Meeting Bowls | via Times Square Alliance

MEET ME IN A BOWL
Times Square is now host to an outdoor urban furniture installation titled “Meeting Bowls,” created in partnership with the Times Square Alliance and design firm mmmm… The Meeting Bowls are three, 8-person, slatted bowls (highly reminiscent of salad spinners), which are meant to offer a place for intimate social experiences in the midst of one of the city’s busiest spaces. The bowls also offer the option to to record dialogue that may take place during your encounter on laptops and smartphones. The installation will be open to the public through September 16th, from 8am to midnight. Read more about the Meeting Bowls from The Architect’s Newspaper and see more on the concept from mmmm…

NYC AT A GLANCE
The 2011 update of NYC At-A-Glance, the New York City Economic Development Corporation’s report on New York City’s economy, covers data on standards of living, length of commute, economic growth and employment statistics. Some of the more compelling stats: 91.7% of New Yorkers live and work within the city (placing us way ahead of the rest of the country, with runner-up Houston coming in at 81%) — though New Yorkers also have the longest commute in the country, as only 33% of us spend less than half an hour en route to work, and a whole quarter of the city have over an hour of commute time. New York’s private sector had the highest average income in the country at $81,800, a reflection of a hugely stratified sector, in which 250,800 people in “Accommodation and Food Services” earned $28,600 per year at the low end, and 161,600 people in “Securities” earned, on average, $361,300 per year. Download the full report here for a detailed look at the state of the city.

NYC Play Street | via Transportation Alternatives

POP-UP PLAYGROUND
Pop-up chapels, pop-up labs for urbanism, pop-up roller rinks — NYC is on a pop-up roll. The latest in imaginative structures to hit New York’s streets are pop-up playgrounds or play-streets designed to combat childhood obesity. Seven civic organizations are leading an effort over the next two months to close streets to traffic and instead use those spaces to accommodate instruction in activities ranging from yoga to rugby to tennis to jump-rope. By re-defining the traditional “play street” in areas where open space and obesity are an issue, these pop-up structures might be as fun as they are good for public health.  Read more in The New York Times.

via Scientific American

ON CITIES: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
The special September issue of Scientific American is all about cities. There are some heavy hitters in the roster of authors — geographers, economists, sociologists and architectural critics who tackle the idea of “the city” from vantage points of efficiency, livability, scale and geography. Look out for the issue, featuring articles by Edward Glaeser, Anthony Townsend and Mark Lamster, and an interview with William Gibson, at newstands next month, or check it out online.

EVENTS and TO-DOs:

Image via stillspotting nyc

TO A GREAT CITY
Stillspotting nyc (the Guggenheim’s 2-year multidisciplinary installation series) has announced its upcoming exhibit To a Great City, a sound-and-space walking tour of Lower Manhattan that was created in collaboration with Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (known for his compositional style tintinnabuli and his search for an absolute essential sound) and architecture and landscape design firm Snøhetta. Starting in Battery Park and traveling underground and into the private recesses of some of the city’s most famous skyscrapers, the tour will explore five typically inaccessible Manhattan spaces. A ticket buys access for a full day of visiting and revisiting as many times as the experience begs. Tours will run Thursdays through Saturdays, September 15-18 and 22-25. See more from Architizer and on the stillspotting website.

Dialog in the Dark

DIALOG IN THE DARK
This weekend, Dialog in the Dark opens as a new form of exhibition/participatory experience at the South Street Seaport. Led by blind or visually-impaired guides, exhibition-goers will be given canes as they enter a complete and total darkness where they experience simulations of familiar New York places and environments through sound, texture, temperature and smell. See more on the exhibit here and read Edward Rothstein’s review in the Times here.

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

The now-found Candela Structure via http://catasterist.com/

CANDELA FOUND
Remember the Candela Structures? In June, Kirsten Hively introduced us these “buildinglets” which were originally constructed for the 1964-1965 World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens. Hively, along with Paul Lukas had started a website and exhibition in honor of the structures and the mysteries surrounding them, one of which has recently been solved. There were initially three structures at the time of the World’s Fair, but by 1966, one of the structures had been removed, and no one seemed to know where it had gone. Recently, Hively and Lukas received a photograph of the missing structure which is now serving as a cabin in the Adirondacks. As more questions get answered, updates will be posted on Hively’s blog Catasterist.

ENERGY GENERATING PLAYGROUNDS
The potential for turning everyday actions into viable energy resources is being tested through revolving doors, dance floors and sidewalks. And now a playground in Gangtok, India has installed equipment that generates energy through its use, which is then used to power the lights in the playground. The city plans on updating all of their parks with the new equipment, which, in conjunction with solar energy installations, will make them energy self-sufficient — and, in some cases, will provide excess to help power nearby restaurants and businesses.

“CITIES”
Radiolab, an excellent public radio program that investigates “big questions” where “the boundaries blur between science, philosophy, and human experience,” has dedicated its latest episode to “what makes cities tick.” Radiolab hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich explore the sounds, rhythms, personalities and appetites of cities around the world and talk to some of New York City’s Sandhogs — the people who build the tunnels we saw earlier this week in Stanley Greenberg’s photography. Check out the sounds and stories in “Cities” and then head to 92YTribeca on Tuesday night to hear Krulwich, Lewis H. Lapham, Jeffrey Inaba and Andrew Dolkart discuss the same incredibly broad topic in a panel hosted by Studio-X, Lapham’s Quarterly and C-Lab.

