A double-stack intermodal train prepares to depart the Arlington Rail Yard on the Staten Island Railroad | Photo by Joshua Nelson

Many heralded the opening of the High Line for its innovative reclaiming of a disused freight rail line as a public, open space. Its abandonment was due, in part, to the rise of interstate trucking since the 1950s, along with changes to the economic geography and industrial practices of New York and its food industries. But just because the city no longer conveys freight via rail through the West Side of Manhattan does not mean that our city no longer has the need for the kind of hard infrastructure that moves goods cheaply, efficiently and reliably from point A to point B.

While the deindustrialization of cities like New York has accelerated over the past fifty years, our awareness of the consumption of environmental resources has grown: we can now evaluate all commodities through terms like carbon footprint, locally sourced or eco-friendly. But without deeper engagement and familiarity with the supply chain, environmental consciousness — not to mention sophisticated economic development strategy — only goes so far. When we think about infrastructure, the benefits of commuter mass transit are well-known, but we often fall short of extending the same logic to the transportation of goods. Freight trains might not be the most efficient thing that comes to mind, until we start comparing them to the trucks that dominate our distribution networks.

Joshua Nelson oversees freight rail operations at the New York City Economic Development Corporation. We sat down with him to help shine a light on some aspects of the supply chain that might not be topics of everyday conversation. Since he’s one of the only people working on these issues at the municipal level, we wanted to know exactly what his job entails, in order to peer into the city’s complex networks of transportation logistics. Trains don’t just get people to work, they also get potatoes to the grocery store, scrap metal to the recycling plant and they just might help keep our city competitive in environmental, economic and infrastructural terms.

– C.S.

The freight rail network of the New York City metropolitan area

A CONVERSATION WITH JOSHUA NELSON

What do you do?
I do planning and policy for the city with respect to freight rail operations and development. This means I make sure that the city has options when it comes to rail freight transportation and that there’s competition in the city among different freight rail carriers. I also do asset management work with the city’s three separate facilities that we own. The City has rail assets in Sunset Park in Brooklyn, at the New York City Terminal Produce Market in Hunts Point in the Bronx, and then the Staten Island Railroad (PDF) on the western shore of Staten Island, which was rehabilitated in 2007 by the City and the Port Authority.

How did you first get interested in rail infrastructure?
I’ve always loved transportation. My father’s a locomotive engineer, who recently celebrated 40 years on the railroad. He worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad in northern Utah and now works for the Union Pacific Railroad. So I grew up loving transportation, but never fully realized I could make a career out of it. After getting into urban planning in college, I found work in traditional transit planning. I worked for two different transit authorities, one in Salt Lake and one in Seattle. And after studying transportation planning in graduate school, an opportunity came up here, at New York City’s Economic Development Corporation, to work with freight rail. It’s a unique position: most cities don’t have somebody devoted to issues of freight rail exclusively. Most often, the planning functions associated with freight happen at the state level, not necessarily the municipal level.

How does rail compare to other modes of freight transport?
In terms of transporting freight, rail is most often compared to truck. There are some other alternatives, like inland waterway movements, but by and large, it’s rail versus truck. There are significant benefits to using freight rail. First, there is the technological advantage: a locomotive pulling a train of 100 rail cars can be operated by two individuals, an engineer and a conductor. A truck carries 1/3 of what a single rail car can carry, and each truck requires one driver. So you need 300 trucks and 300 drivers to transport the equivalent amount of cargo as one 100-car train. Freight requires a fraction of the labor, which translates into significant cost savings for the customer.

1 locomotive engineer + 1 conductor carries 300 truck loads; 1 truck driver carries 1 truck load

Second is the environmental advantage. Rail is more fuel-efficient than trucking. Of course, locomotives pollute. But replacing 300 tractor-trailers with one or two locomotives is obviously going to provide a net benefit in environmental terms. Overall, the big advantage is rail’s ability to transport a lot of stuff very cheaply over a very long distance.

A common concern is that railroads, because they’re inherently monopolistic, often don’t provide the levels of customer service that people require. So, here in New York, we’re constantly working with all of our freight rail partners to make sure that the businesses that do receive services from the railroads are getting what they need.

How does freight rail interface with other modes of freight? Particularly the maritime infrastructure, like tugboats and barges?
When people think of freight transportation, they often think of container ships, which is what we call intermodal containerized service. The premise of intermodal transportation is that when you’re switching between modes (say from ship to truck or to rail) you don’t have to unload a whole bunch of product from a ship and individually load it into a boxcar for rail transport. Instead, you just put everything in one container that stays closed and is picked off that ship, put directly onto a railcar, and taken to wherever its final destination is in the middle of the country. While containerization in the maritime industry had its origins in the late ’50s, the intermodal revolution on the rails has really come about in the last twenty years, alongside the booming trade with China. Southern Pacific Railroad introduced the first double-stack container car in the late 1970s, which made handling intermodal containers extremely cost-effective for the railroads. By the late 1980s, the technology was fully embraced by the railroads and intermodal really took off. Today, intermodal traffic accounts for approximately 20% of revenue for U.S. railroads.

The New York Container Terminal at Howland Hook, Staten Island | Photo by Joshua Nelson

Before intermodal, you had to unload the ship by hand, break bulk, and then get that cargo into a boxcar. If that boxcar was terminating in a place where there’d be a truck trip to a final destination, then all those goods would have to be unloaded manually and put into the truck. It was extremely costly and the multiple “touches” always led to the potential for damaged goods.

Here in New York, we have a unique operation where there’s a much more direct interface between the maritime world and the rail world, and that’s in the “car-float” operation that takes place between Greenville, NJ and Sunset Park in Brooklyn. It’s the last vestige of this huge network of barges and tugs that used to be owned by all the private freight rail carriers in the city. Because of the lack of bridges across New York Harbor, these railroads actually put rail cars onto the barges and used tugboats to deliver them to pier sheds all throughout the city, and also to interchange with other railroads.

A carfloat approaches the 51st St Float Bridge in Sunset Park, Brooklyn | Photo by Joshua Nelson

In New York City, how does most imported cargo get to market?
The vast majority, by tonnage, is trucked into the city. According to a 2004 report by the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council, which is our local Metropolitan Planning Organization, freight rail’s share of the cargo flow is right about 1%. It’s very small when you compare it to everything else.

So 99% of our cargo is trucked from our ports?
Pretty much. Most goods don’t travel from port to the end user immediately; it’s not like it goes from a boat straight to your local Target. Often, goods move from the port facilities to a distribution center, many of which are off exits 7 and 8a on the New Jersey Turnpike, and also in Eastern Pennsylvania. Everything gets consolidated in these big distribution centers, and then trucks take the goods from there to make deliveries throughout the city.

