HOLIDAY HIATUS
The holidays are upon us. And while we busy ourselves this week with buying urban-themed gifts for loved ones, we are also planning to take a little extra time in the first days of the new year to do some Omnibus brainstorming, housecleaning, and party-planning. So we will be back in full force on January 9th, just in time to celebrate our third birthday, preview an exciting new line-up of features, forum posts and special projects for 2012, and invite you officially to our second annual benefit party, which will take place on February 28th. Mark your calendars! And don’t forget your pens, pencils or laptops while you’re enjoying some holiday downtime — the deadline for our Unfinished Grid essay competition is just a little over a month away!

Meanwhile, yuletide cheer is once again broadcasting itself on the built environment of New York. Beyond the many iconic Manhattan landmarks and events to choose from — the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, Big Apple Chorus performances by the South Street Seaport tree tonight and tomorrow, ice skating in Bryant Park, the New York Stock Exchange’s own tree — make some time to treat yourself to some of the most festive urban explorations the outer boroughs have to offer, starting with the famous lights of Dyker Heights, Brooklyn.

YEAR IN REVIEW
Another staple of the holiday season is the reflection on the year coming to an end through best-of lists and year-in-review recaps, and the architectural and urban affairs press is no exception to this tradition. Over on The Atlantic Cities, Nate Berg lists his top ten examples of long-form urban journalism from the past year. On Grist, Greg Hanscom profiles the year’s major urban trends, from what the census tells us about younger Americans’ preference of cities over suburbs to how Occupy Wall Street might inform politicians in 2012. TIME magazine’s list of the top 10 green buildings of 2011 includes some uplifting examples such as the school in Greensburg, Kansas that was completely destroyed by a tornado in 2007 and rebuilt this year according to the highest sustainability standards. But when 2011 is remembered by future historians, it will be for the range of protest movements which ignited in cities across the world. The New Yorker‘s Elissa Curtis rounds up the year with commentary on twelve poignant images capturing “Twelve Months of Protest.”

A NEW TECH CAMPUS FOR ROOSEVELT ISLAND
On Monday, Mayor Bloomberg announced the winner of the city’s $100 million competition to build an applied sciences and technology campus on Roosevelt Island. After weeks of deliberation and negotiation, Cornell University and Technion Israel Institute of Technology were chosen to build an innovative network of research and lab facilities. The Bloomberg administration labeled this project as a “new land grant,” affirming their belief that this partnership will foster economic growth, develop the city’s research and development sector and attract high-technology entrepreneurship to the metropolitan area. Early projections argue that the Cornell campus will generate over $23 billion in economic activity in the next thirty years and will create over 20,000 jobs. The first phase of the new campus is expected to be constructed by 2017. Read more of the coverage at DNAinfo and Curbed.

STUDENTS TAKE ON PERFORMING ARTS AT GROUND ZERO
While the performing arts center at Ground Zero is seemingly indefinitely paused, students at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Utah College of Architecture and Planning took on the program as a studio problem this past semester. The challenges of the site, even if we ignore the budgetary and political constraints for a moment, are daunting. The students had to take into account the site’s emotional, as well as infrastructural, demands. And their scheme had to accommodate 100,000 square feet of program on 30,000 square feet of land. Check out The New York Times article and accompanying slideshow.

NEWSFLASH: NEW YORKERS ARE OBSESSED WITH THEIR TRANSIT
Google has released its annual year-end Zeitgeist report for 2011. While some of the results are less than surprising (Apple made it to the U.S. top ten twice with the iPhone 5 placing 6th and the iPad2 placing 10th) and some are a little unnerving (how did Ryan Dunn make it to 3rd?), they get more interesting when filtered by region. The top three searches for the New York region are (in descending rank order) MTA, NJ Transit and Hopstop. New Yorkers are seemingly obsessed with transit (as are we). Rounding out the top ten for NYC are the DMV, Con Edison, Hurricane Irene’s Path, the NYCDOE, EZ-Pass, the Brooklyn Public Library and, oddly, the Williamsburg bowling alley Brooklyn Bowl. Read more at Gothamist or explore this year’s Zeitgeist for yourself.

ElectriCity exhibition at the New York Transit Museum

ELECTRICITY: EMPOWERING NEW YORK’S RAILS
The New York Transit Museum has organized a fascinating exhibit that dives into an aspect of the city’s rail system that many of us take for granted: its energy supply. The third rail isn’t just a metaphor for sudden death, it’s part of a complex infrastructure that powers the subway and commuter trains. Designed by Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, the exhibition uses the powering of trains to explain the science of electricity more generally, from generation to distribution. The show is a great destination for kids, and just might inspire a new generation of young people to ask questions about where our energy comes from and to demand alternatives. ElectriCity: Powering New York’s Rails is on view at the New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn through December 2016. Read more of the coverage at The New York Times.

Macy's department store employee cleaning up piles of debris after the Christmas shopping rush. | via Gothamist

CHRISTMAS SHOPPING, CIRCA 1948
On a lighter note, if you think that the Christmas shopping rush is bad now, take comfort in the knowledge that it has never been good. This week, Gothamist has unearthed some 1948 photos documenting the shopping and its aftermath of the holiday rush at Macy’s.

