Map created by WXY Architecture + Urban Design

Long Island City covers a huge swath of Queens — 1,664 acres, or 500 square blocks, between Newtown Creek and 33rd Street — and encompasses such neighborhoods as Hunters Point, Ravenswood, Astoria, Dutch Kills, Sunnyside and more. Its history is one of transition from farmland to industrial center, accompanied by large-scale infrastructural development, as bridges, tunnels, ferries, rail lines and roads criss-crossed the region, to support the many steel, stoneworking, food processing and manufacturing companies that populate the area. But while industry continues to be an active and present part of LIC life, these days residents and visitors recognize the neighborhood’s thriving contemporary arts scene.

Individual artists and cultural institutions have fostered the evolution of Long Island City’s cultural landscape. In 1976, PS1 Contemporary Art Center opened its doors in a former school building on Jackson Avenue (PS1 merged with MoMA in 2000). The Thalia Spanish Theatre was established in 1977. In 1985, 24 years after first opening his studio in the neighborhood, sculptor Isamu Noguchi founded The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in Long Island City. One year later and one block away, sculptor Mark di Suvero (who had also had studio space in the area since the early 1970s) established, with a coalition of other artists and community members, Socrates Sculpture Park, a foundation and public park on the site of a formerly abandoned landfill and illegal dumping ground. The establishment of these two cultural centers amplified LIC’s burgeoning identity as a contemporary arts hub, soon joined by the Museum of the Moving Image (which opened in 1988), the Fisher Landau Center for Art (1991), the Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs (2001), the Museum for African Art (2002), SculptureCenter (2002), and MoMA QNS, the temporary home of the museum during the two-year renovation of its Manhattan space, which took over factory space on 33rd Street as its central exhibition space from 2002-2004.

For both Noguchi and di Suvero, affordable real estate and proximity to suppliers and fabricators with whom they worked made the area appealing and logical for studio space. But their impact on the neighborhood extended beyond the studio and out into the public spaces of Queens, and the cultural institutions they founded underscored the existence of a local residential and cultural community that deserved attention and support. Now, the Noguchi Museum and Socrates Sculpture Park have come together to organize Civic Action: A Vision for Long Island City, a multi-phase project, in the spirit of Noguchi and di Suvero, to conceive of new approaches to the neighborhood’s growth. They invited Natalie Jeremijenko, Mary Miss, Rirkrit Tiravanija and George Trakas, artists known for their socially-engaged work, to lead teams comprised of designers, writers and others in envisioning a future Long Island City that will retain its cultural, industrial and residential texture — as well as the still-evolving legacy of its artists — as it grows.

Opening tonight, October 12, 2011, at the Noguchi Museum, is an exhibition of the projects created by the four teams. Over the course of the fall and spring, the organizations will present a series of public programs to engage the public in the conversation and further investigate many of the issues at play. In the spring of 2012, the teams will install large-scale prototypes for elements of their proposals in Socrates Sculpture Park. A publication documenting the teams’ processes and projects will be published to conclude the project.

Last week, we had a chance to sit down with two of the forces behind this ambitious project: Jenny Dixon, the director of the Noguchi Museum, and Alyson Baker, the former executive director of Socrates Sculpture Park (now the director of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum). Read on to learn more about Civic Action, the legacy of these two prominent artists, and how big-thinking, creative approaches to planning and development can encourage growth while maintaining character, honoring local history and recasting the role of the artist in urban development. Then click through to get a preview of the projects created by the four artist-led teams, on view at the Noguchi Museum, tomorrow through April 22, 2012.

— Varick Shute

R/Call: IF ONLY THE CITY COULD SPEAK installation by artist Mary Miss and project team as part of Civic Action: A Vision for Long Island City | Photo by Bill Taylor, Courtesy of The Noguchi Museum

Tell me about Civic Action. How did you conceive of the idea and what was the process of turning it into the project it is now?
Jenny Dixon: The idea started with our concern about how development might drastically change this neighborhood, and the environment and experience of the Noguchi Museum and Socrates Sculpture Park. Alyson and I, along with my colleague Amy Hau, were invited by the head of the local community board to come and look at a proposed project for a building right behind the Noguchi Museum. The plans referenced the Noguchi garden and Socrates Sculpture Park, but the architect and developer had never asked us or talked to us.

Alyson Baker: The crux of the problem, illustrated by that story, is that there is an awareness and acknowledgement of how important the legacies of figures like Isamu Noguchi and Mark di Suvero are to this area, and yet development is going on without including, or even speaking with, people from the creative sector who are such a big and important part of this community. The acknowledgement is there, but the inclusion is not.

Here we have this tremendous legacy of two artists shaping a significant section of New York City and we need to make sure that legacy is not only acknowledged, but becomes part of the future. That really inspired the project.

For those who aren’t familiar with Noguchi and di Suvero’s histories with Long Island City, can you summarize their relationship with the area?
AB: The short version is that Mark di Suvero established his studio here, saw an empty lot next door and had a vision that probably no one else could have possibly had other than Mark di Suvero, which was to transform it into a park and a residency and exhibition opportunity for artists.

JD: Noguchi’s story is not dissimilar. Noguchi came here first in 1960, and around 1980 he decided to build the museum. Noguchi’s vision for the Museum was to house his work and be the place for people to understand who he was.

Here we are, in the shadow of these amazing visionaries — of course, Mark is still living and working here today — who lived within spitting distance of each other. It’s our job to carry forth their legacies. That’s what we’re trying to do with Civic Action.

