CityBench | photo via streetsblog.org

BENCHES!
Weary pedestrians take note. This week, DOT commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan introduced CityBench, a PlanNYC project to install 1,000 new benches on the sidewalks of New York City. The benches will strategically be located adjacent to major transportation nodes that mostly attract seniors and mobility impaired or physically disabled individuals. They also will enable social encounters across local communities and will bring people together in a collective effort to improve their own neighborhoods, as local residents can help determine the location of the benches simply by calling 311. Meanwhile, as part of their “Building of the Day” series, the folks at the Archtober blog reminded us of the Rogers Marvel-designed flood mitigation streetscape installations, already in place in certain locations around the city. In response to subway shutdowns caused by intense storms back in 2007, the MTA and the DOT were charged with finding a way to prevent similar service interruptions in the future. The benches serve a utilitarian double function as they manage overflow depths and provide outdoor seating for pedestrians.

Photo by Flickr user SpecialKRB | via secondavenuesagas.com

7 TRAIN TO SECAUCUS
Mayor Bloomberg has generated some buzz this week with his apparent support of a proposal to extend the 7 line, under the Hudson, to Secaucus, New Jersey. The plan was first floated after New Jersey Governor Chris Christie killed plans for the ARC Tunnel last year. Details are still fuzzy, with the city’s plan only in draft form and not yet formally released to the public, and though city officials claim funding could be shared by the City, the State, NJTransit, the MTA and the Port Authority, some of those parties are already distancing themselves from the idea. The $10 billion plan is already drawing criticism and skepticism, even though nothing concrete has been announced. Check out Second Avenue Sagas, which has been keeping a close eye on the topic, for the latest.

PARKING REFORM
Streetsblog has been reporting this week on some potential parking reforms under consideration at the Department of City Planning that would tighten loopholes in the policies that determine parking maximums in Manhattan’s core. Parking maximums were implemented in response to a series of lawsuits brought against the city after the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1970. But the research studies come from DCP appear to be flawed, weakening the agency’s argument, and any proposed parking reforms will no doubt be challenged by opponents, such as the Real Estate Board of New York, which lobbies for the removal of parking limits already in effect. Meanwhile, in a seemingly contradictory move, the DCP has also expressed interest in removing the link between the existing parking maximums and the Clean Air Act, a connection that Noah Kazis describes as “the ultimate guarantee that the parking rules will remain in place and be upheld.” For more about parking reform and the potential future of the DCP plan, stay tuned to Streetsblog.

EVENTS AND TO DOs

The Civilians — Tonight at Joe’s Pub: Tonight, Friday, October 28, theater company The Civilians (whom Omnibus readers might remember from Brooklyn at Eye Level, a production about Atlantic Yards in 2009) will perform a one-night-only cabaret of monologues and songs on the topic of Occupy Wall Street. The Civilians team has been down at Zuccotti Park “talking to the 99% about the current demonstrations, our government, the economy and the future,” and tonight they’ll turn those conversations into a performative investigation of “the current exercise of democracy that will mark our nation’s history.” Buy tickets here or watch a livestream of the event here.

Urbanized at IFC: Last month we spoke with Gary Hustwit about his new film Urbanized on the eve of its US premiere at the closing night of Urban Design Week. For everyone who was unable to make that screening, the film is returning to New York for a week-long engagement at IFC Cinemas, until November 2nd. Don’t miss this chance to see this inspiring overview of some of the innovative thought and action addressing some of the most complex challenges facing our cities and our planet.

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Left: Allen Street under the Elevated. New York Public Library Digital Gallery (Image ID: 715898F) | Right: Compass Bench at Stanton Street, looking north.

Last week Hester Street Collaborative (HSC) — a nonprofit that works at the intersection of design/build, education and advocacy from its home base in the Lower East Side and Manhattan’s Chinatown — unveiled a temporary public art installation on the Allen Street Pedestrian Malls. These “mall-terations” build upon years of advocacy and visioning HSC has undertaken with the residents of the Allen and Pike Street corridor in an effort to turn this underperforming streetscape into open space that provides places for residents to play and explore the history of their neighborhood. Created in conjunction with the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Urban Art Program and a quartet of Venezuelan-bred, New York-based artists/designers (Carolina Cisneros, Marcelo Ertorteguy, Mateo Pinto and Sara Valente), the installation evokes some forgotten histories of a street also known as the “Avenue of the Immigrants,” in honor of its long history as a spine along which many communities of new Americans have established their homes for well over a century. For example, the line of white paint down the center of the mall from Houston to Delancey operates as a reminder of both the elevated rail line that used to cast its shadow on this street as well as the demolished block of tenements that used to take up what are now the eastern lanes of Allen Street.

