This week New York City was fascinated by the unearthing of a portion of an 18th Century ship during excavation at the World Trade Center site. CityRoom provided an account of the discovery and of the urgency of its archaeological documentation, noting that the 30-foot segment of the wooden vessel began deteriorating as soon as it was unearthed, “no longer safe in its cocoon of ooze.” Archaeologists state that it was most likely discarded as part of an intentional landfill that lay ground for what, by 1800, had become Washington Street. That conclusion inspired BLDGBLOG to dig up a 2007 post about San Francisco’s ship-hull foundations, in which another history buried in New York City landfill is reference: the FDR Drive is built atop rubble from World War II Britain.

Relics of more recent histories can be found in cities worldwide, often in the shape of industrial infrastructures left abandoned or deteriorating. Few (so far) have been able to come up with a successful solution for adaptive reuse, but eyes are turning to New York for inspiration. The success of New York’s High Line has prompted calls and visits from public officials and planners from Chicago, Memphis, Rotterdam and Hong Kong, just to name a few, who hope to create similar public amenities back at home.

Record heat has been hitting New York City, but, compared to during heat waves in years past, power outages have been noticeably few. GOOD credits smart-grid technology and demand-response initiatives that alleviate consumption during peak usage to avoid brownouts and blackouts. Two-way digital connections between power providers and consumers’ thermostats or air conditioners can slightly reduce or cycle on/off air conditioning when a threat of an outage occurs. Meanwhile smart meters that allow residents to monitor their usage are becoming more common, a technology that is also being implemented by New York City to track individual water use.

Another way to reduce energy consumption is to turn off the A/C and go outside. New York Magazine has compiled a list of the top nineteen New York City playgrounds for your summer enjoyment. And on three Saturday mornings in August the Department of Transportation will again bring Summer Streets to Park Avenue — but this time with dumpster-style swimming pools!

On Wednesday, Mayor Bloomberg unveiled an electric car charging station in a parking lot near the Lincoln Tunnel. The mayor was joined by HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, who explained that the pilot program is about more than reducing our reliance on fossil fuels: “By creating jobs manufacturing and installing charging stations for electric vehicles in nine metropolitan regions around the country, we are partnering with industry to provide a low-cost transportation option for tens of thousands of families.”

A few weeks ago we featured Kirsten Hively’s visit to the Candela Structures at the World’s Fair Marina. If that piqued your interest, she just uncovered a research paper from 1966 dealing with the design and construction of those structures themselves.

Plans for a mixed-use development — set to include 600 housing units, 420,000 square feet of commercial space, a YMCA and a park – in what is currently a 1,100-car parking lot is stirring up ethnic tensions between Chinese and Korean business owners.  The businesses surrounding the lot are predominately Korean and rely on the lot for customer parking, while the majority of the Chinese businesses are blocks away, and many Korean owners fear that without nearby parking, their customers will simply turn elsewhere.

And finally, happy 75th birthday to the parking meter!

Photo by Flickr user misplacedparadox.


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

Yesterday was a beautiful day for wandering along Roosevelt Island’s waterfront. The Omnibus team and fifty of our friends spent the afternoon learning about the history of the masterplan, seeing one of the infamous pneumatic trash chutes in action, and getting a guided tour of the Fast Trash! exhibition (open for one more week!). Thanks are in order for Juliette Spertus, Judy Berdy, Jack McGrath, Adam Michaels, and Marianne Lau for taking us around.

Scheduled tour-guide Donald Richardson, one of the masterplanners of Roosevelt Island, was unable to join us at the last minute. Luckily, Judy Berdy of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society was part of the group and stepped in to fill his shoes. Berdy shared her extensive historical knowledge of the island, from its days as Blackwell’s Island, home to a penitentiary, smallpox hospital and asylum for the insane, to its transition to a hospital complex, renamed Welfare Island, and its subsequent redevelopment in the late 1960s/early ’70s into the Roosevelt Island we know today. The original three-phase masterplan, developed by architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee, anticipated housing and services for 20,000 residents and turned the island into a car-free zone, connected to Queens by the Roosevelt Island Lift Bridge and to Manhattan by tram and subway (though F train service did not come to the island until 1989). Ultimately only phase one was implemented, and car-free didn’t take hold (though the island is essentially a one-road town — Main Street, supplemented by a few service roads), but the island flourished and is now home to approximately 12,000 people. Development continues, with a newly modernized tramway opening later this year and construction underway for the FDR Four Freedoms Park at the island’s southern tip.

