Tomorrow, Saturday, July 24th, the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance is hosting the third annual City of Water Day Festival. Head to Governors Island, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Liberty State Park and the Atlantic Basin for free harbor boat tours, a children’s festival, live music, and a film expo. (If you find yourself on Governors Island, don’t forget to visit the League’s current exhibition, The City We Imagined/The City We Made, on view in Building 110 through August 15!)

Park development and renovation has been a recent topic of interest for cities worldwide. Next Tuesday, July 27th, there will be a Freshkills Park Talk on that very subject. Entitled “Innovative Parks for Resurgent Cities,” the lecture will feature Peter Harnik, Director of the Center for City Park Excellence at the Trust for Public Land. Reading from and talking about his book of the same name, he will discuss how these new parks are revitalizing previously unused public space and how city planners can add green space in built-out cities. In anticipation of the talk, check out Gotham Gazette for a piece on Harnik, his book, and the politics and planning behind open space in New York City.

New York City is becoming an easier and safer place for senior citizens to live. A number of small, “age-friendly” adjustments are already being implemented, such as increasing the duration of walk signs and providing school buses for trips to the grocery. But that’s just a start. The New York Times reports that the city is in the midst of establishing two “aging improvement districts,” an initiative presented to the City Council and Mayor Bloomberg’s office by the New York Academy of Medicine. The details are still in the works, but it sounds like the planning team should take a look at Interboro’s research into NORCs (Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities) in NYC.

The revival of many New York City neighborhoods was tied largely to the renovation and refurbishment of thousands of apartment buildings in the city. However, given the current economic climate, many of these buildings are falling back into disrepair, as tenants are unable to pay their rent, or owners their mortgages. The city once owned many of these properties as a result of tax delinquencies and was widely criticized for how it managed their care, and has no interest in taking them over again. New owners for such buildings are scarce right now, and residents of central Brooklyn, the South Bronx and Harlem in particular are feeling the impact as their neighborhoods, after a period of revitalization, are deteriorating once again.

The Gowanus Canal, recently named a Superfund site by the EPA, has been fitted with a oxygenation system, temporarily replacing a flushing tunnel that is under repair. Part of a $140 million, four-year plan by the EPA, the added oxygen, which determines the water’s ability to sustain life, and repaired flushing tunnel will allow the Gowanus to meet recreational regulations for boating and fishing by the project’s end.

The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about. Photo by Flickr user cyu06.

U.S. Northeast. Screen grab from NASA's "world tour" of cities at night.

This week brought news from both the Brooklyn waterfront and the NASA space shuttle, and talk of both construction and demolition.

An agreement has been reached between the Port Authority, New York City and State officials and WTC developer Larry Silverstein that will allow further development of the World Trade Center site after a year and a half of financial negotiations. The deal allows for construction of Towers 3 and 4 to move forward, but the fate of Tower 2 is still up in the air (the site will be built up to ground level until the economic climate improves). Nothing is final yet: Silverstein will need to rustle up private funding and tenants for Tower 3 in order to access the hundreds of millions of dollars of public financial assistance being offered. Beyond that, the agreement itself isn’t even finalized yet — the Port Authority board won’t review the proposal for final approval for another 4 months.

Flavorwire and Gothamist both have documentation of the demolition of old Yankee Stadium’s Gate 2. Fans are mourning its destruction, though neighborhood residents might be pleased to see activity on the site. The parks and public ballfields promised to local residents can’t be developed until the old stadium has been cleared away, a process that was supposed to be complete by the time the new stadium opened last year.

The Department of Transportation has announced that it will take over the community-initiated plan for a 14-mile Brooklyn waterfront greenway. $16 million in funds have been earmarked for the project, which will run from Greenpoint to Sunset Park. DOT has scheduled planning workshops throughout April, and according to the Daily News, DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan has said that she hopes to have “at least a bare-bones version of the route in place within three years or so.”

