PLACEMAKING THROUGH LIGHTING
The City’s plan to make Lower Manhattan more vibrant after dark goes beyond simply installing more lights. The title of the New York City Economic Development Corporation’s Request for Proposals, “Placemaking through Lighting,” explains the initiative’s priorities: to use creative illumination to enhance Lower Manhattan’s identity, to attract visitors and investment and to create a sense of place for the area. Some of the vanguard lighting technologies mentioned in the brief include projection mapping, 3D effects and a range of interactive strategies, including motion-activated lighting. According the The New York Times’ City Room, EDC officials and local Community Board members cited the fact that the Financial District loses out on the after-dark tourist foot traffic that small businesses in other neighborhoods enjoy, a concern that motivated the desire to use lighting to “transform the experience of Lower Manhattan at night.”

TRANSIT POLITICS
Transit advocates are angry at the implications of Governor Cuomo’s new tax code on MTA funding. Essentially, Cuomo sets to eliminate a payroll tax from which the MTA receives roughly $320 million and substitute it with a direct state government subsidy. This transformation of dedicated MTA revenue to discretionary funding makes the MTA particularly susceptible towards future budget cuts. Moreover, the new bill, rushed forward by Cuomo, avoided public discourse and “eviscerated” the previous lock box legislation, which made the government responsible for reporting fully the effects of funding cuts ahead of any fiscal re-appropriations. Assuming the MTA subsidies do wither out in the future, Charles Komonoff of Streetsblog did some number crunching to demonstrate the negative effects. In short, New York’s $320 million in tax savings would be offset with nearly $580 million in extra costs. Apparently the difference between $320 million from payroll taxes versus $320 million from direct subsidies is much more than semantics.

IT MIGHT BE GETTING EASIER TO BE GREEN
This week, officials from the Department of City Planning announced the beginning of the approval process for new zoning regulations that would remove impediments for property owners to build green buildings or to retrofit existing buildings with renewable energy technologies such as windmills or solar panels. Other energy-efficient measures that will become easier to implement if the regulations are adopted by the City Council include stormwater retention systems, height exemptions for greenhouses, and the building of walls thick enough to allow for external insulation. According to Amanda Burden, the City’s Director of City Planning and the chair of the City Planning Commission, the changes will amount to “the most comprehensive citywide initiative dealing with energy efficiency and green building in the U.S.” Read the full article on Crain’s.

THE HENRY HUDSON BRIDGE TURNS 75
On December 12th, the Henry Hudson bridge celebrated its 75th birthday. Originally built to accommodate light traffic, it is now one of the most vital and dense transportation nodes in the city, linking Manhattan to the Bronx across Spuyten Duyvil Creek. In celebration of this iconic landmark, the Riverdale Public Library will open a photo exhibit featuring historic photos of the construction and evolution of the bridge over time as well as an archival collection on other bridges built during the Depression. For more background about the history of the bridge, read the press release from MTA Bridges and Tunnels.

PUBLIC AUTHORITIES BLOG
For another view of the government agencies and lawmakers that preside over public works, the Public Authorities blog, a project of the Government Law Center at Albany Law School. Its one of the more recent finds added to our increasingly geeky feedreader and offers an excellent overview of the “laws, practices and proposed reforms relating to state and local public authorities in New York.” Its comprehensive links roundups and its concise and measured summaries of bills or court cases or major capital projects (like the reconstruction of the Tappan Zee Bridge, reportedly among the largest public works projects currently being planned in the nation) will be of interest to anyone whose ears perk up at the mention of terms like “eminent domain” or “utilities reform.” The authors also dip into the history and culture of public decision-making, like in this recent post that recapped a live conversation with Robert Caro, author of The Power Broker, a tome sure to be on the shelf of every self-respecting urbanist.

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

Photo by Iwan Baan | via thehighline.org

HIGH LINE PHASE 3
On November 1st, Mayor Bloomberg announced that all of the major stakeholders in the West Side Rail Yards have agreed to preserve the final section of the High Line for use as public space. CSX Transportation, a private freight rail company that still owns the undeveloped stretch of the elevated tracks, has committed to donating the remaining portion of the structure to the City; and the City, State and site developer Related Companies have all agreed to retain the structure and turn it into parkland. Meanwhile Friends of the High Line have been working hard to secure funding for phase three, helped by a recent $20 million donation from the Diller-Von Furstenberg Foundation. In his press statement, Mayor Bloomberg made it clear that this project was part of a collaboration between the City of New York and Related Companies to revitalize the West side of Manhattan in order to encourage commercial activity and in turn to promote the creation of jobs. Legal details and final negotiations are still in process, but confidence is high that a complete High Line, from Gansevoort to 34th Street, is in New York’s future. For more information, check out the Friends of the High Line website.

City Lights | photo via tphifer.com

SLEEK CITY LIGHTS
Head down to Church and Warren Streets to see the latest addition to New York City’s streetscape design. In 2004, a team led by Thomas Phifer and Partners won City Lights, a juried design competition led by the Department of Design and Construction and the Department of Transportation to conceive of a new streetlight for New York. Now, thanks to a reduction in cost of energy efficient LEDs over the past seven years, these sleek new lights are starting to appear on the city’s streets. For more pictures, check out The Architect’s Newspaper Blog and Thomas Phifer’s website.

