Give a Minute NYC | via Co.Design

STATE OF THE CITY
Mayor Bloomberg delivered the State of the City address on Wednesday. His focus was on neighborhood specific issues, including various changes ranging from livery cab policies to urban technology innovations. “Transformation” — economic, technological, physical, social, and otherwise — and “simplicity” were the words of the day. The Staten Island Navy Homeport, Governors Island, the Narrows at Coney Island, Steeplechase Plaza, Brooklyn Navy Yard, Hunters Point South, Willets Point, Hunts Point Landing and the development of ferry service were some of the large-scale projects that received specific mention. The Simplicity Plan promises to modernize City government by “making it smarter, more efficient and oriented around customers” — an effort that includes the launch of Give A Minute for New York City. You might remember that we interviewed the minds behind Give a Minute in December, learning about the processes of sharing our concerns for a more sustainable urban environment. The New York version of Give A Minute promises to offer a platform to share ideas as well as a connection with various city departments that share your concerns, thus “redefining public participation for the 21st century.” The official program launch is pegged for April or May, so start thinking of your ideas!
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POWERLESS IN BROOKLYN
In a biting essay in the New York Times Complaint Box, Atlantic Yards Report blogger Norman Oder decries the lack of local government and local media in the “non-Manhattan” boroughs. Primarily addressing Brooklyn, Oder asserts that the absence of daily borough-wide newspapers and a concentration of city agencies in Manhattan render the other boroughs powerless, resulting in muted citizen voices. His piece inspired debate and commiseration from Brooklynites and other New Yorkers. If you have something to say on the issue weigh in here.
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THE BLUEBELT AND BEYOND
Next Tuesday, January 25th, Dana Gumb will share his Bluebelt model for sustainable urban stormwater management at the Arsenal in Central Park as part of the Freshkills Park Talks series. The long-time leader of the Staten Island Bluebelt project (which you can read about in this recent Omnibus feature), Gumb will discuss how his experience with stormwater management on Staten Island has translated into current DEP projects in Queens and the Bronx and the potential for future open space and water reclamation in the city. The talk is free and open to the public.
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NEWTON CREEK NATURE WALK EXPANDS
Regular readers of the Omnibus know that we are big fans of the Newtown Creek Nature Walk, so we’re pleased to see plans for an expansion of the project. New city funding is being directed towards a near-doubling of the path, which has been open since October 2007. However, we were not so pleased to hear that George Trakas has not been hired to design the second phase, which is instead being planned by the DDC. WTF?
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Conductor (In progress demo) from Alexander Chen on Vimeo.

A PLAY ON THE SUBWAY MAP
Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 subway map design has inspired praise, criticism and now music. Alexander Chen’s “Conductor” transforms the map into a musical instrument with each line as a different string synched to video visualizations. The work is still in progress, and we can’t wait until we can play the map ourselves, but for now these beautiful videos are diversion enough.
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FOOD FOR THINKERS
Much like cities, the roots of food politics extend into myriad conversations, from history to sustainability to class and to architecture. To reinforce the complexity of conversations about food, Nicola Twilley has been hosting Food For Thinkers, “an online festival of food and writing” that invites thinkers, writers and bloggers to write about food from different areas of expertise. The festival continues through the 23rd, and all of the links are being collected at GOOD magazine’s Food hub, so tune in to read about edible architecture, the classist geography of restaurant reviews or food as a public space editor — and check out Urban Omnibus’ contribution, our interview with Nevin Cohen of the Five Borough Farm project.
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Imagined transportation for the sixth borough | Image via One Prize

THE SIXTH BOROUGH
As Bloomberg talks about the state of the City’s five boroughs, the One Prize committee is envisioning a sixth. “Water as the Sixth Borough” is a concept that’s been popping up in a few different contexts lately, and now “architects, landscape architects, urban designers, planners, engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, economists, artists, students, and individuals” are being asked to envision ways to incorporate New York City’s waterways into the urban structure. Registration is open until April 30 for the annual design and science award, which aims to promote green design in cities, and the full competition brief is available for download on the One Prize website. For anyone interested in entering the competition, BLDGBLOG offers some suggested reading to help imagine such a “liquid neighborhood” for the future.

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Artists and public art projects on display as part of Wave Hill's Remediate / Re-vision exhibit.

THIS WEEKEND
Open House New York is unlocking doors and waiving admission fees all across the city this weekend. Have you signed up to explore Bayside’s Fort Totten? A peek inside the Chrysler Building? A Cathedral tour of St John the Divine? From historic homes to botanic gardens to architecture offices to skyscrapers, the choices seem limitless. Of particular interest to Omnibus readers is a trip to Wave Hill to view the exhibition Remediate / Re-vision, which showcases a wide variety of public art projects that engage the natural environment by improving conditions, increasing awareness and recasting the role of the artist as an instigator of ecological awareness and action. Some of the projects shown will be familiar to Omnibus devotees, especially George Trakas’ design for the Newtown Creek Nature Walk and Natalie Jeremijenko and The Living’s Amphibious Architecture. The show (including an Omnibus-produced video on the Creek’s design) is on view through November 28th, but if you sign up through openhousenewyork.org and go this weekend, admission is free. Next week, Wave Hill is programming a closer look at the site’s unique ecology: on October 17th, join Trakas and Gabriel Willow of the Aududon Society for a tour of some of the plants and animals that make Newtown Creek their home.

The streets and spaces of the East Village will be taken over by the participatory art and technology events of Conflux for the next two days, starting with a talk by “legendary urban explorer” Steve Duncan, tonight at 7pm. Take a look at our preview of the event or peruse the complete schedule of performances, walks, workshops, artist talks, games, expeditions and tours at confluxfestival.org.

Tomorrow is also the start of the Cooper-Hewitt’s National Design Week, the fourth annual “education initiative offering free admission for all museum visitors and hosting a series of public programs surrounding the National Design Awards.” Mediabistro lists Seven Ways to Spend Your National Design Week, some of which take place in other parts of the country. To find events in New York though, you can go to the National Design Week site, which lists everything from free movie screenings to galas.
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NEXT WEEK
The Underdome project maps out competing theories, agendas and strategies for creating a more energy efficient world. We’ll hear directly from the project’s initiators — Janette Kim and Erik Carver — in next week’s feature, but first check out the first of a series of four panel discussions next Tuesday at 630 at Studio-X, with Keller Easterling, Petra Todorovich and June Williamson, moderated by Georgeen Theodore.

New York City’s Department of City Planning recently released the draft recommendations for Vision 2020, a work-in-progress building off of the City’s first comprehensive waterfront plan, released in 1992. Community input from borough workshops and public forums resulted in the current recommendations, now available for download and review. One of two core components of WAVES (the Waterfront Vision and Enhancement Strategy, a citywide initiative launched in April), Vision 2020 will lay out long-term goals for the enhancement of the City’s waterfront and waterways (complemented by the New York City Waterfront Action Agenda, which will focus on short-term priorities to be implemented within the next three years). Public input is still open — on October 12, City Planning will host a public meeting to present the draft recommendations and hear community feedback, at NYU’s Rosenthal Pavilion. If you can’t make it, comments can also be submitted online through November 12.
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CREEKSPEAK
Last week, Newtown Creek was announced as an EPA Superfund Site, a national program to rehabilitate the country’s most polluted sites. To effect change on a local scale, HabitatMap and the Newtown Creek Alliance just announced CreekSpeak, a project cataloguing the oral history of local inhabitants through interactive maps. The objective of the project is to “highlight and document the experiential knowledge of individuals who are inside narrators of day-to-day life in these communities.” Environmental justice meets oral history and map mashups! Check out the stories (embedded below) by clicking on an orange flag for inhabitant profiles or a blue flag for specific site information.

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THE SOLITARY LIFE OF CRANES
Another narrative on urban life from a unique perspective — that of crane operators — can be seen in The Solitary Life of Cranes, a short film by Eva Weber that exposes the “invisible life of a city, its patterns and hidden secrets, seen through the eyes of crane drivers working high above its streets.” We have only seen the trailer (embedded below), and unfortunately there are no screenings currently planned in the US, but you can read BLDGBLOG’s account of the film in his ruminations on Urban Optometry — or purchase the DVD (and find information about Weber’s other short documentary, City of Cranes) on the film’s website.

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THE LAST NEWSPAPER
This week, The Last Newspaper opened at The New Museum, “a major exhibition inspired by the ways artists approach the news and respond to the stories and images that command the headlines.” Some familiar names, including the Center for Urban Pedagogy and Joseph Grima with Kazys Varnelis, are serving as some of the partner organizations for the show, groups that will engage in public dialogue, research and presentation in an attempt to infuse the museum with active “intellectual production as well as display… posing new possibilities for a contemporary art museum experience.” The Last Newspaper will be on view through January 9, 2011.