You know we love maps. Now NASA has allowed us to view our cities in a new way, visualizing their boundaries using the simplest of methods: lights at night. Thanks to astronaut Don Pettit and his experimentation with a barn-door tracker camera mount, NASA has been able to compile precise, detailed images of cities around the world illuminated after dark. Yes, the photographs are visually stunning, but they also tell us stories about our urban environments. As this article on NASA’s Earth Observatory explains, these images can be used to analyze the effect of urbanization on Earth’s ecosystems, to study lighting use (Japanese cities tend to glow a cool blue-green due to the use of light green mercury vapor lamps, though newer developments by Tokyo Bay are characterized by orange sodium vapor lamps), and to illustrate street grid and infrastructure patterns that suggest cultural influences of how similar areas have grown. “At night, city lights present the space observer spectacular evidence of our existence, our distribution, and our ability to change our environment.” And with new housing in cities outpacing that of suburbs (according to a new EPA report), imagine how this images will change over time. Read the article and watch the video. (via The Map Room)

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

Yesterday I went down underneath the Manhattan Bridge to pick up my rejected manuscript from a publisher. Feeling a little blue, I shoved my hands in my pockets, kicked at the dirt like a ragamuffin, and walked all the way back to Greenpoint, sticking as close to the East River as possible. It took two hours.

If you follow Navy Street to Flushing and head north to Kent Avenue, you’ll see the scotch tape and wires that hold the city together: emergency systems and impound lots, chewed up docks and steaming smoke stacks, auto auctions and lost property storage. Ambulances idle next to the river, waiting for the next heart attack. Rings of razor wire cordon off rows of Red Cross trucks and disaster relief vehicles and SWAT jeeps.

And those shattered mansions. Admiral’s Row: ten stately homes dating back to the Civil War, built for naval officers and their families. Look through the barbed wire and you’ll see abandoned tennis courts and a greenhouse and head-splitting bureaucracy. The Army Corps of Engineers still owns the property and, nearly forty years after they were first abandoned, the debate continues about whether to restore the homes or build a supermarket in their place.

I peer through the fence, feeling the sucker punch of wrecked architecture and systematized neglect. Somebody taps me on the shoulder. A guy with muddy shoes asks if I’m a reporter. He runs a hustle, shaking my hand and clapping me on the back. He says he can break me into one of those mansions. He talks some junk about the neighborhood that I can’t follow. He gets pushy. He says I owe him five bucks for his stories. I tell him he owes me ten for my sparkling personality. He gets upset. We argue. We part ways.

I push north. After snaking beneath the legs of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, the scene turns orthodox fast. Over 60,000 Satmar hasidim live here. A ramshackle van circles the block, broadcasting Yiddish from a public address system lashed to the roof. The architecture gets heavy and the bicyclists get hip with black glasses and ironic tattoos as the apartment towers give way to warehouses and bars.

To my left, the sun sinks against strange industrial snapshots backed by the familiar Manhattan skyline: shipping containers and parking lots, oil tankers and barges spread before the Chrysler and Empire tops.

Along these four miles, it’s surprising how much of it is fenced off with barbed wire.

Click image above to visit the Rising Currents website

The creative upwelling that you will soon be able to see at MoMA is one of those unique points of public focus that come along only every decade or so. With a name like “Rising Currents” it’s easy to ask if anything will actually float up to the top. Or will all the ideas take in water and lie in suspension until its just too late? Already the blogosphere and comment boards such as the one over at New York Magazine’s website are filling up with decriers: “Don’t people know that global warming has been debunked?” That our “methane is worse than our CO2?”

Nevertheless, just think for a moment if somehow we managed to bring back vibrant aquatic life to the shores of our inner harbor. If a resurgence of oysters and shellfish ate up all the bacteria our sewage treatment plants cannot. If New York Harbor waters were actually made to be swimmable again, would that be a bad thing? Let’s not waste the opportunity to ponder these questions. Grab your date book and pencil in “March 24th – October 11th.” It isn’t often the stars in our cultural, design, and media worlds all focus on the same topic, and for this reason alone we should all pay close attention to what’s presented and dare to ask, “So what do we do next?”

The exhibition prompted five New York architecture firms to each come up with architectural solutions for the problem of rising ocean waters around Upper New York Bay. The choice of sites ignores the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge – where rising waters are already being blamed for disappearing marshes – and the Rockaways – where barrier islands are populated heavily by senior citizens as well as low income residents. But we can forget that for a moment and delve into the deep pool of talent applied to this imminent challenge. See the map below for how the Upper Bay was divided up amongst the designers:

0. Architecture Research Office (ARO) and dlandstudio,  1. Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis Architects (LTL) 2. Matthew Baird Architects 3. nARCHITECTS 4. Scape Studio

For those who haven’t had the time to peruse the MoMA site or attend either of the open houses at PS1 over the last few months, here are a few things to look for when you go.

Matthew Baird Architects, Zone 2

In my mind the most compelling idea comes out of Matthew Baird Architects‘ look at the western part of New York Harbor and the Kill Van Kull.