TOKYO’S BACK-UP CITY
A consortium of Japanese political officials have proposed building a “back-up city” for Tokyo. — Wait, what? — After the devastating 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami that hit northeast Japan in March, and with seismologists warning that Tokyo itself is long overdue for a major quake, people are looking for a contingency plan. The Integrated Resort, Tourism, Business and Backup City, or IRTBBC, would house 50,000 residents and a working population of 200,000 (a far cry from the 13 million that currently live in Tokyo), and would serve to take over the major functions of the capital city in the case of a crippling disaster. The plan suggests using the site of the outdated Itami Airport outside of Osaka, 300 miles away. ”The idea is being able to have a back-up, a spare battery for the functions of the nation,” said Hajime Ishii of Japan’s Democratic Party. For more coverage, check out The Telegraph.

via theatlanticcities.com

SELLING HOUSING
The Atlantic Cities has a a delightful collection of vintage posters that tell the story of how New York City originally sold the idea of public housing to the pubic. The New York City Housing Authority was the first of its kind in the United States. While strategies for redevelopment of housing have evolved past in the past eighty years, the posters reflect the fundamental motivations behind the founding of NYCHA in 1934, to provide safe and secure housing for low-income city residents. Check out the series of posters advertising the new program and buildings here, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

EVENTS and TO DOs

Making Room Symposium: Tickets are still available for Monday’s Making Room symposium, where teams of architects commissioned by the Citizens Housing & Planning Council and the Architectural League present innovative ideas for new types of housing that might better match the contemporary demographic make-up of New York and how New Yorkers choose to live now. For an introduction to Making Room, click here. For more information about the symposium, click here.

Performa 11, the fourth edition of the visual art performance biennial, is now in progress. Performa brings together dozens of arts institutions and curators to present discipline-meshing performances that explore visual art, music, dance, poetry, fashion, architecture, graphic design and the culinary arts, in public and private spaces throughout the city. There’s also a Performa magazine, online TV show, radio program, film screenings, bookshop and lounge. For a complete list of events, running now through November 21, visit the Performa 11 website.

Poem Forest: This weekend, the Poetry Society of America is hosting Poem Forest, a walk along Thain Forest’s Sweetgum Trail designed by Jon Cotner (who recently took us on a walk through Fort Greene Park). Weaving together poetry and space, the self-guided tour relates lines of poetry from all different eras and regions with fifteen specific spots chosen along the trail.

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

Stargazing in Times Square | Courtesy of Ian Cheney

When artificial light shines upward, it bounces off particulates in the air, causing a haze — some have described it as a “luminous fog” — that prevents us from seeing the stars and skies above. As our powerfully-lit built environment expands across the planet, so does this dome of light. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson contends that a connection to the night sky offers us a sense of “cosmic perspective” that, when denied, causes us “to not live to the full extent of what it is to be human.” The stars have inspired mythology, poetry, curiosity, inquiry and exploration throughout history. So, what happens when we lose the night sky? That question is at the heart of The City Dark, a new documentary film by Ian Cheney that explores the effects of light pollution on our environment, our society, our bodies and our psyches. (See the trailer here.)

The most obvious implications of light pollution are to astronomers. The stronger the light pollution, the harder it is to see the universe beyond. But, as Cheney explores in the film, the consequences of our pervasive use of artificial light reach much further. Biologists who study habitat disruption are tracking how city lights disorient, and ultimately cause the death of, hatching sea turtles and migrating birds. Epidemiologists are investigating the hypothesis that night shift work, and the disruptions to circadian rhythms and melatonin production that come with it, is a carcinogen.

But light activates space, improves public safety and facilitates social interaction. Light is used as art, as celebration, as tribute. We equate light with progress and achievement. So what do we do when, as Cheney says, “though we might love light, we might need the dark”? That’s where lighting designers, architects and planners can help. A darker city can come from, not just less light, but less wasteful light. Careful, thoughtful lighting design is economically and environmentally beneficial, and can help reconnect us to the majestic skies above.

Tonight, Wednesday, August 17, The City Dark is being screened at the BMW Guggenheim Lab in New York City. In anticipation of the event, we sat down with Ian Cheney to learn more about light pollution, the disappearance of the night sky and what we can do to get it back. —V.S.

Sky Village, Arizona | Courtesy of Ian Cheney

Tell us about The City Dark.
The City Dark is a documentary about light pollution — which ought to be called night pollution, if you think about it. Air pollution is pollution of the air, water pollution is pollution of the water and what we are really talking about is pollution of the night by light.

I have found that light pollution as an urban and environmental concern isn’t a topic on everybody’s radar screen. But once one mentions the disappearance of the night sky, people instantly connect. There’s something so fundamental and present to all of us about that.

Throughout the film, evocations about the poetry and mythology of the night sky interweave with scientific inquiry into the effects of artificial light on ourselves and our environment. Though a complete telling of the story seems to demand both poetry and science, did you come to the subject matter from one side or the other?
The film began much more with the intangible questions and what I might categorize as the more philosophical or spiritual question about what we lose when we can’t connect with the night sky. I knew next to nothing about most of the ecological or human health issues related to light pollution. But I knew that astronomers, of course, were worried about the loss of the stars. So it was with them that we started the film. The astronomers were the ones to point out that this topic touches a much broader range of people. But even as the film snowballed into explorations of the scientific issues, there was no way to tell the story without the intangible aspects. What we lose as individuals, as a culture, when we lose the night sky is what underpinned the whole project for me.