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

BLDG 92, the new museum and visitors center for the Brooklyn Navy Yard that opened last month, offers the general public an opportunity to look behind a walled-off stretch of the Brooklyn waterfront between Flushing Avenue and Wallabout Bay that has played a pivotal role in US naval and military history since its founding in 1801. The Navy Yard, which was one of the first five shipyards in the United States, saw its peak during World War II when over 70,000 employees were based at the site, a workforce that eventually shrunk to less than 10,000 in the years before its official closing in 1966. [The closing of the Brooklyn Navy Yard was the result of the same cost-cutting measures that led to the decommissioning of the Brooklyn Army Terminal. –Ed.] In 1971, the Yard reopened as a City-owned industrial park, which today has 230 tenants and over 5,000 employees and is in the midst of a rejuvenation and redevelopment effort led by the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation (BNYDC).

BLDG 92 inhabits the 1857 Marine Commandant’s house, originally designed by Thomas Ustick Walter and fully restored with a 20,000-square-foot addition by Beyer Blinder Belle and workshop/apd. The exterior of the addition is impressive, and recalls the building’s shipbuilding history in the image adorning the perforated metal façade. The interior, however, is much simpler, more modest in its approach. The clean white walls and metal detailing clearly delineate it from the wood and brick historic space — although so much of that interior is covered by exhibition material that you can easily forget that the building is 154 years old. As part of the new green building initiative at the Yard, BLDG 92 is aiming for LEED Platinum certification, and the BNYDC is working hard to share that goal with the public. Upon entering the museum, you’re given instructions for a “Sustainability Scavenger Hunt” that leads you around the building and grounds, to eighteen stations that highlight specific sustainability features. It’s an engaging way to introduce green building principles to children, and a large part of the BLDG 92 educational mission seems to cater to a young audience. BNYDC has partnered with the Brooklyn Historical Society to provide curriculum materials for students in all grades, tours are provided for schools during the week, and free learning materials are provided on the BLDG 92 website to compliment these visits.

The inaugural exhibit, Brooklyn Navy Yard: Past, Present and Future, examines the 165-year history of the Yard. On the first floor, you find a chronological overview of the history of Brooklyn, the Navy Yard, and relevant US military activity, along with a section dedicated to how military innovations have influenced mass-market product design. The second floor delves more into the history of naval ship building, and highlights a few of the major vessels constructed at the Navy Yard and elsewhere in Brooklyn. Two mutoscopes on display – which remind me of the classic ‘80s viewfinder toy – allow you to watch a slide show of sorts of a dry-dock in action. The third floor of the museum also houses “Gallery 92,” which will host rotating, temporary shows. Currently on view is an exhibit curated by Christopher Anderson, a Yard tenant and war photojournalist, in memory of his friend Tim Hetherington who was killed in April 2011 while documenting the Libyan revolution. The fourth floor features an outpost of the Cobble Hill cafe Ted & Honey, and a seating area wrapped by a terrace that offers views overlooking the Yard.

The mission of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Center at BLDG 92 is not limited to education and sustainability. The community center and museum serves as a way for the BNYDC to maintain good will with the surrounding community in the face of contentious debate about the redevelopment of the site — the preservation of Admiral’s Row, a series of historic houses most of which will be razed to make way for a large supermarket, is just one example — and to promote the viability of industry-led development. It will be interesting to see how the future growth and reinvention of the Yard is represented in the museum’s programs. But, from this first look, BLDG 92 has the potential to be an excellent addition to the cultural landscape of Brooklyn and to engage the local community in ways the Navy Yard of years prior was unable to do.

Mutoscopes at BLDG 92 | All photos by Katie Stapleton

Katie Stapleton is a licensed architect currently working at Kliment Halsband Architects. She is particularly interested in the relationship between architecture and [German] politics and interim architectural installations in an urban context. She is a former project associate for Urban Omnibus.

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.

Photo by Ismaelly Pena

In our quest to bring you a wide range of urban thought and action, Urban Omnibus has, over the past two years, shared perspectives on the social and environmental promise of vertical density, on the rich diversity of New York’s housing typologies, and on the specific social and cultural conditions of certain New York neighborhoods, from Jackson Heights to the East Village to East New York. This week, Architectural League Executive Director Rosalie Genevro brings those three themes together in a historical snapshot of Starrett City, a major housing development built between 1972 and 1976 in Southeastern Brooklyn.

Starrett City’s history is singular, formed in the urban crosscurrents of race, class, housing policy and the ever-evolving idea of community. As Genevro delved deeper into this story, speaking with long-time residents and some of the people who helped create and manage the development, she found much more than an account of how a fascinating New York neighborhood got to be that way. She found a thought-provoking counter-example to trends in housing and urban policy that prioritize individualized kinds of built form and ownership over shared resources and collective aspiration. 