One element of the masterplan that did get implemented — and the topic that piqued the interest of many of our meet-up attendees — is the island’s pneumatic trash system.  Juliette Spertus, architect, curator of Fast Trash! and subject of last week’s Omnibus feature, explained more about the history and implementation of this unusual trash collection system. Together with Jack McGrath, the exhibition’s curatorial assistant, and Marianne Lau, an architect who lives on Roosevelt Island, Juliette walked us around the island, stopping to let us see the infrastructure in action. First stop: Riverwalk, courtesy of Charlie, a maintenance supervisor, who showed us one of the residential complex’s chutes. Next stop: the waste transfer station, where we saw the remarkably unassuming entry point where the island’s two central tubes converge to deposit the trash of thousands and peered in through windows at the facility.

While walking along the waterfront, we caught sight of another project of interest to Omnibus readers: the tidal hydropower turbine project implemented by Verdant Power and Keyspan to harness the energy of the tidal estuary that is the East River.

We wrapped up the afternoon at the exhibition space itself, watching a sample Lamson airtube shoot a capsule over our heads and across the room, looking at archival documentation of New York City’s now-defunct pneumatic mail delivery system, and learning about past experiments and current advances in pneumatic waste management in cities around the world. Juliette, Adam Michaels of Project Projects, who designed and co-organized the exhibition, and other members of the exhibition team discussed the research and inspiration for the show and pondered issues surrounding waste management and consumption on a broader scale. Our nation consumes at an excessive rate, producing a similarly excessive waste stream, one that is whisked away to far-off landfills, making it easy for us to ignore or deny the larger impact our habits create. The relative invisibility of our waste management system, it was argued yesterday, might detract from our perception of individual accountability. Would a centrally-located, highly-visible waste disposal system encourage better practices? How can we learn from the infrastructure investments being made in places like Stockholm, Barcelona or Macau? Both Juliette and Judy also rallied for individual and community involvement on a local level. The existing system is reaching its limits, and those who support its modernization, potential expansion to incorporate recycling, or even exploration of the technology’s plausibility beyond the island must make their voices heard. Sound advice from a Sunday afternoon walking tour.

As always, thanks to everyone who came out to join us. Don’t miss our next event. Sign up for our weekly email, become a fan of Urban Omnibus on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter to keep up with the latest.

Judy Berdy of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society

Charlie, maintenance supervisor, Riverwalk.

Architect and Roosevelt Island resident Marianne Lau.

Project Projects' Adam Michaels and Fast Trash! curator Juliette Spertus.

Photos by Varick Shute or Cassim Shepard.

Underneath a Manhattan-side artery of the Brooklyn Bridge is a pedestrian egress area linking streets Rose and Pearl. The area is of little consequence to most New Yorkers – it has neither a Wikipedia page nor a Google Maps marker – but for the small yet loyal skateboarding community it is one of the most used, photographed and mythologized parts of the city’s fabric. Since 2003, the area known to insiders as “Brooklyn Banks” has been legally open to skateboarders and they’ve been permitted to modify it to better suit their needs. The site’s DIY attitude has been further demonstrated by the work of non-profits such as Open Road NY, an organization that engages community volunteers in the development and maintenance of environmental projects that extend from urban gardening to skatepark design and construction.

While the future of Brooklyn Banks is tenuous – due to staging during bridge maintenance through 2014 – what continues to lure skaters to this location under the bridge is a brick embankment that mirrors the ramp’s grade in what seems to be an attempt to control the ratio of the pillars. This change in elevation, coupled with the shade provided by the ramps and the site’s seclusion, makes an impossible place for skaters to resist.