Is that what you hope people with take away from the film?
I’d be happy if people took different ideas away from the film. One person might be energized by the idea of writing a new lighting ordinance for their town and introducing legislation that helps preserve the night sky, whereas another might be reminded to step outside and look up from time to time, to take his kids outside the city to find darkness, or to think differently about how to design lights on a building.

We are setting up a lot of screenings this fall with a whole range of people, from astronomers to ecologists to wildlife groups, but also with lighting designers and architects who are very much engaged in rethinking the way we light our cities.

The High Line, New York | screen capture from The City Dark

Speaking of which, in the film you say “a darker city is a matter of design.” You also spend some time with Hervé Descottes, the lighting designer of the High Line. Talk a little bit about the design of a darker city, and the role that architects and designers can play in preventing light pollution.
The way we have come to light our cities, perhaps unintentionally, is extremely wasteful, haphazard and careless. The idea that light can trespass, can pollute, can be damaging, is relatively new. Maybe because you can’t hold light in your hand like you can water or garbage — if someone were spewing garbage into your window, you would object.

There’s a fair bit of generalizing and mudslinging directed towards architects and lighting designers by people who think they all just love to blast light up their buildings. Some do, and you see that walking around the city, but there are an increasing number of lighting designers that are trying to do things differently.

It’s not that advocates of “re-darkening” the city want to turn off all the lights. Hervé Descottes is one of, hopefully, a growing number of designers who are thinking about light in a more sophisticated way than we may have in the past, when we were responding to a centuries-long legacy of having too much darkness and seeing more light as better. His approach to lighting design is as much about celebrating the darkness and the shadow spaces as it is about the beauty of light. Whether that comes from a respect for the beauty of the night sky, a regard for people’s melatonin levels or aesthetic choice, I think it’s a profound and interesting shift in the way we think about lighting cities. It may seem ironic that a lighting designer would be talking about the need to use less light, but fortunately lighting designers aren’t paid by how many lumens of light they use in a design.

The International Dark-Sky Association has done a lot of wonderful work in helping people rethink the way we light our spaces, from introducing and modeling lighting ordinances to conducting nuts-and-bolts research on fixture design and how light affects space. There are so many strategies and technologies available to people that I think suggest a promising future. It’s similar to the way we talk about green design — in fact, smarter nighttime lighting is a LEED green building point, which is a sign that people are recognizing that lighting our environment means more than just the loss of the stars. We can use better lighting as a way to create different and, in the end, more livable spaces, where people will be able to sleep better, birds can find their way and we can connect to the stars.

Trespassing Light | Courtesy of Ian Cheney

You spend some time in the film talking about the enormous cultural impact of light. Light is used as art, as celebration, as tribute. Light is equated with safety, with social activity, with progress, with development. With light so often linked to positive notions, when and how did the idea of light pollution, and the need to “re-darken” the city, take hold? And does the cultural significance of light present obstacles to popular acceptance of light reduction?
It’s fascinating — even though the recent attention to light pollution paid by groups like the Dark-Sky Association is new, the idea that people think their city is over-lit is not. The introduction of new lighting technology has always made people long for the way the city used to be. When arc lighting and electric lighting were introduced in the late-19th century, people were immediately nostalgic for the quiet, orange glow of the gas-lit city. In the film we speak with Bill Sharpe, a historian of the way people wrote and created art about the night in New York City, whose book New York Nocturne documents some of the rich history of that nostalgia effect. But today, people dismiss that nostalgia as overly romantic because it looks back to something none of us have experienced. We’ve had electric lighting for over a century.

As you mentioned, there is an involved relationship between light and safety or crime. People feel safer in well-lit spaces. But when you start getting into the data about whether introducing light alone will consistently make a neighborhood safer or not, there are instances where it does and instances where it doesn’t, where light just moves crime elsewhere or even makes it easier for criminals to operate. But it’s inarguable that people continue to feel safer in the light. I suppose it’s in our genes. We don’t see as well at night — though we can see and navigate through shadowy space better than we think. It’s a complex issue, one that I only touch on briefly in the film.

What are some other ways that people are addressing light pollution through technological advances, legislation or individual action?
The way people are starting to rein in the light runs the gamut. There are volunteer measures, such as In New York City, where some people have signed on to shut off lights in buildings or on bridges at certain times during migration season. Then there are cities like Tucson, Arizona, where you can see the Milky Way from downtown because they have such a robust lighting ordinance.

Many lighting ordinances are designed to be gradual and realistic about what is expected of the community. They don’t require everyone change their lights immediately, which would be quite costly, but any new lights that are introduced have to be cut-off lights, which direct the light downwards, to the ground, where you actually need it, rather than through someone’s windows or up into space. Which is almost a boringly obvious idea, to not waste something.

When you get right down to the nuts and bolts of better lighting, it’s pretty easy to grasp, even if implementing those ideas isn’t always easy. It involves years of wrangling, because there’s money to be made burning fuel to waste light, and there’s an instinctive resistance to reducing the way we light. It often goes back to the question of crime that we discussed earlier. People think that if the city turns off lights, crime will follow. It’s instinctive.