The need to rethink shared resources is a recurring theme in innovative thinking about housing current and future urban populations. Just last week, the Architectural League joined with the Citizens Housing and Planning Council to unveil some provocative schemes for residential units and buildings that address New York’s shortage of housing for single adults and other “unconventional” households — households that form the large majority in the city these days. The schemes are part of the Making Room project, and were produced by four teams of architects whom CHPC and the League commissioned to test what kinds of housing could be produced for New Yorkers if certain housing regulations and standards were reconsidered. The architects’ proposals and the proceedings of the Making Room symposium will be available very soon on the Making Room website and the Architectural League’s website. One of the threads connecting the proposals was an emphasis on shared facilities and common spaces, which poses some interesting questions about the very idea of “home.”

In thinking about these questions, New Yorkers have a number of rich traditions to draw on. The cooperative housing model is much more ingrained here than in other cities. The diversity of our multifamily housing stock already relies inherently on sharing — boiler systems, lobbies, hallways — and on the intensive use of our streets and other public places. Looking a little deeper into the social story that inhabits the built environment — in this case, the story behind one of the last New York City developments built on the tower-in-the-park model — can only help illuminate new thinking about the relationship between people and buildings, and just might challenge us to question some of our basic assumptions about house, home and the American landscape. -C.S.

Photo by Flickr user C-Monster

Some months ago I was asked to take part in a series of lectures on the reverberations of the idea of “house” in American culture. Being a New Yorker, I immediately moved away from “house” and towards “home” and “apartment.” To my mind, American mythmaking has given far too much weight to “house.” What interests me more is the idea of home and the many, many different ways Americans construct that. If the idea of “house” didn’t wield so much influence, what might that mean for public policy?

I have been intrigued by Starrett City for quite a while, since spending time in the neighboring district of East New York working on Architectural League projects on housing, park and community design. Starrett — renamed Spring Creek Towers in 2002 — is a community that works. It is one of the most racially integrated areas of the city; it is safe; and if the buildings themselves seem uninspired on the exterior, they nevertheless provide accommodating, affordable housing for moderate income New Yorkers in a well-tended landscape. There is a large group of residents who feel deeply connected to Starrett/Spring Creek Towers and who feel that it provides all they are looking for in a place to live. So the question is: How did a group of high-rise, unlovely brick buildings designed on the much-maligned tower-in-the-park model and built on a former landfill on the very edge of Brooklyn ever manage to become “home”?

THE SITE
The 46 residential towers of Starrett City, along with parking garages, a power plant, sports center and shopping center, were built from 1972 to 1976 on a large, marshy, city-owned site in southeast Brooklyn. Since the late 1960s, efforts had been made to develop the site, which offered the possibility of creating a very large number of new housing units without having to relocate current residents. The project site, between Flatlands Avenue and the Shore Parkway on the edge of Jamaica Bay near the Brooklyn/Queens border, had been used as a landfill. It was located across a small inlet from the Italian and Jewish neighborhood of Canarsie, and on its north side abutted East New York, which had changed during the 1950s and ‘60s from working-class Italian and Jewish to largely low-income black and Hispanic residents.

THE POLITICAL CLIMATE
New York City in 1972 was a city under stress. Crime was high and increasing; racial tensions were inflamed, the city’s manufacturing job base was disappearing, and its fiscal situation was deteriorating. Liberal Republican John Lindsay was mayor. He had attempted to introduce new approaches to planning, experimented with decentralization of control of the schools, and made an effort to integrate residential neighborhoods through introducing scatter-site public housing. But the ambitious 1969 plan for the city, developed by the City Planning Department, was never enacted; the effort at school decentralization in Ocean Hill-Brownsville eventually resulted in an enormously destructive teachers’ strike; and attempts to integrate New York neighborhoods produced an tense situation surrounding the Housing Authority’s proposal to build a project in the middle-class neighborhood of Forest Hills. In general, there was widespread skepticism about the motives and capabilities of liberal-led government.

THE PROJECT
Work to develop the landfill site had been begun by the United Housing Foundation (UHF), a union coalition that had developed a large number of cooperative apartments in New York over the years. UHF and its leader, Abraham Kazan, were pioneers in the development of workers’ cooperatives in New York City, and had created a substantial body of well-built, carefully managed, desirable and long-lasting housing that continues to this day to account for a very significant portion of New York City’s middle-income housing stock. For this and other projects, Kazan and the UHF worked with the architect Herman Jessor, who devoted his entire 60+ year career to the design of housing for workers, including the more than 40,000 units built by the United Housing Foundation in such projects as Penn South, Hillman Houses, and Co-op City. Jessor was known for his mastery of construction technology and building and zoning codes, and a superbly honed capacity to deliver the greatest possible amount and most practically usable space in his apartments.

Penn South

Hillman Houses

Co-op City and Baychester

In keeping with its other projects, the United Housing Foundation envisioned the Twin Pines development — as Starrett City was initially called — as a cooperative. But rising construction, financing and energy costs, and the fact that UHF was simultaneously developing Co-op City in the Bronx, forced the organization to sell the unfinished development. It found a willing buyer in the Starrett Company. Starrett saw potential in taking over the project because of a recent change in the tax laws, making it possible to sell tax shelters for low and moderate income rental (but not co-op) housing and thereby providing a very lucrative benefit to investors.