Manufacturers Hanover Trust via SOM | Ezra Stoller

SABOTAGING ARCHITECTURE
“It’s time to stop worrying about whether New York has enough ‘starchitecture’ and consider the ways in which we are destroying or sabotaging the architecture we already have through neglect, ignorance, disfigurement, willful disregard and the sacrosanct belief that nothing takes precedence over the investment opportunities encouraged by Manhattan’s stratospheric real estate values.” This week in the Wall Street Journal, Ada Louise Huxtable calls attention to a problem facing the preservation of many mid-20th century modernist structures — the need to retain the relationship between interior and exterior, inextricably linked in the glass-walled structures representative of the materials innovations of the time. Huxtable’s focus is the removal of a 70-foot Bertoia sculpture from the Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company Building at Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street, the facade — but not the interior — of which is protected by the Landmarks Preservation Commission. “The Bertoia sculptures are gone, and the interior seems destined to be stripped of everything that defined it and made the city a better place. The building has been irrevocably impoverished, and the destruction promises to be complete with its conversion to generic commercial space. As a landmark, it becomes a travesty.”

207 Acres by Heather L. Johnson via CHRISTINA RAY

ERASURE
Heather L. Johnson first came to our attention through her delicate embroidery work about New York City infrastructure, which we discussed with her in our interview Ever-circulating Fluids and Continuously Moving Parts. Next Thursday, November 11th, Johnson’s latest exhibition opens at CHRISTINA RAY. In Erasure, Johnson uses embroidery, drawings, and paintings to explore “a poignant moment in the history of late nineteenth-century Hudson County, New Jersey, where long-forgotten insane asylums and penitentiaries once existed amidst violence and political corruption.” Erasure will be open through December 12 at 30 Grand Street.

THIS IS ALSO SERVICE DESIGN
Last week, Laura Forlano talked to several leading professionals in Service Design, giving an introduction to the emerging field. On November 10, another leading professional in the field, Marc Stickdorn, will give a talk as part of the Service Design Performances Fall 2010 Lecture Series at Parsons The New School for Design. “This is also Service Design Thinking” will be a further explanation of techniques and concepts of the field, which will also be a part of the first Service Design textbook to be published in December by Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider.

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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.

Swelter, by Keystone

Background
A gushing hydrant drenching happy kids is an iconic image of urban summertime. My first 4^th of July living in New York was boiling hot and I was thrilled to see the open hydrants in person. It wasn’t until several years later that this article from the Times caused me to rethink the excitement of the open hydrant.

The article provided a shocking statistic: at full power an open hydrant pumps out 1,000 gallons of water a minute. Uncapping, or opening, the local hydrant for relief from the heat had never struck me as anything more than a fun, and totally accepted, urban practice that had been going on for decades.

But that 1,000 gpm figure stuck in my head. And my curiosity eventually led me to develop nyc: uncapped, a study of the common summertime practice, and, in response to those discoveries, an exploration of alternatives.

Diagram courtesy of Flickr user takomabibelot

Quick web-surfing yielded plenty of articles going back for a number of summers, chronicling the water lost from open hydrants all over New York and other cities like Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Chicago. The cumulative effect of so many running hydrants raised concern – especially since New York has had at least seven droughts in recent history.

It is estimated that the average person will consume about 7,000 gallons of water in their lifetime. At 1,000 gallons per minute, an open hydrant will have spent the entire lifetime supply of drinking water for two people in just 15 minutes. The water loss is staggering, particularly when you consider that hydrants typically remain open for much longer.

This tension between the ability of an open hydrant to activate public space and the potentially serious impact it has on ecological health provides the foundation for nyc: uncapped.  Exploring the uncapping ritual and its context, this project re-imagines the hydrant as more than a basic tool for firefighting – it can also be a valid opportunity for play and even a catalyst for ecologic improvement.

Context
Unless they are uncapped, or you’re in a car looking for a momentary parking space, hydrants disappear into the white noise of miscellaneous street appurtenances. The first step in my research was to understand how the hydrant worked and fit into the New York City water supply system.

The city’s water originates in upstate watersheds encompassing more than 2,000 square miles of land. 21 reservoirs and lakes collect, hold, and distribute water into a system of aqueducts and tunnels that travel over 125 miles to deliver more than 1.3 billion gallons of water to the city every day (an amount that would fill the Empire State Building to the brim more than four times). After being filtered and treated, the water delivered to our kitchen sinks is identical to the water flowing to a hydrant – it is all potable water.

At least 60 different boards, agencies, and committees across city and state borders form a complex web of organizations that manages the vast operations of the NYC water system.  Chief among these is the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), which is responsible for maintaining the hydrants.

Citizens are allowed to use their local hydrant only if it is equipped with a spray cap, provided and installed by the fire department at no charge. Holes in the cap on the barrel’s side reduce the flow of water from 1,000 to 25 gallons per minute. Opening the hydrant without a spray cap is illegal and citizens can be ticketed or fined for what the city terms ‘hydrant abuse’.

When a hydrant is fully open, water pressure in the surrounding hydrants drops, rendering them ineffective in their primary role as sources of water for firefighting. Water pressure in nearby buildings is also affected, causing problems for hospitals, local businesses, and residents.

On top of public safety issues, the water is not free. We currently pay indirectly for water expended from a hydrant through water rate hikes. If hydrants were metered to charge an on the spot pay-to-play fee, the water would cost $2 per minute plus an additional $4.30 per minute to take the water into the city’s treatment system for cleaning. At $6.30 per minute, three hours romping in the local hydrant would run just over $1,000 – which does not take into account extra costs associated with man-hours required to close, repair, or replace broken hydrants.

nyc: uncapped
While open hydrants can be found across much of the city, Washington Heights, the South Bronx, and South Jamaica neighborhoods experience the most frequent activity, according to the DEP. In preliminary research a single hydrant on 156^th Street was notable for having been opened and closed 14 times in a single day, prompting my decision to focus nyc: uncapped on the Washington Heights and Inwood neighborhoods. For ease of information gathering, the study also includes everything north of 155^th Street in Manhattan (the geographic boundary for Community District #12). While only 1% of the city’s hydrant inventory is located in this district, 20% of the calls to 311 complaining of an open hydrant come from this area.