New York City and New York State have seen their fair share of lighting measures introduced and failed time and again. Maybe a city like New York seems like too much of a lost cause, maybe there are other things to worry about, or maybe there’s real pressure coming from people with an interest in maintaining the status quo. But whatever the reason is, those efforts haven’t been able to gain traction as more than volunteer measures.

Brooklyn, New York | Courtesy of Ian Cheney

As you travelled from city to city, region to region, did you see differences in the way more vertical cities were tackling these challenges as compared to more sprawling cities?
This is a bit of a roundabout way to answer your question, but it ties in with how we think and talk about wilderness and the environment. Environmentalists and conservationists are often arguing about where to put our money and energy – should we conserve and preserve fenced-in parks as pure wilderness, where urban residents can visit to enjoy trees, bugs, birds, ponds and stars? Or — and it really shouldn’t be an either/or — should we put our energy into making the spaces where we live every day that much more green and livable? At the end of the day, there are limited resources and one has to figure out where to put one’s efforts.

That same debate applies to light pollution and the disappearance of the night sky. In a city like New York, should we put any effort into restricting lighting given how few stars we can see? Or should we put more energy into the suburbs, where you have at least a fighting chance of seeing the Milky Way? Or should we dedicate ourselves to preserving rural skies, where both urban and suburban residents can escape to see the night sky? Of course, I think all should be done.

But I do think bringing back even one more star to a city sky is worthwhile. Maybe that one star — and I’m paraphrasing a comment by Neil deGrasse Tyson that didn’t make it into the film — will be the star that catches some young scientist-to-be’s eye and enthralls him or her with the idea of becoming an astronomer. Or connects someone with the idea that there’s a larger world, which I think ultimately is the most important thing. The most profound risk we’re taking by losing the night sky is becoming a completely downward-looking species.

There’s something mesmerizing and unparalleled about a truly dark night sky. It’s hard not to get really cheesy, really fast when talking about it. And, just like seeing the Grand Canyon or a great whale, there’s something different about experiencing it yourself than seeing it on a television screen or in a magazine. But Neil deGrasse Tyson’s story of discovering astronomy through the planetarium, because he never saw the stars from his home in the Bronx, is a great example of how, on the one hand, the proxies we create for wilderness experiences, whether it’s Central Park or planetariums, are meaningful and important. Tyson wondered aloud whether, if he’d grown up on a farm, seeing the night sky every night, it would have inspired the same sense of awe that it did for him, having grown up in the Bronx.

As the night sky recedes from view, what do you think it means for our collective imagination, curiosity or inspiration? What happens when we don’t have access to that sense of awe?
It’s an experiment in progress. We’re doing this to ourselves. As a country, and now as a world, as we tip towards being a dominantly urban population, we are mostly growing up without the stars. On some level it remains to be seen what it will do to us. This whole film was in a way my own attempt to engage with some of those questions. I certainly don’t have all the answers.

I think we all gain wonderfully different things from our experiences with the night sky. For me, it has been a profound reminder of our place in space and a perspective on my own moment in the lifetime of the universe. It has made me really value what time I have on the planet, but I think that’s probably not a bad thing to value and to keep in mind, how remarkably unique life on the planet is.

At times the environmentalist community and the astronomy community have been at odds with one another, arguing about whether limited financial resources should be dedicated to cleaning up our mess here on this planet or exploring elsewhere. But I think the more we learn about outer space, our place in space and our relationship to the stars, the more it makes us careful citizens of the planet. That, weirdly, was one of the things I was most interested in exploring in the film – I don’t think it actually comes through very much at all, but so it goes. But I do think that the more we see the stars the more we actually care about our planet.

Haleakala, Maui, Hawaii | Courtesy of Ian Cheney

Are there other topics you wanted to explore further than didn’t make it into the film?
Sleep science. I would love to make a whole film about how we sleep. There weren’t really sleep scientists before the industrial revolution, so we don’t know that much about how we naturally sleep. Experiments have been done where people are locked away for weeks at a time to see how they sleep “on a natural cycle.” The results echo how sleep patterns used to be described in literature — people often sleep in two segments of time, waking up once in the middle of the night.

There is so much about a city that is a shock to the human immune system. Think about what you learn in seventh grade: animals exist in habitats and if you disrupt those habitats, the animals suffer. And yet somehow we don’t turn that same attention to our own habitat.

I realized — and I never used to think of it this way — that we keep exploring this question of disrupted habitat from different perspectives through our films. In King Corn, we looked at the way we eat and how it’s completely out of whack with how we’ve evolved to eat. With The Greening of Southie, a film about green building in Boston, we explored the physical spaces we find ourselves living in. And now we’re looking at this question of how we light our world and how it represents a real disruption in our circadian rhythm. We’ve evolved for many, many generations with certain cycles of light and dark. It’s very interesting to live in an urban environment and think about how can we design spaces to give us the things we want out of a city, which are many, and yet not make us sick or unhappy or solipsistic in the process.

Really we just take these recklessly boring topics like watching corn grow and watching buildings go up and star gazing — its not blockbuster stuff — and we try to suggest ways that they are fundamental to our lives.