Left: Some new users of one of the Mall-terations. Photo: Sara Valente | Right: Roadside injuries to pedestrians along Allen Street from 1998- 2009. Diagram: NYC DOT

The guiding principle of the piece is historically informed wayfinding, yet, mercifully, this is a far cry from a tourist-oriented heritage tour. Maps, timelines and directions to nearby streets painted into the malls mark the path between a delightful series of mobile benches that function as seating, play structure and overgrown compass at once. The compass “dial” beneath each bench’s compass “needle” is a painted circle that depicts a map of the area in one case, a pie chart of neighborhood demographics in another, and a timeline of neighborhood history in a third. The history is rich, and it resonates poignantly with contemporary reality: Allen Street’s rail line was part of the Second Avenue Elevated, whose underground replacement, now dubbed the T train, has been under discussion since before elevated service was discontinued in 1940 and is now projected to open in 2016. The block of tenements that used to occupy the eastern side of the street were razed in 1930 under a predecessor program to Urban Renewal intended to clean up the slums of the Lower East Side. The same program created Sara D. Roosevelt Park, which runs along Chrystie Street two blocks to the west.

But whereas the demolition of two blocks of tenements made way for the green space and ball courts of Sara D., Allen Street received a series of median malls, cemented directly over the foundations of the bulldozed buildings. The malls — there are 14 of them between Houston and South Streets – have been neglected for the past fifty years, beginning the moment the benches were ripped out to discourage use by habitual drug users and the homeless. That pattern of neglect may be coming to an end. The Parks Department, which maintains the malls, has funding to rehabilitate at least five of them, starting with those closest to the waterfront. DOT has already instituted some temporary improvements, including signaling changes and the provision of protected bike lanes aimed at improving road safety. But just because Allen Street is seeing some overdue capital improvements does not mean that active processes of engaging community members’ vision for the space should cease.

The Hester Street Collaborative has been involved in advocacy efforts around re-envisioning the malls since 2003 and was aware of desire within the community for some rehabilitation efforts further north as well. So they set out to transform the northernmost malls, between Houston and Delancey. Which brings us to the real power of ”mall-terations:” they attest to the way an art intervention can foster a sense of transformative possibility and community involvement in the design and programming of public space. That seems to be exactly why the DOT is interested to work with artists and community-based organizations to realize projects like this. The DOT’s Urban Art Program “is an initiative to invigorate the City’s streetscapes with engaging temporary art installations.” The pARTners track, under which the mall-terations received support, invites not-profit organizations to propose a temporary public art installation (for up to 11 months) on DOT priority sites. The “mall-terations” will be on view through the summer of 2011.

Photo: Sara Valente

Photo: Sara Valente

Wendy Feuer, DOT's Assistant Commissioner for Urban Design and Public Art, takes a turn on the compass bench at Stanton and Allen Streets during the October 21st unveiling of Mall-terations.

Cassim Shepard is the project director of Urban Omnibus.

Next Tuesday, the Architectural League will host a talk by Andrew Whalley, who heads up the New York Office of the international architecture firm Grimshaw Architects. Many of this firm’s current and recent work has Urban Omni-love written all over it, from the expansion of the Queens Museum of Art to the Fulton Street Transit Center to the massive overhaul of New York’s street furniture, including 3,300 bus shelters, 330 newsstands and 20 automatic public toilets. So come out next Tuesday to the Great Hall at Cooper Union and hear all about Grimshaw’s work. (And, remember, if you are a member of the Architectural League, admission is free. Please join today, and make note if you’re an Omnibus reader; we could really use your support).

In their respective Omnibus features, both Robin Chase and Rachel Abrams spoke of the incredible potential of instituting some sort of ride-sharing scheme for New York City cabs. Well, the Taxi and Limousine Commission is all set to move forward with three cab stands – at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue, 72nd Street and Third Avenue, and 72nd Street and Columbus. Our take? Sounds cool, but the fact that all routes are fixed to head down Park Avenue to 42nd Street makes it seem rather like a bus. Where would you like to see a cab stand where you can share a cut-rate cab with a stranger? Let us know in the comments.

Or maybe shared cab-stand recommendations could follow the trend of map-based, user-suggested, urban problem solving. Instead of using the internet to flag a pothole or report a code violation, you can use this site to make your voice heard on the best location for bike racks.

Newton Creek news just in: five oil companies are working on a deal to pay for the investigation phase of the Creek’s clean-up, which will end up being far more expensive and complicated than the one for the Gowanus Canal.

An entirely different sort of relationship between private money and public aspirations has sparked intense debate and protests at the proposed Kingsbridge Armory mall conversion, over the issue of requiring a living wage for retail workers. Going forward, we think we’ll be following this one pretty closely, so if there’s a blogger out there who wants to cover this project, get in touch.

