The Andrew Freedman Home at 1125 Grand Concourse | Photo by Kathy Zeiger for No Longer Empty

A large, imposing and seemingly abandoned mansion occupies an entire block on the Grand Concourse between 166th and McClellan Streets in the Bronx. The building — a neo-Renaissance, limestone palazzo behind a black iron fence and a large, tree-shaded lawn — stands apart from the neighboring apartment buildings and the stately street wall of the boulevard. Across from the Bronx Museum and just a few blocks north of Yankee Stadium, the Andrew Freedman Home looks, at first glance, like an uninhabited relic forgotten during the decades of the Grand Concourse’s decline from grandeur. But closer inspection reveals a range of community-oriented activities that will be amplified this spring, when No Longer Empty, a young and nomadic cultural institution dedicated to bringing contemporary art to underutilized spaces throughout New York City, invites the public inside to experience a contemporary art exhibition of 30 new works that weave evocations of the building’s unique history into interpretations of contemporary realities in the Bronx.

Andrew Freedman, a self-made millionaire financier who died in 1915, left much of his fortune to build the place as a retirement home for formerly wealthy people who had lost their fortunes, so that these newly indigent could spend their final years in the manner to which they were accustomed: dinners served in banquet halls by servants with white gloves, readings in a wood-paneled library, entertainment in the billiard, card or ball rooms. The Home operated on this vision from 1924 until the 1970s, when mounting operational costs and a dwindling endowment forced it to charge for accommodations. In 1984, the facility was purchased by the Mid-Bronx Senior Citizens Council (MBSCC), a non-profit formed by local residents in 1973 to provide direct services to the elderly and disabled that has since grown into a property developer of low- and moderate-income housing with a portfolio of 28 buildings throughout the Bronx and a suite of programs in economic development and children and family services. MBSCC attempted to re-start the retirement home under a more inclusive model in 1985, but the endeavor eventually proved unsustainable, and activity was restricted to the refurbished lower ground floor, where a Head Start program, a day care center and a job resource center operate at a remove from the vestiges of both luxury and penury upstairs. The function rooms on the main floor are recently refurbished. The bedrooms on the higher floors have been abandoned for almost 25 years, and amid the chipping paint and splintering furniture are the personal effects of former residents, from postcards to upright pianos, and the professional equipment of a nursing home, from medical cabinets to beehive hairdryers. It’s not hard to imagine how the combination of grand spaces and ghostly absences could inspire visual artists. And Manon Slome and Naomi Hersson-Ringskog, the founder / president and executive director of No Longer Empty respectively, have been hard at work since last September making that happen.

No Longer Empty’s mission, as Slome and Hersson-Ringskog explain in the interview below, is to use the presentation of contemporary art as a mechanism for community revitalization — through partnership with local institutions, increased activity and awareness from non-local visitors, and innovative live programming that engages both. This process corresponds well to MBSCC’s current plans for the site. According to Walter Puryear, who manages much of MBSCC’s real estate and is responsible for the development of several ambitious new programs, in order for the organization to realize its mission of comprehensive community development, the long-term employability of local residents is an urgent priority. The vision for the Andrew Freedman Home includes an array of ambitious workforce development initiatives, including training programs for culinary and hospitality services (in coordination with the opening of a bed and breakfast currently under construction in one wing of the building), a small business incubator, a media center and a green technology training institute. In the meantime, make plans to visit the building in its current state this April, when No Longer Empty’s new exhibition, This Side of Paradise, opens to the public.

- C.S.

The Library at the Andrew Freedman Home

Tell me about No Longer Empty. How did the organization come to be?
Manon Slome: As a curator, my interest has long been the intersection of art and social issues. I founded No Longer Empty in April 2009 and since then we’ve organized 12 exhibitions throughout the boroughs. Before that, I worked at the Guggenheim and at the Chelsea Art Museum, where I was chief curator. But when I started I wasn’t out to set up an organization, I was just thinking about an exhibition and a site for it. It was around the time of Lehman’s collapse and the broader economic crisis, and I was walking down Madison Avenue noticing how many storefronts were empty and how even the active businesses were empty of customers. I began to conceive of an exhibition called Empty, and when I thought about where to do it, an empty storefront seemed like a great space.

A friend offered us a storefront adjacent to the Chelsea Hotel, a former fishing tackle store. We put on a show of ten artists’ work in a very short amount of time, and given the store’s history and the fishing-related artifacts that were left in the space, we worked around a maritime theme. For example, the artist Michael Bevilacqua’s piece referenced the drowning of the economy in nautical terms. We found the notion of responding to the site to be very evocative.

Installation view of "No Longer Empty in Chelsea Hotel," June - July 2009 | Photo by Kathy Zeiger for No Longer Empty

What was most interesting to me was the reaction of people wandering down 23rd Street who popped their heads in and asked questions. We found that people who might not normally go to a gallery or a museum were comfortable coming to see this, and were interested in the work and in engaging in conversation about it. As a curator, there’s very little interaction with visitors built into the traditional processes of an art exhibition. For me, being present and available for conversation with visitors was very interesting.

After that, we were offered a second space in the Meatpacking District. It was a brand new condominium building with a vacant retail space. So, contrary to the fishing tackle store with its rich history, here was a site with no history. So we decided to reference the idea of a community in transition. We called the exhibition Reflecting Transformation and a lot of the works explored the notion of a neighborhood turning over and what that meant.

At that exhibition, we had our first panel discussion with thought leaders in public art, to probe the nature of what we were doing. The notion of a storefront as a semi-private, semi-public space was interesting to us; and orienting the exhibitions towards a wide public was very important for us. This launched our programming, which has since expanded to include children’s programming, artist-led workshops, roundtable discussions with the artists, and more. The programming and the community engagement became as important to us as the exhibitions.

Naomi Hersson-Ringskog: The art can have multiple purposes, and every time we go into a new neighborhood, we are actively figuring out how art is going to be used differently in a new context.

Slome: For example, when we held a show in the former Tower Records Store on Broadway and 4th Street, visitors’ nostalgia for the record store where they hung out in college informed their experience of an exhibition curated around themes of music and the changing nature of music distribution.

Hersson-Ringskog: Or when we did a show on Governors Island, at which a lot of visitors remarked on the magic of being brought into a house that was otherwise vacant to see art that referenced the history, the past, the people that lived there, or what the island might be without human inhabitants.

"The Island of Dr Mastrovito" by Andrea Mastrovito at "The Sixth Borough," Governors Island, June - October 2010 | Photo by Kathy Zeiger for No Longer Empty

How does your community research process typically work?
Slome: I come from an arts background and Naomi comes from an urban planning background, so our working together is a fabulous marriage of disciplines for community-based work.

When we go into a neighborhood, the first thing we do is get to know the organizations with deep roots in the community and partner with them to provide programming, to bring new people and new ideas to the community. And often community organizations are strapped financially, so our collaborative process is quite valued.

Take the Andrew Freedman Home as an example, which has a very particular history. All of that influences our ideas of what we might do here. First, you can’t ignore the history. But you also don’t want simply to mirror that history. This enormous abandoned building is a white elephant as it is on the Grand Concourse, so you don’t want merely to accentuate that. Rather, we want the exhibition to merge the history of the Andrew Freedman Home with the current day realities of the Bronx.

A third floor bedroom at the Andrew Freedman Home

Any representations of the Bronx have to contend with the borough’s history of disinvestment and poverty and also the feeling that everything that’s not wanted in Manhattan is pushed onto the Bronx. This led to a good discussion about the title. Poor, in Style was our working title, but then we moved onto This Side of Paradise with all of its associations with F. Scott Fitzgerald, with 1920s ideas of class and the class loyalty that Andrew Freedman embodied, and with the ambiguous, ironic notion that we assume Manhattan is the paradise and the Bronx is something else, so let’s see how we can shift that.

We did a lot of research into the art that’s produced here. We didn’t want to create a show of exclusively Bronx-based artists; we didn’t want to make another kind of ghetto. But we learned about some phenomenal local work. And we learned about some fabulous organizations working in choreography and music. Obviously, the legacy of the Bronx as the birthplace of hip-hop is incredibly important. All that will be reflected in the exhibition.