For the film, you developed a letter-grade system for rating star visibility in different locations. Sky Village, Arizona (?) received an A; Times Square an F. The highest grade for NYC – at least of the areas you list in the film  — is a C+ (Staten Island). Did anywhere in New York City get a better grade? Are there any secret corners that are still good for stargazing?
I bet there are places in New York City that can rock a B—. Maybe Floyd Bennett Field? That’s where all the astronomers go. There’s also a wonderful guy named Jason Kendall who runs an astronomy program up in Inwood. He leads groups, does stargazing and meteor-gazing there.

What’s next for Wicked Delicate Films?
We got a little development grant from SilverDocs, in partnership with Whole Foods, for a film called BlueSpace, which will be a film about urban waterways around New York City. We’re looking at the idea that the city’s waterfronts and harbors — its “blue space” — should be considered as powerful and important a resource as its green space. I’m infatuated with that idea, especially given the city’s history of thinking of our water as a toilet. We’re just digging into that.

Courtesy of Ian Cheney

Ian Cheney is a Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker. He grew up in New England and earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at Yale. After graduate school he co-created and starred in the Peabody Award-winning theatrical hit and PBS documentary King Corn (2007), directed the feature documentary The Greening of Southie (Sundance Channel, 2008), and co-produced the Planet Green film Big River (2009). Ian maintains a 1/1000th acre farm in the back of his ’86 Dodge pickup, which is at the center of his recent film Truck Farm (2011). He has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, on CNN and on Good Morning America. An avid astrophotographer, he travels frequently to show his films, lead discussions and give talks about sustainability, agriculture, and the human relationship to the natural world.

There’s a large section on public input gathered from various ‘digital environments’ via Quora.com, Meetups, By the City, online surveys at nyc.gov and more. The top identified needs gathered from such surveys are public wi-fi, internet access in more locations (even in the subway) and real-time public information.

Much of the report talks about all the great stuff the city is already doing — but here’s some of what we can expect from the city’s growing digital infrastructure in the years to come:

• Better Access to the Internet: public computer centers with senior learning, underground subway wi-fi and cell service in six stations, improve computer access with hardware and internet to 72 of the highest-need middle schools in the city
• Open Government: API-enabled Public Data and NYC Platform, an open government framework featuring Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for City data, a hub for feedback from the developer community and an NYC App store
• Engagement: Partnerships with social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Tumblr) to engage residents, digital 311, and a better nyc.gov

Read the full Roadmap for yourself here.
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HOUSING TRENDS
With New York City’s housing climate hitting new lows — last week’s tragic fire in Bushwick resulted in the deaths of two men living in an illegally-converted boarding house — the need to reevaluate legislation and enforcement around illegal subdivisions was made clear. Bolstered by surprising 2010 Census numbers which discounted predictions on Queens’ new residents (reporting that only 1,343 new people moved to Queens in a decade), illegal conversions housing new immigrants are being taken seriously by housing advocates and even City Hall. A recent analysis by the Citizens Housing & Planning Council (CHPC) found that “illegal housing types, subdivisions and sharing are so extensive in the city that it has become impossible to truly understand the population living behind our closed doors.” The Architectural League is working with CHPC on a multi-phase design study that will provoke innovative design thinking to promote a greater diversity of housing typologies in the city, given the mismatch between contemporary demographic reality and the kinds of dwellings that conform to New York’s complex housing code. Stay tuned for more on this collaboration in the weeks to come.

The issue was also addressed in the most recent version of PlaNYC, and re-evaluation of the topic is at the forefront of political conversation. NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy released its quarterly report on the city’s state of housing — and trends look dreary for foreclosure and sales. Housing prices have dipped in all boroughs except Queens, and 40% of the city’s foreclosure notices are in Brooklyn, but have declined in every borough since 2010. See the full Furman Report and more on housing reform here.
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New and Old Parks Department Logo | Images courtesy Pentagram

PENTAGRAM AND PARKS DEPARTMENT TEAM UP
Paula Scher, of the design firm Pentagram, has teamed up with the NYC Parks Department to retool their iconic logo and identity, first introduced in 1934. The redesign will touch signage, wayfinding and environmental graphics for 1,700+ parks, playgrounds and other facilities. The design effort, spearheaded by Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, seeks to coordinate the visual identity of the Department of Parks and Recreation with high-profile projects like the High Line and Madison Square Park and to increase consistency across agency materials.

Although consistent with the original design of a leaf in a circle, the new logo has a modernized leaf, a thinner circle line, a brighter, lighter green and is set in the typeface Akkurat. Park signage has the most radical revamp, with modular pieces for future expansion and double sided signs. To read the full story, see Pentagram’s coverage.