In the volatile racial climate of early-’70s New York, the change from a cooperative project to a rental project generated a great deal of controversy, because many residents of nearby Jamaica Bay neighborhoods equated rentals with low income black tenants and feared that the new project would “tip” the Brooklyn shore to all minority tenancy. To get the project approved, Starrett Housing Corporation promised the city’s Board of Estimate that it would create and sustain an integrated development with a 70 percent white population, which was the figure the developers believed would prevent the project from “tipping.”

Starrett City under construction

AN INTEGRATED COMMUNITY
Starrett hired a Lindsay administration housing official named Robert Rosenberg to create the integrated project that Starrett had promised the Board of Estimate — but which the company had no idea how to deliver. Realizing his task was first of all a marketing challenge, Rosenberg made a number of moves to make the development more attractive and to reinforce the sense that this was a fresh new community. He insisted on completing the buildings near the Shore Parkway first, rather than on the north near Flatlands. Prospective tenants would come into the development from the water side, rather than passing through the deteriorated blocks of East New York. He invested more in the landscaping than had originally been budgeted, and built an on-site sports club. He added canopies to the buildings, built a shopping center, and successfully lobbied to have an elementary school built on the site, with lots of parking that proved to be a significant attraction for teachers. He created a private security force for the project.

Making the apartments themselves appealing required less effort: the fact that the original architectural program was for cooperative units meant that they were larger than typical New York City rental apartments. Jessor designed apartment buildings from the inside out, with cross-ventilation in the bedrooms, entry foyers and windowed kitchens. Rosenberg skillfully used all these features in his marketing. He organized the first focus groups ever employed in multifamily rental housing, and he made the first television ads for a rental development.

He also managed the tenant selection process to make every building and every floor integrated. In 1988, 12 years after the development opened, an article in The New York Times called Starrett City perhaps the most integrated area of New York City: 62% white, 23% black, 9% Hispanic and 6% Asian or people of mixed race. Twenty years later, in 2007, the Starrett City census tract was 32% white, 41% black and 19% Hispanic. How these levels of integration were initially achieved — through the use of separate waiting lists for white and minority tenants — was the subject of a suit brought by the NAACP, which was settled in 1987 with an agreement that Starrett City would increase the number of apartments made available to minority applicants and that 20 other New York State housing projects built under the Mitchell-Lama program would set integration goals. This settlement was challenged by the Reagan Justice Department, which argued that the waiting lists constituted illegal use of quotas. This argument prevailed and the use of multiple waiting lists was ended.

Notwithstanding the controversy and attention that surrounded the suits, something significant — a community — had been established at Starrett City. Whether because of Rosenberg’s skillful marketing, or the fact that he and his tenant relations staff had an ample budget to fund tenant clubs and activities, or something about the self-selection of the tenants, or whether it was the aspiration to integration itself, Starrett residents seem, from the start, to have perceived their development as something particular and appealing.

Ellie Mandell, the white president of the local school board, told a newspaper reporter in 1988: “We want to live in an integrated community, that’s what we’re all about. Maybe we didn’t do so well in our generation, but we hope the kids who are growing up here together will do better.” Spencer Holden, a black resident and president of the Onyx Society, a benevolent association, told the same reporter: “I have lived all over New York and this is 1,000 percent better than any other neighborhood. I’m not saying everyone’s just nice, nice, nice. But when you’ve got blacks, Jews, Italians, all living together on the same floor, you’re not going to be yelling crazy things. I’m not saying everybody loves everybody else, but everybody lives with everybody else in a comfortable civilized manner.”

Photo by Ismaelly Pena

In over 20 years as the executive director of the Architectural League of New York, Rosalie Genevro has pursued the League’s mission – to nurture excellence and engagement in architecture, design and urbanism – through consistent innovation in the content and format of live events, exhibitions and publications (both in print and online). She has conceived and developed projects that have mobilized the expertise of the League’s international network of architects and designers towards applied projects in the public interest, including Vacant Lots, New Schools for New York, Envisioning East New York, Ten Shades of Green, Worldview Cities and Urban Omnibus.

On Saturday, October 8, Cinebeasts presented Gowanderlust!, an event combining a neighborhood walking tour with quick, guerilla-style film installations. Just after dusk, a group gathered at the Bell House, a bar in Gowanus, Brooklyn, where we met Nathan Kensinger, photographer, documentary filmmaker, festival programmer and our tour guide for the evening. Kensinger is best known for his work documenting off-limits spaces along the industrial waterfront of New York City. After many years living and working in Gowanus, he knows the neighborhood well and our walk was enlivened by his tales of neighborhood’s politics, environmental issues and urban legends.

