This week, two exhibitions opened at the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) that celebrate the evolving legacy of Manhattan’s street grid. In one of the Museum’s ground floor galleries, urban historian Hilary Ballon has curated The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011, a historical show that celebrates the 200th anniversary of the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan for New York through an astonishing collection of the maps, drawings and documents that moved the plan from a bold idea to a defining reality of New York. Upstairs, The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan, a display of eight proposals by architects — curated by Gregory Wessner, the Architectural League’s Special Projects Director — showcases a wide and provocative range of speculative futures for the grid. These proposals are the winning entries to an international ideas competition, organized by the Architectural League in collaboration with MCNY and Architizer.

This Saturday, three of the competition’s jurors will join Wessner for a panel discussion that will reflect on themes that emerged from the over 120 entries, the implications of the eight winning proposals and questions raised by the Call for Ideas. Taking the consistent adaptations to the grid over the past two centuries as a point of departure, these questions include: What new possibilities for the grid still exist? What can we expect for the city’s future and how will it be shaped and reflected by the street grid? What kinds of ideas as bold and visionary as the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan might New York undertake?

The Unfinished Grid: Speculations for Manhattan
Amale Andraos, Mark Robbins, and Ken Smith, moderated by Gregory Wessner
Saturday, December 10, 2011
4:00 p.m.
Museum of the City of New York
1220 Fifth Avenue

Amale Andraos is co-founder and partner of Work Architecture Company. Recent projects include the winning competition entry for a new cultural center on New Holland Island in Saint Petersburg, Russia; a museum extension for the Blaffer Museum, Houston; a branch library for Kew Gardens Hills in Queens; and the first Edible Schoolyard New York City with chef Alice Waters. WORKac’s entry for the redesign of Hua Qiang Bei Road, was recently awarded first place in the international competition for the redesign of Shenzhen’s busiest shopping street.

Ken Smith is principal of Ken Smith Landscape Architect. His background and training is in landscape architecture and the fine arts. Recent projects include the East River ferry landings, New York City; a rooftop garden for the Museum of Modern Art; and a major urban park for El Toro Marine Base in Orange County, California.

Mark Robbins is the Dean of Syracuse University School of Architecture. He was previously Director of Design at the National Endowment for the Arts and Curator for Architecture at the Wexner Center for the Arts.

Gregory Wessner is Special Projects Director for the Architectural League and the curator of The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan. He was curator of League exhibitions The City We Imagined/The City We Made: New New York 2001-2010 and New New York: Fast Forward.

Co-sponsored by the Museum of the City of New York and the New York Public Library.

Tickets
Tickets are $6 for League members and members of the museum; $8 for students and seniors; $12 for all others. Tickets include Museum admission. League members may register online at www.mcny.org and enter code AL1210 upon checkout for discounted rate.  For more information or to reserve by phone, please call 917-492-3395.

Top image: Projects in The Unfinished Grid (clockwise from top left) — The Informal Grid (Isaiah King, Ryan Neiheiser, Giancarlo Valle); The Plaid (Architecture Commons: Eric Ho, Rick Lam); Tabula Fluxus (Group Han Associates New York: Myung Kweon Park, Yikyu Choe, Michael Chaveriat); Flow My Tears, The Commissioners Said (GHILARDI + HELLSTEN ARKITEKTER: Franco Ghilardi, Ellen Hellsten, Espen Vatn, Erik Stenman, Einar Rodhe); 6 1/4 Avenue (Ksestudio: Kyriakos Kyriakou, Sofia Krimizi, assisted by Yubi Park, Jennifer Endozo, Inti Rojanasopondist, Pauline Caubel); NYCity2 (Fotis Sagonas, Ioannis Oikonomou); Dissociative New York (Joshua Mackley, Mathew Ford); Projective Exceptions (Grant Alford, assisted by Spencer Lindstrom).

For all the griping about tourist crowds, corporate control or inauthentic sanitization, no one can doubt Times Square’s status as iconic, legendary and spectacular. In an excerpt from his 2006 book On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square, Marshall Berman, a scholar whose Marxist readings of urban history might lead one to expect a dismissal of the area’s redevelopment in the 1990s, writes, “it isn’t as bad, as antiseptic, as suburban, as many of us feared. It’s nice to see that Rudolph Giuliani’s project of turning the keys to the city over to Disney hasn’t turned the city into Disneyland. The thrill’s not gone.”

Of course, much of that thrill comes from the dazzling electric signs, the teeming crowds, the overwhelming sensory experience of the place. But the group responsible for its upkeep, the Times Square Alliance – which was originally formed as a Business Improvement District in 1992 to provide additional security and to clean the streets, and subsequently grew to produce New Year’s Eve, Broadway on Broadway and other large events – also sees Times Square as a fertile canvas for contemporary artists, a unique opportunity to bring individual, creative visions to bear on a popular landscape that we think we know. So Times Square Alliance president Tim Tompkins hired Glenn Weiss, a veteran arts administrator and curator with a diverse body of work that has ranged from putting on shows at Storefront for Art and Architecture and PS1 in the 1980s to implementing local government public art programs in Seattle and south Florida, to bring public art to Times Square.

Business Improvement Districts are more commonly known for putting on events (alongside traditional maintenance activities) than they are for robust public art programs. Weiss cites other examples, like the Downtown Alliance, the Madison Park Conservancy or the Chicago Loop, as examples of local or community-based groups committed to public art. But few places can claim the sheer number of visitors or the indescribable energy of Times Square. With those unique characteristics in mind, we took Weiss on a walk through Times Square to talk about the place, the role of public art in civic life and some of the art works he has facilitated over the past three and a half years. It was one of his last days on the job, as he prepares to move to Houston to take on yet another exciting challenge at the intersection of community engagement, urban placemaking and contemporary art practice.

– C.S.

What do you do?
For the past three and a half years, I’ve been the manager of public art and design for Times Square. We look for the very best in contemporary arts in all mediums and all forms, and we invite artists to come in and diversify the activities and reputation of Times Square as it is today. We want Times Square to be seen as part of New York as a whole. And since the best in contemporary art and design is part of that whole, we want that to be in Times Square.

I see myself primarily as an arts administrator who also does curatorial work rather than the other way around. The difference is that my goal is to facilitate creative people to do their best work. I’m less concerned with evaluating whether the work is excellent to present or whether it advances the field, I’m evaluating whether or not I can help an artist do something special in a particular place with a particular community. And in Times Square, that community is the 300,000 people who pass through here every day.