Trucks at the Hunts Point Terminal Produce Market | Photo by Andreas Burgess

It’s important to note that there is a difference between cargo that terminates in the Port of New York and New Jersey, 100% of which is trucked to these distribution centers, and cargo that passes through the port. Approximately 10-15% of the cargo that enters the Port of New York and New Jersey on its way to, say, Chicago, Cleveland or St. Louis, leaves the port by rail on its way to other destinations.

Something we’re exploring, which is part of the Sunset Park vision plan and part of the Community Board 7′s 197(a) plan and in the latest update to PlaNYC, is turning two railyards in Brooklyn into “transload” facilities, places where you can bring in a railcar of goods and transfer all those goods to truck. That way, someone who doesn’t have a rail spur right into their building or their backyard can nonetheless pick up their goods by driving a truck, say, a mile and a half into Brooklyn, rather than moving their goods hundreds of miles by truck entirely. The city really lacks those kinds of facilities, and we think it’s important to develop them.

Tell me a little bit more about the three freight rail assets that the City maintains.
The Staten Island Railroad opened in April of 2007 and, for all intents and purposes, has been a huge success. When they did the initial projections for how much traffic they thought they would generate, I think it was 1/3 of what it’s generating today. The trackage formerly belonged to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) and, later, CSX Transportation. In recent years, the only customer was the Proctor & Gamble facility at Port Ivory, on the northwest shore of Staten Island. After Proctor & Gamble ceased operations there, the City acquired the right-of-way with the intention of reactivating the rail line. The City also saw the route as a means of effectuating its 2006 solid waste management plan.

The Port Authority and the City partnered and put $72,000,000 into the rehabilitation of the railroad in order to create direct access to the Howland Hook container port facility and also to the newly constructed Staten Island waste transfer facility in the Fresh Kills area. The container port really relies upon on-dock rail service and, of course, the Department of Sanitation definitely benefits from being able to export the waste by rail as opposed to truck. Now the City can shift its solid waste disposal out of Staten Island while retaining a significant number of jobs connected to solid waste disposal industry on the Island. And, besides saving money, the railroad eliminates about 90,000 truck trips, on average, from our roads every year. So that’s a big deal.

Double-stack container cars in the Arlington Rail Yard near Howland Hook Marine Terminal, Staten Island | Photo by Andreas Burgess

Then in the Bronx, the City maintains a relatively short spur that leads to the Hunts Point Produce Market. This line is important to us, and to the cooperators of the produce market, because it provides an alternative to truck. Five days a week, about 3-4% of the produce in the market comes in by rail as opposed to truck. The City is very focused on expanding the Produce Market and giving the cooperators what they need to continue to provide the valuable services that they do to all the restaurants, bodegas and grocers across New York City.

The cooperators of the market like rail because it’s cheaper by a significant price differential, but not all products can handle the long transit time. It takes about ten to twelve days for a boxcar of produce to make its way across the country, so the kinds of fresh produce that are still good after that kind of journey are what we call “hardwear”: potatoes, onions, sometimes carrots, coming from the growing regions of Eastern Idaho, Western Washington and sometimes California.

A locomotive crew switches refrigerated boxcars at the Hunts Point Produce Market | Photo by Joshua Nelson

The third of the City-owned freight rail assets, in Sunset Park in Brooklyn, is what we call the Brooklyn Waterfront Rail system — and I think this is the most exciting piece of the freight rail puzzle right now.

It’s comprised of components of a number of different old railroads: the Bush Terminal Railroad and the New York Connecting Railroad, which was operated jointly by the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad and the Long Island Railroad (when previously owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad). What’s left of these networks is some trackage between 29th and 65th Streets to the west of 1st Avenue in Sunset Park. It’s a system that was all under private ownership until the Port Authority bought it in 2008, and it is in need of significant capital upgrades. So we’re working with the Port Authority on updating the railroad’s old service contract with modern legal terms; bringing everything into a state of good repair on the Brooklyn waterfront; and making capital improvements to enhance our ability to market the rail line and to market parcels within the Sunset Park area to companies that would be interested in rail service.

The Brooklyn Waterfront Rail System

What kind of companies are those?
For example, one of the companies that will be relocating to the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal (SBMT) is the Axis Group, an auto import/export distributer. They’ll be bringing in import vehicles via deep-draft ship and using the Marine Terminal area as a distribution facility. A portion of those vehicles will leave SBMT by rail. Another tenant is Sims Metal Management, which is building a municipal recycling facility in partnership with the NYC Department of Sanitation and they want to be able to ship out repurposed recyclables by rail. So those are two totally different kinds of operations: one ships out recycled tin cans and baled waste for sale on the domestic commodity markets, and the other ships out shiny, brand new automobiles.

What do you wish people understood better about freight rail and why it’s important for New York?
What I would encourage people to do is to think about their supply chain in general. When you’re on line at Duane Reade or the grocery store, take a look at whatever you have in your hand and ask yourself: “Where did this avocado come from? And how the heck did it get here?” By and large, when people think of transportation, they think of it in terms of something they don’t want around them: they don’t want trucks or freight trains rumbling past their door. But at the same time, they want a huge variety of consumer products when they walk into the store, and they want cheap prices. I think freight rail, for New Yorkers, is a totally unseen part of life in the city that the average person doesn’t think about, but it’s definitely there. And although it doesn’t handle a large portion of the overall traffic that we have coming into the city, it’s still very important.

I think that the more that we can encourage rail freight activity, the more transportation options small businesses will have and the more competitive the city will be. It’s a much more positive approach to the city’s supply chains, not only in relation to consumer products, but to anything that is manufactured, either on greater Long Island or within the city.

Does encouraging usually mean expanding the infrastructure?
I think in some cases it means expanding infrastructure, but it also means maximizing and leveraging what you already have. In a lot of cases, when we talk about the proposals for the 65th Street Rail Yard and the 51st Street Rail Yard to develop these transload facilities, this is land that the City owns that could be utilized in a much more robust way. It’s less a question of building railroads or building new infrastructure than it is about bringing everything to a state of good repair and then marketing the facilities we have to utilize them to their full potential.

"Where did this avocado come from? And how the heck did it get here?"

Graphics by Marcelo López-Dinardi.

Joshua Nelson is an Assistant Vice President at the New York City Economic Development Corporation specializing in freight rail transportation. He is responsible for managing the City’s freight rail assets while also developing goods movement policies that support more modal balance in the regional transportation system. Previous transportation experience includes improving the on-time reliability of Mexico City’s Metrobús bus rapid transit system, promoting rideshare programs in Seattle and launching the TRAX light rail system in Salt Lake City. Joshua received a BA and BS from the University of Utah and holds both a Master of Science in Transportation and a Master in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The “infra-“ in infrastructure means below, which perhaps explains why we rarely pause to consider the sewers, water supply or electrical grids that enable the basic functions of urban living. Even when critical infrastructural systems are visible and not hidden below ground — like highways, power lines or traffic lights — their ubiquity and necessity put them just out of sight and out of mind. Until, of course, they break: a pothole is the quickest reminder of the good road maintenance we generally take for granted. How often do we stop to reflect on the full scope of what well-functioning roads and bridges and tunnels make possible? The desire to provoke that kind of reflection is what the City of Systems video series is all about.