Hydrant uncapped without spray cap

Hydrant equipped with spray cap

Beyond the obvious temperature driver, it became apparent that the physical environment of CD12 contributes to the frequent open hydrants. Looking at a map one would think that this area, the skinniest part of the island, surrounded by the Hudson and East Rivers and large swaths of park, would have plenty of shady opportunities for recreation. However, major highways run through the parks and steep elevation changes (up to 150’) make it a challenge to access much of the parkland and waterfront. Despite the acres of parks, CD12 has one of the lowest percentages of tree canopy cover in the city. The lone municipal pool in the district, which can handle about 2,400 visitors a day, has to serve the district’s 50,000+ kids under the age of 18. People often stand in line for an hour or more waiting to be admitted.

Numerous visits to CD12 confirmed that hydrants were getting a lot of unauthorized use during the summer.  I also found plenty of residents hanging out on the sidewalks in front of their homes in cooler months, suggesting that hydrant uncapping is partially fed by a broader socially-active sidewalk life, and is not singularly motivated by physical factors.

Alternatives to uncapping
The open hydrant tradition has to evolve. Given the projected increases in both summertime temperatures and the city’s population, a corollary increase in the number of uncapped hydrants can also be expected. While the creative appropriation of the hydrant and surrounding sidewalk for recreation is the beginning of a good multi-use strategy, my goal was to preserve the positive aspects of uncapping without sacrificing water resources.

Part of the city’s plaNYC initiative is to plant one million trees by 2030. Why not target streets with frequent uncapping activity and limited tree cover, close those streets to traffic for the summer, and transform them into seasonal tree nurseries? In so doing, these temporary parks would provide immediate relief to the residents of CD12 while supporting a city-wide green agenda.

Each summer, growers would deliver a planting season’s lot of new trees to the Uncapped Streets, their leafy cover providing relief from the sun while mitigating the intensity of heat bouncing off paved surfaces. Temporary irrigation nurturing the boxed trees would also provide a cooling spray for locals playing tag among the boxes or pausing for a moment in the shade.

By piggy-backing on an existing program and utilizing basic materials, the Uncapped Street program could be mobilized quickly with minimal investment. Assuming a successful reduction in “hydrant abuse” the temporary nursery/park program could be enjoyed for a number of years, rotating through streets in need. Supporting one of the city’s premiere green initiatives could become a badge of honor for these selected streets. And with a million trees to plant, CD12 would be able to develop a permanent tree canopy by planting their share of the new trees before the Uncapped Streets program is retired.

The future uncapped
While the Uncapped Streets nursery/park program meets immediate needs, I also wanted to investigate longer-term solutions to address the causes of uncapping: heat and park access. One possibility builds upon the simple technology of a tree box filter, envisioned here as a hydrant garden. Extending the entire 30’ of a hydrant’s no-parking zone, a planted section of the sidewalk becomes a bio-retention component of the city’s drainage system. Storm water is slowed and filtered by the plants and their soil before entering the city treatment system.

Framed by a pair of the million new trees, the hydrant is recast as the anchor of a mini-park and micro-climate generator. Reconfigured to use river water instead of potable water, the hydrant with its spray cap continues to provide cooling water, filtered from the river, on demand. The spent water collects in the garden, nourishing the plants as it percolates through the soil. Evaporation of the water and evapotranspiration of the plants “breathing” cools the local air. By making the hydrant the centerpiece of the mini-park, the hydrant becomes more visible as a signifier of the city’s hybrid approach to civil engineering, natural resource management, and recreation.  Repeated from block to block, the hydrant garden, a decentralized segment of park, reiterates the presence of a larger ecologic and engineering system at work.

nyc:uncapped was motivated by more than a concern for wasted water. I used this study to demonstrate how a more holistic approach to urban problem solving can allow a single intervention to address several municipal challenges more effectively than looking at each issue as a discrete problem with a singular solution (i.e. Problem: Unlawfully opened hydrants threaten public safety and ecological health; Solution: eliminate all hydrants and have firefighters access water mains through sidewalk vaults). Here, a hydrant garden provides an array of benefits to both city and neighborhood. The bio-retention capabilities of the hydrant garden/mini-park help protect water resources by slowing the storm-water as it enters the city’s treatment system, thus reducing peak flow of storm water and incidences of CSO discharges. The contaminant load entering the system and requiring treatment is also reduced. Yet the engaging ad-hoc event of uncapping can continue without threatening water resources. The mini-park promotes neighborhood gathering and recreation while contributing to a reduction in urban heat island effects across the city.

I would like to gratefully acknowledge the sponsorship of the Architectural League and the financial support of the New York State Council on the Arts in completing this project. nyc:uncapped was funded by an independent project grant through NYSCA’s Architecture, Planning, and Design Program.

Adrienne Cortez is a licensed landscape architect with degrees from the University of Virginia and Trinity University, Texas. Recent work has ranged from an intimate city garden to a large post-industrial site. She recently relocated from Manhattan to Dallas to handle project work in Mexico. She can be reached at cortez (at) nyc-uncapped (dot) com.

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.

West Harlem Piers Park
Linking Riverside Park, which begins at 72nd Street, to Riverbank State Park, from 135th to 145th Streets, the West Harlem Piers Park is the last jigsaw piece in a now unbroken strip of publicly accessible waterfront running all the way up from Battery Park. A safe, continuous and dedicated bicycle path now extends along the west side of Manhattan, allowing a no-dismount ride from the Battery all the way to Dyckman up at 200th Street – a bright feather to the city’s cap, or bike helmet.

