So, CUP’s Nehemiah talk last night was dope. Reverend Dr. Youngblood and architect Alexander Gorlin delivered on their promise to share some of the fascinating back-story of how they teamed up to design and built the Spring Creek Nehemiah Houses and how, against the odds, East Brooklyn Congregations built almost 3,000 units of owner-occupied, single-family housing in East New York, Brownsville and other areas of East Brooklyn affected by years of disinvestment.

Gorlin doesn’t just do East Brooklyn, however. Today in the Daily News, he opines on the rare instances of modern architecture in the Bronx, most of which find their expression in community service buildings such as the courthouse by Rafael Viñoly Architects or the Bronx Charter School for the Arts by WXY (designers of the NYC Info Center featured recently at the Architectural League).

Gorlin and Youngblood spoke within The University of Trash, an installation by Michael Cataldi and Nils Norman, billed as “an experiment in alternative architecture, urbanism, and pedagogy taking place in SculptureCenter’s main space.” Check it out before it closes on August 3rd.

And speaking of our friends at CUP, last week their Making Policy Public jury convened to select the advocacy groups and issues they will be addressing in their next season of posters. Now they’re putting the call out for policy-friendly artists and designers who want to collaborate on the new editions. If you aren’t familiar with this excellent project, a series of foldout posters that use graphic and information design to explore and explain complex public policy issues, or if you’re curious to know more about past designers’ experiences, check out Candy’s piece on Vendor Power! and Glen’s on Predatory Equity. Then, check out the five briefs, get your portfolios and statements of interest ready, and get involved! This season’s topics are:

1. Keeping parks public with FIERCE
2. Participating in public housing with Community Voices Heard
3. Redistricting reform with the Brennan Center for Justice
4. Navigating the juvenile justice system with the Center for Court Innovation
and
5. Mapping the tomato supply chain with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and Just Harvest USA

We’ve been talking about public space a lot lately, but Metropolis points out a different angle on the topic. Secure Cities is a website that maps out how heightened security measures in a post-9/11 world have affected urban public space in terms of increased surveillance, reduced accessibility and mobility, and restricted activity (via either physical or legal barriers).

Since it’s a Friday afternoon — Look! There’s a video game about controlling gridlock! (via Streetsblog)

And wait! Who knew the Manhattan Bridge was so wobbly?

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

Many of you have been getting into work by Marpillero Pollak Architects, info about East New York, and all the interesting happenings over at the Architectural League. If you fall smack dab in the overlap of that Venn diagram, then take a look at this podcast.

Last month, as part of the League’s New York Designs lecture series, Linda Pollak and Sandro Marpillero discussed their recent design of two Learning Gardens, one at the Whitestone Branch of the Queens Public Library and one at the Stone Avenue Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library in East New York. The gardens were constructed as part of the Horticultural Society of New York’s GreenBranches program.  In Linda and Sandro’s words:

The Horticultural Society of New York’s GreenBranches Program – in public-private partnership with Queens and Brooklyn library systems – constructs and maintains Learning Gardens in underutilized outdoor spaces at branch libraries. The program enables libraries – which have been called the last remaining truly public institutional spaces – to realize the potential of long-derelict sites as public outdoor program space.

The gardens, which are primarily intended to function as space for educational programming and library workshops, also benefit the neighborhood at large. The fences, once barriers, now offer places for social interaction, activating the boundary between these beloved neighborhood institutions and the streets that surround them. And they didn’t wait around for a ribbon cutting to start offering social benefits. The projects employed members of the GreenTeam, a transitional work program for recently released inmates that provides vocational training. And as for the immediate community of each library, GreenBranches and Marpillero Pollak involved them throughout the entire process, giving the garden’s users a strong sense of pride and ownership of the site.

Libraries, community engagement, excellent design, and activating street life. Yep, we like.

This Thursday, the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) is presenting another installment of their excellent People and Buildings series of live talk shows. This one will shed light on the fascinating back-story of the partnership, leadership, reverendship and, er, ‘architectship’ that has, to date, constructed almost 3,000 single-family, owner-occupied homes in Brooklyn. The program will feature a conversation with Reverend Dr. Youngblood and architect Alexander Gorlin about the Nehemiah Homeownership Program. More info is below; I recommend attending. Highly.