This project stems from the idea of Noguchi as somebody who looked at public spaces, who was engaged in the realm of planners and architects. Noguchi was an artist who hired architects, hired planners — and he worked for them as well. His relationships with Gordon Bunshaft or with Louis Kahn were very much collaborations of mutual respect. His very dear friends at the architectural firm of Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao were right next door. It was in that light that we chose to have artists lead the Civic Action teams.

How did you identify the artists who are participating and how did they assemble their teams?
AB: We both did a lot of research, reached out to peers, and then put together shortlists. We knew that we would be asking these artists to jump in with a relatively short time frame and that they really needed to be able to come to the table with a good solid background in socially engaged work. We also wanted each artist to have a unique perspective, but one that would complement the others.

Though they are artist-led, the teams include designers, architects and landscape designers as well. But this wasn’t an architectural competition. We wanted to make sure that the artists, the public and everyone participating knew that this was a collaboration. It was about complementary ideas coming together, with as broad a perspective as possible.

Once the artists signed on, you charged them with finding an architect or planner and a scribe to complete their teams. What did you imagine those three roles would accomplish together?
AB: That goes back to the idea of Isamu as an artist who hired architects to work with him. He was, as an artist, the leader of the team and the director of the concept, and was looking to architects to support his vision — not that he didn’t also work in support of architects as well. We took that model and translated it within the framework of this project. The artists would be the initiators, the driving forces behind the teams — and we didn’t limit it to just an architect and a writer, they were welcome to open up their teams beyond that as well.

JD: The writers, documenting the teams’ work, are key to the project. We will be producing a catalog, in which each team will explain their process, their ideas and their thinking. We want to offer this project as a model in some ways. So the catalog will be more like a workbook or a journal.

AB: Collaboration is something I’m really interested in because of the years that I’ve spent at Socrates working with young artists, mentoring them through a process of understanding how to work on a larger scale, with materials that might be unfamiliar to them. We have just initiated a new project at the park where we are creating a forum where young architects and young artists work together, on separate projects, on their own things, but in the same studio. I think that kind of collaboration is important, especially when it comes to work within the public realm, and when you have so many artists who are interested in architecture, urban planning, design — a much bigger picture.

What was the brief that you presented to the teams? What did you challenge them to do?
JD: We gave them a big briefing book on the community, with information about neighborhood demographics, local industry, things like that. We also gave them a list of people who had agreed to be community advisors, people like Alan Suna from Silvercup Studios, community board members, residents, the principal from a local school.

Then we told them a story similar to the one that we’re telling you, about how we wanted to empower them to look at this community, in the spirit of di Suvero and Noguchi, and come up with ideas about how to maintain the existing texture. Everything changes — we’re not saying there should be no development — but how can we participate in that change in a way that affirms the missions of our respective organizations and their founding artists.

AB: In a way, we didn’t tell them so much what they should do, as we told them what Mark and Isamu had done. We said, this is the legacy of this neighborhood and the impact that artists have had, and now we’re handing the baton to you to look to the future.

JD: We didn’t enter into the project with any preexisting expectations. We didn’t know what they were going to come up with. We presented information to the teams and gave them access to resources and people — it’s important to recognize the advisory group we had for the project: Hugh Hardy, Donald Elliot, Diana Balmori, Richard Meier, David Childs and Richard Maltz. We set up meetings with the artists and the advisory group, moderated by Claire Weisz, who was our project strategist and has been key to the project, and Laurie Beckelman. Those meetings were where these ideas and conversations began.

AB: We informed the teams that there was going to be a component of the exhibition at Socrates next year, which represented an opportunity to do real scale, real time prototyping in the landscape — to realize something substantial. But it was about vision, too, so we knew that some of the ideas might be far-fetched. But George Trakas has actually completed amazing projects with the City, so has Mary — we knew that these artists were capable of realizing projects.

Click here for a preview of the projects created by the four Civic Action teams, on view at the Noguchi Museum from October 13, 2011 through April 22, 2012.

Building on Legacy: Artists as Planners, a video from The Noguchi Museum about Civic Action: A Vision for Long Island City.

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Jenny Dixon joined The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum as director in April 2003. She began her arts career in 1977, when she joined the Public Art Fund, where she served as executive director from 1980 through 1986. Among her many accomplishments at the Fund was the initiation of the New York City “Percent for Art” program. In 1986, Dixon joined the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council as executive director, and in 1999 was named director of The Bronx Museum of the Arts. She has taught at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, Parsons School of Design, and New York University. She is on the boards of the Public Art Fund and the New York City Arts Coalition, among other organizations.

Alyson Baker is the executive director of The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, and was formerly the executive director of the Socrates Sculpture Park for over a decade before she ended her tenure in June 2011. Prior to joining Socrates, Baker was director of Pat Hearn Gallery (1987-1992), an associate director of Gagosian Gallery (1992-1997), curatorial assistant in the Contemporary Art Department at the Carnegie Museum of Art and assistant to the 1999 Carnegie International exhibition (1998-2000). Ms. Baker is a co-founder and former president of the Long Island City Cultural Alliance, a non-for-profit partnership of arts organizations that works in concert with artists, businesses, and residents to encourage and enrich the arts community in Long Island City. In 2009 she founded Makers Market, an annual craft and design fair, in partnership with American Craft Magazine, The Noguchi Museum, and R 20th Century. Most recently, she initiated a collaboration with The Architectural League of New York to create “Folly,” a studio residency and exhibition program at Socrates Sculpture Park for architects and designers.