Photo by Matthew Caron

Moving towards our first stop, a truck depot at 5th Street and 2nd Avenue, we took a moment to discuss the industrial history of the Gowanus Canal, its designation as a Superfund site and why, unlike many of New York’s other post-industrial waterfront areas, it has yet to be redeveloped (extreme pollution combined with the economic downturn was the group consensus). After a quick turn, we rambled across railroad ties to a vacant lot, the site of our first screening. On a screen tacked to an unsuspecting van, we viewed Silo and Camera Roll for Taylor. Silo is a single-shot time-lapse of ISSUE Project Room at its former location in a converted silo alongside the Gowanus Canal. Camera Roll for Taylor is what director Joel Schlemowitz calls a “camera roll city cine-poem.” Made as a filmic postcard to a friend, Schlemowitz refracted his frames through a crystal, shooting only sites in the vicinity of the canal.

Our second stop landed us just across from Dykes Lumber Yard on 6th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues. Projected just below the Dykes sign, we viewed SSS by Henry Hills. Shot in 1988, the film is composed of footage of instances of dance-like spontaneous movement in the streets of the East Village. SSS provoked conversation about ways to inhabit and appropriate under- and un-used urban space — and, it turns out, the film was the inspiration for the Gowanderlust event.

Photo by Matthew Caron

Our third stop landed us across from The Old American Can Factory, at 3rd Street and 3rd Avenue, facing a long abandoned landmarked building. Built in 1872-3, the Coignet Stone Company building was built entirely of cast concrete as a prototype to demonstrate the material’s versatility. The building sits at the edge of what was once an industrial park and is now an expansive, locally-infamous vacant lot. It has housed squatters, provided space and inspiration to artists, been termed a part of “Brooklyn’s biggest toxic playground,” and is now owned by the Whole Foods Company. Projected onto the doors of the Coignet building, we viewed Autumn Leaves, a short film by Brooklyn-based artist Donna Cameron. Cameron uses a unique method that combines photo emulsion and paper to create her work. In Autumn Leaves, she recreates the beauty of autumn by ripping, tearing and rustling the papers, simulating both the sounds and appearance of falling leaves.

A short walk across the 3rd Street Bridge brought us to our fourth stop, at the edge of the canal by the Gowanus Dredgers’ boat launch. Founded in 1999, the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club is dedicated to providing waterfront access and education along the canal and throughout other waterfront communities in Brooklyn. Just next to the launch site, we screened our final film, Kevin T. Allen’s What the Sea Left Behind. Depicting a “journey above and below one of America’s most polluted waterways,” Allen used a homemade hydrophone and binaural contact microphones to record the sounds of a canoe on the canal.

Photo by Matthew Caron

On our way back to Cabinet magazine’s offices for a final slideshow and some Brooklyn Brewery brew, we took a break on the Carroll Street Bridge. Built in 1888, it is the oldest retractile bridge in the United States. Instead of rising up, the bridge swings to the bank to allow oncoming boats to pass. From the silo in Joel Schelmowitz’s film to the vacant lands and, of course, the canal itself, the view from the bridge perfectly linked all the pieces of our walk together and offered us a moment to discuss the past and the future of the canal and Gowanus.

Hosting everything from off-the grid communes turned drug houses, to houseboat pioneers, to innovative work spaces, to dumpster swimming pools, post-industrial Gowanus has acted as a refuge for the artistic and the eccentric, for the communal enthusiast and the anarchist. And so, the days when the police would comb the canal for bodies, and the density of toxic waste would cause the canal to self-ignite now seem both long gone and not so long gone. With a massive rezoning complete, construction and development efforts stalled, and the Superfund clean up just beginning, I was left wondering what the future will hold for Gowanus. Are the days of dumpster pools and guerrilla film exhibitions on their way out, soon to be replaced by condos and nondescript commercial development? Or, thanks to the economy, are they just warming up?

Photo by Matthew Caron

Meg Kelly is a researcher and designer. As a Fulbright Fellow, she recently completed “Tracing Shifts of Place: Migration, Identity and Landscape in Dharavi,” a year-long oral history project that investigated and documented the physical, political and cultural landscape of one of Asia’s largest and most complex informal communities through the eyes of its youth. She is a former project associate of Urban Omnibus and a current collaborator at UnionDocs.

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.

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.

For architecture-, design- and urbanism-themed cinema fans in New York, the next few weeks are a treasure trove of festivals, screenings and panel discussions. This weekend, from October 15-16, is the Red Hook International FIlm and Video Festival. The Architecture & Design Film Festival runs from October 19-23, and then from November 2-10 we’ll get DOC NYC, New York City’s Documentary Festival. Though only one of the three festivals is explicitly dedicated to architecture and design, all three have lineups full of films that readers of Urban Omnibus are sure to find interesting. To help you sift through the options, we’ll be bringing you suggestions of what not to miss from each event. Stay tuned for suggestions for the A&D Film Festival and DOC NYC next week. But first up, this weekend’s Red Hook Festival.

