Photo credits from left to right: Kyle R. Brooks; Steven Yavanian; Frank Guittard; Jason A. Tax.

Be sure to join us on July 8th for the latest in the Architectural League’s Conversations on New York series of public events. This one features former Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Dan Doctoroff, who set in motion many of the most significant urban projects of the past decade, from the Olympic Bid to congestion pricing to PLANYC 2030. Doctoroff will be in conversation with Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New Yorker. (Thursday, July 8 | 7:00 p.m. | The Great Hall, The Cooper Union | 7 East 7th Street | 1.5 CEUs).

And that’s not all that’s going on next week. On July 7th, there are two stimulating panel discussions to choose from. Up in East Harlem, a panel discussion and tour of Tapestry, the new mixed-use, green building, will highlight affordable housing and sustainable design. If you’re more up for a debate on what housing in 2050 will look like, the Forum for Urban Design is hosting a moderated discussion of their own. With the American population projected to grow by another 100 million by then, you can listen to two men with very differing opinions talk about how they think the American urban and suburban landscape will have adapted by then.

Speaking of ideas about the future, Crains, in honor of their 25th anniversary, reached out to a variety of New Yorkers from all disciplines and has come up with 25 ideas to create a better, future New York City. These ideas include topics familiar to Omnibus readers, such as how to rethink Governors Island, how to develop the local food chain, and how deal with New York’s traffic.

Back on May 3rd, ground broke on the Via Verde project in the South Bronx, a new mixed-use development that will include a variety of living environments for a multitude of income levels, and is also slated to certified LEED gold upon completion. The project will also help the city get to Mayor Bloomberg’s goal of an additional 165,000 affordable housing units by 2014. Shaun Donovan, the U.S. Secretary for HUD was at the ground-breaking ceremony, was recently interviewed by Architectural Record to discuss the effects of the stimulus package on affordable housing, and the role that architects have in reshaping urban communities. With $13.6 billion in stimulus funds allocated to HUD, that money has been critical to the continued construction of multi-family homes, and both HUD and architects have an unique opportunity to create a new sustainable model for lower-income communities.

The former Domino Sugar refinery on the Williamsburg waterfront has long been the source of contention within the neighborhood regarding future plans for the abandoned site. This past Tuesday, the City Council gave its support for the $1.4 billion development plan to turn the site into a 2,000 unit residential development. With this approval, the project is expected to gain final approval from the City Planning Commission next month. 660 of the units will be for lower income and working class families, and the Community Preservation Corporation, the developer for the site, conceded to reducing the height of the two tallest buildings (although the total number of units will remain the same), and will keep the main refinery building and the 40 foot tall Domino sign intact. Shuttle buses to the nearest subway stop will also be provided, but with the large number of parking spots that are planned for, many fear that the development will not encourage sustainable living in any regard, and have a negative impact on the surrounding community.

Making Policy Public, a program of The Center for Urban Pedagogy, has released their latest poster, “I Got Arrested! Now What?,” the sixth in the series that explores complex public policy through graphic design; past topics have included street vendors and predatory equity. This one deals with the juvenile justice system, following “Chris” from his arrest through trial in court, explaining each phase of the process and even giving important tips.

Image by Iwan Baan via Fast Company

The Summer Warm Up begins this Saturday at P.S 1, featuring Pole Dance by SO-IL, winner’s of the Young Architects Program. Constructed of a large mesh net set on a 16′x16′ grid of metal poles, bungee cords connected to the poles allow visitors to manipulate the net and the yoga balls atop the net. Perhaps the most interactive (and fun!) of the past few installations, you can also manipulate the sound of the poles or watch real-time visualizations of the installation from its own website.

That sounds like a great way to kick off what for many New Yorkers is a three-day weekend. Fireworks are along the Hudson River again this year. Below, a time-lapse video of last year’s display on the Hudson:

NYC Time Lapse July 4th, 2009 from BoB Coon on Vimeo.

If you’re staying in the city, take advantage of the summer weather, and check out Time Out’s guide to the long weekend. And for those that want to stay in Brooklyn, there are a few patriotic events there as well, including a bar crawl in Greenpoint that culminates in a “Most Patriotic” costume competition.


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

The City Reliquary’s show celebrating Stanley Wisniewolski’s eccentric oversize styrofoam icons that once accessorized many Williamsburg storefronts is just the type of quaintly doting showcase of local obscura I’ve come to love about the Reliquary. Thanks to a neighborhood resident who loved the character Wisniewolski’s sculptures gave to storefronts so much that she took the initiative and time to research them, Karen Hudes, a Brooklyn writer, found out the hoisted sculptures were painted styrofoam that had succumbed to the elements after their creator passed away.