Over ten years in the making, the West Harlem Piers Park has been the laborious fruit of many stakeholders and the subject of discussion at every level of government. The site exists where several different neighborhood initiatives intersect: the West Harlem rezoning, the 125th BID westward expansion and Columbia University’s Manhattanville expansion. The complex consultation process brought in many parties, evidenced by the long succession of assemblymen and community leaders who took the stage to thank their colleagues. Congressman Charles B Rangel, who procured federal funds (including still-to-come stimulus dollars), and Assemblyman Herman “Danny” Farrell reminisced about the ferry to the Palisades Entertainment Park in New Jersey and trolley cars which rattled into the area when the West Harlem Pier was still functioning (indeed there were plans to rebuild the pier as an additional stop on the Manhattan Circle Line). Others grimly recollected the site’s seedier and more dangerous recent history: the milk bottles of the erstwhile Borden Milk Factory gave way to crack vials, broken glass and prostitution during the recession of the seventies. Today the park has been transformed into a highly usable and attractive addition to Harlem’s public spaces. Hope Knight from the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, and Pam Jones from Community Board 9 both spoke of the site’s proximity to 125th Street, a major east-west connector, and of the ongoing developments planned for the area as being strategic to the park’s popularity.

W Architecture & Landscape Architecture and Archipelago Architecture and Landscape Architecture, who design exclusively for New York City, worked with the EDC to come up with a design for the space on this rather awkwardly shaped sinew of land. Several narrow lawn areas are neatly dissected by north-south pedestrian and bike paths; the southern end of the park has an ample number of benches and reclining areas, facing the water or the green spaces within the park. A triangular void in the decking separates the lawns from a pier-like strip of walkway running parallel to the park over the water, and increases the feeling of proximity to the river as it sparkles and spits underfoot. The strip allows fishermen – who have been provided with cleaning tables – and spectators of the growing kayaking community to be closer to the river whilst being undisturbed by the park’s other users. The park has also been landscaped to allow for small performance spaces, as demonstrated during the park’s inaugural ceremony by the company of the Dance Theatre of Harlem and the Patience Higgins Trio of jazz musicians.

Local artist Nari Ward was brought into the mix by Percent For Art, which ensures that one percent of public project funding is given over to the arts on site. His three metallic sculptures, derived from the shapes of fishing hooks, punctuate the lawns of the Piers park, while a walkway on the sidewalk edge of the park attempts to weave in spatial memories from the local community and from the history of the site.

Marine Transfer Station at 135th Street
Now relatively benign on the northern fringe of the Piers Park, until 2001 the Marine Transfer Station at 135th Street received 95 truckloads of garbage every day, all of which was largely transported by barge to Freshkills Landfill in Staten Island; the air pollution caused by the garbage and idling trucks exacerbated the locality’s already high asthma rate. The protests against seeming environmental racism gained weight as the negative effects to air quality were compounded by the local bus depot and the North River Waste Treatment Plant just behind the MTS, which processes sewage from all of West Manhattan, as well as the Riverdale area of the Bronx.

Two parties who are highly concerned in contesting the future of the 28,000 square foot space of the defunct Transfer Station are WEACT and Community Board 9, both of whom have been fundamental in the collaboration to develop the park so far. While WEACT, headed by the Jane Jacobs Medalist Peggy Shepard, sees the structure as playing host to further leisure activities such as kayaking, boat trips and a visitor center, Community Board 9 suggests that the creation of local green jobs is of paramount importance and so proposes long-term aquaculture and hydroponic agriculture projects, as well as promoting tourism and cultural activities. Having promised never to reopen the MTS for waste disposal, the Mayor’s office has commissioned WEACT to organize a broad-based steering committee and community-based charrette process that would work to find the best possible use.

We want to hear from designers about precedents and lessons learned from relevant experiences elsewhere, and from users and stakeholders about what they think should be considered too – let us know in the comments section below, and stay tuned to Urban Omnibus for updates. Though the park looks set to become a much-loved spot over the summer months, the MTS will remain ‘hot’ for some time yet.

As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Shumi Bose is an architectural writer and researcher. She is currently working between London and New York, and lives in Brooklyn.

Mehta – whose 2004 book Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found set the bar for place-based, narrative non-fiction about urban space and society, and whose forthcoming book about New York and its immigrants is sure to set it even higher – opened the event by invoking a personal memory: after migrating from India to Jackson Heights in 1977, Coney Island was the first leisure outing his family undertook. The image of the Mehta family aboard the Cyclone introduced an important theme to the discussion: the historical openness, accessibility and affordability of Coney Island’s amusements for working class New Yorkers, especially lower- and middle-income immigrants. Mehta was quick to add, however, “Nostalgia is not a sufficient reason to stop change in a city defined by constant change.” Nonetheless, the images that supported each of the presentations took cues from a history of sideshow freaks and the teeming masses along the boardwalk from Coney Island’s heyday – over a century ago.

The first speaker was Amanda Burden, Chair of the City Planning Commission and the Director of the Department of City Planning. She, too, led off with Coney’s legacy of open-air amusements but swiftly contextualized the area under review as a neighborhood of approximately 50,000 people, characterized by vast tracts of public housing (one in six live in NYCHA projects), a population with twice the unemployment rate of the rest of the city and which lacks basic services and retail. Preservation of the amusement district, Burden said, would require some City control of land and year-round entertainment, but the success of any comprehensive plan could only be measured in terms of increased opportunities for housing and jobs.

Burden left the details of the City’s plan to be explained by Purnima Kapur, the Brooklyn director of City Planning. Kapur presented an overview of a five-year process, including intensive community visioning sessions and historical analysis of sixty years of speculative land acquisition and the gradual shrinking of the amusement district from 27 acres to the three acres that remain. City Planning divides the neighborhood into three distinct zones: Coney East, or the amusement zone, between the KeySpan baseball stadium and the Aquarium; Coney North, to the north of Surf Avenue; and Coney West, to the west of the stadium. To revitalize the amusements, Kapur made a strong case for mapping a city-owned park – in perpetuity – in Coney East. To encourage infill retail development, the current maximum retail floorplate of 2500 square feet would be maintained, but restaurants and shops (largely prohibited under the current amusement land use designation) would be encouraged. Hotel development would be confined to Surf Avenue frontage, and new street linkages would be mapped between Surf Avenue and the Boardwalk.

Dan Jennings spoke for Thor Equities, a real estate development firm famed for its malls across the country, which has been acquiring land in Coney East since the mid-1990s. Jennings sounded similar notes of year-round entertainments, expanded retail opportunities and rejuvenating the local economy. The major differences between the city’s plan and the developers’ plan lay in the necessity of mapping the amusement district as city-owned parkland and the size of appropriate retail floorplates: Thor wants it increased to 10,000 square feet. Jennings reminded the audience that this is not equivalent to big-box retail, citing the fact that retailers such as CostCo explore real estate with 30,000 square feet as a minimum. The video Jennings presented conjured a vision of mixed-use in Coney Island that was equal parts Las Vegas and Mall of America, where hotel guests, daytrippers to indoor rides and retail shoppers from South Brooklyn rubbed shoulders.

The Municipal Art Society (MAS) presented a third vision of Coney Island’s future. A long-time planning and preservation advocacy organization, MAS – represented by Melissa Baldock, the Kress/RFR Fellow for Historic Preservation and Public Policy – shared the results of its economic feasibility study and its large-scale community visioning process that included a far-reaching online call for ideas. She argued for the largest possible amusement area that would include both preserved icons such as the Cyclone and new ones, along the lines of the London Eye. Because land prices deter amusement development, Baldock said, the City must control the land where amusements are to flourish.

After these three visions were articulated, the presenters shared the stage with Charles Bendit of Taconic Investments, Dick Zigun of the Coney Island Circus Sideshow, Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush of El Diario/La Prensa, and Ahsanullah “Bobby” Khan of the Coney Island Avenue Project.

Taconic’s holdings are in Coney North and Coney West, areas slated for residential and hotel development. Bendit was quick to remind the audience that Taconic’s proposals have caused no controversy; his only recommendation to the City’s land use plan was to use Inclusionary Zoning to encourage affordable middle-income housing, arguing convincingly that this bracket is underserved by the market and the supply of low-income housing in the neighborhood is sufficient, if poorly serviced.

Zigun, whose most passionate recommendations were for landmarks designation for Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs, referred to Taconic as the “good developer” and repeatedly asked Thor Equities to sell their land to the City and leave Coney Island alone. But his contribution was notable for articulating the different scales at which the Coney Island site must be considered: from its position in the immediate neighborhood and New York City, to its significance to the US as a whole. Zigun, producer of the Mermaid Parade and other quintessential Coney Island programs, invoked the national legacy of Coney Island. Kapur talked about Coney Island in the context of New York City. Jennings expressed the commercial demands of the site in terms of the South Brooklyn retail landscape. And Mehta had opened the program in the context of working-class Brooklyn and Queens.

Vourvoulias-Bush and Khan spoke to the immigrant experience and the needs of the working class. Vourvoulias-Bush discussed these priorities in terms of access to open-air, affordable family fun. Khan, whose organization primarily works on behalf of the South Asian Muslim community of the area, expressed shock at the relative lack of discussion of general economic development for the area and, specifically, workforce development for the chronically unemployed residents of the neighborhood.

The atmosphere was tense, but nothing compared to the passions that are sure to fly during the public hearing on Wednesday. I recommend attending. You can find more information about the hearing here.

Panelists:
Purnima Kapur, Brooklyn Director of City Planning; Dan Jennings, Thor Equities; Melissa Baldock, The Municipal Arts Society; Charles Bendit, Taconic Investments; Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, El Diario/La Prensa; Dick Zigun, Coney Island Circus Sideshow; Ahsanullah “Bobby” Khan, Coney Island Avenue Project.

Convened by: Suketu Mehta, NYU School of Journalism

Cassim Shepard is the project director of Urban Omnibus.

Click on any image to launch a slideshow of images of the Floating Pool. | Photo © Philippe Baumann

Ann Buttenwieser drew her inspiration for the Floating Pool from the public baths that dotted New York City’s waterfront in the 19th century, and then projected that vision into a contemporary amenity for underserved communities. After years of planning and development, in 1999 she found an equally enthusiastic partner in Jonathan Kirschenfeld, whose interest in waterfront use had led him to design a (yet-unrealized) 600-seat floating theater. Design of the project continued until 2004, when Kent Merrill, the naval architect working with Buttenwieser and Kirschenfeld, located a decommissioned river barge for sale in Louisiana. Shipyard construction on the Floating Pool began in Amelia, Louisiana in 2005, and after narrowly avoiding devastating damage from Hurricane Katrina, the barge made its 10-day trip to Pier 2 in Brooklyn in October 2006. The Pool docked there for retrofitting and final design until its opening on July 4, 2007 at Brooklyn Bridge Park. In 2008, the pool moved on to Barretto Point Park in the South Bronx, the only community district in New York without access to a public pool, where it will return for the next two summers.

Interview with Ann Buttenwieser, The Neptune Foundation
Founder of the Floating Pool

What was the initial concept for the floating pool?
In 1870, Boss Tweed, under the Public Works Department, created five floating pools. There was even a captain in charge. Each summer there was a parade – it was an event! – when the captain led a pool flotilla from the Bronx down to the sites for the opening. Then around the turn of the century, when we had five borough presidents all of a sudden, the pools were turned over from the Public Works Department to the Borough Presidents’ offices. By 1915 there were fifteen pools, with bottoms open to the river water, and slats to keep people from falling out. People felt that there were health benefits from being in the salt air and swimming in the salt water. You got better, you felt better.

Milstein Division, The New York Public Library

© Jonathan Kirschenfeld Associates

© Corey Phelps

© Jonathan Kirschenfeld Associates

© Jonathan Kirschenfeld

© Jonathan Kirschenfeld

© Chris Sedita

These “floating baths,” as they were called, were placed around the city in the tenement areas — the Lower East Side, Hell’s Kitchen, the South Bronx, some areas of Brooklyn, I think there was one in the German district [in Yorkville]. They were created to provide a place for people without running water in their homes to be cleansed. They were pontoon structures — they floated on top of the water like a catamaran. The baths were completely enclosed by a rectangular structure that held dressing rooms. They were not anchored, they were attached to existing piers — recreation piers, commercial piers. They were stored in the winter in the Bronx at Classon Point, which, curiously, is around the bend from where the floating pool was this past summer in the South Bronx. It was as if it came home.

In 1915, the Health Department tested the hygiene of the river water in the floating pools. They put dye in a sewer on the Lower East Side and it came out in one of the pools at Battery Park, and turned the water pink! So they promptly closed the pools down. They retrofitted five of the pools, put a solid bottom in them and then filled them with city water now flowing from the Croton aqueduct. I have no idea what happened to the remaining pools. At some point, I’m not sure when exactly, all were taken over by the Parks Department. When Robert Moses was running the Parks Department, he took the last three that were still running and put them outside of Riverside Park when he was building the West Side Highway. It was sort of a sop to the community that was not able to get access to the waterfront.

The point of this was to reconnect New Yorkers with the water and the fact that they lived on an island city. … They could see the land, feel the water, and see the water.When did you decide to bring floating pools back to New York?
I was working at the city’s Economic Development Corporation, helping people like Roland Betts get his Chelsea Piers project started, and generally trying to help people get through the system. Jonathan Kirschenfeld called and said he had this idea for a floating theater, and asked where he had to go to get permits and such. I talked him through that, he got all the permits and secured a space down at Battery Park but he wasn’t able to raise the money to actually build it.

Meanwhile, in 1980, I wrote an Op-Ed piece for The New York Times about the floating baths. They printed it on Memorial Day with a Jacob Riis picture of one. I figured if the Times thinks this a good idea then it should be done. So from 1980 to 2000 — I was working on waterfront projects, in the Parks Department, and with the EDC throughout that time — whenever I went to a community meeting or a meeting about the waterfront and everybody was talking about putting up an amphitheater (amphitheaters were de rigeur in waterfront design at the time), I said, “How about a floating pool?” Wherever I went, I talked about this crazy idea of mine. It was motherhood. So when I was working at the Parks Department I convinced their Concessions Office to issue an RFP for a floating pool alongside park property. But the RFP was written in a way so that it would be financially impossible to do it. No developer bid on it.

In 2000, I quit my last job and decided to build the floating pool. The first thing I had to do was to get a charter for a not-for-profit, the Neptune Foundation, which enabled me to start raising money. Kent Barwick got me a grant to do a feasibility study, which required collaboration with an architect. Kent suggested Jonathan Kirschenfeld, and I thought – Oh my God, he’s back!

So Jonathan did the feasibility study and I started raising money. We hired a naval architect, because we were now dealing with something that was outside of Jonathan’s expertise, and they worked together.

We figured it was going to cost $250,000 to buy a used barge. By the time we got drawings and were ready to purchase, the price of barges was just horrendous — the cheapest we could find was a million dollars. (I think that this was before we had drawings. We just set out to see what the cost would be.) So the naval architect and Jonathan sat down to plan how to build one from scratch, assuming the cost wouldn’t be higher than the purchase costs cited. We pursued that for six months or so, but when we went out to bid on steel, the building booms in China and New York had begun, so the price of steel had skyrocketed. We discovered that the cost of building a barge would be two million dollars, so we went back to the drawing board and it just so happened that a lot of barges had been dumped on the market because single hull vessels were no longer allowed in commerce. We were finally able to buy one for $250,000.

© Timothy Schenck

Did you want elements of the design of this pool to echo the 19th century baths in any way, or was the inspiration in concept only?
No, I did not want it to echo the floating baths because I had actually gone to Paris to see the Piscine Delunay (which I’m not sure exists anymore, I think it may have been rebuilt). It was a similar concept, with the pool in the middle and with the dressing rooms around it so you were entirely enclosed and you didn’t see you were on the water. You could have been anywhere. The point of Neptune’s pool was to reconnect New Yorkers with the water and the fact that they lived on an island city. We wanted it to be as open as possible, so people could be in the water in the water, so to speak, and be able to see out and understand that there was a view behind them. They could see the land, feel the water, and see the water.

How did the design reflect issues of site selection and infrastructural requirements?
The problem in New York is that despite the fact that everything is on the water, there is no such thing as connections to the upland. We were very lucky in Brooklyn because we went to the old Brooklyn piers and they all had electricity and sanitation and water connections we could hook up to. But other locations posed real problems. For example, Hudson River Park has a historic wall, which you are not allowed to penetrate. The infrastructure just isn’t there, beyond some electric wires now on the piers for lighting. In the Bronx we were very fortunate because the Department of Environmental Protection needed to expand its waste treatment plant, which required mitigation, so they paid for putting in the infrastructure for the pool.

What kinds of jurisdictional issues did you have to battle with?
If I hadn’t worked for the city for so many years I couldn’t have done it. There’s no question. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation said the pool was a structure, and therefore we had to get a permit from them. They fined the Neptune Foundation $20,000 for being in Brooklyn in 2007. On the other hand the Coast Guard said we were a vessel and thus required certification from them. When we were in Brooklyn I had to get a permit from the Empire State Development Corporation to be there, and then establish an agreement with the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy for them to run the pool. It went on and on and on. There were also insurance issues — noone had created insurance policies for floating pools before, so all kinds of questions were raised about kids falling overboard and such. The Parks Department still feels that Jonathan didn’t put the fences up high enough.