On a lighter note, we couldn’t help but agree with Curbed that Columbia’s historic real estate brochure collection is 100% floorplan porn! The online database “consists of over 9,200 advertising brochures, floor plans, price lists, and related materials that document residential and commercial real estate development in the five boroughs of New York and outlying vicinities from the 1920s to the 1970s.” The digitization of all Brooklyn addresses in the collection is complete, Manhattan will be available in January 2010, and the rest are forthcoming, borough by borough. Hot.

Top image: Grimshaw-designed street furniture, courtesy of Cemusa. Bottom image: Address: 35 Prospect Park West | Borough: Brooklyn, New York City | Neighborhood: Park Slope – Gowanus | Architect: Roth, Emery | Owner / Agent: Realty Associates, Inc. 35 Park West Corp. Bruton, Francis X. | Format: Brochure | Call number: YR.0499.BR.002.004

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How do you reclaim the city’s streets for pedestrian use in a way that is flexible, inexpensive and contextually appropriate to the site in question? We at Balmori Associates have been been wrestling with these issues since being asked, by the Meatpacking District Initiative, to create a temporary solution for the public space of Gansevoort Plaza in the Meatpacking District (MPD), just steps away from our office.

The NYC Dept of Transportation continues to reimagine traffic throughout the city and employ a system of bike paths, street closings and new traffic alignments in order to both create public space and make traffic more efficient and safer. While this strategy is citywide, the ways in which space is reclaimed must rely on neighborhood-specific solutions that enhance the existing use of space and enable new uses. On 9th Avenue between Gansevoort and 13th Street, DOT’s preliminary system of bollards and planters [profiled here on Streetsblog -ed.] left us wondering how best to imagine the public spaces created by the new traffic alignments and how to design a language of street furniture and planting that helps define the space. Before beginning to develop our design principles, however, we first had to ask: what should a public place be?

We wanted to engage a wide audience in answering this question. 40 Dutch urban design students and their professors, landscape architect Erik de Jong and planner Arnold van der Valk, happened to be in town and were eager to discuss urban public space in the American context. We invited these young designers to join Balmori Associates staff, our client – represented by Annie Washburn of the Meatpacking District Initiative – and some colleagues at our office. We extended the conversation to a worldwide public through live video and Twitter. The discussion touched on topics including ecology, funding, furniture and materials, program, public/private, public amenities, scale, and circulation/traffic. In the Twitter forum, the discussion focused on sharable space, urban decorum, and contextual appropriateness (read my summary of the topics discussed in the Twitter forum here). These topics helped us to develop our design principles.

For this project, given the brief, the principles we developed are:

+ Re-use materials
design to avoid waste
create rough, industrial aesthetics

+ Keep it simple
low tech and inexpensive construction and maintenance

+ Anticipate changing requirements
plan for easy reconfiguration

The video below chronicles some of the ways we turned this community engagement exercise into a preliminary design scheme where one simple and inexpensive piece of furniture with interchangeable components – a pole and hollow pole base, canopy and rubber mats – can perform the functions of planter, shading, space partition, seating, lighting… even a birdhouse.

In other words, starting from the themes that emerged in the Twitter forum, we set about identifying the components that would help us to build an urban living room. Here’s how it works:

The flexibility of this solution allows for a variety of layout options, from grouped seating at right angles or in triangles, to weekend market activities or event space. But even when that is attempted and sometimes achieved, questions remain about stewardship and maintenance going forward. This scheme provides a starting point for a discussion. We need to move beyond reclamation of the street for pedestrian uses as an end in itself. The way in which it is reclaimed requires reconfigurable and inexpensive solutions that are both contextually appropriate and experimental.

Balmori Associates main design team:
Mark Thomann, Julia Siedle & Angela C. Soong

Forum hosted by Diana Balmori + Balmori Associates + Erik de Jong
With Guests: Architect Joel Sanders, Arnold Van del Valk and Annie Washburn
Forum Organization and Production: Monica Hernandez, Noemie Lafaurie-Debany & Sangmok Kim
Photography: Jeffrey Debany
Video: Nicoleta Coman

Diana Balmori, founding principal of Balmori Associates, brings a breadth of experience in architecture, urban design, landscape
architecture, ecology, architectural history and sustainability to her New York-based landscape urban design office. She is recognized internationally for her innovative work in the field of landscape and urban design.  She teaches at the Yale School of Architecture and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and has recently been appointed a Senior Fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library in Washington, D.C.  She serves on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C.

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

In the Twitter forum, our discussion focused on shared space, urban decorum and contextual appropriateness. Here’s a summary of the event and what we discussed followed by some commentary on the use of social media, like Twitter, to allow truly public discussion of public space.