The Red Hook International Film and Video Festival presents short films from around the country, with a particular focus on Brooklyn filmmakers, stories from New York City, and reflections on the festival’s home base, Red Hook, “an urban, industrial, waterfront community where fisherman, longshoreman, artists, small businesses and housing projects live together.” The films range from 5 to 27 minutes, and will be presented in five screenings organized around themes like “Stories from the Streets” and “Underneath the City.” The Red Hook Festival takes place at the Brooklyn Waterfront Artist’s Coalition at 499 Van Brunt Street in Red Hook, Brooklyn, on Saturday, October 15th (1-6pm) and Sunday, October 16 (2:30-6pm). Read on for some highlights from the event (including two Urban Omnibus-produced short films!) or click here for more information and complete listings.

Still from Lehigh Valley 79

Lehigh Valley 79
Saturday, October 15th, 2:30pm
In 1986, Red Hook resident David Sharps bought the Lehigh Valley #79, also known as the Waterfront Museum and Showboat Barge, for one dollar. Since purchasing the vessel, Sharps has devoted his life to restoring the barge to its original condition — while raising his family on board. Lehigh Valley 79 will be screened as part of the program “Red Hook Block: Family and Tradition.”

Still from Urban Soil Horizon

Urban Soil Horizon, Urban Watershed and The Urban Homesteading Project
Saturday, October 15th, 4:00pm
The short films clustered assembled for the session titled “Art on the Waterfront” explore the city’s boundary between land and water. Urban Soil Horizon documents “the existence of dirt in a world of concrete and asphalt” and chronicles the the rhythms of erosion and accretion in the urban, human driven environment. Urban Watershed follows the paths of water in the city, as it travels over surfaces, into storm drains and then to groundwater systems carrying both nutrients from and detritus of the city. Urban Omnibus‘ own George Trakas at the Water’s Edge: Newtown Creek is next on the docket, followed by The Urban Homesteading Project, which highlights an installation that took discarded Christmas trees and deposited them in semi-natural formations “to mimic natural forests in industrial zones located along the Newtown Creek.” “Art on the Waterfront” concludes with the second Urban Omnibus video appearing in the festival, Archipelago, which captures a day in the life of five New York City neighborhoods: Hunts Point, Jamaica, Mariner’s Harbor, Downtown Brooklyn, and Chelsea. For a complete list of films screened during “Art on the Waterfront,” Click here for more films screened as part of “Art on the Waterfront.”

Still from Masstransiscope

Masstransiscope, Inspiring Spaces and Undercity
Sunday, October 16th, 2:30pm
The session titled “Underneath New York” focuses on the city beneath the surface. Masstransiscope is a short portrait of Bill Brand’s zoetrope installation in the abandoned Myrtle Avenue station in Brooklyn, visible from Manhattan-bound B and Q trains, from its creation in 1983 through its recent restoration. Inspiring Spaces: 25 Years of Arts for Transit profiles the history of this MTA program that brings public art to New York’s subway stations. Undercity follows urban explorer Steve Duncan to the city’s extremes, from the underground tunnels and streams to the top of the Williamsburg Bridge. Click here to see more films screened as part of “Underneath New York.”

Still from Nobody Can Predict the Moment of Revolution

Nobody Can Predict the Moment of Revolution and To Be Seen
Sunday, October 16th, 4:00pm
“Taking it to the Streets,” the final session of the weekend, will look at public expression and protest. Nobody Can Predict The Moment Of Revolution, a particularly timely screening, is an 8-minute glimpse into days five and six of Occupy Wall Street. And To Be Seen examines street art’s capacity for social, artistic and political expression, with a particular focus on work found on the streets of New York City. Click here to see more films screened as part of “Taking it to the Streets.”

Jessica Cronstein is a project associate at Urban Omnibus. She is a designer and writer interested in the point at which the social, cultural and physical growth of a city intersect. She has just completed her M.Arch at Rice University and lives in New York City. 

Remember the Festival of Ideas for a New City? Among the incredible offerings of talks, openings, innovative street fair activities and, of course, posters, one of the more visually striking happenings was the transformation of the facade of the New Museum and parts of the surrounding neighborhood by a group of artists who work with projection and light. Tomorow night, the people who brought us Flash:Light NYC are bringing together an even greater collection of artists to light up the industrial waterfront of Greenpoint, Brooklyn for the second year of Bring to Light: Nuit Blanche New York.

This free, nighttime festival of ephemeral public art will showcase the work of some of the established auteurs of this artistic genre, such as Krzysztof Wodiczko, alongside architects, such as Diller, Scofidio and Renfro (who are reprising their 1993 video “Soft Sell,” which critiques the re-development of Times Square in a way provocatively resonant with changes currently underway in Greenpoint) and a long list of emerging talent. The entire spectacle intends to encourage spectators “to re-imagine public space and civic life.” The Omnibus team, proud civic partner of the event, is particularly excited to check out the urban interventions of Chris Woebkin, the industrial photography of Nathan Kensinger and the joyful rainbows of Reid Bingham and Sean McIntyre.

The festival runs from 6pm until 1am, Saturday, October 1st, one block from the intersection of Greenpoint Avenue and Franklin Street. For more information, head to bringtolightnyc.org.