Times Square is the most amazing document of the kind of interfaces we create between ourselves and what we broadcast to ourselves.

How did this job come about for you?
When I first heard about this opportunity in Times Square, I was living in Florida, where I managed a public art program and worked in urban design and planning for a suburban, planned community called Coral Springs. I think part of what qualified me for this position – in addition to my experience as a curator in alternative art spaces and as an arts administrator in local government – was a blog about public art I’d been writing for the previous two years or so for ArtsJournal. There were not many people writing consistently on public art at that time.

So you’ve worked with public art in a wide variety of contexts.
When I moved here for this job in 2008, it wasn’t my first time in New York. In the ‘80s, I studied architecture at Columbia, and during that time I became friends with a lot of great artists in the East Village, one of whom is Kyong Park, who founded Storefront for Art and Architecture in 1982. We worked together for two years running Storefront, and we became very engaged in how artists and architects are able to make an impact with their work. We did several major public projects: one dealt with homelessness and how to build shelters, another was our attempt to save Adam Purple’s Garden in the Lower East Side. We didn’t think to label these projects as “public art,” we just thought of ourselves as doing stuff out in the world. To be here, doing that, during those early years was an exceptional experience in my life.

After that, I moved to Seattle, but I simultaneously became the architecture curator at PS1, so I would return to New York to manage the exhibitions I organized up until 1990. When I first moved to Seattle, I curated a series of outdoor exhibitions on people’s front yards. Then I was hired to be the manager of the public art program for King County, which surrounds and includes Seattle. So that’s where I “learned” public art in an official sense.

I’ve heard your early work described as political in nature. Do you think about your work in public art as political?
I don’t. In the ‘80s, in Seattle as well as at PS1 or at Storefront, my work was very clearly political: I wanted to change the world, I wanted to find artists and architects that were interested in changing the world and I wanted to work with them.

In Seattle, after running the public art program for King County, I decided I wanted to be a community activist in my neighborhood, which was a very low income and very diverse community. And what happens when you dedicate yourself to the community is that all those abstract ideas about who is to blame for various kinds of social injustice suddenly seem not to function very well. Not only do you have to work with real people who have wonderfully different ways of doing things, but you also have to start making compromises in order to effect change within your community. When you start to do that, the strategy of being aggressive toward the powerful doesn’t function as well any more.

Given the trajectory of your career — moving from being a curator in the vanguard of art and culture to a role in municipal government instituting public art policy — what does “public art” mean to you? How would you define it?
Public art, as I see it, began as an idea that architecture had failed to humanize its environment, that the bad modernism and strip-down economics of government buildings had left public architecture bereft of any human intimacy. Public art as we think of it today emerged from a passionate urge to bring back that sense of human intimacy.

But these days, architects are finding ways to bring that intimacy into our built environment. So public art, when it works well, becomes about finding ways for artists, administrators and curators to work together – in  collaboration with communities of people who use or visit a particular place – to create the conditions for some new thing to be born.

What does Times Square mean to you?
From 1990 until I moved back here in 2008, I hardly ever visited New York. And in 1990, Times Square was a very different place than it is today! Even when I did live in New York in the ‘80s, I would rarely ever come to Times Square. 42nd Street was very active, whether it was with movies or porn or drugs, but Times Square itself was very quiet. There weren’t even very many electric signs at that time. Other than when people came to see Broadway shows, there was a sense of emptiness.

When I came back for the first time in 2008, it was completely surprising to see the number of people, the number of stores, the kind of transformation to a place that seemed more normal in a way but also not normal at all. Times Square is the most amazing document of 21st century entertainment, of the kind of interfaces we create between ourselves and what we broadcast to ourselves.

There is no other place like it, maybe in the world. Times Square is a place of visceral experience; it is not a place of thought. And making that connection in an artwork – to experience, rather than to thought – can be extremely difficult.

So what was the process for presenting public art in that context?
We started by identifying the public space throughout Times Square, both the plazas and the privately-owned public spaces. We did two open calls for ideas, one in 2009 and one in 2010. Basically we just said “give us your ideas about what you would like to do and we will evaluate the quality of the proposal and the feasibility of actually making it happen within that space.” Our criteria for selection, beyond making sure every proposal considered was functional and safe, prioritized projects that somehow spoke to Times Square and the people who would be here.

When I first came, we started out at the Port Authority Bus Terminal with Tattfoo Tan’s giant mural on the front of the bus terminal and then a smaller mural on a fence on 8th Avenue by Kai McBride. Our idea was to go from all these corners because, here in Times Square itself, there is very little space. When the Mayor closed Broadway to traffic, then everything changed.

"Nature Matching System" mural at the Port Authority Bus Terminal | Photo courtesy of the Times Square Alliance

How has the public art program interfaced with the urban design changes that happened over the past few years, if at all?
Tim Tompkins is very concerned, and rightly so, that Times Square be a great public space with valuable civic events and people on the ground. The Times Square Alliance did not want Times Square to be just left as an empty plaza or open only to corporate events. The public art program became a kind of demonstration project to show how these plazas could be a benefit to the general public. Remember: on an average day, 300,000 people pass through Times Square.

One thing about Times Square is that an audience is always here, in a way that does not exist when you are in, say, Madison Square Park or in front of the County Court House. So one of the main objectives for artists or designers is to figure out what to do with that audience. How do you engage them, where do they physically place themselves? How do they as a group go in and out?

One of the great projects from Performa in 2009 was Arto Lindsay’s dance performance where a line of fifty dancers slowly made their way through Times Square. I loved the way the crowd dealt with how to keep up with the performance. They had to keep running around ahead of the dancers. So you have the dancers in a line, but the people move in blobs and waves as they try to keep up with the the dancers — and the strange phenomenon is that the crowd didn’t give the dancers any space. They would keep crowding around them again and again, so the crowds become part of the interactive potential for the artist.

Here is another type of interactive project, a piece called Performer by Adam Frank, installed in Anita’s Way, which is the name for the pedestrian passageway of the Bank of America Tower. Adam calls this a “self-affirmation piece.” If you stand in this spotlight on the ground, your presence triggers the sound of beautiful applause for you and only you.

