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.

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:

Spanish-born, Rotterdam-based artist Lara Almarcegui’s Guide to the Wastelands of Flushing River — at Ludlow38 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side — carves an interdisciplinary niche at the intersection of photography, urban studies, and performance — a terrain every bit as ambiguous and enticing as the urban spaces documented in her work.

For her first solo exhibition in the U.S., Almarcegui turns her attention to the Flushing River in Queens.  The river bears the scars of last century’s discarded urban agendas: partially buried under Flushing Meadows Corona Park, sliced up by multi-lane freeways, fragmented and mostly abandoned following the decline of industry along its banks.  Almarcegui has exhaustively researched and photographed its litter-strewn remains, and her photos are displayed in a hypnotic slideshow projected on the gallery wall.  They are also printed, with explanatory text, in a pamphlet which gallery visitors are “invited to pick up [to] explore these sites at their own leisure”.

Guide to the Wastelands is the main attraction here, but taken in context with the other works on display (particularly Construction Materials Sao Paulo City, in which she catalogs the relative volume of building materials used to construct the city), the selection reveals a broader interest in the physical stuff that composes the built environment, and the voids that remain when it is removed.  Mostly, this interest is communicated through photographic documentation.  But the inclusion of a portable brochure reveals a hint of the political in Almarcegui’s didactic intent, as if to say “take a guide, get out of your apartment and go see the site for yourself — before developers drop cheap condos on it.”

This gesture places places the work in a lineage of conceptual artists who engage audiences by prompting behavior; Almarcegui’s approach is simply re-tooled for the soft-power, facebook era.  The more we know about the Flushing River (or the Gowanus Canal or Pennsylvania Avenue Landfill), the more likely we are to advocate for its sensitive reweaving into the urban fabric of New York.  Compared to the work of other international artists, Almarcegui’s work is not glamorous.  But by exposing the forgotten spaces in our midst, it just might be more important.

Lara Almarcegui
on view April 17 – May 16, 2010
Opening Hours: Friday – Sunday, 1–6pm and by appointment

All images: Lara Almarcegui,
from Guide to the Wastelands of Flushing River, Queens, New York City, 2010
courtesy the artist and Ludlow 38, New York

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.

Travis Eby is a recent graduate of the Yale School of Architecture. He loves his stoop in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.

This week brought news that Tishman Speyer and BlackRock Realty are handing over Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village to creditors to avoid bankruptcy. The Wall Street Journal lists the estimated value of the properties at $1.8 billion, just three and a half years after the $5.4 billion deal to purchase the site in 2006, and lists a few of the investors facing losses, ranging from the California Public Employee’s Retirement System to the Church of England. The New York Times explains why this is “a big black eye…but it’s not the end for Tishman” and investigates what this all means for the tenants. And the Post takes a look at who is thinking about buying the property now.

In waterfront news, $8.9 million in grants is being awarded by New York’s Department of State to waterfront revitalization projects in New York City. The Waterfront Alliance summarizes what projects will receiving funding — including the installation of MWA Eco-Docks, the implementation of the Bronx’s Shoelace Park Master Plan, Brooklyn Navy Yard improvements, climate change education programs, $1.5 million for the Randall’s Island Living Shoreline, two Jamaica Bay projects, and a seed farm and tree nursery at Freshkills — and points out that the announcement is also noteworthy for demonstrating “a major commitment to urban waterfront access” by the State. Check out the complete list with more details on MWA’s Waterwire.

The Make a Difference in Two Days lovers out there will appreciate this DIY intervention in Astoria that helps pedestrians cross a filthy pool of water that has submerged a heavily-trafficked sidewalk. An artist who goes by “Posterchild” constructed the “Astoria Scum River Bridge” out of an old work bench found on a curb as a gift to the neighborhood and was recently awarded a commendation from the office of Councilman Peter F. Vallone, Jr. (which came with a promise to help get the leaking pipe fixed).

Downtown Brooklyn residents: plan ahead. In 2019 your stretch of the BQE will be closing for a complete reconstruction. While it’s a bit early to start planning alternate routes, this announcement gives us occasion to think about the challenges of tackling significant infrastructure reconstruction projects in the middle of densely populated and highly-traveled neighborhoods. Streetsblog attended the stakeholder advisory council meeting for the project where the discussion often focused on how to balance neighborhood quality of life with the need to address the existing hazardous roadway conditions.

Outside of New York, high-speed rail is the hot transportation topic of the week now that details have been released about where the $8 billion of stimulus money allotted for HSR is headed. Much of the money is going to California, Florida and Illinois, with the Northeast receiving just $485 million to upgrade 7 major corridors in the region. The Infrastructurist points us to a post by Robert Puentes at the Brookings Institute that explains why prioritizing the Tampa-Orlando route makes sense and how this program is “nothing short of a sea change for how Washington thinks about infrastructure investments.” Meanwhile Wired digests it all in their feature about the history and future of “superfast bullet trains” in the U.S.

Finally we send you off into the weekend with a little toe-tapping video we’re calling “Me and Julio Down by the PS1 Pavilion” (aka SO-IL’s winning entry for the 2010 MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program):

SO-IL PS1 Pole Dance from SO-IL on Vimeo.

(Side note: Also on SO-IL’s Vimeo page you can see two quick clips of their installations for the League’s 2007 Beaux Arts Ball, Smoke and Mirrors.)


Image: Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village by Flickr user Carly Hoskins. The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

Those of you that came along for our walk through the Atlantic-Pacific Subway Station a few months ago might want to swing by the transit hub again — the new LIRR Atlantic Terminal Pavilion is now open. The terminal, which links the LIRR, 10 subway lines, and 5 bus routes, not to mention the vibrant surrounding neighborhoods, offers a new ticket office, a customer waiting area, public rest rooms, and an installation of the artwork “Overlook” by artists Allan and Ellen Wexler. Although it ended up being more than $26 million over budget and more than two years behind schedule, people seem to be pleased with the result — at least until they walk outside.

The proposed plan for the Domino Sugar Refinery site has entered public review, a process expected to take eight months. The proposal would require a rezoning of the area, from manufacturing to residential, and would include development of the three landmarked structures on the site. Community Preservation Corporation, the developer, and architects Rafael Viñoly and Beyer Blinder Belle have presented designs that include a waterfront esplanade, a large community facility, retail space, and 2,200 units of housing, 30% of which would be set aside as below-market-rate (noteworthy, as similar luxury developments in the area typically offer only 20%). CPC hopes to begin construction in early 2011.

If you’ve ever started craving a waffle while sweating it out in a sauna, you might want to take a trip to College Point, Queens to visit the 5-story, 100,000 square foot luxury-fest that is Spa Castle. Sarah Muller at WNYC checked it out and reports on a mini-village built inside the facility, Sauna Valley, which she describes as “a huge cluster of igloo-shaped huts with a mock-river running through it for added effect.” Rooms might be LED-illuminated, gold-plated, or hand-painted. And to top it all off, it’s owned by an architect.

New years always prompt reflection and evaluations of the previous year or decade. What about what comes next? As we settle into 2010, where do we think we’ll be in 2020? Jonathan Bowles imagines what New York City will be when we ring in the next decade.

Image: Atlantic Terminal Pavilion, courtesy of the MTA. The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.