One of the things we’ve found in the Bronx is that it is a very fragmented borough. It is easier to get from here to Manhattan than it is to get to parts of the South Bronx. So it became very apparent that if we wanted people outside of the immediate vicinity to know about the show, we should partner with cultural organizations in other Bronx neighborhoods and work on transportation and cross-promotion. We’re going to be meeting with the Bronx Tourism Council to think about how we can realistically shuttle people around to various locations.

Beehive hair dryers on the fourth floor of the Andrew Freedman Home

Hersson-Ringskog: We’re exploring whether it’s possible to establish a pilot program that addresses the mobility issues here, like a bike-sharing program. Being able to move between different cultural organizations is an important aspect of having a vibrant arts scene.

An alliance is being formed called the Bronx Cultural Alliance, which will create a structure for collaborations between organizations like Wave Hill in Riverdale, the Point in the South Bronx, Lehman College in Bedford Park, Hostos College in the South Bronx, and others. The point is to create a tighter-knit cultural landscape in the borough.

Tell me about your curatorial process?
Slome: Most works we present, about 70%, are commissioned. The basis of our curatorial work is site-responsive or site-specific. In most cases, we already have interest in the artist to begin with: I’ve done a studio visit; I know the work. And because the sites we go into are non-traditional sites, there’s often phenomenal opportunities for the artists to create outside the box.

Community revitalization is also a part of your mission, how does that factor into your process?
Hersson-Ringskog: We take a potential liability to a neighborhood corridor – an empty building or inactive business can bring down a neighborhood’s quality of life by reducing foot traffic – and activate it with artwork, and with live programs that engage the community: panel discussions, children’s workshops, music or dance performances. In this way, we are advocating for interim use, for a more nimble, flexible and creative city. In addition to curating and producing the exhibition, we also research what’s unique about the area and create cultural maps that indicate to exhibition visitors all of the other cultural opportunities available in the vicinity – from parks to other art organizations to stores or restaurants.

A second floor corridor at the Andrew Freedman Home

Slome: We encourage our audience to discover the area. So we might arrange some sort of discount to a local restaurant for exhibition visitors, or try other kinds of things to keep foot traffic up and to keep people patronizing local businesses.

Hersson-Ringskog: And we track these effects through head counts, through measuring increased foot traffic and evaluating collaborations. Our research and analysis allows us a distinct and deep understanding of the site, the building details, and the area where it’s located. And we are able to relay some of that understanding back to the property owners. Further down the road, it would be interesting for No Longer Empty to have an arm that could advise on community conscious retailing or to provide other insights into community revitalization that emerge from our process.

In terms of the legacy of the projects we work on, the Bronx Cultural Alliance is a fantastic initiative that will continue forward. Art in Empty Spaces is another legacy project, where we work with Manhattan’s Community Board 3 to take No Longer Empty’s model and scale it up.

Postcards on a bedroom wall at the Andrew Freedman Home

Slome: The community board learned that storeowners and residents weren’t happy about the vacancy rates in the area. So they asked us to match arts groups up with these empty spaces and then to create a program that would get visitors to visit them. An organization we’ve talked to here in the Bronx is WHEDco, the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation, which is working on a new site on Southern Boulevard. WHEDco surveyed how many local dollars are going out of the community because of the lack of stores and services. They’ve asked for our advice on how to activate the storefronts under an elevated rail-line, to get the community to recognize the stores’ existence in order to increase foot traffic and eventually attract the kind of retail they need. If you can draw foot traffic for an exhibition, you can demonstrate the demand for the right kind of retail.

If you produce quality programming, people will come. I’m always very concerned with issue of legacy.

Hersson-Ringskog: And after we conjure up an exhibition and programming, in the long term we are also giving people an opportunity to dream. People come into an exhibition and see a space transformed. I think that’s where, perhaps, crowdsourcing could come in: we could create opportunities for visitors to share their vision for the site or the area.

We are a young organization with a clear mission of knitting a vibrant cultural landscape through art and interim use. We know how to take over empty spaces and turn them into professionally curated art exhibits with programming, but in terms of creating and supporting a cultural landscape that’s sustainable, we’re working towards that, testing and learning different tactics along the way.

An abandoned Christmas tree at the Andrew Freedman Home

Manon Slome (PhD), President and Founder of No Longer Empty, is an independent curator working in New York City. From 2002 to June 2008 she was the Chief Curator of the Chelsea Art Museum in New York. During that time, she curated and oversaw a program of some forty exhibitions, symposia and museum publications as well as monographs and scholarly essays. Ms. Slome became highly involved with the Israeli art scene during her research for the exhibition, Such Stuff as Dreams are Made on, (2005) and has followed and researched the Israeli scene for the last three years. Prior to the CAM, Ms. Slome worked as a curator at the Guggenheim Museum for seven years and was a holder of a Helena Rubinstein curatorial fellowship at the Whitney Independent Study program.

Naomi Hersson-Ringskog, Executive Director of No Longer Empty, has spearheaded community and real estate outreach strategies for No Longer Empty in order to study and measure the effects of art as a tool for re-activating corridors and making a local economic impact. She is a graduate of Columbia University’s Masters Program in Urban Planning where she studied urban green sustainability, specifically green roofs. She is also recipient of the William Kinne Fellowship Award. Naomi has also worked for an information architecture firm in Washington DC. Currently serves on the Executive Board of the Columbia University’s Alumni Association.

-C.S.

A selection of videos from blocks in Manhattan

What is MyBlockNYC?
Alex Kalman: MyBlockNYC is a site that allows users to share videos on a map. It’s an interesting balance between a video sharing website and a new kind of map, and we are still asking ourselves which one is primary. You can explore the videos geographically — through a video’s location on a map of New York City — or thematically — through basic thematic categories like food, or sports, or transportation, or crime.

It started with a very simple idea: we found ourselves excited by the constant capturing and sharing of little moments in people’s daily lives. Yet the platforms for hosting, sharing, organizing and presenting these videos are limited: they don’t put the individual videos together in a way that says something larger or builds them into a cohesive language. The impulse to use MyBlock isn’t just “Oh, I heard about this video; let me find it and watch it.” The impulse is “I’m interested in this idea or this part of town; let me explore that.” The idea of exploration is very important to us.

Alex Rickard: On most video sharing websites, if you want “A,” you type “A,” and you get “A.” There is no sense of exploration beyond “A.” Those sites are big buckets into which everyone can pour material and then dig through to find videos to watch.

Kalman: With MyBlock, we wanted to do something more meaningful with user-generated videos. We had the idea that the moments people document on video and share are the building blocks, in a way, of a new city, one that can be explored by anyone in the world.

Users can start to take trips through areas based on their interests. And they can also define their own landscape, they can build their own city that’s an amalgamation of so many different personal visions and interpretations – as opposed to the singular perspective of a Hollywood film about a city. Taken together, these multiple moments create the whole picture of a community.

The various ways to search MyBlock content include thematic categories such as food, sports, crime, community, news, work, landscape, landmarks and music. Additionally, users can search based on the age and sex of the filmmaker, whether he or she is a local or a tourist, and other identifying characteristics. MyBlock is currently developing finer grained categories of searchability.

So, it differs from a narrative film about a city and it differs from the current crop of video-sharing websites. How does it differ from other mapping platforms or sites?
Rickard: Some people have compared MyBlock to Google Maps. We love Google Maps; we love Street View; these are incredibly powerful tools. One way to characterize the difference is that with Street View, you can see the cars parked on a particular street or the fronts of buildings; you find the closest subway station or which side of the street a restaurant is on. But does it give you a sense of the life or cultures or communities in that neighborhood? On MyBlock, you can go behind the visible surface to get an idea of the life of a certain block: what it sounds like, what people look like, what kind of action is going on. We’d like to add an experiential and explorative dimension to mapping that hasn’t existed before.

A selection of videos from the Morris Park neighborhood of the Bronx

It also seems to have an archival sensibility. What makes it distinct from other databases or archives of urban images and storytelling?
Rickard: We want the site to become a living archive of the city, documenting neighborhood change over time. I think that is going to be an immense resource for future historians and for people curious about how places change.

Kalman: I’m not sure I’ve come across databases of information that are as visually seductive as MyBlock. The stories contained within it will certainly be of value to, say, a sociologist gathering information, but its value also comes from being fun, engaging entertainment. It’s great for kids; it’s great if you’re bored; and it’s great as a source of a certain kind of data about how we live now. For me, it’s important to mix the high and low. That’s why the fact that MyBlock was included in Talk To Me at the Museum of Modern Art was so exciting for us. For an institution of high art to be displaying videos made by high school students in the Bronx demonstrates the way an interface such as this can create opportunities for distinct communities to intermingle in ways they otherwise might not.