New Parks Signage | Images courtesy Pentagram
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END OF SUBWAY CAR REEFS
If you caught last week’s UO feature on Stephen Mallon’s photography, including his series capturing the process of using retired New York City subway cars as man-made reefs, check out this New York Times slideshow from last week announcing the end of the decade-long program. Over 2,500 retired subway cars (toxic and valuable material removed) had met their fate in the Atlantic, off the coasts of Virginia, Maryland and Delaware, as permanent underwater homes for sea creatures. The program was discontinued this year, when the introduction of newer subway cars with more plastic parts and more complex stripping methods, rendered them unsuitable for oceanic disposal.
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EVENTS & TO-DOs…

NYPL ALL LIT UP
Paul LeClerc, the president of New York Public Library sought Parisian inspiration to light the renovated Fifth Avenue landmark library. François Jousse, Paris’ civic expert on building lighting and engineering, impressed the library with his practice of putting lights atop streetlights surrounding Paris’ most beautiful buildings, casting a magnificent glow onto the most ornate of facades. The library chose Claude R. Engle, a lighting consultant who has illuminated the World Trade Center, the Louvre and the Pompidou, to redo lighting on the beloved library. Marking its 100th birthday on May 23rd, the building will be drenched in glowing, white light to highlight the massive three-year restoration project.

WILLIAMSBURG SMÖRGÅSBORD
Starting this weekend, there’s a new addition to the growingly popular flea market culture with foodies in mind. Smorgasburg, the new Brooklyn Flea Food Market, is a popular add-on to Williamsburg’s waterfront with 100+ food vendors, food organizations (SlowFood, Just Food, NYC Food Coalition) and NYS Greenmarket farmers to offer a retail market with fresh and prepared food, kitchenware and al fresco dining. Yum! Every Saturday. See the official site here.

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

THE ENERGY REPORT
Continuing on their Roadmap 2050, AMO teamed up with WWF and Ecofys to envision a world completely run by renewable energy in the next forty years. Today, the organizations collaboratively launched The Energy Report – a comprehensive plan to harness and proliferate renewable energy that aims to convince governments and business of the economic benefits of  sustainability. The report is replete with infographics and images communicating the potential for energy production and its cultural implications. “Through the realization that future energy provision really is a universal issue which must be addressed at a global scale, we have developed a new perspective on the world,” AMO’s Reinier de Graaf claims. But, lest you think a well-designed pamphlet can fix the world, John Thackara unpacks The Energy Report in a Design Observer essay questioning the feasibility of implementing the report’s recommendations. Thackara decries the report as a “tragedy for WWF,” and through a careful meditation on the real repercussions of renewable initiatives – like spreading millions of wind turbines off our shores and through our forests – demonstrates that sustainability is rife with complexities best addressed by interrogating the “energy-intensive way of life that a spoiled 20 percent of us across the industrial world take for granted.”
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CHOKE POINTS AND KILL SWITCHES
Following the Egyptian government’s severing of the country’s internet connection, journalist and Omnibus contributing editor Andrew Blum examines the vulnerability of our online access in an Atlantic editorial covering Verizon’s purchase of computing company Terremark. Blum’s piece is an important reminder of the tangibility and physicality of information exchange. The internet is indeed a network of networks and, in America, one with “choke points” and “kill switches” located in Terremark’s highly-guarded Miami building. And when the locus of the most open medium of communication is bought and sold, it’s worth taking note.
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THROWDOWN REVISITED
The Boston Globe recaps the debate between New Urbanism and Landscape Urbanism in a well-balanced article outlining the history of two movements over the last 30 years. Cambridge and the “intensely confident” Charles Waldheim may be the epicenter of Landscape Urbanism, but the school of thought has recently gained international traction — most significantly in the halls of urban planning programs, as writer Leon Nayfakh points out — and is vying to replace New Urbanism as the popular planning paradigm. With the ever-increasing relevance of environmental concerns in design, Nayfakh’s piece is a welcome revisitation of the laudable intentions behind the two schools of urbanism, and sheds light on their drawbacks (the hubris of the master plan and perpetuation of suburban sprawl among them). For more on the contentious debate between the two camps, read Genevieve Sherman’s analysis of the Harvard Design School’s 50th anniversary conference and the conversation it generated.

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On Melancholy Hill – NYC Lights from Chateau Bezerra on Vimeo.

OMNI-UPDATES
A lot of updates on projects and happenings we’ve recently covered came across our desks this week. Here’s a brief rundown of the highlights:

In light of this week’s feature Project Neon, we thought we’d share Chateau Bezerra’s On Melancholy Hill – NYC Lights, a music video made entirely from footage of New York’s neon signage. (Embedded above.)

Two weeks ago, we saw a preview of Alexander Chen’s in-progress musical subway map, “Conductor.” The project is now live on his site, so play away! At least the subway inspires mirth in some fashion — Governor Cuomo this week announced a decision to cut $100 million in transit dollars in efforts to balance the State’s budget, which looks grim for the MTA’s promise to improve service but not hike fares.

If you enjoyed reading Alan Rapp’s review of “Unseeing Modernism,” an exhibition of Ezra Stoller’s architectural photography at the Yossi Milo Gallery, check out A Daily Dose of Architecture’s notes on “The Photography of Ezra Stoller,” a recent Center for Architecture panel discussion that brought together Erica Stoller, Kenneth Frampton, Brook Mason and John Morris Dixon, moderated by James Sanders.

Superfund! Next Tuesday, February 8th, at 6:30pm the Museum of the City of New York is hosting a panel discussion entitled “NYC Superfund: Toxic Solution or Toxic Label?“ that ponders what the recent Superfund designations of Newtown Creek and the Gowanus Canal will mean for residents, real estate development, and the natural environments themselves. Reservations required: 917-492-3395 or e-mail programs@mcny.org. Tickets are $6 for museum members, $8 for non-member seniors and students, $12 for non-members — but only $6 when you mention the Architectural League or Urban Omnibus. Thanks MCNY!