SHARABLE SPACE
Our Dutch guests raised the prospect of sharing of a space between cars and pedestrians without any sidewalk edges, bollards, painted lines, and traffic cones. This concept goes so clearly against American assumptions and its traffic engineers’ advice that it seemed useful for clearing the ground for a fresh start. Tweeters questioned if a shared space could emerge from the dominant fabric of urban America. If implemented, at least in New York City, the feeling was that pedestrians would take over; another thought presented was that the real determinant would be the volume of cars or pedestrians. We also heard that shared space could work if pedestrians were given priority by slowing down the cars in that space. In different ways, participants stated that if the space was truly perceived as shared then the space was in fact sharable. We then asked if it this concept was particularly applicable in certain parts of the city. If so the Meatpacking District (MPD) might be particularly well suited to such treatment.

URBAN DECORUM
The appropriate treatment for public spaces in the city was another extensively discussed subject. It stemmed from Erik de Jong’s example of lounge chairs being recently added to the newly pedestrianized section of Broadway at Times Square. Lacking “urban decorum”, he said, and more appropriate to park or suburban use. Whether or not such a concept is fertile for the treatment of urban space, it immediately brings up if any kind of decorum is desired and whether it is to be brought about by the design, as that of the type of furniture for example. Sexual transgressive behavior in public is the obverse of “urban decorum,” and the point was raised if it too was to be limited by legislation and design. There is a long history of such behavior in cities, associated in different periods with different types of spaces such as parks, dancing venues, bars, promenades, red light districts. Here, the definition of what is considered transgressive was missing, but there were those who considered that this question will have different answers for different age groups. This in turn brought to the fore a larger social point, that this space exists in a larger social context that it cannot ignore. Or, at times, escape: one participant saw public spaces reproduced by the power structure to ensure the order of the existing social infrastructure.

APPROPRIATENESS
This led to the larger topic that took over the tweets about what is fitting to a particular city section. And whether there should be a fit. The example of the MPD is a case in point, a neighborhood with an industrial character, grey concrete, grey cobblestones, metal structures (e.g. meat hooks on conveyors under metal canopies). Should its future design carry this forward? Yet the MPD’s industrial grittiness also contains a new and handsome, if somewhat prettified linear park, the High Line, and is near to a sports-oriented linear park, the Hudson River Parkway. These parks have, in turn, have brought about new buildings by modern architects who are using new materials or using old materials differently. The MPD could be kept in the vestments of its market origins or could adopt modern elements of the present. Its context is certainly doing so. Many new European public spaces were mentioned. The discussion brought about several calls for simplicity, not overdesigning, nor making the design obvious and self‐conscious. And this was accompanied by calls for enormous diversity in the use of the space. The variety of programs mentioned provoked several responses. On the one hand, this went against simplicity. On the other hand the extensive list of temporary art exhibits, theatre or music performance spaces; sitting, shady spaces; places to eat without having to go to a restaurant, congregating spaces, plug‐in internet spaces – the contemporary wish list – makes a full pan ply of objects creep in. Nearly the death of public space can be the result of this. My own plea is one of focusing design on the shaping of the space, not on the objects for its programs.

CRITIQUE OF THE MEDIUM
What I found of greatest value in Twitter was that it allows non‐hierarchical comments; it did not become a debate of stars. At first glance, the tweets seem chaotic. They are written quickly, on the spur of the moment, in real time, and are only 140 characters long, so the language is cryptic. But it picks up on the inherent tendency of English for plain brevity.

Above all, Twitter diminishes the gulf between speaker and audience. It increases participation by making everyone a speaker. It also eliminates the gulf between professional and public, allowing crisscrossing paths for common concerns (though the crossing may still be cumbersome). There are technical difficulties too: Twitter does not include images (only links) yet no conversation on design or public space can succeed completely without them. Tweeters in the room and out in the world are in different situations; those in the room see the people and things, but are more likely to fall back into a passive role as audience. Those tweeting from afar may have time gaps, making them feel remote and disconnected. A tweeter in China complained that it was too early in his day. Remote tweeters may become impatient with the pace of the insiders who have more things to observe. A better interface for both, with visuals, is needed to allow everyone to see a drawing being made, in house or out. But it is a good start.

Forum hosted by Diana Balmori + Balmori Associates + Erik de Jong
With Guests: Architect Joel Sanders, Arnold Van del Valk and Annie Washburn
Forum Organization and Production: Monica Hernandez, Noemie Lafaurie-Debany & Sangmok Kim
Photography: Jeffrey Debany
Video: Nicoleta Coman

Diana Balmori, founding principal of Balmori Associates, brings a breadth of experience in architecture, urban design, landscape
architecture, ecology, architectural history and sustainability to her New York-based landscape urban design office. She is recognized internationally for her innovative work in the field of landscape and urban design.  She teaches at the Yale School of Architecture and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and has recently been appointed a Senior Fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library in Washington, D.C.  She serves on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C.

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.