Click image to play video

Tell me about your partnerships with the schools.
Kalman: As we were developing the concept for MyBlock, we started thinking about the teenage journey through New York City and the richness of that experience. We felt it was very important to include teenage voices. And we also felt that in this age of the prevalence of video technology, it was important for teenagers to understand the potentially powerful uses of creating their own media.

So we thought to ourselves, how wonderful would it be if making a MyBlock video – a mini-documentary about your block – were a homework assignment for students? It would be an opportunity for high school students to represent their own identity as part of the community. And so we approached the Department of Education, which advised that we create some relationships with schools and test out our crazy idea. So we did that, and based on what we learned we created a curriculum and lesson plan. The program is designed to be flexible enough to accommodate any school’s preferences or limitations. If they don’t have cameras, we loan them cameras. If they don’t want to spend a whole semester on it, there’s an abbreviated version that takes a couple of weeks. If they don’t have any money, that’s okay because the program is free.

Image excerpted from "The Field Guide to Street Filmmaking" produced by MyBlockNYC for New York City public high schools | Illustration: Victor Kerlow

Rickard: As of now, we’re working strictly with public schools. Most of the students have never picked up a video camera before. One teacher expressed to us that after seeing her students’ videos, she had a far better grasp of what they go through every day.

Give me some examples of students and the kinds of videos they made.
Rickard: One powerful example is Jamal’s video. He was one of the high school students in our pilot program who has since become one of our interns. He made a really strong video about a murder that took place in his building. It documents the crime scene, the community’s response, and provides this incredible firsthand access and a deeper level of awareness about our city and its inhabitants’ daily experiences.

Click image to play video

The curriculum you developed invokes the “civic possibilities of video.” What does “civic video” mean to you?
Rickard: Maybe this is overly romantic, but I think of uploading a video to MyBlock as means of participating in the defining and redefining of our city. It’s almost like a way of voting, of taking responsibility for a full and true representation of who is in our city, what our city is like, what we like and don’t like about the way our city is.

I also think that humanizing issues — including personal perspectives on urban challenges like crime — can be a very effective way of addressing problems. Video is a tool that can bear witness to social conditions in powerful ways. When harnessed properly, it can be very powerful.

Why else do you think making videos is an important skill for young people to learn?
Kalman: Video can travel all around the world within a matter of moments, and the language of moving images is universal. And many, many people have this tool in their pockets that can create video, that can create hard proof of what happened in a given situation – like the documentation of police tactics with Occupy Wall Street, for example.

Rickard: And beyond bearing witness, there’s video’s potential for citizen journalism. I think the key thing about video is its accessibility – both for creators and consumers. Everyone with a cell phone has the capacity to document his or her life, so let’s give each of them the tools to craft that documentation into whatever it wants to be, whether that’s advocacy-based citizen journalism or a memento of a first date.

MyBlock’s inclusion in Talk to Me seems to put it in a group of technological innovations that foster the communication between people and objects. What does that mean to you?
Kalman: A lot of the objects in Talk To Me had a very specific application, like here’s a pair of shoes that make you seem taller or here’s a pill that makes your poop different colors in order to diagnose you with various diseases. But MyBlock differs from those projects in that it doesn’t really have a precise and singular goal in mind; it’s very open-ended.

Rickard: MyBlock is about the city speaking for itself, citizens speaking for the city. Talk To Me took all that communication and re-inscribed it within the museum. The installation was a large touch screen monitor that was positioned like a drafting board. Museum visitors could physically play and drag around the map of New York, then zoom into a particular block and have it come to life within the walls of the museum.

Kalman: And I liked the ways in which MyBlock knocked down those walls, in a sense. In the context of Talk To Me, MoMA wasn’t just a temple of high design and art for the presentation of artefacts selected by curators. And it wasn’t like a spotlight on this precious design object. Any moment, uploaded by anyone, anywhere in New York City could be found within the museum’s walls. In a way, we flooded the museum with New York City.

Click image to play video. For this video, a MyBlock user visiting from Singapore recorded himself in Times Square proposing to his girlfriend via a series of iPad notes. He then brought her to the Talk To Me exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and watched as she selected the video and experienced the proposal on the MyBlock kiosk in the gallery. When the MyBlockNYC team learned of this plan, they made sure to document the unfolding of events themselves; watch their video here.

When and why did the emphasis on the block as the organizational framework for these place-based videos emerge?
Kalman: When we started to narrow down our vision, we started to ask ourselves,  “what is the tangible unit of New York City?” An entire world exists on a block of New York.

Rickard: I think the idea was to work with the preexisting organization of the city and not try to pin drop or abstract it, but to facilitate the predefined associations.

Kalman: Exactly. Integration into the city’s landscape as it is experienced was important for us. Most map services use the concept of the pin drop to denote location, but the pin drop is not a tangible aspect of urban experience, it has no preexisting relationship to the architecture or layout of the city.

What do you think the users of MyBlock can learn about New York City from exploring the content on the site?
Kalman: It’s less about the facts and more about the nuances of place. One example is a Japanese woman who had previously lived in New York and missed it terribly when she returned to Japan. Someone shared the site with her, and she let us know that she started crying when she was checking out the site. Finally, she said, there was a way to reconnect emotionally with a place she loves.

Rickard: New York is such a diverse place. When you see a video somewhere else on the internet, even if it is labeled as taking place in New York, there is no immediate way to juxtapose it to another view of the same place or some other geographic relationship. But with MyBlock, users can look at one block and see the interplay of all these different worlds within finite locations.

Kalman: And (as long as its not pornographic or inappropriate) it isn’t controlled or dictated by any editorial voice.

Do you think this way of engaging with images and stories of New York challenges some of our assumptions our iconic city and the ways we are used to imagining it?
Kalman: I think so far what’s it’s doing is re-affirming the common notion of New York as having this raw energy, this amazing mix of unique strong characters that makes itself known to you as you walk the city’s streets.

Rickard: I think that we also get really excited with the idea that politicians and policymakers could use this website to get a better sense of what is going on in the city. The statistics and data points that generally guide daily decision-making at City Hall are limited by their lack of faces or tangible personal experiences. Another way it could be used is simply to get a better sense of a neighborhood, whether you’ve lived there your whole life or you’re a visitor preparing to do an apartment swap.

Where is the project going next?
Kalman: We’re trying to figure out how to take this simple idea and start to focus on what our users want, as well as how this can be actually used beyond entertainment and exploration. So the next steps are to develop ways to help people use the site to improve their understanding of some aspect of New York, lo learn what the city’s like from a first-hand perspective.

Rickard: It’s at the proof of concept stage right now: we needed to design it, get it out there and see how people use it. Now, we are really excited to optimize what we have launched. I think once we figure how it can work best for New York City, we are excited to bring it to other cities, both in this country and around the world. We want to continue to mature our search engine and how people filter through this content, and to find more practical uses for the site. I think that right now it’s fun, it’s entertaining, it’s leisurely, it’s art. But the next step is to get some practicality out of it for our users without weakening our commitment to art, self-expression and exploration.

Alex Kalman, co-founder of MyBlockNYC, is a first-generation American. The son of a graphic designer and magazine editor from Hungary and a writer and illustrator from Israel, Alex grew up walking the streets of New York with his eye on the vernacular. Alex is a founding member of renowned New York City production company, Red Bucket Films, whose features, shorts, docs, and commercial works show in theaters, festivals, galleries, and publications around the world. Alex currently lives in New York City.

Orchard Beach (pavilion at left) | photo: emixpix.com

Deborah Wye is a seasoned curator of visual art, with over 30 years experience at the Museum of Modern Art, where she was most recently the senior curator of prints and illustrated books until her retirement late last year. Since then, she’s taken on a different kind of research project, one that marries her curatorial expertise with the passionate curiosity of a true urban enthusiast: the fascinating history and uncertain future of the Orchard Beach Pavilion at Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx. For Wye, a keen interest in the pavilion itself — the Depression-era politics of its development, the social story of its decades of public use, the architectural choices for the building itself — transformed into a desire to advocate on behalf of its preservation, so that “layers of history [can] be visible for the collective memories of New Yorkers.” To that end, she has curated an exhibition that is currently on view at the City Island Nautical Museum and has been presenting a related lecture about the building at interested forums throughout the city. She’ll be reprising this presentation for the Department of Bridges and Tunnels in December, the East Bronx History Forum in January, at the Bartow-Pell Mansion and the Bronx County Historical Society in the spring. In May of next year, she’ll present at the Bronx Central Library, where an abbreviated version of the exhibition will be on display. 

