Our friends at the Center for Urban Pedagogy have released their latest project, The Water Underground, in collaboration with the Lower East Side Ecology Center, City-as-School and RECYouth. CUP worked with students to research and produce a video exploring our city’s water infrastructure, from watershed to sewers to wastewater treatment plants. Regular Omnibus readers are very familiar with CUP’s work, and will also recognize the project’s teaching artist, Kate Zidar, from her recent feature on stormwater management. The 24-minute video, which can be viewed on Places, is both informative and entertaining — how often do you see an educational video about water supply that cuts together interviews with representatives from the DEP, claymation cavemen and Chamillionaire’s “Ridin’ Dirty?”

Speaking of dirty water, it has now been a month since the Transocean Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, setting off the devastating oil spill that is already past the 6 million gallon mark, and still growing. While conversations rage on about the environmental, economic and political impacts of the spill, our nation’s dependency on oil and the lifestyle choices that feed it, New York Times Op-Ed contributor Alex Prud’homme reminds us of our own local battles with mind-boggling toxic spillage, on the border of Greenpoint and Long Island City: “We tend to think of oil spills as dramatic events — a sinking ship, a burning rig. So it’s easy to forget that across the country, hundreds of spills, many left over from a less regulated time, continue to poison groundwater and leak toxic fumes. Instead of letting the Gulf spill divert our attention yet again from slow-moving disasters like Newtown Creek, we should take it as an impetus to address problems much closer to home.”

Worldchanging reports on some new developments in the field of tidal hydropower: underwater kites tethered to the ocean floor. Swedish company Minesto is working on these new turbines and hope to make them commercially available within four years.

This weekend is your last chance to visit the Fast Trash! exhibition on Roosevelt Island, and the organizers are closing it with a bang. Tomorrow, Saturday May 22nd at 5pm, there will be a live musical theater production in the gallery. “AVAC Memories tells the story of five pieces of household waste who are tossed into a Roosevelt Island garbage can and, together, go on a thrilling journey through the AVAC sanitation system.” Then, if you missed the Omnibus walking tour of the island last weekend, on Sunday the 23rd at 11am you can join Richard Melnick, President of the Greater Astoria Historical Society, on an East River waterfront walk starting in Queens and ending at the exhibition space at Gallery RIVAA.

Last, but not least, here’s a little poetry for a beautiful Friday afternoon: haikus about Freshkills.


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

Tuesday night at Metropolitan Exchange, John McLaughlin, Director of Environmental Services for the NYC Department of Environmental Protection, presented the lecture “Restoring Brooklyn’s Pennsylvania and Fountain Landfills” as part of the Freshkills Park Talks lecture series. The landfills – on Jamaica Bay, near JFK – were opened in the ’50s, closed in the ’80s, and capped and rehabilitated in the ’00s.  While they look like pristine parkland today, they represent a dark chapter in New York’s environmental history: both sites are listed as Class 2 Inactive Hazardous Waste Sites, which means that beneath their surfaces lie unknown quantities of toxins like benzene and dioxin.

Much of McLaughlin’s talk was Landfill 101: he described the type of membrane used to cap the toxins (40mm plastic), the varieties of topsoil chosen to cover the cap, and the plant species used to repopulate the site. He described the difference between landfills receiving municipal solid waste (like Freshkills), and those receiving more insidious toxins, like Pennsylvania and Fountain.  What lies inside a landfill determines its capping and effluent strategies, but interestingly, it also determines the site’s potential for eventual reintegration into larger sociological and political networks. For instance, public access to the sites is currently a flashpoint between DEP and representatives of East New York. The former want to make sure the site is absolutely safe before opening to the public; the latter want to secure open space for one of Brooklyn’s most park-deprived communities.

I found McLaughlin’s definition of ecological restoration salient: “the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded.” I couldn’t help but think of the parallel to urban ‘ecosystems’ like Detroit or the South Bronx – different kinds of sites where designers’ efforts are similarly needed to restore damaged ecologies, via a delicate intervention strategy like that described by McLaughlin. Landfills are simply the most egregious of past misdeeds, and therefore symbolize the daunting scale of our challenges.

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.

Travis Eby is a recent graduate of the Yale School of Architecture. He loves his stoop in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.