Passersby triggering applause at "Performer" by Adam Frank

Tell me about some other artists and artworks that you brought to Times Square, and how they responded the context they found here.
One of the major ways that visitors to Times Square engage with the place comes from photography and the public’s desire to make a visual record of themselves experiencing something new. As an artist, how do you take advantage of that?

"Valentine Heart" by Gage / Clemenceau | Photos courtesy of the Times Square Alliance

In 2009, Gage / Clemenceau Architects attempted to do just that with Valentine Heart. They made a sculpture of a heart and also designed a little stage in front of the sculpture with up-lights. People waited in line to have their picture taken on the stage with the heart. Gage / Clemenceau understood what people wanted to do and how to create a setting for it in Times Square.

The first and only time we tried using the three billboards at the southern end of Times Square — the NASDAQ, the Reuters, and what was then Panasonic News, which is now the Sony News — was two years ago during Performa ’09. For a piece called Snorks, the artist Loris Greaud had all three screens playing images of fireworks for 20 minutes that relate to a complicated project of underwater animals and fireworks in Abu Dhabi.

We did a piece with the Cuban artist Alexander Arrechea on the NASDAQ Board right after the economic crisis, which was a giant animation of a wrecking ball smashing against the NASDAQ sign. Not only did the public not really recognize what was happening, but even NASDAQ did not necessarily recognize the relationship between the piece and what was going on in the world.

What we found is that for the artists as well as the people who come to Times Square on a daily basis, the memory of being in Times Square and the projection of being in Times Square is almost as important as actually doing the work in Times Square.

"Black Sun" by Alexander Arrechea | Photo courtesy of the Times Square Alliance

That seems to reflect what you were saying about people’s primary point of engagement being photos of themselves in this place, the desire to create a memory of having been in a place seems a primary reason that a lot of people come.
People come here to experience the center of New York. For example, my wife’s relatives are from Argentina. When they come to New York, they don’t think about whether or not they might come to Times Square. They have to come to Times Square on a visit to New York.

Another thing that interests me about Times Square is that a lot of the social services remain. Right in front of us is the Woodstock Hotel, which provides services for very low-income seniors, and there are facilities for the homeless nearby. These types of uses may no longer be considered to be part of the character of the place in the way they might have been in the ‘80s or early ‘90s, but the living legacy of the senior center in the Woodstock Hotel is just as much a part of Times Square as the history of the Paramount Theatre, the site of the first youth fan craze for a musician, for Benny Goodman in the ’30s. Years later there was an actual riot for Frank Sinatra, with teen girls fainting as he arrived to perform. These historical moments become part of the density of the experience.

Do you consider the billboards and signs themselves to be a form of public art?
No, I don’t. They are very infrequently used to engage or empower an individual community or to bring the artist and the community together. But I do think what makes Times Square unique is the way that it fills up your whole cone of vision and your peripheral vision: everywhere you look, there’s this lighting and this crazy energy that you don’t experience in physical space anywhere else in the world. When you’re here, you feel the space of it as opposed to a combination of the particular buildings or other individual components.

But, speaking of billboards, a little known fact is that 1 Times Square on the southern end has no occupants, aside from a Walgreens on the ground floor. It is completely economically supported by the advertising from the billboards.

Public art by the Red Stairs | Photo courtesy of the Times Square Alliance

You’ve worked at the county level in Seattle, at the town level in south Florida, and in Times Square you are working at the relatively small scale of a district, albeit one of the most iconic districts in the world. In terms of having a coherent, influential or successful public art program, do you like working at the district level?
I think the great public art administrators and curators in the country are those that have a single place of operation where they continue to work over and over again. Of course there are groups like Creative Time that do great work pretty much everywhere. But, for me, a sustained effort will produce better results than what’s possible in a county or a large city or a state, where you would have to come into a community one time, learn once, listen once, and then leave. I think it’s far more difficult at larger scales to do work that’s the same level of quality, unless you are very lucky or have the benefit of an artist’s sheer determination to do a great job.

What’s next for you?
I’m going to run the Art League Houston, which is an art center near downtown Houston. My goal is to expand its capabilities in serving the artist community and those people who want to make art – fusing adult education with community engagement. I have this idea in my head, after being here in the land of the virtual, to get back to something my parents dreamed of in the ’50′s and ’60s, which was for people to make art together. In their generation they called it a hobby; in ours we call it Do-It-Yourself; but whatever we call it, there’s a desire for physical and collaborative activities, for people to come together and make art together. I’d like to try to help create space for that in Houston.

…

Glenn Weiss has maintained a diverse professional practice assisting governments and civic organizations with physical transformations of cities and neighborhoods through urban planning, architecture, landscape and public art. Since May 2008, Glenn Weiss has developed and managed the new public art program for the NYC Business Improvement District responsible for Times Square and the Broadway Theater District. He is currently the executive director the Art League Houston. 

Photo by Yael Friedman

Concentrating the mind and standing still often seem two of the most elusive experiences in New York. In To a Great City, the second edition of the Guggenheim’s multidisciplinary stillspotting nyc program that ran from September 15-18 and 22-25, Estonian composer Arvo Pärt and the NYC- and Oslo-based architectural firm Snøhetta sought to provide New Yorkers with opportunities to do just that. At five sites located along the perimeter of Ground Zero, Pärt’s minimalist, monastic compositions permeated a series of spaces where large white balloons were the only physical alterations to already naturally seductive spots. The installation was a clear ode to New York, and the tenth anniversary of 9/11 was both physically and psychologically just beyond the immediate experience, providing a quiet and elegant elegy.

The recommended route took the visitor from the Labyrinth at the Battery, then onto a ferry to the two sound installations on Governors Island, back on the ferry to the Woolworth Building and then, in one of the best orchestrated (so to speak) finales to a project, up an elevator to the 46th floor of 7 World Trade Center and a 360-degree-view of the island of Manhattan and its surrounds.

Photo by Yael Friedman

At the entrance to the Labyrinth — a small, circular, grassy maze built to commemorate 9/11 on its first anniversary — visitors were provided with iPods programmed with an Arvo Pärt composition. As one concentrated on the maze, and the large white balloon in the middle of it, Pärt’s music completed the task of shutting out surrounding sounds, people and movement. Of course, it is impossible to forget you are actually in New York, and that was never the intention. One brief look up and the skyscrapers are still, reassuringly, there. Some visitors sat on nearby benches, listening to the music and gazing at the big white balloon and at others navigating the maze. Perhaps the most valuable experience these installations provided is one very rare for the modern city dweller — a place and time for such secular meditation.