For a deteriorating building whose history is most often overlooked, an advocate like Wye offers a fortuitous opportunity for a grass-roots approach to historic preservation to benefit from a professional command of art history and a passerby’s amazement at New York’s architectural treasures, some of which truly take us by surprise and capture our imagination. So we asked Wye to tell the story of how she discovered this building, how she went about researching it, and what her personal hopes are for its future. 

- C.S.

The Orchard Beach Pavilion in 1937 | Photo courtesy of the New York City Parks Photo Archive, all rights reserved

A fenced-off landmark is languishing in the Northeast Bronx.

I can’t remember when the grand Orchard Beach Pavilion first grabbed my attention. It is a massive gray structure, hard to ignore, but it had an abandoned air about it — sitting there in the background of the beach experience, with no one seeming to notice it, even at the height of the season. But I began to look more closely, and as I started to notice its classical and Moderne details, I became curious about its function and its deteriorating condition. The Pavilion once served as the entry portal for changing rooms and lockers occupying areas behind each curving wing. And there were lots of shops and dining possibilities, for a quick snack or for lunch in a more formal setting with tablecloths. There was once a staffed medical station, and a police outpost that still functions today, as do Parks Department offices. But I believe that the way the Pavilion’s form responds to the curving beach was also meant to serve a dramatic, theatrical function, the focal point of a bold and ambitious public project.

When I discovered this monumental structure, it was a mess, and after a few years went by, even the concessions were closed up. Protective fencing was added to keep people away at a certain distance. Scaffolding appeared. I wondered if that was a good sign — that maybe some improvement was in store.

Although I live in Manhattan, I found out about this building when my husband and I bought a weekend house on City Island, which, to us native Bostonians, was like a funky Cape Cod. I began biking a lot and discovered nearby Orchard Beach — truly a wonder. It was off-season, before the Beach was teeming with people, some 1.4 million each year. I couldn’t believe the views I saw as I rode along the stone boardwalk that hugs the crescent-shaped shoreline. Somehow I knew — I can’t remember how — that Robert Moses was responsible for “inventing” this beach. Of course I had heard of Moses, having lived in New York briefly in the 1960s and then moving here permanently in 1979, but I wasn’t very knowledgeable about him. I only knew he was supposed to be bad. But with my good luck at finding Orchard Beach, as I looked out at the water, I could only say “thank you” to the much-maligned master builder.

Photo by Aurelija Cepulinskaite-Jara, for the 2010 Architectural League exhibition The City We Imagined/The City We Made

Once I retired from my position as Chief Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books at The Museum of Modern Art, in the fall of 2010, and finally had some free time, the first book I read was The Power Broker by Robert Caro, that riveting story of Robert Moses. But I also learned of a newer book, Robert Moses and the Modern City, from 2007, by Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, that offers a different perspective on Moses and acknowledged a range of accomplishments. Most helpful for me was the catalogue of projects from the 1930s (the period of the so-called “good Moses”), each described in great detail, including Orchard Beach.

I began taking courses on the history of New York City and its architecture, taking walking tours and joining all sorts of organizations in the “preservation community.” I was thrilled with the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s 2006 designation report on the Orchard Beach Pavilion, recognizing the beach project as “among the most remarkable public recreational facilities ever constructed in the United States.” I was inspired. I dove in and began studying the building in earnest, not only its architecture but its place in New York history. Moses became even clearer in my mind, and I also found out a lot about the remarkable Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, and the impact of the Moses-LaGuardia team through FDR’s New Deal programs of the Great Depression.

Robert Moses and Fiorello Laguardia | photo via swimminginthecity.com

The style of the WPA-funded Orchard Beach Pavilion, with its imposing but sleek monumentality, is sometimes referred to as “Federal Moderne” and it shares characteristics with many public buildings built through the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. I realized by now that I was tackling my subject as if I were doing curatorial research for the kinds of exhibitions I have curated at MoMA. But this time, I had no real goal yet. I was just learning and amassing material. It was such a great subject!

From left: Pavilion Entry Balcony; Pavilion Collonade; and Pavilion Colonnade with Greek fret trim | Photos: Carl Foster, New York Landmarks and Preservation Commission, 2006

The project took me to places and parts of New York City I had never explored. My subway map was worn out and taped together. In the Bronx, I visited Marianne Anderson, the administrator for Pelham Bay Park, the park in which Orchard Beach is the star attraction. She very nicely gave me a tour of all the closed-off parts of the Pavilion, which are alarming in some cases. And I met Librarian Laura Tosi at the Bronx County Historical Society, in a neighborhood where I also saw the historic 1758 Valentine-Varian House and the Williamsbridge Oval Park, another Moses project of the 1930s. I walked the extraordinary Grand Concourse to learn more about Art Deco, since the Pavilion is often cited for its Deco details. I joined the Friends of Pelham Bay Park, an advocacy group, in hopes of finding others who might share my passion for the Pavilion, and then began to attend meetings of the East Bronx History Forum. But my research also brought me beyond the Bronx, to the Parks Department’s Olmsted Center in Queens, where a bonus was the nearby Queens Museum of Art (originally the New York City Building for the 1939 World’s Fair) by the architect Aymar Embury II, who is also credited with the design of the Orchard Beach Pavilion.

Other examples of Aymar Embury's civic architecture in New York. From left: the New York City Building at the 1932 Worlds' Fair (now the site of the Queens Museum of Art) photo courtesy of the New York City Parks Photo Archive; the Prospect Park Zoo, photo: Deborah Wye; the pavilion at Jacob Riis Park, photo: Deborah Wye

There was more research and more travel — to the lovely Prospect Park Zoo, where the exterior is much the same as when Embury designed it in 1935 (which isn’t the case for Central Park’s Zoo, also designed by him at about the same time but now drastically altered). I made my way to Jacob Riis Park, where Moses and Embury worked together, and the buildings share the sleek classicizing aesthetic of the Orchard Beach Pavilion, something both men favored. In fact, Moses believed that structures for the public should be traditional rather than avant-garde in style. And he found the perfect collaborator in the rather conservative Embury, who served as the Parks Department Consulting Architect for hundreds of projects. Embury was also an architectural historian, a Princeton graduate, and an accomplished and well-educated man generally, exactly the kind of Ivy-Leaguer that Moses, a Yalie himself, always preferred for his top team.

I also discovered the places where New York history professionals and amateur “buffs” like myself spend lots of time, from the Municipal Archives to the Milstein Division of the New York Public Library. Photo archives were another story. One stand-out was the immense collection of 1930s photographs of New York City taken by Berenice Abbott for a WPA project and available on the Museum of the City of New York’s website. While Moses made sure Orchard Beach was carefully documented in photographs for the Parks Department, some great images were also taken at the time by the firm of Gottscho-Schleisner.

So, what happened with all this research? It turns out that last summer, July 25 to be exact, was the 75th anniversary of the dedication of Orchard Beach. I seemed to be the first one to realize that, even taking the Pelham Bay Park Administrator by surprise.

Orchard Beach opening day ceremony, 1936 | Photo courtesy of the New York City Parks Photo Archive

When talking about my project with Barbara Dolensek, Vice President of the City Island Historical Society and Nautical Museum, she suggested a 75th anniversary exhibition. That opened in July with about 55 photographs. The community is enjoying the show, which has had some good coverage in the local press, and my PowerPoint talk got a standing-room-only crowd. (Granted, it’s a small place!) Now, I’m taking this illustrated talk “on the road,” so to speak, in order to garner interest in the Pavilion.

I want people to know about it, to give it the recognition it deserves. I want these layers of history to be visible for the collective memories of New Yorkers. Today, the Parks Department is in the midst of a scoping process for a possible restoration of the Pavilion. They have received bids for a six- to nine-month study of the building that will result in proposals for various options: restoration, partial restoration, and also replacement buildings. Community meetings will be part of that process, and I’m gathering names at my talks so I can contact people about them.