This area isn’t even on most New Yorkers’ radar screen. Inside this industrial landscape – still home to tank farms, oil terminals, and even a Scottish “Links” style golf course (you look surprised?) – Baird’s firm proposes a new wave of industrial development. Combining the millions of cubic yards of silt and mud that are dredged up out of the harbor each year with the millions of tons of recycled glass collected throughout the region, a Seuss-esque harborside factory could roll out, in Jane Margolies’ words, “jumbo crystalline jacks” which could then be assembled on the bay floor and post a “free parking” sign for algae, shellfish and other aquatic life. At a time when everything in Washington and Albany alike seems to be retreating like a fast-moving glacier, it’s inspiring to see someone tackle two big problems – repurposing industrial waste and providing new habitat for marine life – with one potential solution.

Scape Studio, Zone 4

Across the Harbor, the Gowanus Bay and Buttermilk Channel team – led by Scape studio – starts with a much, much smaller building block: the oyster.

Oysters, that most-celebrated bivalve, are enjoying a resurgence throughout the region, from Soundview in the Bronx to Somerville Basin in Jamaica Bay. A whole network of oyster-lovers, cultivated by New York-New Jersey Baykeeper, is itself now spawning a new initiative that is so big even the US Army Corps of Engineers is getting on board. That Agency’s goal – to restore 500 acres of oyster reefs around the estuary – makes this ecological vision something that could actually happen if we just help nature get started and then move out of the way. Some might say that this team had an easier assignment, given the huge amount of study and consideration the Gowanus Canal has been given for more than a decade. Still, a close look at their proposal beneath the surface of the water reminds us that the health of the Canal is linked to the health of Gowanus Bay and to the adjacent Bay Ridge flats.

nARCHITECTS, Zone 3

Heading south to the Narrows, the team of nARCHITECTS had probably the most challenging study area.

Southwest Brooklyn’s waterfront, with its acres of landfill and piers and the sliver of Belt Parkway, doesn’t pair simply to the Clifton and Stapleton areas of Staten Island. The urban fabric and scale of uses are very different in each place, and the only unifying element here is the mouth of the Upper Bay at the Narrows. Given the assignment - “to re-envision the [New York Harbor] coastlines … with adaptive ’soft’ infrastructures that are sympathetic to the needs of a sound ecology” – surge barriers may seem an obvious solution to suggest. However, to bring this effort into its larger context we must not forget the need to create new barriers along the Arthur Kill and Long Island Sound. Just like Times Square, there are many, many ways to get to the Upper Bay. The team succeeds by creating a new vertical reality: a semi-submerged housing typology where blue space downstairs becomes the “front” yard and the roof garden becomes the “back” yard. One can almost imagine the concrete and steel lobbyists now gathering at the Hilton to figure out how to make this modular prototype of residential construction the new Celebration, FL – on FEMA’s dime.

Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis, Zone 1

Moving clockwise along the clock face of the harbor, LTL had a simple and yet very challenging project area in the form of Liberty State Park, Jersey City.

In this study area, the question arises: wipe the slate clean or protect and strengthen the existing uses? LTL’s treatment represents, in my mind, the maturation of public design competitions today. Wiping the slate clean is easy. Ask anyone who has ever done an historic renovation and they will agree. But nowadays one cannot really do that – you end up fending off attacks rather than interpreting your ideas. The “monumental inundation” the team prepares for seems still bound by its historic geometry. As an old railroad yard in the 19th and 20th centuries, the site bears almost all straight line edges and has but a few curves. But here they find in the old railroad terminal (built in 1889, it is the oldest ferry terminal still in the Harbor) an iconic template which they inflate to the whole scale of the Park and study area. The ferry racks – which face the red brick Richardson-Romanesque building – are like the jaws of beetles waiting to grab the vessels arriving from New York and especially from Ellis Island. Today they are largely intact, but wholly and almost strangely unprogrammed. LTL inflates these slips into giant piers, cramming onto each of them some combination of uses which already adorn the giant park. The resulting construct is on a scale that might speak to and even welcome vessels visiting from outer space. Big thinking indeed!

Architecture Research Office and dlandstudio, Zone 0

Ending this Palisade Bay runaround and returning to Lower Manhattan we return to the realities of our existence today: huge amounts of financial capital embedded in schist, just a Frisbee toss from the rising tide.

ARO and dlandstudio hark back to the colony’s founding: the canals that became the first local arteries of commerce. The wetlands, which Mannahata reminded us used to be here, have been mercilessly filled in as we haved marched to progress and prosperity. Bravely, this team seems to insert even a few new buildings in towards the edge, albeit with a program that is much more stratified and cognizant that ground floor space in Manhattan may actually not always command such a premium.