Photo by Kristopher McKay, copyright The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

The space where this was most obviously and effectively borne out was in the neo-Gothic Woolworth Building, whose famous gorgeous lobby was built to resemble the inside of a Gothic cathedral. Visitors were seated on the main staircase and faced out, looking onto Broadway, watching the traffic and the pedestrians while listening to an especially Gregorian-sounding score. The original Gothic cathedrals made their celestial claims persuasive through the use of architectural elements that appealed to people’s emotions — high vaulted ceilings, large windows pouring in light and a daunting, humbling scale — and the Woolworth Building shares many of these elements. But the combined experience of the five sites and installations, including the time commitment (visiting all five sites took at least 3-4 hours), the ecclesiastical-sounding music, the heightened awareness of your personal meditations within the surroundings of an overwhelmingly-large city, all effectively formed a sort of modern secular cathedral.

The sites on Governors Island did veer from this effect and seemed to have a program all their own, quite apart from the rest. The effort to get to Governors Island, the exploration of the multi-chambered underground cavern of the first site, with the slightly melodramatic music, did not provide the feeling that one has entered a place and left the rest of life behind. Instead, a more directed and anxious feeling of searching for the right way to experience the space and sound emerged, perhaps defying the objectives of the project. The other site on Governors Island, a grassy hill with the view of the city ahead, was lovely but reminded one that a long line and a boat ride back across the river awaited.

The final installation, on the 46th floor of 7WTC, was indeed a crescendo and one or two visitors even squealed in delight as the doors to the elevator opened and they took in the view — a full 360-degree view of New York City, with the Empire State Building in a seeming straight line to 7WTC. After the somber music, gilded and detailed architecture and stillness of the installation in the Woolworth Building, 7WTC definitely felt lighter, the music a touch more “Rhapsody in Blue” than Gregorian chants.

Some critics have mused that really all one needs is their own iPod with dramatic ecclesiastical music and a long walk along any New York street to achieve the same effects as these installations. And like the Gothic cathedral, which manipulates its visitors through emotional tricks, these installations perhaps do the same. But a secular cathedral is rare and valuable and it is indeed a shame that this project was temporary.

Yael Friedman writes about art and culture, and often about sports. She lives in Brooklyn and grew up in Tel Aviv and Rockaway (Bauhaus heaven and unapologetically homey beach town, respectively). You can check out more of her stuff at Ida Post.

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.

In late 2013, the MTA will complete a 2-mile extension of the 7 line, from its current terminus at Times Square to 34th Street and 11th Avenue. Improving transit access to the far west side of Manhattan is part of a far-reaching City plan to activate the Hudson Yards area, an “under-utilized” neighborhood in Manhattan roughly bounded by West 43rd Street, West 28th Street, Eighth Avenue and the Hudson River, with commercial, residential, cultural and public space development. The area is currently served by buses — including the M42, which received the shameful Pokey Award last year for being the slowest bus in New York — but subway access is as far away at Times Square or Penn Station. But in a time of limited financial resources and other pending transit projects that would serve already-bustling communities with comparable transportation expansion needs, how was the decision made to extend the 7 line?

In spring 2011, Alexandra Woolsey Puffer and Jeff Maki, as teaching artists for the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), posed that very question to a group of ninth, tenth and eleventh graders. CUP is a nonprofit organization that uses art and design to improve public participation in shaping the places where we live. Fast-Tracked is the latest in CUP’s “Urban Investigations,” a series of project-based after-school programs that ask high school students to explore fundamental questions about how the city works and translate their findings into multimedia teaching tools for audiences in the arts and social justice professions. For Fast-Tracked, they worked with students from the New Design High School on the Lower East Side of Manhattan who are participating in College Now, a free City University of New York program designed to prepare New York City’s public high school students for success in college. Over the course of 15 weeks, the students, led by the team from CUP, investigated how transportation planning works by talking to stakeholders, researching policy and financing, and pounding the pavement. Here, Woolsey Puffer and Maki share their students’ story of the 7 line extension and what they learned about who determines the shape and flow of our public transportation. — V.S.

Students design a subway system for aliens (L) and for pirates (R)

WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES A SUBWAY MAKE?
What’s the connection between subways and (re)development? Which comes first, the subway or the people? And why doesn’t the bus get any love? These are the questions that formed the basis of our CUP Urban Investigation in collaboration with ninth, tenth and eleventh grade students who are part of the College Now program at the New Design High School.

We began our investigation by exploring the fundamentals of mass transit. We posed the question to our students: is a subway system built for aliens the same subway system a pirate would want to use? Different riders want to visit different places, and everyone has his or her own idea of the path the subway should follow and the stops it should make. With 8 million people living in New York, there is no easy solution. Because transit needs to serve so many different types of riders, the name of the game is tradeoffs.

Access to transit, for businesses and for residents, is access to opportunity. Subways bring people to places they need to go — for work, for fun, to eat, to get home — and living close to transit increases options for all of those activities. But the longer the journey takes, the less practical it becomes, especially early in the morning or late at night, when transit service is less frequent.

By analyzing where subway stations are located in their own neighborhoods, how they are used and how they impact their surroundings, the students recognized the importance of efficient, reliable public transportation in everyday life. From that basic understanding, we began to look closely at one new subway development currently underway in New York: the extension of the 7 train westward, from its current final stop at Times Square to 34th Street and 11th Avenue.

By December 2013, this $2.1 billion 7 line extension will take riders to Hudson Yards, a 26-acre “under-utilized” area on the far west side of Manhattan. If you visit the area today, you’ll find check-cashing stops, parking lots, car repair garages, the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel and the Javits Convention Center. Few people live there and at first there does not appear to be strong demand for a new subway station. “This is the middle of nowhere,” summarized Shadiq Williams, a student at New Design High School. But a proposed redevelopment of the area will transform the MTA’s West Side Rail Yard into a multi-use residential and commercial complex — and improved access to transit is a key part of the redevelopment plan.

The Hudson Yards redevelopment area. The current/future route of the 7 line (solid/dashed yellow) and the newly redeveloped High Line (green).