Sometimes, the spaces that inspire skaters the most are those that seem designed by default, or at least not intended to be used in this way. Other times, specific design interventions intended to discourage skaters’ “abuse” only make a skater’s experience more enjoyable because of the added difficulty. But no matter the architect or city planner’s original intention, if the designed form works for skaters, often it will be re-appropriated into skatepark design. This system – skaters appropriating parts of the built environment for their own uses to invent and test tricks and then skatepark designers appropriating what works into purpose-built skatepark design and construction – is essential to skateboarding. But the proliferation of skateparks being built today (estimated at three per day, nationwide) blurs the origin of the physical forms that define our sport.

The phenomenon is not exclusively urban. Rumor has it that the concept for the classic and best-known skatepark structure, the half-pipe, came into being out of the infrastructure used in the Central Arizona Project, a massive public-works project to divert water from the Colorado River to Phoenix. As the legend goes, teenagers from California began traveling to the Arizona desert in the mid-70s to skate in the project’s 24-foot diameter water pipes and the half-pipe as a structural typology was born.

The history of using residual infrastructures extends, of course, beyond the half-pipe. On the West Coast in particular, emptied swimming pools have served “pool skaters” who take advantage of the deep wells and steep slopes (this form of skating has been on the upswing lately as home foreclosures have led to more abandoned pools). “Street skating” (currently the more popular form) refers to the use of paved surfaces and objects like curbs, handrails and stairs found in an urban setting. Because of the popularity of these urban and infrastructural forms for skaters, modern skatepark architects incorporate many elements of these structures into their designs.

I first began work within the human scale by riding a skateboard through and on architecture: planters, benches, handrails, sculpture. The nature of that activity forced me into a dual relationship with physical space. I was in command of the built environment while the built environment was simultaneously in command of me. After six years as an apprentice to a furniture maker, it became clear to me that the thrill I got from this dual relationship with the built environment meant I should probably go about trying to design it.

So, skateboarding sent me to architecture. And now architecture has sent me back to skateboarding in a role I never planned. I’ve become a skateboard park designer. In doing so, I’ve had to force myself to consider skateboarding’s larger context as “urban phenomena” and while manipulating a part of its theater (the “skatepark”), I’ve found myself increasingly interested in its future possibilities in both architectural and urban terms.

With 11.8 million skateboarders (71% between the ages of 12 and 17 and only 41% representing that range in 2006, recorded 2008) creating a $4.8 billion dollar market, we see a significant rise in investment: as sporting goods manufacturers increase professional sponsorships, all kinds of investors are realizing the market value of the sport and its consumers. Yet citizens still have a difficult time convincing any city to build an urban skatepark. Even when that obstacle is overcome, its success would require a conscientious designer who would consult skaters within the community and non-profits such as Skatepark.org to learn about the type of park most appropriate to a particular community as well as to inform his or her understanding of the sport’s specific physicality. It would also help a lot if the designer were a skater.

Queens is aiming to do just that. Renowned skaters Chris Cole, Geoff Rowley and Steve Rodriguez and Joe Ciaglia, president of California Skateparks, helped develop the design of a 16,000-square-foot street course being constructed in Flushing Meadows/Corona Park, where we’ll see some of the city’s most notable skate terrains – including a replica of the original Brooklyn Banks 9-stair rail, the iconic Union Square rail/steps and the Police Plaza 7-stair rail – represented.

No matter how relatively young the sport’s history or how destructive it may appear, skateboarding is here to stay. It’s a valid form of youth recreation in a healthy and active city, and the sport deserves better representation within city funded parks programs and physical education programs.

Buck Jackson is an artist, designer and educator. He teaches furniture craft and digital design at 3rd Ward in Brooklyn and places most of his studio focus on designing skateboard parks and furniture. He lives in Long Island City with a partner and four cats.