Are there more floating pools coming in the future?
I would love to do more. I do not have the ability to raise any more money – that’s the problem. I’m just hoping that the folks in Brooklyn will decide that they would like to have one as part of Brooklyn Bridge Park. There is such a wonderful community there and they are dying to have that pool come back.

© Kent Merrill

What is next for the existing pool?
It is going back to New Jersey for the winter, because the DEC permit requires it to leave New York State, but it will return next summer to the South Bronx. The permit is for three years there and is renewable. But what the city will decide to do then, I don’t know — there might be demand someplace else. (The pool was given to the city as a gift in June.)

Do you plan on being involved in future site selection, after these three years in the Bronx?
Oh I hope so.

There has been a lot of attention paid recently to the waterfront, whether for leisure uses, greenways, public art installations, private development, etc. You have watched this evolution throughout your career. What are your thoughts on the direction of such developments? Do you see this increased attention as a direct result of the hard work of people like yourself?
Yes, people like me, and people like Kent Barwick who dedicated extraordinary amounts of time and effort to the cause while at the Waterfront Alliance. Mine was more of an area-by-area approach and his was really a regional approach. But we both fought tooth and nail to get things going. Difficult issues arise endlessly on the waterfront. What should be there? Should it be housing? Should it be parks? How are you going to pay for the parks?

But I believe the turning point was when Governor Pataki finally put money into Hudson River Park. That was after an awful lot of pressure from the environmentalists,  the “parkies.” Once Hudson River Park was under way, I continued to work my way south. I was working for the Downtown Alliance to do a master plan for the Lower Manhattan waterfront so we could connect Hudson River Park, Battery Park, Battery Park City, and then up the east side to the Manhattan Bridge. Again, this is all motherhood for me. And I must mention Dan Doctoroff. One of his big projects was to unify everything that is going on between Brooklyn, the Brooklyn waterfront, Governors Island, and then Staten Island, and making it into a harbor park. Yes, the attention is there, and it strikes me as odd when I come across people who are against it all now.

You have spoken in the past about how, if we can clean up our waterways enough, amenities like the Floating Pool will not be necessary in the future. What are your thoughts on the ability of temporary space to condition the public to see a space as what it could be, and to be a catalyst for action and change?
I think that the pool is really a catalyst for the demand to find some way to clean up parts of these waters. The DEC permit requires the Parks Department and the City, I guess the DEP, to clean up a piece of the Bronx River so that people can actually swim in it. If the pool hadn’t been stationed there, then the DEC wouldn’t have required that.

I don’t know if you realize this, but the pool was located between a waste treatment plant and fertilizer plant. Treated waste from the former gets sent to the latter plant to get turned into fertilizer. The smells there can be pretty obnoxious. This summer, because the pool was there and the park is there, the community finally got together and, I believe with the NRDC, brought a lawsuit against the city and fertilizer plant to abate the smells. The pool was a catalyst for that. It allowed them to say to the City: You have given us this wonderful thing. Now make it usable.

© Philippe Baumann

© Philippe Baumann

Click on any image to launch a slideshow of images of the Floating Pool. | Photo © Gary Smith

© Jonathan Kirschenfeld Associates

© Jonathan Kirschenfeld Associates

Ann Buttenwieser drew her inspiration for the Floating Pool from the public baths that dotted New York City’s waterfront in the 19th century, and then projected that vision into a contemporary amenity for underserved communities. After years of planning and development, in 1999 she found an equally enthusiastic partner in Jonathan Kirschenfeld, whose interest in waterfront use had led him to design a (yet-unrealized) 600-seat floating theater. Design of the project continued until 2004, when Kent Merrill, the naval architect working with Buttenwieser and Kirschenfeld, located a decommissioned river barge for sale in Louisiana. Shipyard construction on the Floating Pool began in Amelia, Louisiana in 2005, and after narrowly avoiding devastating damage from Hurricane Katrina, the barge made its 10-day trip to Pier 2 in Brooklyn in October 2006. The Pool docked there for retrofitting and final design until its opening on July 4, 2007 at Brooklyn Bridge Park. In 2008, the pool moved on to Barretto Point Park in the South Bronx, the only community district in New York without access to a public pool, where it will return for the next two summers.

Jonathan Kirschenfeld
Design Architect of the Floating Pool

How did the Floating Pool get started?
It started a little before 1999. Early on in my practice, I had more time to take my imagination to places it wouldn’t otherwise go. I started working on another floating project, a floating theater, learning what it was like to try to do a project without a client. I went around to community boards to ask for their support, I applied for grants. And during this process, I met a wonderful woman named Ann Buttenwieser, who was running the Parks Council, was very interested in waterfront issues, and was very supportive of an innovative project like this. But after two or three years I put it on the shelf for a little while. A couple years later, I got a phone call from Ann Buttenwieser. She said, “I loved the theater but I have been dreaming of making a floating swimming pool, would you be interested?” I had never worked on a pool before, but what does that matter? I said “Of course, let’s get started!”

That must have required a distinct approach to your research.
I was pretty familiar with regulatory, city and approving agencies. I learned early on that this was going to be a very difficult project to categorize. Was it a boat or was it a building? Who regulates: the Coast Guard or the building department? Of course, it ends up being both.