WHO DECIDES WHERE THE SUBWAY GOES?
So, did (re)development follow from the plan to extend the subway, or did the subway follow the development? We turned to four people with markedly different viewpoints on transportation planning and real estate development to find out how the decision was made to extend the 7 train to Hudson Yards — and ended up with many different answers to the questions of who decides where the subway goes and how those choices are made.

Steven Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) and a former deputy mayor of economic development, told us about the tradeoffs politicians are required to make when allocating limited financial resources. “Do we spend it on police? On education? On infrastructure? You spend it on all of them,” he explained, “but in what proportion? It’s a judgment call, but that’s what government people are elected to do.” When deciding how much to spend on improving mass transit, politicians must consider the broader implications of the proposed project. For Spinola, the redevelopment of areas like Hudson Yards and improved subway access to the neighborhood help create what he referred to as “another infrastructure” — namely, office space — and can generate construction jobs during a tough economic climate.

Students interview REBNY President Steven Spinola (L) and Pratt Center for Community Development Director of Policy Joan Byron (R)

We got a very different perspective on the issue when we talked to Joan Byron, Director of Policy, and Elena Conte, Organizer for Public Policy Campaigns, at the Pratt Center for Community Development in Brooklyn, where transportation is a social justice issue. “The short answer is that the MTA decides. But the bigger question is, who wields the most influence over the MTA?” Byron said. “Who has power over legislators? Those folks have the most input.” Byron and Conte noted that lower-income residents of the city typically don’t have a strong voice in transportation planning issues, particularly in comparison to real estate developers, and are often left with slower, less-reliable transit options.

An imbalance in efficient transit access is one of the reasons Byron and Conte are strong supporters of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). BRT is bus service that acts like a subway, with dedicated travel lanes and platforms for efficient entry and exit. Just like the subway, you pay your fare before getting on the bus. BRT is more practical and cost-effective to build and operate than the subway — $1 million per mile to build here in New York City, as opposed to an approximate $1 billion per mile cost to build a subway — so why isn’t there more BRT in New York?

To investigate why the MTA prioritizes specific transit modes for certain sites we turned to Mark Schiffman, vice president of MTA Capital Construction, the department responsible for “mega projects,” such as the 7 line extension, the Fulton Street Transit Center and the Second Avenue subway. Mark showed us renderings of the proposed development for Hudson Yards and maps of where the subway is being extended underground, and addressed some of our questions about the new station and the process of deciding where the subway goes.

Students meet with MTA Capital Construction VP Mark Schiffman (L) and DCP consultant Sandy Hornick (R)

“It used to be that one individual, such as Robert Moses, would determine in large measure where a public works project would go,” Schiffman told us. If that one person preferred highways and bridges to public transit, for instance, then priority was given to building roads. Today, it’s harder to figure out exactly who decides; it is a process with many players and multiple steps. One key piece of the process is the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), which, as its name suggests, identifies the potential effects a project will have on the environment of the city — traffic flow, patterns of light and shadow, ecology, infrastructure and more. An EIS is required by the federal government for any project that receives federal funds. But, Schiffman pointed out, no federal funds are being used for the 7 line extension. The MTA saw an opportunity to fast-track the development by financing the project with bonds. Yet the MTA still chose to undergo the EIS process, a decision made, Schiffman told us, “to prevent one individual from playing king.”

Sandy Hornick, a consultant to the New York City Department of City Planning, elaborated on what Mark Schiffman introduced to us: the EIS process, ULURP (the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, a public review process for zoning changes), and the “creative financing” of the project that, as Schiffman described, would “fast-track” its development. Hornick explained that the 7 line extension is being funded through municipal bonds rather than state or federal monies, which come with restrictions and long-term financial unpredictability. Distilling the complex financial processes down to their essence, Hornick summarized: “All of this development will generate a lot of revenue. And we can borrow against this future revenue and use those bonds to pay for the subway.” Other transit projects that are funded by the federal or state government receive money over a certain period of time, after which they have to hope that funding will continue so that they can proceed with construction. With this project, as Schiffman said, “the money is in the bank, so we have certainty that we’ll be able to build.”

Creating the timeline

BACK IN THE CLASSROOM AND OUT ON THE STREET
Back in the classroom, we had our field notes, the recordings and transcriptions of our interviews, and an understanding of a new vocabulary we had encountered when talking to our interviewees. Now, we had to make sense of it all. What did our stakeholders tell us about the decision-making process? What are the issues at play? The alternatives? What can we do as citizens to affect the process?

To put things in perspective, the students created a timeline. From the transcripts, we cut out process-related quotes from each of our four interviewees and sorted them chronologically, from the very beginning of the project to the present, to help us understand what actually happened across organizations and from different perspectives.

Newly informed, we decided to revisit Hudson Yards and visualize the complete process of the 7 line extension in real space. We identified “six steps” to the project: Planning, Analysis/Scoping, Financing, Rezoning (ULURP), Agreement/Memo of Understanding, and Construction. With student-drawn placards that illustrated these six phases in hand, we organized a “process-ion” along the path of the subway extension — starting at 8th Avenue and 41st Street, continuing across 41st Street to 11th Avenue, and then turning south to 11th Avenue and 34th Street. We marked each of the six steps above ground, while tracing the path of the new subway tunnel beneath our feet.

Walking the Line, the 7 line process-ion

Fast-Tracked “Process-ion” by the Center for Urban Pedagogy

The final installment of our Urban Investigation was to share the story of the 7 line extension with a larger audience. We created a newspaper to inform others about what we had learned. We included quotes from our stakeholders, our own thoughts on the project, and the drawings we created to represent the six steps of the process. The newspaper — “This is a Story of the 7 Line Extension and the Hudson Yards Redevelopment Project” — will be distributed along the 7 line and beyond. (Click here to download a PDF copy.)

Printing the newspaper

Our exploration of transportation planning in New York City was full of surprises. What surprised our students the most was the fact that there is no public vote. The messiness of real-world politics, as we learned from each interview, was a lesson in the constraints and tradeoffs that need to be made in government and public policy.

More, though, than the process of figuring out who decides, we learned that behind government process there is an entire team of dedicated public servants (and lobbyists and advocates) who are willing and even excited to talk about their work. At a stage in life where the students are trying out their adult selves, it is important to find ways to practice the role of “engaged citizen.” Elected officials really do owe us all their time and accountability — especially in cases where public input is often limited to community boards composed of appointed officials.