Cotner’s methods connect an inheritance of classical poetic forms and oral tradition with the audio- and image-based communication of the contemporary urban milieu. Plato took to the agora as the stage for his dialogues. Today’s agoras are more fluid. Commerce, politics and social activity play out in public and private realms, tangible and intangible spaces. Cotner’s work seeks out the democratic domain of traditional social space while inhabiting and embracing modern day agoras, from shops to sidewalks to the websites where his captioned slideshows are published (most recently down Brooklyn’s beloved Bedford Avenue).

Fleeting conversations are a human infrastructure that, according to Cotner, “build automatic bridges among people amid the city’s ceaseless flow.” His deliberate interventions are intended to give rise to organic and unpredictable results. Earlier this month, I had an opportunity to take my own walk with Cotner, and to reaffirm Urban Omnibus‘ commitment to introducing readers to creative urbanists whose work falls outside traditional urban practice. As with our other artist interviews, Cotner offers a new way of looking at and interacting with the physical and social fabric of New York. Read on to hear his musings on poetry, neighborliness and waking up to the city around us as we stroll through Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park.

— Caitlin Blanchfield

Jon Cotner

In many ways writing is like a city; there is a structure and there are rules, but often the beauty comes from improvisation within this framework.
Should we take this dirt path?

Sure. Do you think your literary sensibility has changed the way you interact with the city or that living in a city has shaped the way that you write?
I would say that New York City presents ceaseless surprises whenever we step outside. Perhaps all places on earth do, but I’m always surprised, always dazzled by what I see in New York. The sheer unpredictability of the sidewalks means that whatever form I develop to convey New York must accommodate spontaneity. So my friend Andy Fitch and I came up with this dialogic form that allows us to drift through streets and various venues here in the city, locations such as the Union Square Whole Foods — which we call “WF,” just to play it safe — MoMA, Central Park, Prospect Park, a Tribeca parking garage and so on.

I’m interested in forms that capture the motion, the momentum of New York. Of course we didn’t invent the dialogic form. That goes back at least as far as Plato, and I’m sure people before him were composing dialogues. But what that form allows me and Andy to do is to constantly alternate between our own thoughts, our memories and our concrete interactions with the city. In other words, it allows us to reach the state of the walker. Whenever you walk, you might be considering something from your afternoon or thinking about something you’ve read. Then, all of a sudden, something else arises: somebody walks by with a dog, somebody pushes a carriage, you name it, and you are pulled out of yourself and confronted with what might be called the external world.

My fiancée Claire Hamilton and I have developed another form — and when I say “develop” I mean “breathe new life into.” Just as Andy and I attempt to breathe new life into dialogue, Claire and I are attempting to breathe new life into the slideshow. We’ve made a variety of slideshows that, again, feature this oscillation between ourselves and the world.

Let me put it this way: I’m particularly interested in forms that capture the motion, the momentum of New York. I don’t want an excessively ponderous form. The nice thing about dialogue is that it always moves; slideshows move too, from one image and caption to the next.

A chat in Fort Greene Park

Both Ten Walks / Two Talks and your slideshows are observational in format. They present a picture of the city that allows other people to take what they will and form their own connections. I guess everyone sees the city differently, but do you think poetry has made you observe the city differently than the average New Yorker would? 
I believe poetry, more than a technique or genre, is a way of life. I’m reminded of this Korean proverb: “Knows his way, stops seeing.” The practice of poetry allows me to tune into the city on a daily basis. There’s a Spanish poet I like very much named Antonio Machado. In one of his longer poems, he presents a series of imaginary dialogues between himself and a younger poet seeking guidance. Machado advises the young poet, “Wake up as much as possible.” He suggests we needn’t bother reading every single book from beginning to end. Sure, we should read a careful selection, so that we get some sense of what other people have done. But the secret for poetry is wakefulness in this physical world. Poetry encourages us all to stay as awake as possible.

Poetry heightens our sense of time — the fleetingness of seconds — because poetry descends to the level of the microsecond. Look, for example, at the haiku poets who attune themselves to the tiniest realities. I think the point of what I’m doing is to encourage people to do their own work, to inhabit their own lives and, using Machado’s expression, to wake up as much as possible.

Click the play button above to listen to an audio clip of Cotner’s Spontaneous Society walks. (Running time: 2:13) 

It seems to be the same thing with the Spontaneous Society walks, where participants are encouraged to reach out to passersby with pre-selected phrases and small gestures of friendliness and conversation. And by bringing attention to obvious but unacknowledged routines, these walks are also funny. How did you conceive of the idea and what fueled your desire not only to make these connections, but also to lead groups in the walks?
Spontaneous Society developed incrementally over the years, line by line, across multiple cities. About 20 lines form the project’s core, though I’ll often improvise new ones as I’m walking. The point is to build automatic bridges among people amid the city’s ceaseless flow. These lines are short — “That’s a good-looking dog.” “That’s a nice spot for a picnic.” “It’s a good day to have the feet out.” — and extremely basic. They’re 99% effective in terms of replacing urban anonymity with something bordering on affection.