I was attracted to a sketch of Grand-Metro Street Improvements by Brooklyn Union Gas and the Saint Nicholas Neighborhood Preservations and Housing Corporation that hung on the wall, prominently featuring Wisniewolski’s icons hanging from storefronts and a neighborhood pennant he also designed. Wisniewolski had worked at Saint Nicholas in an artistic capacity in the 70s and 80s, and was able to provide a distinctive design element for Williamsburg’s retail strips. Many stores hung his three-or-four foot three dimensional mobiles next to their signs for decades: a hammer still hangs outside the Crest hardware store on Metropolitan Avenue.

I spoke with the curator, Karen Hudes, about her inspirations. She noticed the icons when she moved to the neighborhood in the 1990s and was spurred to find out more about them as their numbers dwindled. A cigar icon, hanging from the ceiling at the Reliquary, captured Hudes’ eye for looking intriguingly old (I would say it looks almost deco). It turned out St Nicholas still had several of his icons in their basement, and the city’s Municipal Archive had pictures of many others. I found her research and exhibit to be an inspiration for anyone who’s ever had the passing interest to research a design element or relic of a bygone era seen around town.

I also spoke with one of Wisniewolski’s daughters who was delighted that Karen had taken an interest in her father’s work. Particularly notable at opening night was the lively mix of older longtime Williamsburg residents and the younger artsy urban history wonks, mingling in the gallery and pouring out into the backyard. It turns out the cigar had a reputation of being vaguely phallic, and made a popular picture background among longtime neighborhood residents.

The Vanishing Icons of Metropolitan Avenue: A History of Williamsburg’s Handmade Shop Signs from the 1980s runs through mid-July at the City Reliquary in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It showcases recovered sculptures and pictures of storefronts decorated with Stanley Wisniewolski’s design elements. Looking at the exhibit’s website, the icons don’t really pop as much as the newer high saturation color plastic lettering that many stores pictured now use. But imagining a Williamsburg past when a painted styrofoam sign would really catch your eye reminds us of the details of the built environment that we take for granted, sometimes even after they have vanished from view.

The City Reliquary Museum
370 Metropolitan Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11211

Call 718-782-4842 for opening times.


Jesse Mintz-Roth is a practicing city planner, originally from Berkeley, who now lives in Fort Greene. As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Update: You can now view Archipelago, an original Urban Omnibus video production, exhibited in The City We Imagined / The City We Made, that explores a day in the life of five New York neighborhoods: Hunts Point, Jamaica, Mariner’s Harbor, Downtown Brooklyn, and Chelsea, here on Urban Omnibus.

From tomorrow until June 26th, we are bringing you a unique opportunity to take stock of the range of design and planning activity that has reshaped New York City over the past ten years. The City We Imagined / The City We Made is the sixth in an ongoing series of Architectural League exhibitions about contemporary architecture in New York City. This installment chronicles the transformation the physical city in light of the convergence of an array of powerful forces: the events of 9/11, the policies and priorities of the Bloomberg Administration, the volatility of global and local economies, advances in material and construction technologies, and a new interest among the public in contemporary architecture. The exhibition consists of a chronological display of major projects, proposals of the past ten years; an installation of one thousand photographs, taken by a volunteer corps of nearly one hundred design professionals, that depicts New York today; video interviews with leading New Yorkers; and an original Urban Omnibus-produced video about the city as experienced in five neighborhoods that we’ll share with you guys in the coming weeks.

You should definitely come check it out. The show is at 250 Hudson Street, entrance on Dominick Street. Exhibition hours: Wednesday to Sunday, noon to 7pm. It’s quite an undertaking, and installing it has prevented us from rounding up the week’s worth of news and updates. But, nonetheless, here are some links to check out:

The Brooklyn Grange finds a site in Queens for its 40,000-ft rooftop farm.

A competition for data visualizations to “make government data more accessible and comprehensible to the American public.”

Speaking of data visualization, while we may have exhausted the Icelandic volcano eruption, check out this amazing visualization of what happened to plane traffic.

And also check out MIT’s progress on printable solar cells, MetroCard art in Williamsburg, and a simpler, safer Grand Army Plaza which reminds us of our detailed look at the plaza and the design competition to reinvent it. Check out the video we made about it below:

The NYC Department of Environmental Protection‘s Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant is already home of some of the most distinctive architecture in the City, the onion-dome digesters designed by Polshek Partnership Architects, as well as a lovely and serene Nature Walk designed by artist George Trakas. Not bad for a sewage plant along one the country’s most polluted waterways! And now the facility is adding another jewel to its crown: a Visitor Center, also designed by Polshek and featuring an indoor-outdoor fountain designed by artist Vito Acconci.

And now we’ll all have one more excuse to visit our beloved Nature Walk, site of our first meet-up and muse to artist George Trakas. As we get psyched to check out the visitor center — which will be open Fridays and Saturdays from noon to 4pm — maybe now is a good time to take another look at our video about Trakas’ design for the Nature Walk: