Click on the image above to launch a slideshow of photographs from “The Quiet City.”

I started photographing in Industrial Business Zones (IBZs) after moving to Brooklyn in 2006.  I was intrigued by the transformation, from industrial to residential use, of areas like Williamsburg and DUMBO. Visits to Sunset Park, Gowanus, Greenpoint, Long Island City, and East Williamsburg followed. The industrial pockets of New York City are often unseen by many residents unless they work or live nearby. I began to photograph the IBZs when most industrial businesses were closed, on Sunday afternoons. Most of the work is void of people. There is a surreal and at times eerie quietness that is rare in New York City.

“The Quiet City” is an ongoing personal project and does not purport to reveal absolute truths or confront issues of zoning or gentrification. There are historic aspects to the work but ultimately all of my work ties back to one subject matter: beauty. Beauty the way I see it, often vernacular, utilitarian and graphic. The aesthetics of the scenes are most important to me, relating to formalism and classic landscape painting. I am fueled by an interest in architecture, infrastructure and a love for lines, texture, materials and color.

Chances are, these areas will look very different ten years from now. Many of the IBZs are located on prime waterfront property or adjacent to expanding, already gentrified neighborhoods. My intuitive work process brings me back to these places on a regular basis to see what is new and what I will find. If I am able to secure funding I hope to expand the scope of the project to include all New York City IBZs and ultimately publish the complete body of work as a book.

Douglas Ljungkvist is a Brooklyn based photographer originally from Sweden. His focus is on travel, architectural photography, and personal projects. His work has been published in Condé Nast Traveler, Tate ETC UK, Focus Magazine, and National Geographic Traveler, among others. He is the recipient of accolades from the IPA, The Color Awards, Px3, and was runner-up in the 2009 Travel Photographer of the Year contest, New Talent category. He has exhibited at the Bridge Art Fair during Art Basel in Miami and at Michael Mazzeo Gallery in Chelsea.

Yesterday I went down underneath the Manhattan Bridge to pick up my rejected manuscript from a publisher. Feeling a little blue, I shoved my hands in my pockets, kicked at the dirt like a ragamuffin, and walked all the way back to Greenpoint, sticking as close to the East River as possible. It took two hours.

If you follow Navy Street to Flushing and head north to Kent Avenue, you’ll see the scotch tape and wires that hold the city together: emergency systems and impound lots, chewed up docks and steaming smoke stacks, auto auctions and lost property storage. Ambulances idle next to the river, waiting for the next heart attack. Rings of razor wire cordon off rows of Red Cross trucks and disaster relief vehicles and SWAT jeeps.

And those shattered mansions. Admiral’s Row: ten stately homes dating back to the Civil War, built for naval officers and their families. Look through the barbed wire and you’ll see abandoned tennis courts and a greenhouse and head-splitting bureaucracy. The Army Corps of Engineers still owns the property and, nearly forty years after they were first abandoned, the debate continues about whether to restore the homes or build a supermarket in their place.

I peer through the fence, feeling the sucker punch of wrecked architecture and systematized neglect. Somebody taps me on the shoulder. A guy with muddy shoes asks if I’m a reporter. He runs a hustle, shaking my hand and clapping me on the back. He says he can break me into one of those mansions. He talks some junk about the neighborhood that I can’t follow. He gets pushy. He says I owe him five bucks for his stories. I tell him he owes me ten for my sparkling personality. He gets upset. We argue. We part ways.

I push north. After snaking beneath the legs of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, the scene turns orthodox fast. Over 60,000 Satmar hasidim live here. A ramshackle van circles the block, broadcasting Yiddish from a public address system lashed to the roof. The architecture gets heavy and the bicyclists get hip with black glasses and ironic tattoos as the apartment towers give way to warehouses and bars.

To my left, the sun sinks against strange industrial snapshots backed by the familiar Manhattan skyline: shipping containers and parking lots, oil tankers and barges spread before the Chrysler and Empire tops.

Along these four miles, it’s surprising how much of it is fenced off with barbed wire.

App-lovers take note: the NYC Economic Development Corporation has presented the winners of its NYC BigApps contest. The winners, who received cash prizes ranging from $500 to $5,000, include the grand prize-winning WayFinder NYC, an augmented reality application that helps users find the nearest subway station, Taxihack, which allows users to share reviews of their taxi drivers, and the Popular Choice Award winner NYC Way, which combines over 30 iPhone applications that sort, by proximity, information about nearby swimming pools, wifi hotspots, post offices, emergency rooms, street vendors, and more.

The pedestrian plazas in Midtown have people buzzing once again, and this time not about the chaise-longues. The New York Times got word from an unidentified city official that the anticipated traffic flow reduction has not met the DOT’s expectations. It is not clear whether the experimental project will be made permanent, but in the meantime both supporters and detractors are eager to see the data made public. Streetsblog reminds us that traffic flow is not the only indicator of success for this project, noting a significant reduction in pedestrian deaths in the area and the support of local businesses and such groups as the Times Square Alliance.

Vishaan Chakrabarti’s Double Down on Density has sparked quite a bit of conversation this week, both here on the Omnibus and around the web. Questions are being asked and comments are being made about the Northeast Corridor, how regional configurations come into play, how infrastructure spending is often cast as “debt and pork,” and our nation’s consistent cultural tendency towards highways and sprawl. The discussion, with Chakrabarti’s responses, continues — join in. There is plenty more to talk about.

Also garnering some attention lately is Vanessa Keith’s recent feature Clip-on Architecture. Fans take note: her piece was adapted from a more extensive article that is now available for download here (PDF). And in other climate-aware news, a panel of experts this week presented over 100 recommendations for how to make New York City’s building codes greener. The measures are referred to as “suggestions” for now, and the panel acknowledged the need for financing and incentives for developers, but Bloomberg sees this as a key advancement in his goal to reduce greenhouse emissions by 30% by 2030. Stay tuned to see how this plays out.

In other transportation news, consulting firm Frost and Sullivan released a report last week that car sharing is up 117% since 2007 (via TreeHugger). Additionally, Streetsblog reports that the Seward Park Houses foray into community-specific car sharing has been wildly popular. The program is run by Hertz and makes use of two of Seward Park’s parking spaces, with claims that each shared car replaces 14 personal cars. Lower East Side residents take note: The program is now open to the general public.

We’ll end this roundup with some fun with maps, photos and archi-art for your weekend perusal. Map lovers, expect to waste some serious time exploring both the New York Public Library’s brand new georectification (!) maps site (via Gothamist) and the 1924 aerial map on NYCityMap (via Curbed) — though Omnibus readers might remember (as Steven Romalewski mentioned in the Curbed comments) that OASIS offers a look back as far as 1609 and explorations of more recent development, in greater detail, from 1996 to the present. For an alternately angled New York City view, WNYC has posted two photo slideshows by Stephen Nessen of underground happenings: one of Grand Central from one hundred feet below and one of the tunnels for the 7 train extension (via The Infrastructurist). Finally, we recently discovered the blog butdoesitfloat and its architecture-centric art eye candy. We highly recommend perusing the archive for a stunning collection of images ranging from a David Maisel photography series on mining to an unearthed LIFE magazine photoessay on Le Corbusier in his studio:

Top image: 100 feet below Grand Central Station, photo by Stephen Nessen, via WNYC. Bottom image: Photo by David Maisel, via butdoesitfloat.com. The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

Safari 7 is back! Actually, it never went away. But starting next Thursday you can delve deeper into the 3D maps, drawings and podcasts that illuminate the ecosystems along this urban transect that runs from Times Square to Flushing.

OPENING: THU 7-9PM OCTOBER 15
LOCATION: Studio-X 180 Varick Street, Ste 1610 New York, NY 10014 – 1 Train to Houston Street
EXHIBITION DATES: October 15-December 31, 2009, open to the public Mon-Fri, 10am-6pm

There are other ways to use handheld devices to improve the experience of riding transit, as we learned from the first in a recurring series of transit data meet-ups. And it looks like the MTA, finally, is coming around on its aggressive actions against techies working in the public interest with transit data. After an uproar from the web developer community, a new MTA chief, and a letter from Gale Brewer, the MTA is reversing course and several apps removed from the iTunes store are back on sale.

Whether you’re lucky enough to carry a smart phone or not, it’s getting harder and harder to find live, official information in subway stations, given the extensive staffing cuts in station agents. Often snack vendors and maintenance workers are the only ones around able (though not always willing) to assist and guide riders.

When it comes to the rights of street vendors, however, there is one guy who actually does have the answers. Sean Basinski, who worked with Candy Chang on the fantastic Making Policy Public: Vendor Power! is answering readers questions over at nytimes.com. Check out Part 1, Part II, and Part III.

If you’re looking for holiday weekend activities, don’t forget to explore the streets of the Greenpoint Williamsburg Industrial Zone tonight and tomorrow with Sarah Nelson Wright and the Brooklyn Makes crew. Or, for a Saturday afternoon activity, register your team to take part in a group scavenger hunt that will help populate one of the most trafficked web sites in the world with your photos.

WHAT: Wikis Take Manhattan III, A photo scavenger hunt through NYC for Wikipedia
START TIME: Saturday, October 10 at 1:00pm
END TIME: Saturday, October 10 at 9:00pm
WHERE: Low Memorial Library, Columbia University OR The Open Planning Project, 148 Lafayette (between Broome and Grand)

And while we’re talking photos, if you were inspired by last week’s WNYC/Omnibus meet-up to look up more often when you’re going about your daily business, try next time to find the hidden alphabet in the constellations of forms created by the skyline. Or, just appreciate these wicked cool images, the work of German artist Lisa Rienermann:

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Wait, the site in the image above couldn’t be in Manhattan, could it? It is, in fact. It’s one of the many overlooked spots of our dense urban island in which a recalcitrant nature has overcome vestiges of a forgotten built environment. For his Nowhere in Manhattan project, photographer Michael Jensen has found and framed such places and aspires to display the images on a billboard near you. Anyone out there got the hookup at Clear Channel?

As always, kind of hard to tame the beast. Another beast many New Yorkers would love to tame is the mass transit system. Last week, Mayor Bloomberg pledged reform and improvements, just as reports this week find many transit agencies slow to spend stimulus funding.

If it were up to you, what small or large changes – in the routes, timing, infrastructure, wayfinding, information display, aesthetic experience – would you make to the way you get to work and around the city? This is one of the questions we’ve been kicking around with our cityscapes buddies at WNYC Culture, so drop us a line or leave us a comment below with your thoughts and stay tuned for more discussion on this theme next month.

For starters, we can think of one simple change that would make deciding whether to wait for the bus or not a whole lot easier. Tell us the ETA of the next bus! And, guess what: miracle of miracles on 34th street.

Remember way back in 2007 and then again in 2008, when our friends at the Forum for Urban Design partnered with everyone’s favorite Storefront and others to prove that bike-sharing was not only fit for Parisians? Yet another way that use-on-demand systems can make our cities more efficient, convenient and fun. New York Bike Share may not yet have become a permanent reality for New Yorkers, but other American cities have taken the plunge, notably… Denver. Denver? Yes, Denver. Check out the video below from GOOD’s excellent green tech series:

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