Graphic charting the amplitude of the tsunami in Japan | via NOAA

EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI RAVAGE JAPAN, DESIGN STANDARDS MAY REDUCE EXTENT OF DAMAGE
The calamitous combination of an 8.9 magnitude earthquake and the subsequent tsunami that hit Japan earlier today has flooded cities, crumbled buildings and left a still-unknown number dead, injured and stranded. Updates and reports are still coming in, but, as expounded on in this Times article, Japan’s stringent building codes and a comprehensive system of seawalls helped to stave off what could have been even more extensive damage and higher death tolls. Preparedness and construction safety standards may have prevented the disaster from claiming the number of lives and destroying property to the degree of last year’s earthquake in Haiti or the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia. To stay informed and assist in response efforts, you can check updates on Google’s crisis response page, follow constantly-updated news reports, and see graphics explaining the impact of the tsunami and its movements across the Pacific on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website, including a fascinating (and terrifying) propagation animation. Meanwhile, GOOD has assembled, and is continuing to update, this list of ways that citizens can offer help from afar.
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New York City Prettymap by Stamen Design | via prettymaps.stamen.com

FAST COMPANY’S 50 MOST INNOVATIVE COMPANIES
Fast Company has released their selections for the 50 Most Innovative Companies in the world, as well as a series of top ten lists for “6 key industries” — Advertising, Biotech, Fashion, Mobile, Music and Design. Ranking first and second on the design list are Omnibus favorites Stamen Design (who made #48 on the overall top 50) and Local Projects (see Give a Minute). (Curiously, architecture firm Snøhetta makes the top 50 at #35, but is absent from the Design top ten.) Fast Company highlights an interdisciplinary mix within the design field — firms that design with information and technology (Stamen), create conversational experiences (Local Projects) and make awesome typefaces (Hoefler & Frere-Jones) all are at the top of the list. The list itself underscores the importance of design innovation in the global business landscape and reaffirms FastCo’s role as a tastemaker in future-facing thinking about the evolution of design professions.
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The Panorama of the City of New York | via the Queens Museum

THINGS TO DO
Fancy yourself a master of New York geography trivia? Tonight you have the chance to prove yourself at the Queens Museum’s 4th Annual Panorama Challenge! Commissioned by Robert Moses for the 1964 World’s Fair, the Panorama is the world’s largest scale architectural model (would we expect any other scale from Moses?), and will provide a visual aid to contestants answering questions about the city’s landmarks, bridges and neighborhoods. The games begin at 7pm, and beer and snacks will provided.

“Single Room Occupancy: New Typologies,” an exhibition by Jonathan Kirschenfeld Architects (formerly featured on the Omnibus for the Floating Pool project) opens tomorrow evening following a presentation of the firm’s recent projects tonight at 6pm at the Pratt Manhattan Campus, entitled “Typologies of Social Engagement.” The exhibition will display four projects that address housing in New York City neighborhoods, and, in conjunction with the lecture, investigates the future of sustainable living and housing prototypes for underserved communities. The lecture is tonight, March 11, at 6pm at 144 West 14th street, and the exhibition will be on view through April 10 at 0.00156 acres Gallery on 114 Smith Street in Brooklyn.
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OLD BROOKLYN CHURCH MAKES A HOME FOR NEW ARTS COMMUNITY
In Greenpoint, an Irish Catholic church makes unexpected bedfellows with local artists. The Times reports on the collaboration between filmmakers, musicians, visual artists and Reverend James Krische to keep St. Cecilia’s church a vital hub of activity. Declining enrollment and lack of funding forced St. Cecilia’s schools to close its doors in 2008, but rather than let the building fall into disuse, as has happened with so many Brooklyn churches, the Reverend reached out to the local arts community — in part because St. Cecilia is the patron saint of music. The popularity of the classroom-turned-studio spaces spread through word of mouth, and St. Cecilia’s is now a location for film and TV shoots, band practices and gallery shows. Most importantly, it is an example of how to bridge the divide between older populations and incoming demographics in changing Brooklyn communities, and of how to keep historic structures relevant through re-evaluating their program.
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Domus architecture guide app | via Apple

DOMUS iGUIDE
Domus launches a new app to ease the life of the archi-traveler. Architecture guides to Berlin, Shanghai, Milan and New York are now available for the iPhone in English and Italian. Replete with maps, directions, images and facts, the guides create itineraries for tourists, and even curious locals, to investigate the built environment with the expert aid of “the most authoritative international magazine of contemporary architecture, art and design.” New York’s edition features 80 buildings, 100 architects and four itineraries: Downtown Architecture, Art and Design Walk; The Center: Midtown Drift; Unorthodox Modern; and Contemporary Curtain Walls. Domus plans to release more versions, creating cell phone accessible tour guides to the worlds great cities. Though an exciting platform to start exploring to be sure, the guides do make you wonder if, as the New York Guide says, “the best architectural moments often happen by way of surprise, through direct and accidental encounters.”
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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Gowanus by Design is asking for speculative ideas on the future urban development of the Gowanus Canal community. Called “Connections: the Gowanus Lowline,” the competition invites participants to imagine potentials to reengage postindustrial lands, and create dynamic, pedestrian-oriented architecture that either passively or actively engages with the canal and the surrounding watershed. Submissions are due April 17th, and the winner will receive a $1,000 cash prize, along with the satisfaction of participating in generative urban discourse, of course.

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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.

“Wherever there are immigrants, there are stories.” This broad observation characterizes and motivates the urbanism of Suketu Mehta, a writer who has dedicated his career to understanding the human experience of large cities around the world. He is perhaps best known for his exploration of Mumbai, the city where he spent his childhood, in Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found. These days, however, his research is focused on New York, the city he moved to as a teenager in the late 1970s and currently makes his home. His forthcoming book on the most recent immigrants to the city is certain to make many readers aware of a New York they only thought they knew, but Mehta’s singular sensitivity to how the immigrant experience is inscribed in the physical details of the urban landscape — from storefront displays to phone booths to courtyards — is what makes his writing of particular relevance to designers, policy-makers and urban enthusiasts. I recently had the chance to wander with Mehta around Jackson Heights and listen to his observations, insights and anecdotes. We started our walk at Raja Sweet House on 73rd Street and strolled among the garden apartments of the Jackson Heights Historic District, the single-family homes of Corona and along the commercial corridors of 37th and Roosevelt Avenues. Learn more about Mehta’s unique perspective on immigration, density and neighborhood change below. -C.S.

When did you first encounter Jackson Heights?
I first came here in 1977, at the age of fourteen. My father has been a diamond merchant for all of his life, and he came to New York to expand the family business. He had already been here, in a studio apartment on 73rd Street on the other side of Roosevelt Avenue, for about nine months. Then he went back to India and brought the rest of the family. So there were five of us in a studio. Our welcome to America was the super of the building turning off our electricity because there were too many people in the apartment. We were only in that studio for a couple of weeks before we got an apartment on 83rd Street, where we lived for another seven years. On the first night that we moved in, my brand new bike got stolen. It was a much dodgier neighborhood back then.

How else would you describe the neighborhood at that time?
When we came here, we found a dangerous city, a bankrupt city, a city from which the white middle class was fleeing. It was far from the Promised Land. I got mugged twice in these streets; our car got stolen regularly. Jackson Heights was not glamorous or welcoming. My parents put me in Catholic School near here, which was the most brutal experience of my life. I was one of the first minorities in the school. The teachers called me a pagan. I remember during the Iranian hostage crisis, I was a senior in high school, I was with an Indian friend of mine — the only other Indian in school — and this Irish kid yells at us, “Fucking Ayatollahs!” and I said, “Hey, we ain’t Iranians, we’re Indians.” And without missing a beat he says, “Fucking Gandhis!”

Wherever there are immigrants there are stories. Immigrants, because of their dislocation, have a need for recollection. At the time that we came here, most of the South Asians in this neighborhood were Indians, and most of them Gujarati. Now, it’s a much more diverse mix of South Asians: Bangladeshis, Nepalis, Tibetans, Bhutanese. The Indians started coming here in large numbers after the 1965 Immigration Act. Before ’65, Asians were actively excluded. When they started letting in Indians, at first, there were a lot of professionals: engineers, doctors. In the ’70s, because of the Family Reunification Act, entrepreneurs, small business owners, shop owners, they started coming in. And now, taxi drivers, garment factory workers, laborers — it’s constantly shifting. Very few of the Gujaratis that I knew when I was growing up here in the ’70s are still in this neighborhood. With one exception: Some of the children of those families, many friends of mine, who are artists, writers and journalists, who would live in the East Village in the ’80s and in Park Slope in the late ’90s, are increasingly moving to Jackson Heights.

There’s something about the diversity of these streets that is attractive to people from all over, like a piano player or a software engineer raised in Kansas, for example. Increasingly, creative people will want to live in the kind of city where they have a choice between pupusas and parathas. Diversity isn’t just a nice thing to have, it is actively essential to attract the kind of people that create wealth.

Much of Jackson Heights was created by the Queensboro Corporation in the 1920s. When the elevated subway came out here, it allowed the middle classes from Manhattan to escape the city and come to a nicer environment: these quite beautiful apartment blocks with long central courtyards or gardens. From the back, the bedrooms face onto a pastoral scene where children can play and the elderly can sit on benches. This is pretty unique in New York.

We’re now coming up onto an interesting block here. The Community United Methodist Church. Now this truly is an ecumenical church. There’s a sign in Spanish, “Iglesia Metodista Unida,” then there’s a sign in Korean, then one in English. It must also be an Indonesian church because it says Community Church welcomes “Gareja Protestan Indonesia.” And, I guess, an evangelical fellowship, the Jesus Our Foundation Fellowship — “Mahal ka ng Dios.”

And besides all of this, there’s a little plaque about Alfred M. Butts, “the architect and artist who… invented scrabble.” Scrabble was invented here!

Now here’s the building I grew up in. Look at the name plate: we have from Abbasi to Winfred, passing Balyuk, Bruschtein, Basu… For anyone going to Jackson Heights, I recommend having a look at the directories in the buildings, which really show why it is such a marvelous area. Here are people – Indians and Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Russians, Greeks, Poles, Turks, Irish – many of whom were killing each other just before they got on the plane. And here they are living next to each other. It’s not that we love each other. Indians and Pakistanis will still say horrible things about each other around the dinner table. But there was this agreement that we were in a new country, making a new life. And we could live side by side and interact in certain demarcated ways. We could exchange food; our kids could play together; they could go to school together. It’s the great story of New York. It’s pretty remarkable how little strife there is.

This kind of density, living in the same space, having to share courtyards and groceries, forces you to interact more than you otherwise would. It forces you to go outside of your comfort zone. The most wonderful thing about Jackson Heights is its diversity. Jackson Heights and Elmhurst together are the most diverse neighborhoods in New York City in terms of country of origin. I think that’s the biggest difference between immigrants of today and immigrants of maybe one hundred years ago. These immigrants feel much less inclined to melt into any sort of pot.

In what other specific ways do you see the particular dynamics of immigration today playing out in a neighborhood such as this one?
Here’s one example: every fifth store is a place where you can send money back. The remittance economy is tremendous — there are barber shops where you can get a haircut and send money back home. I’ve read many studies that show that best way to help the poor is to reduce the fees on money transfers. The money migrants sent back from the US, I think it was 300 billion dollars last year. Money orders and phone cards. You‘ll often see rates for these two things in these store windows.

There are all manner of transactions happening. People are selling food out of shopping carts, there are people offering services, day laborers… The City seems to have agreed to suspend many of the laws that it might enforce in Manhattan in places like Jackson Heights. That’s also part of the vibrancy and part of the accessibility for immigrants. Because you don’t need a permit, really, to sell food here. You can just stand on a street corner and sell it. Occasionally, a cop might come along and tell you to move. So you wait for the cop to pass and then resume selling what you sell. In neighborhoods like this, the line between formal and informal is thin to the point of invisibility.

Another effect of the informal economy is that economic value in immigrant neighborhoods is generally underestimated. Much of the money that these people make and spend doesn’t show up in official records. Some friends of mine in the Department of City Planning were telling me about how Costco came to them with a plan to set up a store in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, but they didn’t think it would be a viable economic proposition, because the official income tax records showed that it wasn’t a high income neighborhood. City Planning said, “Go in there, trust us, you’ll make money.” And now, I think it has one of the highest revenues of any Costco in the country.

So City officials are aware of some of these dynamics?
The population division of City Planning, in particular, are people who really have their finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the city. They are an extraordinary group of demographers. They know about alternative housing arrangements, what kind of money transfers happen — they know about the hidden city of New York.

This administration in particular, the Bloomberg administration, has been absolutely exemplary in its treatment of immigrants. Mayor Bloomberg actually went up to Capitol Hill and said if it weren’t for illegal immigration, the economy of New York City would have collapsed after 9/11. I think this city has learned that immigration of all kinds — documented, undocumented, semi-documented — is vital to the economy of the city.

And I love walking along these streets because the visual juxtaposition of these disparate objects is so casual and always surprising. Every time I walk by, I always find something new to look at. Here, you have giant bags of pork rinds next to fresh flowers. One of the great pleasures of living in Jackson Heights is this feast of seeing. And I’m a person who gets bored easily — that’s why I am a writer. And walking around these streets, I never get bored.

Which raises the question: how do some of the things we have talked about — immigration, streetscape, the informal economy — relate to your work as a writer?
Primarily, I am a storyteller. I tell stories in screenplays and prose and just about every other medium. I like to walk around the streets of large cities and gather stories and tell them. Lately, I’ve also become a teacher to students who want to learn how to tell stories. So I often bring them around here to Jackson Heights to show them this feast of stories. Because, where most of them are in Manhattan, it seems enervated, it often seems that every story has been told a hundred times. And then they take the train out here and are dazzled.

Wherever there are immigrants there are stories. I find that immigrants, because of their dislocation, have a need for recollection. And, many of the stories around here you find in phone booths. There used to be more of these phone booths, before everyone started getting cell phones, where people would go to call their families. Often you’d see these migrants weeping as they spoke to their children who, if they were undocumented, they would not see for ten years, twenty years, while they were sending money back home. Many of these migrants are desperately lonely, they’ve left their families and, in a sense, can never go back home unless they are ready to give up their residence here. Those are some of the saddest cases. Especially the mothers — I’ve met Cameroonian babysitters who have broken down weeping while telling me about how they spend their lives caring for somebody else’s child, while their own children are strangers to them. It’s heroic. These people are heroines and martyrs. There ought to be some sort of sanctuary spot on Earth where these mothers and their children could be allowed to see each other for half an hour and hug each other without the immigration agents and the lawyers and the governments intervening.

So, I’m writing a book-length essay on this subject: What happens to the human being in the city? You know, many of these people have come not from Tegucigalpa or Delhi, they’ve come from small villages direct to this big city. And how do they deal with it? How do they deal with subways, the social security system, women in short skirts, a sense of time that is completely different from the village? It’s worth looking at novelistically. So I’m looking at space in the city, time in the city and velocity in the city. And what connects it all is storytelling.

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Suketu Mehta is the New York-based author of ‘Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found,’ which won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. Mehta’s work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Granta, Harpers Magazine, Time, and Conde Nast Traveler, and has been featured on NPR’s ‘Fresh Air.’ Mehta is Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University. He is currently working on a nonfiction book about immigrants in contemporary New York, for which he was awarded a 2007 Guggenheim fellowship. He has also written an original screenplay for ‘The Goddess,’ a Merchant-Ivory film starring Tina Turner, and ‘Mission Kashmir,’ a Bollywood movie. Mehta was born in Calcutta and raised in Bombay and New York. He is a graduate of New York University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

As we head into 2011, the Omnibus will be reviving our field trip suggestions, leading into a fun season of meet-ups and group explorations of the city in the spring and summer. But the Flea Market is one fascinating urban destination that won’t be around in the new year. We’ll be following this story to see if the vendors are successful in finding a new location, and what the urban design challenges and opportunities for any such location might be. In the meantime, listen to a one-minute excerpt of the market’s rich combination of sounds in the clip below:

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Cassim Shepard is the project director of Urban Omnibus. He makes non-fiction media, especially films and video, about architecture and urbanism. He lives in Brooklyn.

In celebration of my birthday, a sunny three-day weekend, and the acquisition of a brand-new bike, I decided to take a ride out to visit the Candela Structures on Flushing Bay.

The Candelas are two fiberglass prefab shells that sit at the World’s Fair Marina, just north of the Mets’ new stadium. These relics of the 1964/5 World’s Fair were designed by architect and industrial designer Peter Schladermundt (not Félix Candela as the names and nearby signs might lead you to believe). A year ago, journalist Paul Lukas and I researched and produced a show about them at the inimitable City Reliquary in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Paul and I had first found out about the structures from a Mets fan message board. I’m a sucker for any kind of adventure, great or small, so as soon as I found them on Google Maps’ satellite view (they’re hard to miss once you look), I knew I had to see them in person. And once we did (on our way to a game at Shea Stadium shortly before it was demolished) we developed a crush on them that snowballed into a crazy-long research project, the exhibition, and a website documenting everything we know.

The Candela Structures: A New York City History Mystery at the City Reliquary

Our show was subtitled “A New York City History Mystery,” partly because up until the last minute (when we got a major detecting-assist from New York Times reporter Susan Dominus) we couldn’t confirm Peter Schladermundt as the structures’ designer (though we knew he had designed the overall marina), but also because the narrative of the show was as much about us unraveling the mystery of the structures as it was about the structures themselves. The buildinglets (as I like to call them) raised so many questions from the moment we first saw them. How had we never seen them or heard about them? How on earth could they be bus shelters (as the nearby signs claim) when they’re so far from the road and not at all closed off from the elements? Why were they named after Félix Candela? As we started researching them, we found more questions than answers, which just drew us in deeper. Why were they not mentioned in Candela’s archives? Why did his widow not remember them? We discovered there had been a third structure in the center that had housed a Coast Guard exhibit, but it disappeared soon after the Fair ended. Whatever became of it? And why did the other two survive when so many of the buildings built for the Fair were demolished when it closed?

This illustration was used on a promotional postcard for the Fair. The structures shown on the dock were never built, but the illustration has circulated among World's Fair collectors, creating confusion about how many structures actually existed. (Courtesy of Owens Corning)

Architecture is just another kind of storytelling, and stories are what make a space into a place.The structures are minimal surfaces, a topic that Candela researched extensively. But beyond looking like they might have been designed by him (though they weren’t), we never found any solid connection. They were, in fact, designed by Peter Schladermundt, an architect and industrial designer, and were made of prefab panels — a sandwich construction of fiberglass reinforced resin surrounding a 2-inch foam core — that snap together. As far as I was able to determine, they are the oldest standing fiberglass structures in the city.

Despite that, I know these structures aren’t central to the history of architecture or the history of New York (and they don’t even appear to have made the cut for the new AIA Guide—drat), but I love them nonetheless. They’re so unexpected, so unlike anything else in New York City, and so utterly charming. They’re not pretentious, they just stand guard by the bay, watching the sailboats come and go, the planes take off and land at LaGuardia, and the cars drive by. They were there long before I arrived in New York in 1993, waiting to be discovered. How many other pieces of New York history are hiding in plain sight, with stories to tell? Architecture is just another kind of storytelling, and stories are what make a space into a place and connect all the disparate pieces of the metropolis.

The structures sit at the water’s edge, on the northern end of Flushing-Corona Park — not the most convenient location to get to from North Brooklyn via public transportation — so I decided to pay my respects by bike, with the added incentive of a stop at Timmy O’s Frozen Custard in Corona on the way. What a ride! Grand Avenue passes by some beautiful old factories, but the roads are a mess and drivers are not particularly interested in slowing down for bikes. In Maspeth the traffic increased, the quality of the road decreased, and buses are ever present. But I made it across the L.I.E. on-ramps, past a Memorial Day observation, and crossed Queens Boulevard. There are some amazing views from this area back toward the towers of Manhattan, but admiring them requires stopping and clambering onto the sidewalk, as the roads are unforgiving of lapses in concentration.

Partway into Corona I lost the thread of Corona Avenue’s many curves. I managed to find my way back, though, and even found my way to Timmy O’s for a much needed break. A large frozen custard from Timmy O’s is huge, but I ate it all and headed for the home stretch. After a few wrong turns and dangerously pothole-filled roads I finally came to the edge of the huge fields of parking lots around the baseball stadium. I dismounted and walked along the narrow sidewalks to the one spot I knew led across the spaghetti of roads to the marina.

At last! My first glimpses of those two old friends were as delightful as ever. I’ve seen them now in all seasons: surrounded by cherry blossoms, dusted with snow, and capped with autumn foliage, but they really look smashing against the deep green of summer leaves. I was happy to see people enjoying the shade under the eastern shell, and I was only too happy to collapse under the shade of the western one and enjoy the breezes off the bay.

The Candela Structures are very much in need of repair. While from a distance they are pristine and white — an almost shocking sight in a city of grey concrete, grey asphalt, and bricks of various earthy hues — up close rust, cracks, gaps, and graffiti mar their graceful symmetry. The gaps reveal the seams of the prefab pieces and, in a couple of places, the metal clips that hold them together. It’s clear that rain and ice have invaded the interior. How much longer can they stand without a major overhaul? They’re amazingly resilient — a function of both their elegant geometry and their lightweight material — especially considering they were built for a temporary event. They no longer sport their angled glass walls and the middle structure is gone without a trace, but the remaining two fiberglass shells still stand as architectural icons on the waterfront.

I feel a real affinity for these quirky little structures. They’re elegant, but odd — they seem to belong to some other city — and they aren’t nearly as grand in scale as the other survivors of the two World’s Fairs in the park, but there’s something charming about that. And even though Paul and I had solved so many of their mysteries (it was a real pleasure to speak with Peter Schladermundt’s children who confirmed him as the designer after we had followed so many false leads), we never did find out what happened to the third one that once stood in the middle, but that mystery only adds to their appeal.

I’ll continue to visit them whenever I have time, hopefully to see them restored and enjoyed into the future, though I worry I’ll just be watching them fall further into disrepair. They lie in that unfortunate gap that swallows a lot of urban artifacts — the space between history and the too-recent past, out of fashion but as of yet unrecognized as part of our cultural heritage. I hope the Candelas survive that awkward transition and find a permanent spot in the cityscape, and that by uncovering part of their story I’ve helped in some small way.

Post script:  While I wouldn’t recommend the bike route I took — though it was convenient for frozen custard on the way out and lemon ice on the way back — I definitely recommend a visit to the marina to see the Candelas in person. You can reach them by bike more easily, I think, using the 34th Ave bike lanes (what I plan to do next time), by subway from the number 7 stop at Willets Point, by car via Northern Boulevard, or by sailboat in Flushing Bay. And look for them next time you fly in or out of LaGuardia. Directions, photos (including historic photos from the World’s Fair), and all kinds of other information are available at candelastructures.org.

UPDATE 11.3.10: The third Candela structure has been found. It is now serving as a cabin in the Adirondacks.

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All photos by Kirsten Hively. Kirsten Hively received her MArch in 2007 from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Together with journalist Paul Lukas, she recently co-produced a show at the City Reliquary on the ersatz Candela Structures in Queens, and when not architecting she can often be found photographing or writing about New York City, where she lives and works.

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

In the past, keys to a city were reserved for the heroic and the honored. Now, thanks to artist Paul Ramírez Jonas, you can bestow a key to New York City upon your own personal hero. Through June 27th, “Key to the City” will distribute 35,000 free keys from their kiosk in Times Square that will unlock 20 sites scattered throughout the five boroughs. What these keys allow you to see has not yet been revealed – some may open up special exhibitions, others to sites rarely made available to the general public.

For a public art piece that has more instant gratification, Miranda July, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, and now sculptor, has recently installed her “Eleven Heavy Things“ in Union Square, which is making its American debut after premiering at the Venice Biennale. The eleven pieces encourage interaction from all park users, and will be up until October 3rd.

While Queens may be the largest borough in size, and second largest in population, it is often overlooked by tourists or even by city residents in the other four boroughs. City Councilman Daniel Dromm is hoping to change that with a new month-long initiative entitled “June in Jackson Heights.” Throughout this month, the diversity and cultural energy of the neighborhood will be showcased through musical performances, a poetry festival, exhibitions in vacant storefronts, and informal events to be determined — local artists and performers have an open invitation to join in the festivities.

Traffic congestion and what to do about it is a never-ending struggle in New York City. But one man, Charles Komanoff, has an idea for how to increase efficiency on Manhattan’s streets — and he has done his homework. Komanoff has spent the past three years studying the patterns and intricacies of every mode of transportation in the city and created an immense spreadsheet documenting his findings. His research and calculations led to a sophisticated plan involving tiered payment for cars and subway riders, increased taxi fares, and free bus service. But we’ve seen how congestion pricing has been received in the past, and we know full well that the various modes of transportation in our fair city are far from integrated. But even if the implementation of Komanoff’s ideas is out of reach, his impressive body of research is worth our attention.

Speaking of alleviating transit congestion, Rachel Maddow recently satisfied her “inner infrastructure geek” by visiting the Sandhogs working on the Second Avenue Subway line, which will eventually help relieve the crowding on the 4/5/6 line — a line that serves, according to Maddow, more riders every day than the subways of Chicago, Boston and Washington D.C. combined! Check out her look at the boring machine, the “launch box” and her interview with Michael Horodniceanu, the president of capital construction for the MTA, below: (via Planetizen)

Among all the various fairs and markets that pop up in the city throughout the summer, this weekend is your only chance to check out the Renegade Craft Fair in McCarren Park, which features over 300 indie artists. After that, head a bit further into Brooklyn for for the Bushwick Open Studios festival, featuring another 300 shows in 150 locations throughout Bushwick and the surrounding neighborhoods. One place however that you’ll no longer be able to check out is the BKLYN Yard, which announced that it had been forced out by their landlord, after four years of hosting parties, shows, and food trucks at their site along Gowanus Canal. Notified at the beginning of May that they had to vacate the premises and cancel their summer schedule, they are hoping to take their party elsewhere in the city.

Top photo: Eleven Heavy Things, photo by Spike Jones via Deitch Projects. The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

The City We Imagined / The City We Made is the sixth in an ongoing series of Architectural League exhibitions about contemporary architecture in New York City. This installment chronicles the transformation of the physical city in terms of the convergence of an array of powerful forces: the events of 9/11, the policies and priorities of the Bloomberg Administration, the volatility of global and local economies, advances in material and construction technologies, and a new interest among the public in contemporary architecture.

In that light, Archipelago seeks to explore how the physical environment of New York is used and experienced in one neighborhood in each of the five boroughs. Each of these communities has undergone changes both visible and invisible in the past ten years, wrought by development in some cases and disinvestment in others. Each defies preconceptions while attesting to the baffling complexity of the city’s systems, from the world’s largest food distribution facility to the AirTrain JFK, from the luxury high-rises along the High Line to the mobile homes beneath Goethals Bridge. And each is worthy of a visit. If Archipelago whets your appetite for some intrepid urban exploration, then read some basic information about each neighborhood below and get inspired to visit the New Fulton Fish Market, ride the AirTrain just for fun, go shopping on the Fulton Mall, wander the industrial fringes of Staten Island, and, of course, stroll along the High Line. As you do so, consider that these sites do not possess their singular senses of place by accident. These neighborhoods are the way they are because of a layering of choices made by planners, policy-makers, developers, designers and citizens.