Visit the area today and you’ll see, right outside the Staten Island Ferry Terminal on Whitehall Street in Lower Manhattan, three steps at grade for you to walk up, before you go down a couple dozen to get to the subway. Many years ago, the public agencies that drive capital construction in NYC realized that the impact of large storms and surges was not simply a threat, but a reality. In low lying areas like Tribeca or parts of Chelsea they are building accordingly, raising grates and station entrances to keep the water from pouring in.

Now with Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront about to open at one of the city’s most celebrated cultural institutions, the question is not at all “whose scheme is the best?” Rather, when do we bring the Cost Estimators in? There are dozens of good ideas here. The challenge is, who will build some of them to see how they work?

Image by Cameron Davidson/John Blackford via www.siliconbeat.com | This image is not associated with the MoMA exhibition, but it bears keeping in mind: we ignore the premises of Rising Currents at our peril.

Carter Craft is a waterfront planner and co-founder of the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance. He is a licensed Captain working in the private sector and teaches the Waterfront Planning seminar at Pratt Institute. This summer he will co-teach the Sustainable New York City course at Fordham University, Lincoln Center Campus.

]]> http://urbanomnibus.net/2010/03/a-deep-pool-of-talent-what-will-rising-currents-yield/feed/ 0 40.760992 -73.977599 http://urbanomnibus.net/2010/02/the-omnibus-roundup-40/ http://urbanomnibus.net/2010/02/the-omnibus-roundup-40/#comments Fri, 26 Feb 2010 23:01:04 +0000 Urban Omnibus http://urbanomnibus.net/?p=13925

Food, urban farming and policy are on our minds this week, (by the way — Foodprint NYC is still on, snowstorm or no snowstorm), and it looks like the issues are peaking interest near and far: Architecture Lab reports on a…

Food, urban farming and policy are on our minds this week, (by the way — Foodprint NYC is still on, snowstorm or no snowstorm), and it looks like the issues are peaking interest near and far: Architecture Lab reports on a project by student Jack O’Reilly that looks at how urban farming and media networks can make Manchester, England more sustainable. If that’s what they’re teaching in architecture school, imagine what we’ll be implementing in five years! In an even more theoretical analysis of food consumption, the Why Factory, a think tank run by MVRDV and Delft University of Technology, produced an animation visualizing the space required if Manhattan were to produce all of its own food. The resulting towers of food production, though obviously unrealistic to implement, are worth a look just for a sense of the scale of our massive caloric consumption.

Clearly, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer has had food systems on mind of late (click here to download a pdf of FoodNYC), and his office has also decided to let Manhattan residents and workers voice their opinions about where budget priorities should lie. An online survey is now up while the next budget is being developed. Fill it out and be heard!

This weekend, if you won’t be talking food systems at Studio-X, instead check out the Bronx Coalition for Parks and Green Spaces’ annual Bronx Parks Speakup tomorrow, Feburary 27th at Lehman College from 11 to 5. The event is free and refreshments will be served. This year’s theme is Open Spaces, Environment and Health.

CUNY’s Institute for Sustainable Cities is in the midst of a four-part lecture series called Turning the Tide: New York’s Waterfront in Transition.  The first lecture was last Wednesday, but there are still three more to go.  The next one will be held on Wednesday, March 17th at 5:30 PM at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College. Be sure to register, or find out more information here. (via Freshkills Park Blog)

In federal news, Urbanophile looks at the recipients of the DOT’s new TIGER grants, and the big winner for New York is Moynihan Station, with $83 million awarded to kick-start phase one of construction (the project is currently budgeted at approximately $267 million). TIGER (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery) is a new federal government program with $1.5 billion in funding for a transportation project of any kind. For more information on grant winners, see the DOT’s pdf report. And head over to Fast Company to see Rob Vargas’ infographic to make sense of what $1.5 billion gets us. (via the Infrastructurist)

While you are waiting for all this snow to melt, let your mind wander and imagine the potential for the MIT Senseable City Lab’s new Flyfire project. The idea is that remote-controlled nano-helicopters carrying LED lights would swarm in unison to form various patterns and shapes, thus creating 3D displays that move and transform through space. BLDGBLOG is excited about it – imagining web browsing, movie watching, “avant-garde rural entertainment” and more. How will you use your first Flyfire fleet?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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