At the beginning, we were talking about making the pool something that was self contained, off the grid, fully powered by sun and wind, something that you did not need to plug in to land-based utilities. Given the budget, however, we decided to do a basic version first. There were a lot of issues aside from the very difficult one of how to take a rusting, 260-foot long, steel barge that used to haul cargo up and down the Mississippi and completely restructure it to hold a pool, a mechanical area and a whole series of structures that included a snack bar, changing rooms, bathrooms, a manager’s office, a reception area, and a staff room. We ended up cutting a huge rectangle out of the deck and dropping it down – after cutting through some very large trusses – to what is now the pool bottom. We had to buff out a series of attachments on the deck, but you’ll see, if you look carefully, circles, triangles, and little remnants that ultimately highlight the history of this barge.

© Doug Cabot

© Brad Kelly

© Gary Smith

© Stefan Danicich

© Jonathan Kirschenfeld

© Jonathan Kirschenfeld

In the basic version, the not quite off the grid version, what infrastructure does it tap into when docked?
Each summer the barge was going to be at different waterfront area enabling folks to have an instant amenity. One of the issues with siting the barge had to do with the infrastructural cost involved in mooring it in any one place for just one summer. To spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring a water line, a sewer line, and an electrical line to the pool that is going to be there for two months is, in a sense, contradictory to its desired effect.

The pleasure of the temporary is in the idea of the circus coming to town … it has all the elements of great architecture and great theater.

We’re in the process now of talking to a variety of stakeholders and funders to do a version that is completely off the grid. We’d like to be working with manufacturers who see this as a demonstration project for new technologies in the environmentally progressive world.

What was the construction process?
We completed 60% of the construction in a New Orleans shipyard — mostly the steel work and the yard specific tasks. The rest was kind of standard architectural construction, which we knew would be more effectively and economically done in New York.

Initially it was going to be a spud-moored barge, which is what you typically see, where you have a spud collar and a piling driven into the river bottom and the barge moves up and down with the tide but doesn’t move laterally. But it was very expensive and we couldn’t find the spuds in time, so we decided on a system of six anchors, which turned out to be much less costly and still very effective. For the three months that the pool was at Brooklyn Bridge Park there was very little movement on deck, it seemed stable as a rock.

We started the ten-day process of pulling the barge up from New Orleans without knowing where it was going to go. It was a little risky. We had not received permission from the Department of Environmental Conservation yet, which was a major piece of the approval puzzle. After an intense three month period of time, filled with meetings every week with the State, the City, the Department of Parks and Recreation, the architects, the engineers, and many, many lawyers, it was decided in March of 2007 that the pool would open by July 4th in between Piers 4 and 5, where Brooklyn Bridge Park would be, to introduce this incredible amenity to the community at large. It was a huge gamble, but we had a tremendous group of motivated people and great government officials supporting us.

It was sort of like preparing for a dinner party. You are never quite ready but at a certain point you just sweep unfinished things under the rug and welcome your guests. So we swept a little of the debris underneath the table, where no one could see, and watched the place fill with kids for the first time in the seven year saga of the pool.

© Philippe Baumann

© Timothy Schenck

© Timothy Schenck

© Timothy Schenck

© Karl Jensen

How was Barretto Point chosen as the next site?
Ann’s intention, and the mission of the Neptune Foundation, was always to give the pool as a gift to New York City, so it was the Department of Parks and Recreation that needed to site it in a place that they thought was most effective. Hunts Point is the only community board in all five boroughs that does not have public pool, so they really focused on that community. They had just finished a beautiful park, Barretto Point Park, and spent a few months with the NYSDEC working out a long term permitting agreement.

It was moved at five in the morning in a beautiful mysterious fog up into Barretto Point Park and moored off a beautiful grassy knoll. So now, instead of taking a gangway from what was essentially a large parking area, you walk through the park and up the 90 foot-long gangways onto the pool, where you look onto quite an interesting urban waterfront. It’s not quite the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty and Lower Manhattan, but it is equally arresting. The pool has been a tremendous success up there and my understanding is that it will stay there for several years. The last count showed, I think, a typical crowd of 1,200 kids a day.

The exigencies of working in the public sector and having to deal with the costs of doing an innovative temporary structure like this involves having to evolve the idea over time. One of the most fascinating things about the project is that it can move. While the pool, for now, is in the Bronx, either this version or another version will be a peripatetic project, where its arrival is awaited and its departure mourned. That’s what excites me ultimately about the temporary nature – it has more the quality of life than something built with brick and mortar.

Ultimately we like to see the pool as a Trojan Horse, which gets people really excited about the waterfront. Ostensibly, this could push the political process forward, prompting local community groups to advocate for more access to the waterfront, for better water.

When you are trying something new it is very difficult for people to believe in it until it is physically there. With the floating pool, the only way that people were finally convinced that this was a real thing and that it needed to open was because we dragged it up from New Orleans.

A lot of these ideas have the spirit of kids putting a carnival together in the backyard. It’s meant to be so low tech and so imaginable — all you have to do is stack some boxes and put up some curtains and that’s enough to create a space that reminds of one being in La Scala. For me, that’s the pleasure of the temporary and of using materials that are common or readily available. You can create something that seems much richer and more evocative of buildings but with materials that are still meant to be suggestive of a temporality, of something that doesn’t always exist, that isn’t there forever. The pleasure of the temporary is in the idea of the circus coming to town, setting up the tents, providing this amazing new world and then skipping out and leaving; it has all the elements of great architecture and great theater. But until you build it folks have a really hard time believing it can be done.

Seven years later the pool is built and now we are starting to get a tremendous amount of enthusiasm, but it took a very long series of efforts and obstacles and tremendous amount of persistence on the part of the design team, on the part of the client, the Neptune Foundation, to make it real. These urban issues are the reason I am an architect and live in New York City — playing with the incredibly vibrant line between public and private, how you do it, how you make things feel alive, how you create urban spaces that are an active part of the city, where unexpected things happen. That is what gets me up in the morning.

© Philippe Baumann