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Sometimes taking a look at how we used to see and imagine the city is as valuable as looking ahead to its future, and we often do both. With SepiaTown, a user-generated map of wonderfully washed-out historical images from around the world, looking back in time and reflecting upon the city’s past has become much easier. Anyone who visits the site can contribute vintage photos, mapped to the places they depict, creating an expanding visual archive that includes the collections of libraries, historical societies, and mementos from your attic scrapbooks. Or you can just waste hours looking around at how your frequented spots looked over a hundred years ago.

While we’re still waiting for a historical sonic map of the world, many are looking ahead to how our cities will sound in the future. As we discussed last week, going on a slow walk through the city can make you attuned to just how noisy it really is. Enter design for a “vibrant calm,” as proposed by acoustic engineer Trevor Cox. With the possibility of very different sounding streets as internal combustion engines are phased out, Cox proposes we work out what we want to hear, rather than continue to simply abate noises. We tend to like a bustling city full of activity, so crafting our soundscapes in a similarly “vibrant” fashion — with attention to the aesthetic and affective dimensions of sound — could make for a better urban experience for all.

Studio Mumbai Architects, Mumbai, India – In-between Architecture from Victoria and Albert Museum on Vimeo.

The current spill in the Gulf of Mexico is on a scale of its own, but New York City does have its under-acknowledged comparisons. Oil and other contaminant spills in and around Newtown Creek, estimated at 17 to 30 million gallons over the past few decades, have had a subtle but major impact on the waterway and industrialized area between Brooklyn and Queens. With Superfund status for the area in sight, as reported by the New York Times, a cleanup of the area in its entirety could last for up to a decade. In the name of ongoing industrial clean-ups, yesterday Bloomberg announced the nation’s first municipal brownfield cleanup program, as part of PlaNYC. The program will enable the recovery of thousands of acres of contaminated land, coordinated for the first time by the City rather than the State Department of Conservation and the EPA.

On the brighter side of reclamation: dumpster pools! Next Saturday, as part of the third annual Summer Street initiative, you can dive into one of three long-awaited ‘deluxe’ versions of the water-filled dumpsters that premiered last summer. The portable (and clean) pools will be found on a car-free stretch from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next Tuesday, the Architectural League will host a talk by Andrew Whalley, who heads up the New York Office of the international architecture firm Grimshaw Architects. Many of this firm’s current and recent work has Urban Omni-love written all over it, from the expansion of the Queens Museum of Art to the Fulton Street Transit Center to the massive overhaul of New York’s street furniture, including 3,300 bus shelters, 330 newsstands and 20 automatic public toilets. So come out next Tuesday to the Great Hall at Cooper Union and hear all about Grimshaw’s work. (And, remember, if you are a member of the Architectural League, admission is free. Please join today, and make note if you’re an Omnibus reader; we could really use your support).

In their respective Omnibus features, both Robin Chase and Rachel Abrams spoke of the incredible potential of instituting some sort of ride-sharing scheme for New York City cabs. Well, the Taxi and Limousine Commission is all set to move forward with three cab stands – at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue, 72nd Street and Third Avenue, and 72nd Street and Columbus. Our take? Sounds cool, but the fact that all routes are fixed to head down Park Avenue to 42nd Street makes it seem rather like a bus. Where would you like to see a cab stand where you can share a cut-rate cab with a stranger? Let us know in the comments.

Or maybe shared cab-stand recommendations could follow the trend of map-based, user-suggested, urban problem solving. Instead of using the internet to flag a pothole or report a code violation, you can use this site to make your voice heard on the best location for bike racks.

Newton Creek news just in: five oil companies are working on a deal to pay for the investigation phase of the Creek’s clean-up, which will end up being far more expensive and complicated than the one for the Gowanus Canal.

An entirely different sort of relationship between private money and public aspirations has sparked intense debate and protests at the proposed Kingsbridge Armory mall conversion, over the issue of requiring a living wage for retail workers. Going forward, we think we’ll be following this one pretty closely, so if there’s a blogger out there who wants to cover this project, get in touch.