The building might be beyond repair. It seems to have a concrete condition called alkali silica reaction, which is disfiguring the building and could be eating away at its foundations. If the Pavilion is actually in dangerous condition, of course measures will need to be taken. But hopefully, this process will mean at least partial restoration, as well as a re-vamping so it can serve as a modern recreation center that fulfills the needs of the community. The residents of the Bronx, as well as those from the rest of the city and beyond, deserve to have this extraordinary example of civic architecture accessible. Great buildings can make people feel great. Even the inimitable Robert Moses thought so. In a quote that might sound a bit corny now, I think he got it right: “I believe in bigger and better construction for public recreation because I am satisfied that it makes people better.”

Personally, I’m not averse to a solution for the building that would combine old elements with new ones. I just want restoration to ensure that visitors can remember the New York history embedded in this structure. It represents a time that is mostly forgotten — the depth of the Great Depression and the massive federal response engineered by FDR, the idealism that was once part and parcel of grand civic architecture, and the leaders with huge personalities who were somehow able to accomplish great feats for New Yorkers. The scale and ambition of the Orchard Beach project, embodied in the Pavilion, seems unthinkable today. But its evocative style is a tangible reminder of the period — this was the 1930s and this is what public buildings looked like. It has an unmistakable symbolic resonance.

All of this might seem like a rationale for letting the building just sit there, to serve as a kind of museum artifact. That’s not what I want. I want people to make use of the building and fully experience its architecture. I can think of so many ways for it to function, in addition to dining, relaxing, and overlooking the beach. How about holding a wedding there? The building could house exercise rooms with equipment, there could be yoga classes. What about interactive displays for children, installations by local artists, and presentations of Bronx history? There is room for a skate park, for a pool, and for so many other things. But such plans need active community involvement. I hope I can help make that happen.

So now, I continue to visit the Pavilion — like an old friend — to pay respects and stay inspired. And I also say a quick good-bye each week on the way back to Manhattan as we cross the City Island Bridge and see the huge, mysterious structure from a distance across the water.

Photo by Aurelija Cepulinskaite-Jara, for the 2010 Architectural League exhibition The City We Imagined/The City We Made

Deborah Wye was a curator at The Museum of Modern Art for 31 years, before retiring in 2010. She now works for the Museum on a part-time basis, preparing a catalogue raisonné of the prints of Louise Bourgeois.

A double-stack intermodal train prepares to depart the Arlington Rail Yard on the Staten Island Railroad | Photo by Joshua Nelson

Many heralded the opening of the High Line for its innovative reclaiming of a disused freight rail line as a public, open space. Its abandonment was due, in part, to the rise of interstate trucking since the 1950s, along with changes to the economic geography and industrial practices of New York and its food industries. But just because the city no longer conveys freight via rail through the West Side of Manhattan does not mean that our city no longer has the need for the kind of hard infrastructure that moves goods cheaply, efficiently and reliably from point A to point B.

While the deindustrialization of cities like New York has accelerated over the past fifty years, our awareness of the consumption of environmental resources has grown: we can now evaluate all commodities through terms like carbon footprint, locally sourced or eco-friendly. But without deeper engagement and familiarity with the supply chain, environmental consciousness — not to mention sophisticated economic development strategy — only goes so far. When we think about infrastructure, the benefits of commuter mass transit are well-known, but we often fall short of extending the same logic to the transportation of goods. Freight trains might not be the most efficient thing that comes to mind, until we start comparing them to the trucks that dominate our distribution networks.

Joshua Nelson oversees freight rail operations at the New York City Economic Development Corporation. We sat down with him to help shine a light on some aspects of the supply chain that might not be topics of everyday conversation. Since he’s one of the only people working on these issues at the municipal level, we wanted to know exactly what his job entails, in order to peer into the city’s complex networks of transportation logistics. Trains don’t just get people to work, they also get potatoes to the grocery store, scrap metal to the recycling plant and they just might help keep our city competitive in environmental, economic and infrastructural terms.

– C.S.

The freight rail network of the New York City metropolitan area

A CONVERSATION WITH JOSHUA NELSON

What do you do?
I do planning and policy for the city with respect to freight rail operations and development. This means I make sure that the city has options when it comes to rail freight transportation and that there’s competition in the city among different freight rail carriers. I also do asset management work with the city’s three separate facilities that we own. The City has rail assets in Sunset Park in Brooklyn, at the New York City Terminal Produce Market in Hunts Point in the Bronx, and then the Staten Island Railroad (PDF) on the western shore of Staten Island, which was rehabilitated in 2007 by the City and the Port Authority.

How did you first get interested in rail infrastructure?
I’ve always loved transportation. My father’s a locomotive engineer, who recently celebrated 40 years on the railroad. He worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad in northern Utah and now works for the Union Pacific Railroad. So I grew up loving transportation, but never fully realized I could make a career out of it. After getting into urban planning in college, I found work in traditional transit planning. I worked for two different transit authorities, one in Salt Lake and one in Seattle. And after studying transportation planning in graduate school, an opportunity came up here, at New York City’s Economic Development Corporation, to work with freight rail. It’s a unique position: most cities don’t have somebody devoted to issues of freight rail exclusively. Most often, the planning functions associated with freight happen at the state level, not necessarily the municipal level.

How does rail compare to other modes of freight transport?
In terms of transporting freight, rail is most often compared to truck. There are some other alternatives, like inland waterway movements, but by and large, it’s rail versus truck. There are significant benefits to using freight rail. First, there is the technological advantage: a locomotive pulling a train of 100 rail cars can be operated by two individuals, an engineer and a conductor. A truck carries 1/3 of what a single rail car can carry, and each truck requires one driver. So you need 300 trucks and 300 drivers to transport the equivalent amount of cargo as one 100-car train. Freight requires a fraction of the labor, which translates into significant cost savings for the customer.

1 locomotive engineer + 1 conductor carries 300 truck loads; 1 truck driver carries 1 truck load

Second is the environmental advantage. Rail is more fuel-efficient than trucking. Of course, locomotives pollute. But replacing 300 tractor-trailers with one or two locomotives is obviously going to provide a net benefit in environmental terms. Overall, the big advantage is rail’s ability to transport a lot of stuff very cheaply over a very long distance.

A common concern is that railroads, because they’re inherently monopolistic, often don’t provide the levels of customer service that people require. So, here in New York, we’re constantly working with all of our freight rail partners to make sure that the businesses that do receive services from the railroads are getting what they need.

How does freight rail interface with other modes of freight? Particularly the maritime infrastructure, like tugboats and barges?
When people think of freight transportation, they often think of container ships, which is what we call intermodal containerized service. The premise of intermodal transportation is that when you’re switching between modes (say from ship to truck or to rail) you don’t have to unload a whole bunch of product from a ship and individually load it into a boxcar for rail transport. Instead, you just put everything in one container that stays closed and is picked off that ship, put directly onto a railcar, and taken to wherever its final destination is in the middle of the country. While containerization in the maritime industry had its origins in the late ’50s, the intermodal revolution on the rails has really come about in the last twenty years, alongside the booming trade with China. Southern Pacific Railroad introduced the first double-stack container car in the late 1970s, which made handling intermodal containers extremely cost-effective for the railroads. By the late 1980s, the technology was fully embraced by the railroads and intermodal really took off. Today, intermodal traffic accounts for approximately 20% of revenue for U.S. railroads.

The New York Container Terminal at Howland Hook, Staten Island | Photo by Joshua Nelson

Before intermodal, you had to unload the ship by hand, break bulk, and then get that cargo into a boxcar. If that boxcar was terminating in a place where there’d be a truck trip to a final destination, then all those goods would have to be unloaded manually and put into the truck. It was extremely costly and the multiple “touches” always led to the potential for damaged goods.

Here in New York, we have a unique operation where there’s a much more direct interface between the maritime world and the rail world, and that’s in the “car-float” operation that takes place between Greenville, NJ and Sunset Park in Brooklyn. It’s the last vestige of this huge network of barges and tugs that used to be owned by all the private freight rail carriers in the city. Because of the lack of bridges across New York Harbor, these railroads actually put rail cars onto the barges and used tugboats to deliver them to pier sheds all throughout the city, and also to interchange with other railroads.

A carfloat approaches the 51st St Float Bridge in Sunset Park, Brooklyn | Photo by Joshua Nelson

In New York City, how does most imported cargo get to market?
The vast majority, by tonnage, is trucked into the city. According to a 2004 report by the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council, which is our local Metropolitan Planning Organization, freight rail’s share of the cargo flow is right about 1%. It’s very small when you compare it to everything else.

