demographic shifts change the way people live, urban development will continue to outpace governance. I’m not saying we should insist on a return of overhead wires. But we should certainly arm ourselves, as concerned urban citizens, with the knowledge of where the laws that limit urban innovation originate.

Map of proposed bus transit along 34th Street, from New York City DOT.