The Omnibus’ proud parents, the Architectural League of New York, have a long history with East New York, one of the neighborhoods where you’ll find Nehemiah houses, such as the ones designed by Alexander Gorlin’s firm, pictured above and featured in the League’s 2006 exhibit, New New York: Fast Forward. Way back in the winter of 1994 – the same year that the Nehemiah model pioneered by the East Brooklyn Congregations went national – the League held a design study called Envisioning East New York. The study invited architects, planners and landscape architects to share a variety of urban design strategies with a community that had experienced decades of disinvestment and contained within its borders many lots of city-owned, vacant land. As we’ve seen on the Omnibus, East New York has been entrepreneurial in its use of vacant lots, digging into urban agriculture in addition to experimenting with a variety of housing typologies and financing strategies. According to Envisioning East New York participant Perry Winston – who is also a trusted Omnibus informant from our days spent looking into community farming in the neighborhood – the League’s inspiration to hold the design study stemmed from “disappointment with the lack of imagination shown in the disposition of City-owned vacant land in the neighborhood.” He goes on:

The impetus for the call-for-ideas was … the desire to tap the imaginations of architects, planners, and landscape architects to broaden the range of development possibilities. The Architectural League’s brief challenged entrants to bring current urban design theories and strategies to bear on the problems and opportunities of this low-rise, mixed residential and industrial area of Brooklyn.

The results of the study – submissions from 25 teams of designers – were exhibited at the New Lots and Cypress Hill Branch Public Libraries in East New York as well as the Urban Center galleries in Manhattan. One month after the exhibit, Community Board 16 began drawing up a “197a Plan.”

Curiosity piqued? Then be sure to get to LIC on Thursday to hear the story of Nehemiah.

Nehemiah Spring Creek Houses. Image courtesy of the Capsys Corporation.

People and Buildings: Nehemiah! A Case Study in Radical Pragmatism
A slideshow and discussion with Reverend Dr. Youngblood and Architect Alexander Gorlin about a visionary project made real: the Nehemiah Homeownership Program. We’ll look at how religious leaders, Alinskyites, and architects worked with the City bureaucracy to develop 3,000 single-family homes for low- to moderate-income buyers – and build community in New York’s poorest neighborhoods. This program is presented in conjunction with the University of Trash exhibit at SculptureCenter in Long Island City.

Reverend Dr. Youngblood served as Senior Pastor of the St. Paul Community Baptist Church (SPCBC), located in the East New York section of Brooklyn, New York from 1974 to 2009. Dr. Youngblood is recognized on the national political front as a result of his work with East Brooklyn Congregations (EBC), the Brooklyn organizing entity of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). Dr. Youngblood is credited through EBC with leading the Nehemiah Housing Project, which to date has constructed 2,900 single-family owner-occupied homes in Brooklyn.

Alexander Gorlin opened his practice in 1986 after returning from his Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. He has since created an award-winning, internationally recognized architecture firm distinguished by its commitment to applying Modernist design principles to projects across the social spectrum. The firm designed the Nehemiah Spring Creek Houses on the edge of East New York. His contribution to the architectural field was recognized by American Institute of Architects when it admitted him as a Fellow in 2005.

Nehemiah! A Case Study in Radical Pragmatism
Thursday, July 23, 6 p.m.
SculptureCenter
44-19 Purves Street
Long Island City, NY
Free and open to the public.
Seating is limited, please RSVP to info@anothercupdevelopment.org

In this piece, Deborah Greig, Urban Agriculture Coordinator for East New York Farms!, explains the history of the organization in the context of the neighborhood.

For more on East New York’s history since the early 1960s, a good first place to look is Walter Thabit’s 2003 book How East New York Became a Ghetto.

In this piece, Holly Leicht, Deputy Commissioner of Development at HPD, explains the recent history of the city’s involvement in East New York and how strategic site disposition enabled the homegrown urban agriculture movement to flourish.

In this piece, we hear from Perry Winston, an architect formerly with the Pratt Center, who has worked with the community since the early 1990s. He describes how he brought together a diverse coalition of organizations, including the Cornell Cooperative Extension and the East New York LDC, on a grant from the Yamaha Corporation to map assets and engage the community in visioning sessions to identify development priorities.

If you want to learn more about East New York as a community, one first step is to look at some land use and demographic information:

Profile: Brooklyn Community Board 5

OasisNYC.net: Community Maps

In this piece, we meet Johanna Willens, the first farmer to sell her produce at the East New York Farmers’ Market in 1998.

For all you budding urban farmers out there, here are some
DIY tips to get you started on your own community garden:
First, the materials:
The New York City Compost Project
Gardens Alive

Then, some community workshops:
Brooklyn Botanic Garden: Gardening Page
Green Thumb NYC

And finally, some tip sheets and online resources:
The City Farms Tipsheet
OrganicGardening.com

In this piece, we explore the East New York farmers’ market. It’s open every Saturday between June 28th and November 15th. This August, the farmer’s market celebrated its tenth anniversary.

Clearly, there’s a lot more to this story than we were able to include. Check out some other precedents, community groups and further reading below, and send us links you think we should know about:

Earthworks Urban Farm: Detroit
Nationwide Urban Farming Site Listing
NPR: Farms Take Root in Detroit’s Foreclosures
Growing Home, Inc.

And last but not least, the live performance you just heard at the East New York Farmers’ Market is original work by local MC and vocalist “Lyrical Artist.” Check her out on MySpace:
Lyrical Artist on MySpace Music