Last year, Urban Omnibus spoke with Tom Wright, executive director of the Regional Plan Association (RPA), an organization that since the 1920s has advocated strongly for “creating infrastructure and building big systems to protect landscapes and water supplies, to provide more mass-transit, to plan for the region’s growth.” Looking forward, Wright explained that future planning and advocacy efforts might be “less about creating new systems and more about getting more efficiency and productivity out of the energy supply, the water supply, community development networks. The bad news is that we’re doing a poor job of managing and operating these 19th and early 20th century systems; the good news is there’s a lot more capacity in them if we start to manage the systems better.” Digital technologies offer one mechanism to get more out of our basic urban systems, facilitating use-on-demand systems or creating responsive environments. Yet, while our new digital infrastructure will do many things, it won’t, by itself, build roads over water. It might, however, enable us to maintain our physical infrastructure better: monitoring usage to identify greater efficiencies, to alert us of potential malfunctions, or to extrapolate broader patterns in regional flows of people and goods. Imagine if the data from E-ZPass toll payments on the Verrazano were made available to support, say, a more nuanced proposal for congestion pricing.

As we go about instrumenting all of our systems in an attempt to harness the excess capacity within them, we would be wise to contemplate the implications of how those systems came into being, what the assumptions were about their eventual use, and how those assumptions have played out in the lived experience of residents and communities. Visible from places in all five of New York City’s boroughs, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge stands as an iconic reminder not only to appreciate a masterwork of civil engineering, but also to reflect on the systemic urban change that infrastructure can bring about.

This Urban Omnibus video is the second in a series called City of Systems, a suite of short videos intended to offer a poetic peek behind the scenes of some of the complex systems that enable New York City to function. This video series is made possible by IBM as part of its commitment to use technology and information to help build more sustainable and intelligent cities.

Interstate highway I-278 crosses the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge

The original music in the video, “Verrazano” by Good Fruit, appears courtesy of the artist.

New York’s waterways are a hot topic these days: from architectural responses to sea level rise in the Museum of Modern Art’s provocative Rising Currents exhibition to the recent release of Vision 2020, a far-reaching “framework for the future of our waterfront, waterways and water.” The fact that this ambitious plan articulates strategies for all three broadens the traditional urban planning focus on the coastline by viewing “the waterfront and waterways as a single interconnected network” whose uses can be optimized for goals that include, among others, expanding public access to recreation and transportation, supporting the working waterfront and increasing climate resilience.

Given this emphasis on increasing the use of New York City’s water, who makes sure everything is working the way it should? Mike Marrella, Project Director of the Comprehensive Waterfront Plan of the Department of City Planning, commented last Friday at a Pratt Institute lecture on the sustainable waterfront that most New Yorkers might not even be aware of the role the Coast Guard plays in our urban waterways. Marrella conveyed that the Coast Guard was an important partner in the development of the waterfront plan and that service demands on the Coast Guard will multiply as recreational and other water-based use expands in the New York area — growth that will be challenged by recent budgetary constraints.

Sector New York’s waterway responsibility includes the New York Harbor and extends north up the Hudson to Troy, NY. The sector manages all the traffic of the Port of New York and New Jersey (the third largest US port), where servicewomen and men monitor the movement of sensitive materials and petroleum product in the nation, and plays an instrumental role in monitoring water pollution, such as the 1978 discovery of the massive Exxon oil spill in Newtown Creek. Just over one percent of the US Coast Guard works in Sector New York, making it the the nation’s largest operational command.

To find out more, we spoke with Commander Linda Sturgis, Chief of the Prevention Department (and one of the station’s most senior officers), and Lieutenant Commander Ed Munoz, Chief of Waterways Management, to talk about the Coast Guard’s role in the day-to-day life of New York. As it turns out, they do a lot. The Coast Guard’s job is to “protect the maritime economy and the environment, defend our maritime borders, and save those in peril.” At first, this may not strike us as a particularly urban set of duties. But in a city of islands and water such as ours, the Coast Guard stewards of one of our most important urban assets. Thus, hearing directly from some of the men and women who make the waterways safe, secure and working — for all users — is an important part of our ongoing efforts to shine a light on the individuals and agencies working to maintain and improve urban life and landscape.

Enforcing the security zones around the Staten Island Ferry in New York Harbor | USCG photo by PA3 Barbara L. Patton.

What is the Coast Guard Sector New York and what is your mission?
Cdr. Linda Sturgis: Coast Guard Sector New York oversees all Coast Guard activities in the New York and New Jersey Port area, including the Hudson River. We have about 1,000 personnel, nine Coast Guard cutters, three small boat stations and two Aids-to-Navigation teams. Coast Guard Sector New York covers a wide area — the approach to New York Harbor, the New York / New Jersey Port area, the Hudson River up to Albany and the Port of Albany up to Troy.

Our mission is to ensure the safety and security of life and property at sea in managing all eleven Coast Guard missions, which encompass various facets of waterborne safety and waterborne security. Our missions include search and rescue, port and waterway security, waterfront facilities security, commercial vessel inspections, maritime accident investigations and waterways management to ensure the health of the marine transportation system.

We work with many stakeholders, including the City of New York, the Office of Emergency Management (OEM) and the US Army Corps of Engineers, to analyze and protect the waterways for all users, commercial and recreational. We aren’t partial to one side or the other – we side with the safety and security of the waterway.

How do you go about managing the waterways?
Lt. Cdr. Ed Munoz: Waterways management’s mission is to ensure the effective movement of goods throughout the port with safety and security in mind. Its an all-encompassing mission, so we deal with marine events, icebreaking, maintaining navigation systems which help the vessels come in and out of the port, construction, marinas, and managing places where vessels can anchor.

LS: We also have two Aids to Navigation teams that report to our office, to make sure all the aids to navigation that line the channels of the New York Harbor, the Hudson River and the approaches are in the right location to ensure proper traffic patterns for shipping are being followed.

Rescue boats moored at Coast Guard Station New York on Staten Island | USCG photo by PA3 Annie R. Berlin

What’s a typical day like at Coast Guard Sector New York?
LS: We are located on Staten Island, and have a very vibrant command duty watch, command center and vessel traffic center. Our offices are located in historic Fort Wadsworth, strategically located at essentially the entrance of New York Harbor. On any given day, we will respond to search and rescue calls — we have three small boat stations that will respond to persons in distress. We do maritime law enforcement boarding for drug interdiction and undocumented migrant interdiction, and we do commercial ship inspections on both foreign and US-flag ships to verify safety and that critical lifesaving measures are in place.