New New York 2001-2010: The City We Imagined / The City We Made is on view until June 26th at 250 Hudson Street (entrance on Dominick). Stay tuned for info on summertime venue for the exhibition starting July 4th weekend.

The Neighborhoods

Hunts Point, Bronx
Hunts Point is home to the world’s largest and most complex food distribution facility. Situated by the tidal strait between the Bronx and East Rivers, the peninsula was, pre-WWI, a leisure destination for the city’s elite and, post-WWII, became a thriving working class community. Today, the neighborhood is part of the poorest congressional district in the country, with over half of its population living below the poverty line. The Hunts Point Food Distribution Center, however, remains an enormously active economic zone, encompassing over 800 industrial food businesses from processing to wholesale – including the New Fulton Fish Market, which replaced the almost two century-old fish market by Manhattan’s South Street Seaport. The NYC Department of City Planning 2008 zoning plan for the ‘Special Hunts Point District’ was developed to support expansion of the vibrant food industry sector while creating a buffer between the area’s residential, cultural, food-related and heavy industrial uses.

Jamaica, Queens
From ancient tribal trail to mid-18th century produce trading post to JFK International Airport, Jamaica’s development has long been tied to transportation and commerce. Several attempts in the past forty years have envisioned downtown Jamaica as one of New York’s major retail and business centers. The 1998-2003 construction of the 24/7 AirTrain from Jamaica to JFK International Airport, at $1.9 billion, has been the center of redevelopment plans. In 2007, the City Council approved a plan to rezone 368 blocks of Jamaica across two community boards (8 and 12), to address the waning retail and business center and out-of-scale residential development, and to encourage transit-oriented planning strategies, an approach central to Bloomberg’s PlaNYC 2030.

Mariner’s Harbor, Staten Island
Situated on the northwestern shore of Staten Island, Mariner’s Harbor was once a major site of oyster and other seafood farming in the 19th century. The area is framed by a mix of infrastructural systems, including the Goethals and Bayonne Bridges, and saw significant decline in the late 20th century with a decline in waterfront activity. Recent big-box retail and business park development have brought economic activity back to the neighborhood and a $350 million expansion of the neighborhood’s New York Container Terminal is in the works.

Downtown Brooklyn
Downtown Brooklyn is the city’s third largest central business district. Its development accelerated during the mid-19th century expansion of the Port of New York and later with the manufacturing boom following the building of the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges in 1883 and 1909 – all of which contributed to a predominance of commercial and shipping activity in the northwestern section of Brooklyn. The residential population has tripled in the last decade and development in the area continues to explode, fed by the approval in 2004 of a development plan prepared by the Department of City Planning, the NYC Economic Development Corporation and the Downtown Brooklyn Council, and illustrated by projects like Atlantic Yards, the BAM Cultural District and Brooklyn Bridge Park. The neighborhood also contributes significantly to Brooklyn’s skyline, with glassy new towers like Oro and Toren rising near landmarks like the Williamsburgh Savings Bank.

Chelsea, Manhattan
Over the past twenty years, Chelsea has become one of Manhattan’s iconic neighborhoods. Once a predominantly Irish-American neighborhood populated by longshoremen and other dockworkers, Chelsea is now known as a cultural, leisure and high-end residential destination. In the 1990s, art galleries and cultural institutions began moving from SoHo to Chelsea, eventually turning the neighborhood into an international center for the contemporary art world. The preservation and reuse of the High Line over the last decade and a comprehensive rezoning plan approved by the city in 2005 fueled a burst of residential and commercial development with many high visibility projects designed by internationally-renowned architects.

Update: You can now view Archipelago, an original Urban Omnibus video production, exhibited in The City We Imagined / The City We Made, that explores a day in the life of five New York neighborhoods: Hunts Point, Jamaica, Mariner’s Harbor, Downtown Brooklyn, and Chelsea, here on Urban Omnibus.

From tomorrow until June 26th, we are bringing you a unique opportunity to take stock of the range of design and planning activity that has reshaped New York City over the past ten years. The City We Imagined / The City We Made is the sixth in an ongoing series of Architectural League exhibitions about contemporary architecture in New York City. This installment chronicles the transformation the physical city in light of the convergence of an array of powerful forces: the events of 9/11, the policies and priorities of the Bloomberg Administration, the volatility of global and local economies, advances in material and construction technologies, and a new interest among the public in contemporary architecture. The exhibition consists of a chronological display of major projects, proposals of the past ten years; an installation of one thousand photographs, taken by a volunteer corps of nearly one hundred design professionals, that depicts New York today; video interviews with leading New Yorkers; and an original Urban Omnibus-produced video about the city as experienced in five neighborhoods that we’ll share with you guys in the coming weeks.

You should definitely come check it out. The show is at 250 Hudson Street, entrance on Dominick Street. Exhibition hours: Wednesday to Sunday, noon to 7pm. It’s quite an undertaking, and installing it has prevented us from rounding up the week’s worth of news and updates. But, nonetheless, here are some links to check out:

The Brooklyn Grange finds a site in Queens for its 40,000-ft rooftop farm.

A competition for data visualizations to “make government data more accessible and comprehensible to the American public.”

Speaking of data visualization, while we may have exhausted the Icelandic volcano eruption, check out this amazing visualization of what happened to plane traffic.

And also check out MIT’s progress on printable solar cells, MetroCard art in Williamsburg, and a simpler, safer Grand Army Plaza which reminds us of our detailed look at the plaza and the design competition to reinvent it. Check out the video we made about it below:

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