One student remarked that transportation issues became more legible to her when she traveled from Queens to Red Hook for a summer internship at Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez’s office. She said that the trip took longer than she had hoped it would each day, and there weren’t adequate transportation options. Her participation in this investigation into transit planning had heightened her awareness of the gaps in efficiency in her own commute and helped her imagine how to create change. We hope that by helping our students understand public process a little better, they will be more likely to take an active role in their own communities and help ensure that a diversity of voices and interests are represented as our city’s policies and plans are made.

Fast-Tracked is a collaboration of CUP Teaching Artists Alexandra Woolsey Puffer and Jeff Maki with CUP staff and students from College Now at New Design High School: Sarai Arroyo, Kharee Boyd, Lawrence Daise, Juan Garcia, Steven Meijas, Isaiah Ortiz, Dahyana Santos, Aldo Sorcia, Ronex Tse and Shadiq Williams. We’d like to thank our student crew who spent 15 weeks after school to find out who decides where the subway goes.

Creating materials for the newspaper

Presenting the final newspaper at the High Line

All photos courtesy of Jeff Maki and Alexandra Woolsey Puffer for the Center for Urban Pedagogy.

Jeff Maki is an artist-programmer in New York City and a principal collaborator with Publicworks Office. Jeff writes about the legibility of urban infrastructure and advises public and private organizations on the future of digital cities.

Alexandra Woolsey Puffer is an artist-designer in New York City and a principal collaborator with Publicworks Office. Her interests include social systems and symbolic capital.

The views expressed here are those of the authors only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Organized by the
Architectural League in partnership with the
Museum of the City of New York
Media Sponsor: Architizer

On the occasion of the two-hundredth anniversary of the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan for New York, the foundational document that established the Manhattan street plan from Houston Street to 155th Street, the Architectural League invites architects, landscape architects, urban designers, and other design professionals to use the Manhattan street grid as a catalyst for thinking about the present and future of New York. For two centuries, the Manhattan street grid has demonstrated an astonishing flexibility to accommodate the architectural gestures and urban planning theories of successive generations of architects, urban designers, private developers, and city officials. Given its capacity for reinvention, how might the Manhattan grid continue to adapt and respond to the challenges and opportunities–both large and small–that New York faces now and into the future?

Up to ten selected proposals will receive an honorarium of $1,000 and will be included in an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, beginning in December 2011, concurrently with the exhibition The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE
September 26, 2011

Click here for more information and to download the full Call for Ideas.

INTRODUCTION
In 1807, frustrated by years of uncontrolled development and a decade of public health epidemics attributed to lower Manhattan’s cramped and irregular streets, New York City’s Common Council (the predecessor to today’s City Council) petitioned the State Legislature to develop a street plan for Manhattan above Houston Street, at that time a rural area of streams and hills populated by a patchwork of country estates, farms, and small houses. The adoption in 1811 of the Commissioners’ Plan for New York laid out in a single bold stroke the Manhattan street plan up to 155th Street (leaving the area north of there for future planners to address). Though it would take the rest of the 19th century to build, this gridiron of twelve north-south avenues and 155 east-west streets would fundamentally shape the future of New York and become an emblem of the city itself.

In celebration of the two-hundredth anniversary of the Commissioners’ Plan, the Museum of the City of New York will present The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, a major exhibition curated by Hilary Ballon that traces the origins and evolution of the grid over two hundred years. As inevitable — or perhaps invisible — as it may seem to New Yorkers today, the Manhattan street plan was an act of breathtaking vision and ambition on the part of city officials and citizens alike, one that required the mobilization of vast resources and decades of sacrifice and inconvenience. Grid plans, of course, were not new; Annapolis, Philadelphia, and Savannah, to name just a few colonial examples, all used a grid in one form or another. What was notable about the Commissioners’ Plan was the relentlessness with which the grid was deployed: 2,028 seemingly identical blocks with little provision for public space and none of the expressive urban gestures then fashionable among city planners — the “circles, ovals, and stars” that, in the commissioners’ own words, “certainly embellish a plan” notwithstanding “their effect as to convenience and utility.” Moreover, the plan displayed a complete disregard for the existing topography of Manhattan, transforming what had been an island of hills, valleys, and streams into the (relatively) level plane necessitated by the straight lines of the plan’s streets and avenues.

Alternately vilified and celebrated over its two hundred years, the Manhattan grid has nonetheless demonstrated a remarkable flexibility to accommodate the architectural gestures and urban planning theories of successive generations of architects, urban designers, private developers, and city officials. Central Park and the super-block housing developments of 1960s urban renewal; Broadway and Madison and Lexington Avenues; the automobile and the subway; the skyscraper and the sliver building; the water system and the electricity grid; zoning resolutions and preservation districts — these are just some of the amendments and additions that the Commissioners’ Plan has accommodated since 1811. Given the grid’s capacity for reinvention, how might it continue to adapt and respond to the challenges and opportunities — both large and small — that New York faces now and into the future?

JURY
Amale Andraos, WORKac
Hilary Ballon, Curator, The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan
Sarah Henry, Chief Curator, Museum of the City of New York
Wendy Evans Joseph, Exhibition Designer, The Greatest Grid; Cooper Joseph Studio
Marc Kushner, HWKN; CEO, Architizer
Mark Robbins, Dean, Syracuse University School of Architecture
Bernard Tschumi, Bernard Tschumi Architects
Gregory Wessner, Curator, The Greatest Grid: Call for Ideas; Digital Programs and Exhibitions Director, The Architectural League
Sarah Whiting, Dean, Rice University School of Architecture

Click here for more information and to download the full Call for Ideas.

CREDITS
The Greatest Grid: A Call for Ideas is organized by the Architectural League of New York and curated by Gregory Wessner. Funding has been provided by the J. Clawson Mills Fund of the Architectural League. League programs are also made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

www.archleague.org

The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan is organized by the Museum of the City of New York and curated by Hilary Ballon.
www.mcny.org

The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan is made possible, in part, by the generous support of The Dyson Foundation, ConEdison, The Durst Organization, Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Todd De Garmo, Jill and John Chalsty, Nixon Peabody, Ronay and Richard Menschel, and Vornado Realty Trust.

Additional support is provided by the 42nd Street Development Corporation, Peter Jay Sharp Foundation, Structure Tone, Gardiner & Theobald, American Continental Group, AvalonBay Communities, Benchmark Builders, Robert Derector Associates, VVA Project Managers and Consultants, and Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects.