Is that something you do for every ship?
LS: Yes, if it’s a US flag vessel that carries cargo or passengers-for-hire, we inspect at least annually. Foreign flag ships also are examined at least annually by the US Coast Guard. We do what we call ‘port waterway coastal security boardings,’ where we patrol critical infrastructure here in the Port of New York and New Jersey for security, and we board deep-draft vessels (those large ships, like bulk carriers, big container ships and oil tankers you see anchored off of New York Harbor) out at sea before coming into port.

From a security perspective, we do security zone enforcement — there’s a permanent security zone around the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, and we enforce any breach of that zone. We also enforce waterway security zones around planned national security events. We manage approximately 700 marine events and large activities, including waterfront security for the UN General Assembly (when we have over 130 heads of state and the President of the United States come to New York right along the river at the UN).

We also do commercial waterfront facility inspections to ensure that they’re in compliance with safety and security regulations and pollution prevention.

Is that any facility along the waterfront?
LS: Only if the facility has a commercial vessel that comes to it, such as the oil terminals or the Staten Island Ferry Terminal. We have 180 waterfront facilities in our area and we’re ready 24/7 to respond to pollution or threats of pollution.

We also do icebreaking, so in the winter months, when the Hudson River is frozen, we have Coast Guard cutters that will break up ice to free up shipping lanes for commercial vessels to transport home heating fuel to Upstate New York and New England.

The Jill Reinauer, an icebreaking tug homeported in Staten Island, N.Y., is beset in ice after attempting to transit near West Point, N.Y. | USCG photo by Seaman Matt Fountain

What was your role in Vision 2020?
EM: We were invited by the City, as they developed the plan, to be one of the advisory agencies. We attended several of the public meetings and inter-agency meetings that went through the development of goals. Different drafts were distributed to all the ports. We commented on the document, added our take, and suggested certain things to be included in the plan.

Do the City agencies involved in the plan have an appreciation for what the Coast Guard Sector New York does?
EM: I think by the end of the process they did. They even went aboard some commercial tugs and barges operating in the Port of New York to see the land-side from the water to better understand some issues.

What is your role in emergency preparedness?
LS: We’re not the only agency involved in emergency preparedness. We use an integrated approach to manage on-water emergencies and work closely with every agency that has some tie to the water, such as the Office of Emergency Management and the Police and Fire Departments.

If there is a mass evacuation, we would closely coordinate our response. If there’s a physical obstruction in the federal waterway, the Coast Guard and the Army Corps of Engineers are the lead federal agencies in charge of restoring the marine transportation system.

The first time the city prepared a long-range vision for the city’s entire shoreline was in 1992, which rethought the water’s edge as a place not just for commerce and industry but also as a place for people to live and play. Did that change in priorities affect the ways the Coast Guard protects and serves the waterfront and the waterways at all?
LS: I am not familiar with the specific details of the plan from 1992. Even before 1992, the Coast Guard’s mission has been to ensure that the marine transportation system remains viable and safe for all users.

Vision 2020 is such an ambitious document expanding multiple uses. How does the Coast Guard go about managing this balance? Do you welcome the diversification of use or do you feel it gets in the way?
LS: Working with all stakeholders, the Coast Guard must analyze any proposed change to current traffic patterns and waterway use to minimize navigation hazards and exposure of both commercial and recreational vessels to increased risk as a result of increased user volume.

Our main goal, as with any proposed plan to increase the volume of the use of the waterway (be it commercial or recreational traffic), is to work as a key agency with all stakeholders — be it the recreational boating community, the kayaking community, the tug and barge community, the deep-trap vessel community. We work in direct partnership with the US Army Corps of Engineers and other key stakeholders to ensure that the waterways remain safe and secure for everyone’s use. We consider all traffic patterns, all usage areas, commercial vessel users and recreational users.

The Vessel Traffic Center at Coast Guard Activities New York, Staten Island, N.Y. monitors vessel traffic in the New York Harbor. | USCG photo PA2 Mike Hvozda

Additional reporting and graphics by Alicia Rouault.

Commander Linda A. Sturgis is a marine safety expert and Chief of the Prevention Department at Coast Guard Sector New York. She joined the Coast Guard in 1993 and served as a Deck Watch Officer on the Coast Guard Cutter Mellon and served at several marine safety offices throughout the country, including Miami, Seattle and Cleveland.

Lieutenant Commander Ed Munoz, USCG, is Chief of Waterways Management Division at Coast Guard Sector New York. Prior posts include Assistant Chief of Waterways Management and Senior Investigating Officer at Coast Guard Sector Boston and Assistant Chief of Contingency and Preparedness at MSO Boston. He also holds a Masters in Public Administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Give a Minute NYC | via Co.Design

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

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

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

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

Triassic sandstone in Park Slope (200-250 million years old).

The materials, colors, and textures that frame and fill our city streets — the very stuff that composes New York’s architecture and infrastructure — are not from the world we inhabit. They are from former worlds that existed millions of years ago, worlds as strange as any in science fiction.

Modern life and deep geologic time are profoundly embedded within one another, with great consequence for both the present and the future. Humans are not only intimately living with — and rapidly using up — geologic material that took scores of millions of years to create, we are also laying down a new and utterly unique stratum on the earth. It’s made up of human-made materials (including waste), and it will remain as one of earth’s geologic layers long after our species is gone. This has led some geologists to declare that we’ve entered a new geologic epoch. And they’ve named it after us: the Anthropocene.

Our work in progress, Geologic City: A Field Guide to the GeoArchitecture of New York, aims to visualize the vast, complex story behind this news. It’s a story that most people can’t begin to fathom, or at least they haven’t yet tried. With a Geologic City printed field guide in hand, residents and visitors will be able to interact with familiar New York architecture and infrastructure in an unexpected way: they’ll be able to see for themselves how forces of deep time give form and materiality to the built environment of the City.

Take, for example, Brooklyn’s celebrated brownstones. Made of red sandstone from the Triassic, they are nothing less than four-story-tall blocks of solid geology, 250 million years old. That’s pre-dinosaur. Rockefeller Center elevates and displays — 872 feet into the air — 340 million-year-old limestone that materialized during the middle Mississippian Period. And the geologic memory of the iron in the Manhattan Bridge predates Earth itself (it arrived here from a supernova to help form Earth 4.6 billion years ago).

Some people argue that humans are cognitively (evolutionarily) unable to imagine deep time. We disagree. So, for Geologic City, we’ve been trying not only to imagine deep geologic time, but also to recognize that our city is built on and of materials of deep time. What if artists and designers could help us recalibrate our capacities to comprehend geologic time? What if everyone did what geologists do: stretch imaginations to recognize the world around us as made out of the stuff of worlds that preceded us?