Poetry encourages us all to stay as awake as possible. It allows me to tune into the city on a daily basis.We’re in a tough spot right now – environmentally, economically, the list goes on. Politicians can’t speak with one another and, as a consequence, economies are crumbling. Citizens are bitter about this destructiveness. Uncertainty and fear are pervasive. Spontaneous Society comes out of my desire to reach as many beings as possible. I’ve grown tired of art that has limited audiences or limited capacities to affect this world.

One way to address widespread social problems is by addressing each other with kindness in the mundane world. At least this much is up to us. Sadly, the other problems seem out of our hands. Spontaneous Society has the humble social aim of producing laughter and smiles among people who might otherwise walk dogs, push carriages, pull suitcases, or go about general daily business with unconscious gravity. Both the speaker and recipient come away with renewed awareness of their physical circumstances. And, because death is inescapable, it’s important to lose as few moments as possible in this life.

Each line depends largely on timing and tone. That’s another poetic feature of the project. Mechanical recitation is insufficient; one must put his or her desire for dialogue into each utterance. I look at Spontaneous Society as a primer for social communication in this era of antisocial corruption and strife.

A "good-looking dog" in the park

What do you think creates neighborliness in different parts of New York? Where do you encounter neighborliness most and least often and what do you think contributes to this? Do you think there are ways to foster friendly connections in different New York neighborhoods? Your walk down Bedford Avenue with Claire, for example, seems to be an exploration of neighborhoods.
Total neighborliness is, of course, unattainable. It would demand consciousness of each person we pass as an absolutely singular being. We’re in a crowded city, and that means paying attention to some people while ignoring others. Everyone has tastes, habits, patterns of movement that outline their own equivalent of “social circles.” The more neighborly somebody is, the broader their circle of acquaintances and friends becomes. Frequent acquaintance leads to friendship. Affection, or what we’re calling neighborliness, originates via shared experience, and much of this experience is linguistic, either spoken language (“How are you?” “Great to see you!”) or the language of gestures (waving hello or goodbye, nodding).

Neighborhoods with less density, less noise and a rooted residential population tend to have greater neighborliness than those that are packed, loud or filled with tenants who move in one year and leave the next. Clinton Hill comes to mind as an example of a neighborly neighborhood. It is a quiet area with gorgeous architecture and good air. People seem calmer, more open than in other neighborhoods around town. There’s tremendous diversity, too. On a single block I’ll talk with people whose heritages span the globe — Bhutanese, Sudanese, Mexican, Caribbean, among others.

Jon Cotner leads a Spontaneous Society walk | via Elastic City

Each neighborhood in New York is so “New York.” When Claire and I were walking down Bedford Avenue, we went into this garage in Bedford-Stuyvesant that was so “New York,” and if you look around here, Fort Greene Park is so “New York” as well. New York exists everywhere but is also more than the sum of its parts. New York City is a giant classroom. Every time you walk around you have an opportunity for learning.

I believe neighborliness occurs at the level of individuals. Those who want to acknowledge people in their immediate vicinity can do so wherever they find themselves. You may not get a response. Depending on the situation, you may even arouse anger. It’s always helpful to keep in mind that we’re incomplete as isolated beings and that, for the most part, we encounter people once-and-one-time-only in this fleeting existence. If we’re going to reach out, even with the simplest greetings, this must happen now or never.

In “Local Worlds: A Bedford Avenue Slideshow,” which we did for the BMW Guggenheim Mobile Lab, as well as in the Art Basel and Armory slideshows we made for Paper Monument, Claire and I put these principles into practice, initiating an array of momentary, mindful encounters, none of which we could have predetermined. The words that come out of others’ mouths are always surprising, even in banal situations.

That’s true, New York is so many things. It’s the brownstones, it’s the things you find at every deli…
Exactly, you don’t have to be wasted in a Union Square night club to experience New York. In fact, I think that would probably get in the way of experiencing New York.

Writing and observation, as well as one-on-one dialogue, are, in many ways, introspective rituals. In the highly social context of the city and given the outgoing nature of your work, how do you balance moments of self-reflection that walking can provide with forging connections?
For me, self-reflection is grounded in the Socratic idea that we can only understand ourselves through dialogue. Which is to say, my self-reflection urges me to risk solitude and to regard myself as a site for improvisatory encounters. Whether it’s Andy in Ten Walks / Two Talks, or Claire in the slideshows, or passersby in Spontaneous Society, I’m always seeking human contact, without which none of this work would happen. So I experience no conflict between introspection and city life. If anything, introspection hurls me beyond its limits, prompting perception, friendship, love.

Update: A video that appeared in the original version of this article was removed on 9/29/11.

Jon Cotner is the author, with Andy Fitch, of Ten Walks/Two Talks. It was chosen as a Best Book of 2010 by The Week, The Millions, Time Out Chicago, and Bookslut. Their new collaboration is called Conversations over Stolen Food. With Claire Hamilton, Cotner has made slideshows for The Believer, Paper Monument, and the BMW Guggenheim Lab. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, and teaches in Pratt Institute’s Creative Writing Program.  

Caitlin Blanchfield is an assistant editor at Urban Omnibus. She is also a freelance editor for Actar and a freelance writer for Architizer.