Architizer is the revolutionary platform for architecture on the internet. An open network of architects, firms, fans, and projects, Architizer has created a database that spans the world in scope. Launched in November 2009, the site now contains the work of 6,400 international firms and 30,000 individuals joining over 300,000 active users on Facebook.
www.architizer.com

But before we delve headlong into the happenings, conversations, performances and talks of early May, we wanted to hear directly from some of the institutions behind this ambitious undertaking. In the video below, Lisa Phillips, the Toby Devan Lewis Director of the New Museum, Rosalie Genevro, Executive Director of the Architectural League, Eva Franch, Director of Storefront, and Brett Littmann, Executive Director of the Drawing Center, explain in their own words what the Festival is, how it came about, and what they hope its legacy will be.

And don’t forget to join us for the Festival itself, May 4-8, 2011. It kicks off with a keynote address by Rem Koolhaas, and includes presentations by a number of people whose ideas you’ve seen on Urban Omnibus: Robin Chase, Frank Duffy, Suketu Mehta, Adam Greenfield and others. Stay tuned Click here to learn more about our poster campaign, which is up on a wall or a fence near you from Sutphin Boulevard in Jamaica to Brooklyn Flea in Clinton Hill to Broadway in Midtown Manhattan. And come visit us in our booth at StreetFest on May 7th, on Rivington near the corner of Bowery.

FESTIVAL OF IDEAS FOR THE NEW CITY
SCHEDULE

WEDNESDAY, MAY 4
Keynote Address: Rem Koolhaas (7pm)

THURSDAY, MAY 5
The Heterogeneous City: Vito Acconci, Jonathan Bowles, Rosanne Haggerty, Suketu Mehta. Moderated by Jonathan F.P. Rose (1–3pm)
The Networked City: Adam Greenfield, Natalie Jeremijenko, Anthony Townsend, McKenzie Wark. Moderated by Joseph Grima (4–6pm)
Keynote Address: Jaron Lanier, The Networked City (7pm)

FRIDAY, MAY 6
The Reconfigured City: Robin Chase, Elizabeth Diller, Frank Duffy, Pedro Reyes (2–4:30pm)
Keynote Address: Antanas Mockus, The Sustainable City (5pm)
Mayoral Panel, The Sustainable City: Sergio Fajardo, John Fetterman, Greg Nickels, Michael Nutter. Introduction by David Byrne. Moderated by Kurt Andersen (7–8:30pm)

SATURDAY, MAY 7
StreetFest (11am–7pm)
Workshop Session 1: World Café: Downtown NYC, Policy Issues (10am–noon)
Workshop Session 2: World Café: Built Environment (2–4pm)
Session leaders include David Benjamin, Andrea Blum, Anna Dyson, Mitchell Joachim, Lydia Kallipoliti, Mitch McEwen, Jorge Otero-Pailos and Roo Rogers.

The Commissioners' Plan of 1811 provisional map, released in 1807 | via Wikimedia Commons

NYC GRID TURNS 200
This week marks the bicentennial of the Manhattan grid system, introducing the 90-degree, angular streetscape we know today. The grid reveals priorities of a 19th century New York, and this bicentennial offers a unique moment for urban enthusiasts to explore and understand the ideas behind 11 major avenues and 155 crosstown streets laid out in 1811.

The creation of the grid is lauded for introducing long, standardized, narrow blocks and responsible for shaping lots and blocks for facilitating real estate demands, breaking up traditionally large estate parcels. It has also been criticized for many of the pedestrian and traffic issues of Manhattan today — the narrow, pre-automobile streets gave rise to the term “gridlock.”

The significant lack of open space — only two areas included in the 1811 map, the ‘wide green’ or ‘Parade’ (Central Park came in 1850) and a future market — perhaps reflects the grid’s expected reliance on waterborne transportation and a clean, accessible riverside. In the words of William Bridges:

“It may to many be a matter of surprise that so few vacant spaces have been left, and those so small, for the benefit of fresh air and consequent preservation of health. Certainly if the City of New York was destined to stand on the side of small streams such as the Seine or the Thames, a great number of ample places might be needful. But those large arms of the sea which embrace Manhattan island render its situation in regard to health and pleasure as well to the convenience of commerce, peculiarly felicitous.”
-Remarks of the Commissioners for Laying Out Streets and Roads in the City of New York under the Act of April 3, 1807

In light of growing discussion over sea level rise and more recent attention given to developing both the built and recreational waterside ‘sixth borough’ in Vision 2020, New York City’s new Comprehensive Waterfront Plan, it is a timely comparison to note 19th century New York’s reliance on the waterfront as major open space and city government’s renewed interest in reviving New York’s waterways. To see other visual representations of the grid and Manhattan’s visual history, check out these beautiful posters on the grid’s birthday.

For in-depth coverage, see the New York Times‘ look at the grid’s birthday featuring an interactive map comparing John Randel’s 1811 map with today’s streets. Also, see Cornell Library’s original text from the Comissioners’ Plan of 1811 when the map was introduced.
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Series of screen grabs from WNYC's Interactive Map on 2010 Census Data

NEW YORK CENSUS 2010
The Census 2010 numbers were released yesterday, and according to the findings, the city grew only 2.1% since 2000 (166,855 people). Mayor Bloomberg is particularly bewildered by the results in Queens, saying yesterday “For example, the Census Bureau determined the population of Queens increased by only 1,300 people…Think about that — 1,300 people over 10 years. I’m not criticizing them, but it doesn’t make any sense.” Other city politicians are anxious about the impact of potential underreporting. Scott Stringer called the numbers “preposterous” adding that “the impact of this undercounting has severe ramifications for the city, when it comes to redistricting and the distribution of crucial social services to those most in need.” According to the Census, Brooklyn only grew by 1.6 percent (to 2,504,700 people) in the past decade while Manhattan reportedly grew by 3.2 (to 1,585,873 people).

The New York Times highlights some significant findings: the number of black New Yorkers has declined 5 percent since 2000, Non-Hispanic blacks now make up 23 percent of the population, the number of Asians increased 32 percent, passing the one million mark (now 13 percent of the population), the Hispanic population rose 8 percent and now 29 percent of the total, and Non-Hispanic whites registered a 3 percent decline, or 31,649 people (compared with a drop of nearly 362,000 during the 1990s) — the smallest decrease in a half-century of white flight. They now constitute 33 percent of the population. Manhattan and Brooklyn accounted for the only counties in the country with a million or more people where the white share of the population rose.