Our project is still very much in the works. But we’re far enough along to take you on a brief tour of a few sites that exemplify, as well as shake up, the premises of Geologic City.
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GEOLOGY IN THE RAW

A rock slide in Inwood Hill Park, induced by glacial activity during the Pleistocene (10,000+ years ago).

Just over 10,000 years ago, Pleistocene-epoch glaciers scoured the face of Manhattan Island during their retreat. They scraped it down to its bones, also known as Manhattan schist, a geologic infrastructure of bedrock whose solid support makes it possible to build skyscrapers on the island. The marks are still clearly visible in the city today.

In Inwood Hill Park — where we kicked off Geologic City last August by taking a geology walk led by the esteemed New York urban geologist Sidney Horenstein — you can find the City’s largest glacial pothole, carved when pieces of rock, swirling in those turbulent melt waters, drilled holes into the surrounding stone. The same glaciers smoothed outcroppings of schist at the south end of Central Park, where today people picnic and lounge on their table-like surfaces.

A month after the Inwood geology walk, we set out to find one particular Central Park schist outcropping, incised with two simple steps — to us, one of the more exquisite conjunctions of the human and geologic in New York City. The stairs caught our attention when we happened upon Robert Smithson’s 1973 Artforum essay “Frederick Law Olmsted and The Dialectical Landscape.” Smithson illustrated his essay with several photographs of the Park, including one captioned, simply, “Rock Stairs 1972.” We wondered if, 40 years later, the stairs could still be found. We spotted them just north of 59th Street.

Manhattan Schist rock stairs (450 million years old), designed by Olmsted and Vaux in Central Park, as photographed by Robert Smithson in 1972.

An historian at the Central Park Conservancy told us the steps were part of the original park plan and can be credited to the designers themselves, Olmsted and Vaux. For a century and a half, these steps have made a 450 million-year-old piece of rock “active” through their poetic futility. A sidewalk runs right alongside the gently sloping stone, which means the stairs don’t provide “passage” or assistance in climbing as much as they offer a shift in being. By “using” the geoarchitecture afforded by these stairs, New Yorkers today accept an invitation to make direct contact with the geology of the City. The stairs politely suggest that we break from the predetermined route of the sidewalk and head up and onto the open space of bare geologic materiality. What happens next is up to us.
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REMIXED GEOLOGICAL STRATA OF THE FUTURE

Out of commission garbage-moving cranes at Freshkills Park.

In October, we took a public tour of the Fresh Kills landfill. We found ourselves standing on a grassy mound, elevated to almost 200 feet by the pile of trash beneath us. As long as funding continues, a park three times the size of Central Park will be completed there by 2036. The “hills” that create the foundation of the proposed recreation area stand in sharp contrast to the schist foundation of Central Park. Because Freshkills Park is being constructed on a foundation of garbage — 53 years worth of city trash to be exact — the site is unsuitable for heavy construction (such as that required for the once-considered wind farm). So, the park will offer light-use activities such as mountain biking and trail running.

Within the hills, one human-made “geologic stratum” enfolds another as the mounded garbage layer is capped and contained by a layer of impermeable plastic. Beneath the plastic cap, the environment is airless, or anaerobic. That means a discarded hot dog will remain preserved, as is, for decades beyond our individual lifetimes. Plastic garbage, which is inorganic, will never decompose here or anywhere. It will merely break down into smaller and smaller bits of itself. Which led us to think that, in 2,000 years, Freshkills Park might be known as a geologically rich site for discovering concentrations of plastic, not so dissimilar to today’s concentrations of coal, uranium or oil.
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EPHEMERAL GEOLOGY

Miocene salt (8+ million years old), also known as rock salt, in temporary storage under the Manhattan Bridge.

One afternoon in early autumn, we found ourselves standing under the Manhattan Bridge in the rain, confronted with several thousand tons of geologic materiality. To the Department of Sanitation, the material is known as rock salt. To us, the elephantine heap of salt was an ephemeral urban sculpture — an installation of deep time on view to select employees of the DSNY.

The salt travels here via International Salt, the City’s supplier, from the Tarapacá Salt Flats in Chile, vast deposits inside ancient sea beds that now lie in the driest desert in the world (50 times drier than Death Valley). Despite having materialized 8-10 million years ago during the Miocene epoch, the tons of solidified geologic time piled beneath the bridge will dissolve away in a matter of weeks as they are spread atop hundreds of miles of wintry city streets. Before washing away with spring rains, this thin coating of ancient salt will first encrust nearly every exterior surface of the city — roads, sidewalks, bikes, cars, and shoes — with traces of deep time.
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TRACE GEOLOGY ON THE MOVE

2351 Richmond Terrace, former storage site for uranium used in the Manhattan Project.

Uranium, element 92 on the periodic chart, is literally otherworldly. It formed in pre-Earth times in supernovae about 6.6 billion years ago. Today, on an exposed edge of Staten Island, cosmic time, deep geologic time and contemporary human time (the Anthropocene) remix wildly in the material form — and continuing flows — of uranium.

In 1938, a three-story Archer Daniels Midland Company warehouse stored vegetable oil in 2377-2387 Richmond Terrace, Staten Island, in the shadow of the Bayonne Bridge. But that year, the building took on a new purpose when a ship arrived from the Belgian Congo — where significant amounts of uranium concentrated in the rock of the Shinkolobwe mine (located in contemporary Democratic Republic of the Congo) sometime in the late Proterozoic (570-900 million years ago) — and unloaded 2,007 steel drums containing 1,200 tons of raw uranium ore. This uranium would soon became part of the nuclear infrastructure known as the Manhattan Project, when it was used to create the atomic weapon that was dropped over Hiroshima.

In 1980, according to the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance, representatives from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory found dangerously high levels of radioactivity in Richmond Terrace. But nothing was done. In 2008, citizens called on the Environmental Protection Agency to investigate the contamination. The EPA recorded levels of uranium radiation more than 200 times what is required to trigger a cleanup. Remarkably, the site is exposed directly to an active waterway, the Kill Van Kill, a tidal strait that runs between Staten Island and New Jersey.

Today, there’s little to see along this stretch of Richmond Terrace. A couple of abandoned trailers and a pile of old tires litter a partially vacant lot used by a local paving company. The gate was open on the day we visited. We walked in and took a look around. Any signs of active remediation were invisible to us. The US Army Corps of Engineers began evaluating the location in January 2010. An April 2010 report from NY1 describes the cleanup, more than 70 years after the arrival of the uranium, as still being in the “preliminary assessment” stage.
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GEOLOGIC FUTURE

It seems that creative works made in response to geologic time are becoming more common. Maybe this means that human capacities to design, imagine, and live in relation to deep time are about to take an evolutionary leap. In the meantime, we’re designing Geologic City as an aesthetic prosthesis — a speculative tool — that New Yorkers can use to activate their imaginations in relation to deep time as they move through New York City.