And then next Wednesday, February 9th, the Omnibus’ own editor Cassim Shepard will respond to a show of visual artists at the BRIC Rotunda Gallery. The panel discussion is titled “Taking, Leaving, Moving: mobility, evocative objects and a sense of home” and begins at 7pm.
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GONG XI FA CÁI
Yesterday we kicked off the Year of the Rabbit. On Sunday, Chinese New Year parades and cultural festivals will take place in both Manhattan’s and Flushing’s Chinatowns. Gong Xi Fa Cái!

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

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On December 3rd, I was two weeks into a new job on the Upper East Side. I have rarely spent time on the Upper East Side over my 17 years in New York. It is not a neighborhood that has ever felt welcoming to me, especially in the dark days of mid-winter, when the streets are pitch black at 5pm. So, I was looking for a reason to like this neighborhood where I suddenly found myself five days a week — and that’s when I discovered my love of neon.

The Upper East Side has quite a few excellent neon signs: Goldberger’s Pharmacy, Cork & Bottle Liquors, and the original location of Papaya King, just to name a few. I was charmed. So, when I saw that December 3rd marked the one-hundredth anniversary of neon signage (more on that history in a moment), I decided to take my camera and follow the glow.

And so, I set out to document the neon of New York — working signs only and, for the most part, avoiding chain-store signs that can be found all over the city. I have been told that New York’s neon is unexceptional in comparison to Chicago’s or Portland’s. I wanted to prove otherwise. I also wanted to demonstrate (mostly to myself) that the quirky, independent New York is still here — it’s not all chain stores, standard-issue vinyl awnings and luxury condos. I too often hear about all the great things that are gone, going or about to go. I needed, in the dark depths of winter, to find good stuff that’s still here.

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The history of commercial neon signs really begin in 1902, when French inventor Georges Claude perfected a technique for liquefying and slowly reheating air, which allowed him to separate out the component gases and thus cheaply extract the trace amounts of the noble gas neon from air. Although the trick of making certain gases glow with electric voltage had already been discovered, suddenly neon was plentiful. Claude demonstrated a long, glowing tube of neon at the Paris Motor Show on December 3, 1910, one hundred years ago. But if you missed this anniversary, don’t worry — there are other neon landmarks to celebrate, including November 8, 1911 when Claude filed for a patent for a “system of illuminating by luminescent tubes,” or January 19, 1915 when the patent was granted. There’s also 1923, when the first neon sign appeared in the US, for a Packard car dealership in Los Angeles. (You can read more about neon’s early history at the American Sign Museum’s website.)

Neon signs, I have learned, don’t always contain neon gas. Different colors are obtained by using neon, argon, helium, krypton, and xenon (all noble gases) singly or in combination, with each other or with mercury, though neon and argon are the most common. The interior of the tube is often coated with phosphors to increase the glow.

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I love neon signs that have a sense of place, that mark a place, that feel unique and evidence their hand-made origins. The glow, the colors, the hum when you get close, the flicker when they need repair. They are lively and engaging. They are landmarks or even icons. A familiar sign can seem like a helpful friend in the dark of the city at night. If I have forgotten which street Old Town is on (as I often do), I know I can just walk up from Union Square and the glow of the sign will catch my eye.

Smaller neon signs often gather in the neighborhood of a great one. Every glimmer seemed to lead me to the next. Are the smaller signs inspired by the glow of the larger? Or do neon sign sellers concentrate their efforts on key locations? Do certain neighborhoods have the right characteristics to encourage the population of neon to grow? I haven’t figured it out yet, though I suspect a combination of all three. Of course, certain business types are more likely than others to feature neon. Liquor stores, bars and strip clubs are all classic spots for neon — but so are parking garages, drug stores, Chinese take-out places and shoe-repair shops. All places you might be in a hurry to find, at night, possibly in an unfamiliar neighborhood — hence the neon.

Not that neon is confined to the metropolis — some of the best neon signs on earth are lighting up old motels off the beaten path or in small towns at the local movie palace. But the neon sign is, for the most part, a cosmopolitan creature.

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I have spent hours darting all over the city in the last two months, visiting neighborhoods I’ve never been to, discovering new signs I’d never seen, stumbling upon half-forgotten landmarks, revisiting old favorites, and encountering for the first time great signs I’d only seen in pictures or during the day time.

So what are New York’s best neon signs? We all have our own aesthetics, of course, and I have to admit I sometimes find it difficult to separate my love for a sign from my love of the place it advertises, but there are more than a few stand-out signs worth a visit. The images in this post’s slideshow are some of my favorites.

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Project Neon has only just begun. I’m continuing to explore and document the neon of New York, and I plan to visit one neon-signed establishment each week (both places I have already photographed and new locations) to have a drink, get my shoes repaired, or eat some BBQ. I want to photograph Sunny’s in Red Hook — one of my favorite signs in the entire city — and, of course, the Wonder Wheel in Coney Island, which is also a gem. I’ll write about each visit on my Project Neon blog and you can track my progress on this Google Map (blue markers are places I haven’t yet photographed, green markers I have already documented and the red markers indicate my favorites so far). I’m also assembling a field guide to New York City neon, which I hope to expand to other neon-filled cities in the future, and exploring the possibility of making this into an iPhone app.