For a detailed report on Census numbers see here, and see WNYC’s coverage and interactive map on the Census data.
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ARCHITECTURAL LEAGUE ANNOUNCES LEAGUE PRIZE WINNERS
Some in-house news: The Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers 2011 winners have been announced! The League Prize (formerly known as the Young Architects Forum) is an annual competition, series of lectures, and exhibition created to recognize specific works of high quality and to encourage the exchange of ideas among young people who might otherwise not have a forum. This year’s theme is It’s Different: “Not content to wait for the hoped-for return of economic conditions favorable to conventional ideas about architectural practice, architects must ask: What is the new role of the designer? The Call for Entries addresse[d] the state of architecture as a reflection of our world: it’s different now.” For the full list of winners and more information, check out the Architectural League website and stay tuned for more updates on the upcoming lecture series and exhibition by the winners.
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CITY CONSIDERS WASTE-TO-ENERGY
Gotham Gazette reported this week that Waste-to-Energy, a process commonly understood as burning garbage to convert to energy, is currently being seriously considered by the Bloomberg administration in light of the soaring costs of exporting our city’s trash (up 62% in the past decade). A similar incinerator has been in operation in Newark for the past 20 years, and currently burns up some of the city’s refuse. Following the closure of the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, most of the city’s garbage is trucked to out-of-state landfills in Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Virginia. Five years ago, the city approved a solid-waste management plan, hoping to improve the handling and moving of solid waste via barge, railroad and new waste transfer stations across the city, to distribute the garbage burden citywide, over a few neighborhoods. Waste-to-Energy has been considered before, as reported in this 2005 WNYC interview on Bloomberg’s take on garbage, and with the possibility back on the table, questions are again being raised — the burden of trash processing has fallen upon traditionally low-income and minority-based communities, and activists in Sunset Park and Hunts Point are voicing their concern. The energy conversion process is popular in Europe and has gotten cleaner in recent years, but remains a potential source of unease for many residents. See more on Waste-to-Energy technology and the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance’s platform, and map on existing waste transfer station in communities of color.
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1911 Postcard of Penn Station

EVENTS
Clean up the Gowanus Canal
Remember the community-drive clean-up efforts detailed in last year’s Canal Nest Colony feature? Now’s your chance to pitch in on the fun and help clean up the Gowanus Canal! Join the Gowanus Canal Conservancy on Sunday, March 27th to clean the 2nd Avenue Rain Garden and organize their Salt Lot for the 2011 season. See more details on the event and more to come in their Clean and Green Season series.

Historical Exhibition on Penn Station
An exhibition exploring the legacy of New York’s lost Beaux Arts landmark and ideas for the future opens today You can see “The Once and Future Pennsylvania Station” at the New York Transit Museum Gallery Annex and Store at Grand Central Terminal now through October 30.

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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.

FATBERGS
“A nice working environment” is not how most would describe a city sewer system, but to Rob Smith, “head flusher” at Thames Water, traversing the bowels of London has its upsides. Smith and his team of 39 flushers are responsible for unclogging sewer tunnels of “fatbergs”– congealed deposits of cooking oil and flushed waste that look as disgusting as they sound. Fatbergs are typically formed of restaurant grease, used condoms, baby wipes and after a bad rain, dead rats. They collect in floating masses to stop up sewer waterways, leading to water pollution. As “Below the Waste Line,” a video by the Guardian, and a post on Edible Geography reveal, an intimate look at subterranean infrastructure reveals a waste-based map of our unsavory disposal practices (Leicester Square for example is a trouble zone for dumped oil from fast food restaurants) and the daily olfactory patterns of the urban population (morning showers are a particularly pungent time).
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Canal Street | Photo by Flickr user YoHandy

CANAL STREET MAKEOVER
To say Canal street is hectic is an understatement, and fortunately the New York Metropolitan Transportation Committee has taken note. In a report released last Thursday the NYMTC recommends widening sidewalks to make the famously bustling street more pedestrian friendly. The report also calls for curb extensions, a redesigned intersection at Canal and Bowery, and crackdown on parking placards to reduce car congestion. The DOT says they will use recommendations from the study in their own plans for the street, funded with World Trade Center relief aid dollars. For more analysis on the report check out Streetsblog’s take.
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ASTOR PLACE MAKEOVER
East Village hubs Astor Place and Cooper Square are also slated for a makeover, as plans for a pedestrian plaza project that were previously sidelined by the economic downturn are now underway. WXY Architecture and landscape architects Quennell Rothschild and Partners, along with the Department of Design and Construction, envision reconfigured streets that make room for new parks, benches, trees and plantings, and added traffic islands, bringing more greenery and usable public space to the highly trafficked triangle.
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Chuck Close taxi top | via ShowMedia

ART CAB
Happy Holidays from John Amato. The president of Show Media, a company that sells ads on NYC taxis, is devoting 500 ad spots to feature art by Chuck Close and Kehinde Wiley. This is the second year self-proclaimed art lover Amato has done this. Last year, work by Yoko Ono and Alex Katz traveled the city streets. Now if only someone would donate video installations to replace TaxiTV inside the cabs…
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OBAMA’S URBAN POLICY
Jarett Murphy at City Limits checks in on the progress of the Obama administration’s urban policies, hoping that the White House Office of Urban Affairs will pick up the pace on policy implementation as the President enters the second half of his term. Murphy cites the collaboration between federal agencies, like the Sustainable Cities Initiative led by HUD, the DOT and the EPA, as evidence that urban policy is slowly aligning with the demands of today’s metro growth and getting out of bureaucratic mire, but says the administration needs to follow up on planning with tangible projects to win favor and funding.
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NEW YEAR, NEW TRANSIT
The TransportPolitic reports on widespread commitment to public transportation in US and Canadian cities for 2011, saying that five new light rail lines slated to open over the next year, along with over a dozen other transportation projects that will break ground, “represent a continent-wide public sector commitment to the extension of transit offerings.” In New York, construction will continue on both commuter and metro rails, with LIRR access at Grand Central planned for 2016 and the much discussed 2nd Ave subway line to open in 2017.
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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.