As our research continues in 2011, we will respond to the geologic materiality of yellow cab paint; hydro turbines in the East River; and we’ll look a bit offshore at the convergence of geology and fiber optic cables in the Hudson Canyon.

We will also explore how we humans factor into the Geologic City — as geologic material ourselves. Humans are carriers of geologic elements: always in motion, we augment and intensify the materials, flows, and remixings of the city’s geologically-based architectures and infrastructures.

We want to invent ways to communicate visually how New York’s geologic materials and meanings flow and transform across worlds that have been and worlds yet to come. We want to ignite a renewed, or perhaps altogether new, appreciation for the materialities of deep geologic time as well as for the infrastructures that channel and consist of them.

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Full Geologic City field reports can be read on the Friends of the Pleistocene blog:
Introduction
1. Pre-Earthian New York City: Inwood Hill and Fort Tryon Park
2. Forces Beyond Time: Shinran Statue
3. Staten Island’s Tainted Edge: 2377-2387 Richmond Terrace
4. Stepping into Time: Rock Stairs
5. A Portal into the Present: Newtown Creek Nature Walk
6. Monument to the Miocene: Rock Salt Warehouse
7. From the Top of the Heap: Freshkills Park
8. Urban Infrastructure as Geologic Material in Motion
9. El Dorado Found: 33 Liberty Street

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Jamie Kruse is a Brooklyn-based artist, designer, and independent scholar. Elizabeth Ellsworth is Associate Provost for Curriculum and Learning and Professor of Media Studies at The New School, New York, and author of Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy. Together, Ellsworth and Kruse are the co-founders of smudge studio and Friends of the Pleistocene. Geologic City is funded in part by the New York State Council on the Arts, Architecture Planning & Design program for 2011.

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

Dana Gumb has been working on the Staten Island Bluebelt since 1988. He started first with the Department of City Planning and then went on to lead the Bluebelt project at the Department of Environmental Protection (NYC DEP), the agency responsible for the City’s water supply — that’s 1 billion gallons a day, 7,000 miles of water mains and 7,400 miles of sewer lines. NYC DEP started acquiring property for the Bluebelt in the early 1990s and since 1995 has worked with the water engineering firm Hazen and Sawyer alongside teams of consultants ranging from environmental planners to archaeologists to architects. In the interview below, Gumb sketches out an overview of how the project has evolved. And he reveals how the project goes way beyond stormwater control, probing the intersections between land use planning, environmental engineering, improving public health, providing open space and sustaining biodiversity. -C.S.

Left: Headline news of the kind of storm that crippled Staten Island before the Bluebelt. Right: A Bluebelt waterway performing its natural function: to convey, store, and filter stormwater | Images courtesy of Hazen and Sawyer

What is the Staten Island Bluebelt project and how did it come to be?
In the mid-1970s, Staten Island was in the midst of a huge wave of development and it lacked the infrastructure to support it. Specifically, storm drainage and sanitary sewers. Some creative thinkers working in the Department of City Planning at that time recognized that a lot of wetlands were still in existence. A wetland is an area that is inundated for a certain period of time during the year, frequently enough that its soil and vegetation can thrive under water. So, rather than building a costly conventional storm sewer system — especially costly when you are dealing with a low density, suburban development — some visionary city planners decided to use the wetlands for purposes of stormwater control.

Basically, the Bluebelt project is trying to replicate the pre-development hydrology of these wetland systems. In the 10,000 years since the last glacier, Wisconsin, retreated from the area and left the current topography and watersheds in its wake, Staten Island has mostly been the site of forests, meadows, maybe a few farms here and there, but basically nothing that was too much for the stream to handle. These days, instead of forests and farms you have roadways and rooftops. So, you don’t get the infiltration of the storm water into the ground any more. You get much more runoff, which, at its peak, becomes a big slug of water that arrives at the stream all at once. What we are trying to do is to hold that water back in extended detention ponds and then slowly release it. That way, instead of this flash flood situation, where the water bursts down into the creek system and ruins it, we are able to control flooding and preserve the stream system as much as possible.

How the Bluebelt works. Adapted by Purva Jain from an interactive diagram produced by NYC DEP.

A lot of the areas that we clean up and and where we create wetlands haven’t seen a positive measure since European settlement on Staten Island. Our process combines stormwater management with natural area restoration so we get a bunch of benefits in one go: flood control, water quality improvement and a new natural area for birds, aquatic life and, in some cases, park access for citizens.

We didn’t call it “green infrastructure” at the time that we started this. But the idea of “stream valley parks” – linear, open space systems that reach into communities while providing drainage service for flood prone areas – is an urban planning concept that goes way back. Frederick Law Olmsted’s plan for the Emerald Necklace in Boston follows the same basic idea. In Staten Island in the ’70s, some basic assets were there to begin with: Staten Island is the last frontier of freshwater wetlands in New York City.

Left: Constructing a wetland. Right: Carefully planned landscaped zones remove pollutants while maintaining biodiversity | Images courtesy of Hazen and Sawyer

At the time, were there other examples of using wetlands to deal with stormwater elsewhere in the country? Or was this idea something we had forgotten about since the days of Olmsted?
The concept of a “stream valley park” was around, especially in other suburban areas. The cutting-edge aspect that distinguishes the Bluebelt program from earlier projects is this concept of BMPs – Best Management Practices. When we say Best Management Practices we are talking about best practices in the management of stormwater, in controlling the quality and quantity of the water runoff that eventually finds its way into the stream system and the receiving waters.

Wetlands are the planet’s kidneys. Our goal is to re-introduce wetlands disturbed by Staten Island’s development.

Typically, in other systems, the drainage mechanism is just a simple storm sewer — one that just dumps the water into the stream system. This approach is limited for two reasons. In terms of quantity control, it means you get these slugs of stormwater traveling through the stream system at high velocities, causing stream banks to collapse, the streams to fill with sediment and the eventual loss of the streams’ capacity to convey water. In terms of quality control, you get all sorts of contaminants washing off street pavements and rooftops and making their way into the stream system.

The Staten Island Bluebelt works differently. It’s a system of BMPs on a large scale — about one third of the land area of Staten Island will be served by the Bluebelt system eventually – all municipally owned and operated. In other parts of the country, particularly in the Chesapeake Bay, you’ll find isolated, private landowners with a BMP in place to improve water runoff conditions. You might find, for example, a Kentucky Fried Chicken with a little constructed wetland pond. The Staten Island Bluebelt stands out in a national perspective for its scale: we have plans for about 90 BMPs in South Richmond – of which 50 are built and in operation – and plans for 30 more in the mid-island area.