On a lighter note, we couldn’t help but agree with Curbed that Columbia’s historic real estate brochure collection is 100% floorplan porn! The online database “consists of over 9,200 advertising brochures, floor plans, price lists, and related materials that document residential and commercial real estate development in the five boroughs of New York and outlying vicinities from the 1920s to the 1970s.” The digitization of all Brooklyn addresses in the collection is complete, Manhattan will be available in January 2010, and the rest are forthcoming, borough by borough. Hot.

Top image: Grimshaw-designed street furniture, courtesy of Cemusa. Bottom image: Address: 35 Prospect Park West | Borough: Brooklyn, New York City | Neighborhood: Park Slope – Gowanus | Architect: Roth, Emery | Owner / Agent: Realty Associates, Inc. 35 Park West Corp. Bruton, Francis X. | Format: Brochure | Call number: YR.0499.BR.002.004

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Everyone knows that the rooftops of New York are the city’s most underutilized real estate asset. But while convincing your landlord to install that bamboo roofdeck might be a challenge, telling her to paint it white should, in theory, be an easy sell. Climate change implications aside, it saves money. According to Crain’s however, New York is behind on this simple energy-saving measure. Hopefully Mayor Mike and enviro-VP Al donning some rollers in Queens yesterday will kick it up a notch.

If thinking about climate change gets you down, then indulge in some informed optimism from genius illustrator and urban enthusiast par excellence Maira Kalman. Not only does the journey she details in this blogpost reveal the complexity of city process and the innovation that goes into making its systems work, it also shows that she shares our love for the Newtown Creek Nature Walk and Polshek Partnership’s design for the upgrade of the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Facility. (In other Newtown Creek news: the EPA has officially proposed adding the site to the Superfund National Priorities List.)

Making Policy Public – the excellent program of the Center for Urban Pedagogy that we’ve showcased in two kick-ass work-process narratives here and here on the Omnibus – has just announced the new list of collaborators. And, proving that the kind of collaborations between designers and advocates that this program fosters can extend beyond the program itself, one of the designers from last year’s MPP – Omni-favorite Candy Chang – has a whole truckload of flashcards she developed with Tenants & Neighbors that explain tenants’ rights.

Candy’s all about making information more accessible and public space more useful, so imagine she’d approve of the instinct behind the Bus-Tops program in London, which invites artists to repurpose bus shelters by installing LED screens that create “a shared visual canvas that would encourage artists, designers, and any other interested parties to upload images, words, video onto the screens … via the web or mobile phone.”

And since everyone’s talking transit, let’s get together and explore a fascinatingly complex subway station next Wednesday. Meet at the northwest corner of 4th Avenue and Pacific Street at 6:30 p.m. RSVP to rsvp@archleague.org.

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First off, save the date: on Tuesday, July 7th, please come and join us and our friends and neighbors, the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), for a different kind of SUPERFUND conversation called… “Goo Gone: a live talk show about risk, responsibility and toxins in the landscape.” Panelists will include artist Brooke Singer, environmental justice advocate Anne Rabe, congressional community coordinator Dan Wiley, and other cool cats who will offer new perspectives on the history of the Superfund program, the politics of designation, and the changing legal definitions of toxins, risk, and responsibility. This will be free and open to the public, but space is limited so please let us know if you’re coming by emailing info [at] anothercupdevelopment.org. This will go down at the Old American Can Factory, HQ for both Omnibus and CUP and the site of a recent Architectural League shindig that was off the proverbial hook.

While you’re down in this neck of the woods, check out the exhibit at Cabinet reviewed in our forum this week.

Speaking of environmentally hazardous canals, Newtown Creek is also near and dear to our hearts. But its peculiar beauty in no way diminishes the huge cost its pollution has wrought on the public health of the area. the Daily News reports on a new study that is looking in to the mysterious ailments that plague nearby residents.

This week we toured some Midtown West megaprojects with Bob Yaro. His arguments for a coordinated approach to intercity transportation recommend that New Yorkers develop a more sophisticated understanding of how New York fits into a megaregional political economy. This point of view echoes Nate Berg’s call, in Planetizen, for a national infrastructure policy. Yaro also has some opinions on other large construction projects closer to home – like the radically reconfigured plan for Atlantic Yards. In advance of the ESDC’s vote on Forest City Ratner’s new, Ellerbe Becket-designed scheme, Yaro opined that ”the horse is already out of the barn.” He was right; the MTA has accepted the developer’s deferred payment proposal.

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