So 99% of our cargo is trucked from our ports?
Pretty much. Most goods don’t travel from port to the end user immediately; it’s not like it goes from a boat straight to your local Target. Often, goods move from the port facilities to a distribution center, many of which are off exits 7 and 8a on the New Jersey Turnpike, and also in Eastern Pennsylvania. Everything gets consolidated in these big distribution centers, and then trucks take the goods from there to make deliveries throughout the city.

Trucks at the Hunts Point Terminal Produce Market | Photo by Andreas Burgess

It’s important to note that there is a difference between cargo that terminates in the Port of New York and New Jersey, 100% of which is trucked to these distribution centers, and cargo that passes through the port. Approximately 10-15% of the cargo that enters the Port of New York and New Jersey on its way to, say, Chicago, Cleveland or St. Louis, leaves the port by rail on its way to other destinations.

Something we’re exploring, which is part of the Sunset Park vision plan and part of the Community Board 7′s 197(a) plan and in the latest update to PlaNYC, is turning two railyards in Brooklyn into “transload” facilities, places where you can bring in a railcar of goods and transfer all those goods to truck. That way, someone who doesn’t have a rail spur right into their building or their backyard can nonetheless pick up their goods by driving a truck, say, a mile and a half into Brooklyn, rather than moving their goods hundreds of miles by truck entirely. The city really lacks those kinds of facilities, and we think it’s important to develop them.

Tell me a little bit more about the three freight rail assets that the City maintains.
The Staten Island Railroad opened in April of 2007 and, for all intents and purposes, has been a huge success. When they did the initial projections for how much traffic they thought they would generate, I think it was 1/3 of what it’s generating today. The trackage formerly belonged to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) and, later, CSX Transportation. In recent years, the only customer was the Proctor & Gamble facility at Port Ivory, on the northwest shore of Staten Island. After Proctor & Gamble ceased operations there, the City acquired the right-of-way with the intention of reactivating the rail line. The City also saw the route as a means of effectuating its 2006 solid waste management plan.

The Port Authority and the City partnered and put $72,000,000 into the rehabilitation of the railroad in order to create direct access to the Howland Hook container port facility and also to the newly constructed Staten Island waste transfer facility in the Fresh Kills area. The container port really relies upon on-dock rail service and, of course, the Department of Sanitation definitely benefits from being able to export the waste by rail as opposed to truck. Now the City can shift its solid waste disposal out of Staten Island while retaining a significant number of jobs connected to solid waste disposal industry on the Island. And, besides saving money, the railroad eliminates about 90,000 truck trips, on average, from our roads every year. So that’s a big deal.

Double-stack container cars in the Arlington Rail Yard near Howland Hook Marine Terminal, Staten Island | Photo by Andreas Burgess

Then in the Bronx, the City maintains a relatively short spur that leads to the Hunts Point Produce Market. This line is important to us, and to the cooperators of the produce market, because it provides an alternative to truck. Five days a week, about 3-4% of the produce in the market comes in by rail as opposed to truck. The City is very focused on expanding the Produce Market and giving the cooperators what they need to continue to provide the valuable services that they do to all the restaurants, bodegas and grocers across New York City.

The cooperators of the market like rail because it’s cheaper by a significant price differential, but not all products can handle the long transit time. It takes about ten to twelve days for a boxcar of produce to make its way across the country, so the kinds of fresh produce that are still good after that kind of journey are what we call “hardwear”: potatoes, onions, sometimes carrots, coming from the growing regions of Eastern Idaho, Western Washington and sometimes California.

A locomotive crew switches refrigerated boxcars at the Hunts Point Produce Market | Photo by Joshua Nelson

The third of the City-owned freight rail assets, in Sunset Park in Brooklyn, is what we call the Brooklyn Waterfront Rail system — and I think this is the most exciting piece of the freight rail puzzle right now.

It’s comprised of components of a number of different old railroads: the Bush Terminal Railroad and the New York Connecting Railroad, which was operated jointly by the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad and the Long Island Railroad (when previously owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad). What’s left of these networks is some trackage between 29th and 65th Streets to the west of 1st Avenue in Sunset Park. It’s a system that was all under private ownership until the Port Authority bought it in 2008, and it is in need of significant capital upgrades. So we’re working with the Port Authority on updating the railroad’s old service contract with modern legal terms; bringing everything into a state of good repair on the Brooklyn waterfront; and making capital improvements to enhance our ability to market the rail line and to market parcels within the Sunset Park area to companies that would be interested in rail service.

The Brooklyn Waterfront Rail System

What kind of companies are those?
For example, one of the companies that will be relocating to the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal (SBMT) is the Axis Group, an auto import/export distributer. They’ll be bringing in import vehicles via deep-draft ship and using the Marine Terminal area as a distribution facility. A portion of those vehicles will leave SBMT by rail. Another tenant is Sims Metal Management, which is building a municipal recycling facility in partnership with the NYC Department of Sanitation and they want to be able to ship out repurposed recyclables by rail. So those are two totally different kinds of operations: one ships out recycled tin cans and baled waste for sale on the domestic commodity markets, and the other ships out shiny, brand new automobiles.

What do you wish people understood better about freight rail and why it’s important for New York?
What I would encourage people to do is to think about their supply chain in general. When you’re on line at Duane Reade or the grocery store, take a look at whatever you have in your hand and ask yourself: “Where did this avocado come from? And how the heck did it get here?” By and large, when people think of transportation, they think of it in terms of something they don’t want around them: they don’t want trucks or freight trains rumbling past their door. But at the same time, they want a huge variety of consumer products when they walk into the store, and they want cheap prices. I think freight rail, for New Yorkers, is a totally unseen part of life in the city that the average person doesn’t think about, but it’s definitely there. And although it doesn’t handle a large portion of the overall traffic that we have coming into the city, it’s still very important.

I think that the more that we can encourage rail freight activity, the more transportation options small businesses will have and the more competitive the city will be. It’s a much more positive approach to the city’s supply chains, not only in relation to consumer products, but to anything that is manufactured, either on greater Long Island or within the city.

Does encouraging usually mean expanding the infrastructure?
I think in some cases it means expanding infrastructure, but it also means maximizing and leveraging what you already have. In a lot of cases, when we talk about the proposals for the 65th Street Rail Yard and the 51st Street Rail Yard to develop these transload facilities, this is land that the City owns that could be utilized in a much more robust way. It’s less a question of building railroads or building new infrastructure than it is about bringing everything to a state of good repair and then marketing the facilities we have to utilize them to their full potential.

"Where did this avocado come from? And how the heck did it get here?"

Graphics by Marcelo López-Dinardi.

Joshua Nelson is an Assistant Vice President at the New York City Economic Development Corporation specializing in freight rail transportation. He is responsible for managing the City’s freight rail assets while also developing goods movement policies that support more modal balance in the regional transportation system. Previous transportation experience includes improving the on-time reliability of Mexico City’s Metrobús bus rapid transit system, promoting rideshare programs in Seattle and launching the TRAX light rail system in Salt Lake City. Joshua received a BA and BS from the University of Utah and holds both a Master of Science in Transportation and a Master in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

SOUTH BRONX RISING
This week, The New York Times new architecture critic Michael Kimmelman took a walk with NYC’s planning commissioner Amanda Burden through the South Bronx. They discuss the area’s long journey after decades of disinvestment and neglect and cite the importance of Nos Quedamos and Yolanda Garcia’s vision of what the South Bronx could become in driving its apparent resurgence, alongside the Bloomberg administration’s smart decisions about the physical elements that make a neighborhood: maintaining a street wall, ground floor retail, street trees and density. The walking tour ends with a followup to Kimmelman’s review of a new residential development in the neighborhood, Via Verde. Check out the video and the write up of the tour.

WHERE TO SHARE?
A couple of weeks ago, Janette Sadik-Khan announced that New York City was starting a new bike share program, set to open with 1000 bikes and 600 docking stations, and asked New Yorkers to suggest where to the stations should be placed. But how will the final locations be selected? The Atlantic Cities reports on the complexities of deciding exactly that. Working with Alta Bike Share, the company selected to implement the program, the city will  ”first target optimal service areas using detailed data models and public suggestions, then approach community boards that govern these areas with at least three possible locations, and last allow the neighborhoods themselves to make the ultimate decision.” In order to reveal the complex methodology of locating the nodes of this new infrastructural system, the article goes on to explain in detail the three “pillars” of a successful bike share program, “high density of stations, close proximity to transit and community feedback.” The public presentations begin next week. Check out the schedule of community meetings and other events at the bike share program’s timeline, and head over to Streetsblog for up-to-date coverage as this program unfolds.