The watersheds of South Richmond | Image courtesy of NYC DEP

How do you plan for something on that scale that also has to respond to such specific conditions in each instance?
To put it in a few words, we’ve based everything on watershed level planning. A watershed is a geographic area that contributes water to a particular stream or water body. South Richmond has about 15 or 16 watersheds, and for each one the first step is to look at zoning to determine the ultimate development pattern within that watershed. Next, we build a mathematical, hydrological model that will predict what the flows are going to be in the stream system. We then acquire the land around the stream system so that we can maintain the streams as a way to convey the stormwater to the ultimate receiving waters. In a conventional suburban sewer system, when the water gets to the end of the street it is simply dumped into the stream. The cutting-edge aspect of the Bluebelt is that at each and every storm sewer discharge point, at each point where the gray infrastructure transitions into green infrastructure, we have these special facilities — the BMPs — that address the issues of urban stormwater discharge in wetland conditions. Sometimes it’s as simple as a series of sumps — or holes in the ground — that slow the storm water down and allow for sediments to settle, accumulate and eventually get removed by our maintenance forces. Once contaminants have flowed into the natural receiving water body, you can never get them out.

Within each watershed, the best site for BMPs is a disturbed wetland – an area that has been filled or paved or otherwise messed up, but yet remains low lying ground. In the last 20 years we have learned a lot about how to construct a wetland, how to get the plant material right, etc. Wetland scientists tell me that wetland plants are unique: while submerged, they are pumping oxygen down into the root mass creating aerobic conditions in what would typically only be anaerobic. Aerobic conditions in the root zone support the bacteria that can eat up the water’s contaminants. Bacteria are the workforces of our planet, breaking everything down and allowing for cycling of nutrients.

Wetlands are considered the planet’s kidneys: they filter out and remove contaminants. Our goal is to re-introduce some of the wetlands disturbed by Staten Island’s development.

Clockwise from top left: Landscaping plan for stormwater wetland in Blue Heron Park; elevation of typical stone faced headwall; cross section through stormwater wetland shows landscaping and vegetation details | Images courtesy of NYC DEP

It sounds like the program was instituted just in time. If it had gone another 10 years…
That’s right. The wave of development started after the Verrazano was opened in 1964. But some of this story goes back to the boom times of the 1920s. Old farms were sub-divided, streets were laid out on paper and many little lots were sold sight unseen. Many people in Brooklyn and elsewhere were persuaded by the possibility of owning a little piece of New York – but little did they know that in certain cases the lot they bought was in the middle of a swamp. And then, when the Depression hit, people could not pay their property taxes and a huge amount of land went into city ownership. So, that was kind of a basic asset for the Bluebelt.

The point is to cobble together whatever public property we can – parkland, highway rights of way, land owned by the State’s Department of Environmental Conservation. The DEP’s acquisition program targeted the missing links, and in all we have amassed 350 acres. Anybody who says condemnation is easy hasn’t been through it! Reviews, public hearings, contacting owners… Luckily, we haven’t had a lot of controversy because in most cases owners are dying to get rid of this property. A common scenario we hear is: “Grandma bought this property in 1924 and every Thanksgiving we get together and laugh about how ridiculous it was that she bought land in that swamp out there. You want to buy it? Oh, great!”

So none of this would have been possible without city ownership?
Absolutely. In terms of the BMP development, we have to be able to do the construction, land-work and earth-moving on the properties. We need to ensure the conveyance capacity of the stream – that we are not flooding anybody out.

In a lot of other places, you’ll find a big watershed with a lot of political sub-divisions, where trying to get everybody together to make a single, watershed-level plan is very difficult. So, that’s one of our advantages, and why we have been able to go as far as we have. We’re lucky that we have a unified DEP agency that can manage this scale of planning.

The Lighthouse Avenue culvert at Richmond Creek | Image courtesy of Hazen and Sawyer

Which leads me to wonder, to what extent it is scalable to other parts of the city and the country?
The Bluebelt system fits right in with PlaNYC and the stormwater plan that was done back in 2008-2009 that mentions the Bluebelt as part of the green infrastructure of the city. DEP has projects going in Queens and the Bronx, both of which have pretty sizable BMPs. The basic idea, again, is that you have a conventional sewer system with a pipe that comes down to a certain discharge point where you want to add a BMP. Making a pond BMP works well with sewer projects that are adjacent to parks with surface water features. We can fix up the park and manage the stormwater at the same time. For example, Springfield Lake in southeast Queens has never been emptied since the 1930s, when it was built. There are maybe six inches of water in it; algae blooms in the summer. We are going to dredge the lake, make it a part of the drainage system, and add BMPs at each discharge point to intercept sediments.

And yes, there is applicability elsewhere in the country as well. There are a lot of areas where private builders are trying to create these BMPs. One area, in our experience, that has attracted a lot of interest is field management: How exactly and how often do you clean these things out? What is the best way of measuring the accumulation of sediment? What are the design features that make the maintenance easy to accomplish? Because we have so many BMPs in a very distinct geographical area and a single municipal agency has control over this very large area — like I said, it is possibly the largest municipally owned system of BMPs — the Bluebelt has attracted a lot of interest and continues to set national standards for managing the quality and quantity of stormwater runoff.

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Further reading:

• Gumb, “Staten Island History and Bluebelt Land Acquisitions” in Clear Waters (a publication of the New York Water Environment Association), Winter 2009.

• Garin, Gumb et al., “Bluebelt Beginnings” in Clear Waters (a publication of the New York Water Environment Association), Winter 2009.

• Brauman, Gumb, and Duerkes, “Designing for Wildlife in the Bluebelt” in Clear Waters (a publication of the New York Water Environment Association), Winter 2009.

• Hsu, “Sustainable New York City“  (a project of the Design Trust for Public Space and the New York City Office of Environmental Coordination), 2006.

The American Society of Landscape Architects held their Annual Meeting & Expo this month in Washington, D.C. This year is the 100th anniversary of Landscape Architecture magazine and the District’s famous Heights of Buildings Act, which, incidentally, limits heights based on street width, not the Washington Monument.

The Meeting theme, “Earth Air Water Fire DESIGN,” was chosen to acknowledge landscape architecture’s unique position as a profession in which designers are trained to work in harmony with the natural elements. The title did not ultimately serve as much of an organizing principle, but there were several relevant threads that emerged across panels and sessions: integration of data with landscape, water management and design, urban agriculture, green/complete streets, public parks, and a down economy.

Dr. Richard Jackson | Courtesy American Society of Landscape Architects

Landscape Architecture and Public Health
Every profession likes to see itself at the center of, and therefore a logical connector among, the otherwise siloed activities of related disciplines. And while the Meeting’s sessions often kept to that reasoning, the panelists were galvanized by civic and environmental responsibility rather than egotism. Dr. Richard Jackson, one of the weekend’s headliners, argued that landscape architects are responsible for our designed environment and by extension, our behavior, health, and national economy. A medical doctor and former head of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), he argued that the obesity epidemic is a result of having “engineered exercise out of our lives. We have medicalized the troubles that people are having in adapting [to our auto-centered] environment,” rather than recognizing our declining health as an indicator of poor design. Though his talk offered few design revelations, the message successfully energized the crowd in the continuation of bike- and pedestrian-friendly work. New York City’s “Active Design Guidelines,” for example, offer evidence of the increasing attention paid to this problem.