Some have said that neon’s days are numbered. LED technology has been steadily improving, but the quality of LED light is not even in the same league as that of neon. LEDs are appropriate for many uses, but neon is worth preserving because nothing — not fluorescents, not incandescents, and not LEDs — can replicate its glow. And so I’m going to continue working on Project Neon, documenting the great signs of New York, mapping them, and visiting the businesses that support them. I hope Project Neon will inspire more New Yorkers to appreciate our metropolis’ treasure trove of neon, encourage shop owners to maintain fading or damaged signs, and persuade citizens to support the businesses that light up our city. New York would be a much poorer city without neon.

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What is your favorite New York neon sign? What other cities do you think have good neon? Would you be interested in a field guide to neon for New York or any other city? Speak up in the comments below!

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All photos by Kirsten Hively. Hively received her MArch in 2007 from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. When not architecting she can often be found photographing or writing about New York City, where she lives and works.

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.

The Architectural League is seeking individuals or teams of artists and designers to create light installation and projection mapping projects for our annual Beaux Arts Ball. Download the complete Request for Proposals here (PDF). The Ball will take place on September 25, 2010, at the American Academy of Arts and Letters at Audubon Terrace in Washington Heights. Last year, the event drew over 1000 architects, designers and artists at The Old American Can Factory in Gowanus (Check out photos of past Beaux Arts Balls here). Up to ten proposals will be selected for display for the duration of the event, from roughly 7:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. Teams may submit one or more proposals for review. The deadline is tomorrow, August 11th, so submit today! Full submission guidelines are in the RFP.

The site, Audubon Terrace, is a landmark complex of approximately eight early 20th Century Beaux Arts buildings in New York City. Home to the Academy, the Hispanic Society and Boricua College, the various architecturally complementary buildings, which take up most of a city block, are arranged in two parallel rows facing each other across an east/west pedestrian plaza. The site is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Images of the terrace and floor plans of the Academy’s buildings can be found here.

Three of the Academy’s buildings and the terrace will house various projection mapping projects and lighting installations.

Examples of types of projects we would like to see include:

Sculptural projection mapping projects that can easily be taken down and set up again. This can involve projecting on geometric shapes, white television screens, white furniture, old architectural models, and sculptures.

2D projection mapping onto any variety of media on walls. Media can range from books, to picture frames, to polygons.

Architectural projection mapping, onto the facades of the buildings and the Audubon Terrace.

Light sculptures that play with reflection, refraction, shadow, and different types of lights.

U.S. Northeast. Screen grab from NASA's "world tour" of cities at night.

This week brought news from both the Brooklyn waterfront and the NASA space shuttle, and talk of both construction and demolition.

An agreement has been reached between the Port Authority, New York City and State officials and WTC developer Larry Silverstein that will allow further development of the World Trade Center site after a year and a half of financial negotiations. The deal allows for construction of Towers 3 and 4 to move forward, but the fate of Tower 2 is still up in the air (the site will be built up to ground level until the economic climate improves). Nothing is final yet: Silverstein will need to rustle up private funding and tenants for Tower 3 in order to access the hundreds of millions of dollars of public financial assistance being offered. Beyond that, the agreement itself isn’t even finalized yet — the Port Authority board won’t review the proposal for final approval for another 4 months.

Flavorwire and Gothamist both have documentation of the demolition of old Yankee Stadium’s Gate 2. Fans are mourning its destruction, though neighborhood residents might be pleased to see activity on the site. The parks and public ballfields promised to local residents can’t be developed until the old stadium has been cleared away, a process that was supposed to be complete by the time the new stadium opened last year.

The Department of Transportation has announced that it will take over the community-initiated plan for a 14-mile Brooklyn waterfront greenway. $16 million in funds have been earmarked for the project, which will run from Greenpoint to Sunset Park. DOT has scheduled planning workshops throughout April, and according to the Daily News, DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan has said that she hopes to have “at least a bare-bones version of the route in place within three years or so.”

You know we love maps. Now NASA has allowed us to view our cities in a new way, visualizing their boundaries using the simplest of methods: lights at night. Thanks to astronaut Don Pettit and his experimentation with a barn-door tracker camera mount, NASA has been able to compile precise, detailed images of cities around the world illuminated after dark. Yes, the photographs are visually stunning, but they also tell us stories about our urban environments. As this article on NASA’s Earth Observatory explains, these images can be used to analyze the effect of urbanization on Earth’s ecosystems, to study lighting use (Japanese cities tend to glow a cool blue-green due to the use of light green mercury vapor lamps, though newer developments by Tokyo Bay are characterized by orange sodium vapor lamps), and to illustrate street grid and infrastructure patterns that suggest cultural influences of how similar areas have grown. “At night, city lights present the space observer spectacular evidence of our existence, our distribution, and our ability to change our environment.” And with new housing in cities outpacing that of suburbs (according to a new EPA report), imagine how this images will change over time. Read the article and watch the video. (via The Map Room)

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