TOO MUCH PARKING!
When people complain about parking in New York, the gripe isn’t usually that New York City has too many spaces. Yet, according to an article in Crain’s New York this week, Robert Moses-era zoning laws dictate that in new residential construction outside of Manhattan, the developer must build four parking spots for every ten residential units, despite New York’s comprehensive mass transit system. Building owners are losing money on predominantly empty parking garages. And even facilities that draw large crowds, like Yankee Stadium, have parking lots that remain mostly empty much of the time. The Yankee Stadium example is now prompting fears that the parking allotment for the contested Atlantic Yards Stadium in Brooklyn will also remain under-utilized. The prospect of a giant blacktop hole adds to an increasing number of concerns about the new development.

PEANUT PARK
New York City is becoming increasingly dependent upon public-private partnerships to maintain its parks. Central Park and Bryant Park have both been arguably saved by such partnerships, to name only two. This week, a new park has opened, this time sponsored by Planters, of nut fame. Mr. Peanut made the requisite appearance at the opening, monocle and all. While there may be something built into the premise of corporate sponsorship of public, even semi-public parks, that smacks ominously of corporate encroachment into civic life, the results are encouraging. Planters Grove, one of three such parks sponsored by Planters and designed by Ken Smith, was built for The Wald Houses, a public housing development in the East Village. The garden allows residents of the project access to the herbs planted there, and will also be open to the larger neighborhood. Read more of the coverage in The New York Times.

EVENTS and TO DOs

CINEBEASTS’ GOWANDERLUST!
This Saturday evening, Cinebeasts is hosting Gowanderlust! with Nathan Kensinger, photographer, documentary filmmaker and film festival programmer. Kensinger will be leading a “zig-zagging tour-screening” — part walking tour, part short film screening — along one of the cities most historied and fascinating industrial landscapes, the Gowanus Canal. Buy your tickets here and then join them Saturday, October 8th at sundown in front of the Bell House, 149 7th Street. A reception, including refreshments provided by Brooklyn Brewery and Cabinet Magazine, will follow at Cabinet Space. For more information, check out Cinebeasts.

OPENHOUSENEWYORK
The 9th annual openhousenewyork, when some of the city’s most spectacular and hard to access spaces and structures open their doors/gates/elevators/ladders/trap-doors to the public for viewings, takes place the weekend of October 14th-16th. Many talks, tours, and workshops are free; some require advance reservations (with a $5 fee). As usual, people are snatching up reservations fast, so be sure to plan your weekend soon. Here’s just a sampling of what you can find in the slate of events: the Holly Whyte Way Arcade Parade, a walking tour along the Old Croton Aqueduct (in both Manhattan and the Bronx), a walking tour on Shaping Urban Design and Policy: The East 96th Street Corridor, Brooklyn Bridge Park (previous coverage of BBP here), Elastic City’s Monumental Walk (previously), Pier Luigi Nervi’s George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal, AVAC System on Roosevelt Island (previously), the final days of the BMW Guggenheim Lab (previously), Lyn Rice Architects, Architecture Research Office (ARO), East Harlem School (previously), the Arsenal, Noguchi Museum (stay tuned for more on this next week!), the Digester Eggs at Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant, the Little Red Lighthouse, Fresh Kills by Bus, Build It! Architecture Workshop, Urbanitis East Harlem Tour, Chris Pellettieri’s Stone Carving Workshop at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, Eagle Street Rooftop Farm, East 4th Street Cultural District Tour (previously), El Puente South Williamsburg Walking Tour, the Eldridge Street Synagogue, Melrose Commons, or tour the city on bikes with either the NYC DOT, a historian Exploring the Street Grid, or with Velo City’s high school student guides teaching you about urban design. Download a PDF event guide here or click through to make reservations on the OHNY site.

ILLUMINATING THE CITY
Last weekend’s Bring to Light, New York’s second Nuit Blanche festival, brought light sculpture, installations and video to the walls, streets, alleys and public spaces of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Tomorrow, the New Museum is hosting a panel discussion to consider the potential of the Nuit Blanche model to reimagine public space and catalyze dialogue. “Illuminating the City: Site-Specific Art as Urban Activator” will start at 4pm and will feature Ethan Vogt and Ken Farmer of Nuit Blanche New York; Eva Franch, director of Storefront; Stephanie Thayer, executive director of the Open Space Alliance for North Brooklyn; David van der Leer, assistant curator for architecture and urban studies at the Guggenheim; with more panelists to be announced. Buy tickets or find more information here. And if you missed Bring to Light last weekend, check out photos from the event in Time Out,  Flavorwire and on the Bring to Light website.

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

Decade of Fire began to take shape for me several years ago, when a friend, Julia Allen, mentioned to me that nearly eighty percent of the housing in the South Bronx burned down in the 1970s.  I was stunned by this figure, but only began to comprehend its meaning after I was introduced to people who had lived through this disaster.

One of these people, Vivian Vazquez, grew up in the South Bronx during the ‘70s. She shared stories with me about the vibrant community that existed before the fires. But by the time she was 18, her neighborhood was nearly destroyed. To her, the legacy of the fires was not just buildings lost and neighbors disappearing, but more a residual feeling of abandonment, a sense that the city purposefully turned its back as the community was destroyed.

Over the next several years the three of us became co-producers. We read up, and talked to current and former residents, defining the outlines of a story about the South Bronx that had yet to be told.  Our research turned up a history of migration, de-industrialization and racially biased development policies that shaped U.S. cities throughout the 20th century.

Although they arrived only after decades of segregation, redlining and urban renewal, the fires were immediately blamed on the pathologies of ghetto residents. In 1970, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then Nixon’s advisor on urban affairs, popularized this claim and suggested that government adopt an attitude of “benign neglect” towards unruly communities of color. During the next decade, as the fires raged on, New York cut fire service in the Bronx down to the bone.

By 1976 much of the South Bronx had burned away. City leaders like Housing Commissioner Roger Starr were proposing that the city perform “triage” and level what was left, including dislocating the 100,000 Bronxites who remained. Starr called this “planned shrinkage,” a term that is today being touted as the solution to urban malaise in places like Detroit. This technical-sounding term masks a brutal policy of abandonment, and ignores how historical forces have created poor neighborhoods of color that are now considered be extraneous and expendable.

I’ve heard that New York has a fiscal crisis every 30 years. If so, today we are right on schedule. While the Bronx has been spared the worst of Bloomberg’s proposed 2011 cuts to fire service, some of the poorest parts of Brooklyn will see their fire protection on the chopping block in the next year.

Today the South Bronx has come back, rebuilt on residents’ love, desperation and sweat equity that finally convinced government to rebuild housing there. Alongside the history of the fires, there are stories of the places and cultures — hip hop, for one — that sustained lives and even allowed them to flourish. But the South Bronx is still one of the poorest areas of the country. As Vivian says in the film, “The people who survive these policies of neglect, we survive. People survive, people cope. But at the same time, it came at a huge cost.”

Vivian Vazquez

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Gretchen Hildebran is a documentary filmmaker who has often focused on the connections between policy and human experience.  Her love of documentary was inspired by a 2002 collaboration with homeless and low-income people to create No On Prop N, a TV ad campaign that opposed cutting general assistance benefits in San Francisco. Since then, Gretchen co-produced the internationally screened WORTH SAVING (2004), which was presented in HBO’s Frame by Frame documentary showcase. OUT IN THE HEARTLAND (2005) tells the stories of gay parents in Kentucky facing a constitutional amendment banning marriage. Since graduating from Stanford University’s documentary program in 2006, Gretchen has worked in Los Angeles and New York as a cinematographer and editor for TV and independent documentary productions. Gretchen shot Ramona Diaz’s THE LEARNING (2011), and contributed camerawork to Joan Braderman’s THE HERETICS (2009) and Socheata Poeuv’s NEW YEARS BABY (2008). Still getting her bearings since moving to New York in 2006, Gretchen is currently shooting and co-producing DECADE OF FIRE, which examines the legacy of the fires that destroyed the Bronx throughout the 1970s.