Renewable Energy: Scenery Management, Social Barriers and the Landscape Architect
A panel on the policies of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), titled “Renewable Energy: Scenery Management, Social Barriers and the Landscape Architect,” might interest those engaged in the debate about the 1,200-foot Vornado Tower that would block the view of the Empire State Building from Chelsea and New Jersey. During the panel, Kate Schwarzler of multidisciplinary Otak explained the BLM’s visual resource inventory, which covers some 50 million acres of land and is based on a specific set of scenic quality characteristics. Any new energy project is now judged by these characteristics and by a less precise political-sensitivity scale. It made me wonder whether opposition to the midtown project, granted a height increase because of its proximity to Penn Station, would have been stiffer if the Empire State Building were blocked from downtown. The saddest part of the presentation was the camouflaging paint palette developed to make power lines disappear, lest Westerners have their perception of wilderness spoiled by visual awareness of electricity infrastructure. Are New Yorkers better off having our infrastructure buried? Should developers be forced to submit building renderings based on proscribed street-level viewsheds and climatic conditions to balance the twilight images so carefully designed to mollify the public?

Herbert Dreiseitl | Courtesy American Society of Landscape Architects

The Promise of Water
There were a lot of sessions that fulfilled the more technical aspects of continuing education, but Herbert Dreiseitl’s talk “The Promise of Water” was, on the contrary, practically metaphysical. He demonstrated how water poured against a flat panel starts out straight and then develops kinks and new directions. Somehow this exercise felt sublime. He proselytized us on how the structures of water repeated at all scales. It was an hour and a half retrospective starting with small sculptures in city parks that captured light or reflected sound just so and moved to restorations of whole rivers that changed the public’s interaction with the ecosystem.  Like all good promoters, his book Recent Waterscapes: Planning, Building and Designing with Water was for sale, for $99.00.

Fresh Kills Park | Courtesy of James Corner Field Operations

Fresh Kills Park: An Extraordinary 21st Century Urban Landscape
One of the most fascinating panels – I took six pages of notes – was the discussion of Fresh Kills park by Tatiana Coulika and Ellen Neises of James Corner Field Operations titled “Work in Process.” (Click here to read about and listen to James Corner presenting his work as part of the Architectural League’s annual Current Work lecture series.) Change over time is one of the compelling lenses of landscape architecture and appropriate to Fresh Kills given that Field Operations started work on the site nearly a decade ago and that construction won’t be complete for another thirty years.

“The site that we meet is a process landscape,” says Neises. “The whole site is a series of experiments over time from 1948 [when the landfill opened]. They started with one set of technologies using clays, then plastic liners, retrofitted as environmental laws changed.  [It’s a] patchwork of experiments.” These industrial process experiments will continue into the future as well.  Only three of six landfill mounds are closed and capped. Methane captured from the site continues to power 2,500 homes for heating and cooking while waste transfer and compost facilities will remain open. Any landfill in New York State is considered active and monitored by regulators for thirty years after it closes.

Even where the processes have stopped, the site is significantly altered. “The steepness and closeness of six landfill mounds grading down to a network of creeks is something that you’d never have in nature,” says Neises. “The moisture regime is so structured and unnatural that each little microhydrology zone” has to be dealt with individually. Field Operations found a natural equivalent to the thin cap of soils on top of the mounds in the morainal soil conditions to which formed coastal New York. But even as they meticulously work with biologists to collect seeds from intact native plant communities across Staten Island, they eschew the tone of return to a static past restoration usually implies. Nor does the restoration framework have an answer for dealing with soil on top of a landfill that is hot from the anaerobic activity inside the cap.

Rendering of Fresh Kills Park | Courtesy of James Corner Field Operations

Instead, Field Operations is planning a number of procedures to address and integrate the industrial processes of the site into ecologically beneficial and visible transformations that are ongoing. They are using a machine called an imprinter “to create micro-topography to stimulate the hooves of ungulates to create grooves for seedlings.” To create soils (regulators wanted two feet of high-grade organic soil everywhere) and propagate plants, they are looking to industrial agriculture models. While the use of machines is practical for working a 3.4 square mile site, early large-scale land works are framed as choreography to attract visitors. This design intention and the duration of the project make real the often-hollow language of public as collaborators. Coulika describes the process as “an open-ended landscape where immediate consumption and fixed control becomes temporal, ephemeral. [Instead we] promote opportunism over time.” (This notion was undermined a bit by images of the colossal mining equipment remaining on site as static, sculptural elements after the work was finished. One clever but facile idea was to hang a huge sign from an excavator, turning it into a highway billboard.)

Another process that will unfold over the next thirty years and will particularly impact the low-lying site is climate change. When I asked about it, Neises said that they were particularly attuned to affects like sea level rise, but that environmental regulators were more concerned with establishing wetlands now than preparing plant communities for future conditions.

As sophisticated as Neises and Coulika were at discussing the environmental and theoretical constraints of the site, they were equally adept at recognizing the political ecology of the project as a park for New York City on the edge of state lines and in a secluded residential area. They forwent technically advanced materials like bio solids because “keeping the tenuous coalition together is more important than pioneering with smart techniques.” They significantly rearranged the original circulation patterns to favor surrounding Staten Island communities who “hated the idea of non-New Yorkers coming in and using their facilities.” The idea of creating a duel-state agency like the Port Authority? “Doesn’t make sense because New Jersey is broker than New York.”

Ultimately, party affiliation among officials, money allocated, and even the tenure of Field Operations as lead firm were more lessons about viewing a site as an evolving composite of interactions. In a piece published on Urban Omnibus last year called “In Praise of Slowness,” Andrew Blum writes that such “evolutionary slowness of the city” is hidden by the tendency to cover architecture as “event rather than as ongoing presence.” Reorienting our understanding of the built environment away from event and toward process is critical, Blum writes, because the first lens cannot effectively focus on the challenges, both in terms of climate change and in terms of geopolitics, facing 21st century cities.

While certainly Fresh Kills will have installation events and ribbon-cutting milestones, Field Operations visions it as a locus of continued intersection among different species, physical conditions, and cultural structures; a landscape process that the public not only witnesses and shapes, but through which the public learns about agency and the process itself. At risk of being heavy handed, those are good lessons to understand moving forward.

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Zach Youngerman is a designer who works broadly on integrating cities and ecology. He’s enjoying freelance writing. He grew up in Riverdale, in the Bronx. He spent four years in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the breaching of the Federal levees doing recovery planning and green stormwater management. His goal is to help citizens understand, enjoy, evaluate and manage urban structures and their associated natural environments.

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.

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.