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.

All images courtesy of Gretchen Hildebran.

Advanced Design Studio II, the second in a series of six studios in the Master of Architecture program at Parsons the New School for Design, asks students to address architecture’s role in constructing contemporary social relationships by reconsidering one of our most familiar architectural spaces — the residential dwelling. Architects Bronwyn Breitner and James Slade, the instructors of Design Studio II, saw the mix of uses along the Lower Concourse and the strong character of the surrounding neighborhoods and landmarks as the perfect context for an exploration of the contemporary dwelling and the influence of culture, technology, history and policy on the places we call home. Here, Breitner and Slade discuss the studio and the site, and share some of their students’ work. -VS

A historical photograph of the north side of the studio site, a former lumber yard. Many of the identifying landmarks still exist. The primary change was the introduction of the elevated Major Deegan Expressway along the waterfront which hugs the site to the west.

Advanced Design Studio II, the second in a series of six studios in the Parsons Master of Architecture degree, traditionally focuses on a housing program. This year, we broke down the spring 2011 semester into three parts: we began with an analysis of housing precedents both in New York City (to understand the local evolution of housing projects) and globally (to understand past and current housing solutions); next, we conducted an extensive site analysis of our selected studio site; and finally, the students worked in pairs to develop and represent their own housing proposal.

NYC DCP revised zoning map

We selected a site within the Lower Concourse in the South Bronx. This 30-block pocket in the southwest corner of the Bronx was rezoned in 2009 by the Department of City Planning (DCP) to maintain the existing manufacturing zoning and add permitted residential use. In recent years, much of the local industry has relocated and the occupancy has decreased by 30%, leaving a neighborhood characterized by underutilized multi-story lofts, single-story automotive buildings and industrial sites, all with valuable real estate development potential. The DCP identified the neighborhood as ideal for much-needed new housing development because of its easy access to public transportation, its proximity to the ever-desirable Harlem River waterfront and its fantastic views to Manhattan.

A Google satellite image of the Lower Concourse district showing the studio site.

Looking back from the 149th Street bridge towards the site. The newly adopted zoning plan permits 400 ft tall mixed-use towers along a new waterfront greenway.

Within this 30-block parcel we assigned one specific site to the students: a full city block with four very different characters at each of its boundaries. The site is bounded on the west by the elevated Major Deegan Expressway; on the east by Gerard Avenue, directly across the street from Gauchos Gym, a neighborhood icon and community hub; on the north by 149th Street, the only currently commercial street in the neighborhood; and on the south by 146th Street, a small and relatively quiet two-block road. The diverse nature of the site, its 15’ change in section east to west across the site, its location within this newly rezoned district and its proximity to the historic Grand Concourse to the north provided a challenging and rich opportunity for the students to envision a new character for the neighborhood within which to situate their own housing proposals.

In the site analysis phase, we reached out to individuals knowledgeable about the district and invited them to meet with the students to share their perspectives. We met with developer Andrea Kretchmer of The Kretchmer Companies, who is working on a proposal for an affordable housing development across the street from our site and is also actively involved with Gauchos Gym. We also met with Paul Philips and Vineeta Mathur from the DCP who were instrumental in drafting the recent Lower Concourse rezoning. These meetings, together with the students’ site analysis work and a very detailed analysis of the zoning regulations, led to the students’ preliminary massing proposals.

A study of building morphology and use.

Analysis of two main traffic corridors defining the Lower Concourse. Different approaches to engaging the ground plane and the path itself.

A section shows some of the challenges of the studio site - a change in section of 15 ft from east to west, and the elevated Major Deegan Expressway to the west. Photos were taken from a nearby parking structure to study the views to the Harlem River and Manhattan from different levels.

A shadow study at the equinox showing the neighboring lots fully developed under the new zoning provisions illustrates a rather sunny site despite the waterfront towers.

A study of available commercial and infrastructural amenities helped the students identify what type of commercial program made sense to introduce into their building proposals, each of which was mixed-use.

Using the insights from the site research, each team had to formulate a unique and comprehensive program for the site that included housing as well as a complimentary “Program X.” Program X was intended to respond to the needs of a changing neighborhood, potentially provide a catalyst for the future development of the area and integrate with the required housing program. Proposals ranged from the introduction of an artist-in-residence sponsored community art center to a public fitness circuit woven into the lower floors of the building to a supermarket. This independent program development required that the students think beyond the physical boundaries of our site by envisioning and influencing the Lower Concourse’s shift from district to neighborhood.

Students worked with physical and digital tools to convert their conceptual responses to this complex site into architectural solutions. The results of the 15 week study were diverse. Many of the projects developed a perimeter street wall with a central courtyard, though the program and nature of the courtyards were varied. Other projects broke the boundary of the block entirely and introduced perimeter parks and plazas that engaged the street. Circulation was often introduced through and across the site as a shortcut accessing Program X and/or the proposed public waterfront park, reflecting a general interest in incorporating public programs for the community.

The fitness circuit team allowed the public program to influence the unit development by designing flexible units around the athletic terms “Pivot” and “Slide.” A courtyard project utilized a series of solar studies to carve away at the extruded site, resulting in a sun-filled central public courtyard and a perforated metal façade system which responded to the location of the sun, controlling solar gain in each unit. In the most successful projects, the housing unit itself retained the required level of privacy but — when combined with shared private amenities, a public program and circulation —also allowed a typically introspective program to introduce character and identity to a developing neighborhood. Ultimately, the projects were nuanced and engaged concepts, from the neighborhood scale down to the scale of the unit, that created a unique vision of housing in New York City.
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PROJECTS:

Students: Olga Anaya and Tamara Yurovsky
A building proposal on the south side of the lot stacks the comforts of the suburban house vertically, providing affordable housing units for families of different sizes. Each unit has a private and semi-private terrace, and access to the common vertical “street” with shared amenities.

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Students: Rahul Shah and Yoseff Ben-Yehuda
Site analysis revealing the current flooding of the NYC sewer system during a storm surge prompted this team to propose a model building with constructed wetlands at the ground level. Coupled with a collection chamber and contained primary treatment stage, the wetlands treat the sewage from the building and collected rainwater. A series of elevated walkways provide public space above the wetlands and weave beneath the elevated highway for safe and easy access to the waterfront park.

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Students: Michael Goetz and Cristina Lorie
Census data indicates that the South Bronx has a very high obesity rate. This team responded by introducing both a traditional gym facility and a public fitness circuit within the residential building. The required 60’ setback provided an opportunity for an 1/8 mile public running track around the building and swimming lanes. The residential building has a separate, private circulation route. The residential units themselves referenced fitness, each falling into either a “Pivot” or a “Slide” category.

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Student: Josh Stone
A sophisticated circulation system stitches a path from Gauchos Gym across Gerard Avenue through the proposed building to a new basketball court and locker room facilities. Another route allows direct access between a much-needed market at the northwest corner of the site and the historical Bronx Terminal Market. Residential units above are broken into three main buildings, angled in plan and section to permit sunlight into the central courtyard.

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Bronwyn Breitner received her MArch with Distinction at Parsons the New School for Design, and her BA at Duke University in Anthropology and Photography. Prior to co-founding 590BC, Breitner worked at Smith-Miller + Hawkinson Architects on a wide range of projects including dense urban residential developments and medium scale commercial offices. Breitner has taught both undergraduate and graduate level design studios at Parsons the New School for Design and at the Pratt Institute. Breitner’s work has been exhibited at The Center for Architecture in NYC and at the University of Alicante in Alicante, Spain.

James Slade has a Bachelor of Arts from Cornell University and a Masters of Architecture from Columbia University where he was awarded an Honor Award for Excellence in Design upon graduation. In 2002, he co-founded Slade Architecture. Slade was also recognized by the Architectural League of New York in the Young Architects Program early in his career and selected by them again in 2010 for their Emerging Voices program. He is a licensed architect in New York, Florida, Missouri, and Pennsylvania as well as a LEED-AP. In addition to his work at Slade Architecture, Slade currently teaches a graduate level architecture studio at Parsons School of Design and has taught in the past at Barnard/Columbia University, Pratt Institute, Florida International University and Philadelphia University. Before Slade Architecture, he was a partner in Cho Slade Architecture.

The views expressed here are those of the authors only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.