Schooled by the Community: Connecting Flushing Meadows Corona Park

Earlier this year, a group of community advisors in Queens attended a community design school to formulate proposals to reconnect Flushing Meadows Corona Park to the surrounding communities. We hear from Design Trust Fellows Sam Holleran and José Serrano-McClain and Community Advisors Esther Sánchez and Jason Chin-Fatt on how it all went down.

Nowhere but the Bronx: A Trail Marks Cultural History

Casita Maria’s Elaine Delgado and Christine Licata describe the sites, markers, and programs of the South Bronx Culture Trail and pay homage to the area's exceptional cultural history.

Beauty Within Darkness: Khalik Allah Captures 125th and Lex

Photographer and filmmaker Khalik Allah has spent three years documenting one Harlem intersection and the people who inhabit that corner at night. His striking portraits confront issues of poverty, homelessness, addiction, and illness, while showing the beauty and humanity of those who are often forgotten, feared, or willfully avoided.

Melding Public and Private: The Partnerships Behind Your Neighborhood Plaza

Laura Hansen explains how the Neighborhood Plaza Partnership supports the local non-profits that operate the city’s newest plazas and asks how much we should, and can, rely on private support for maintaining our public realm.

Preoccupied with Place, Musician Gabriel Kahane Plays the City

Singer-songwriter and composer Gabriel Kahane describes the way architecture, literature, and historical research inform his compositions and why he's drawn to storytelling tied to place.

Where Chaos Is Normal: How Times Square Operates

Damian Santucci, Director of Production and Operations for the Times Square Alliance, walks us through the groundwork behind the spectacle of the Square and the logistics of coordinating hundreds of events, film shoots, and public art installations in a public space that sees 350,000 visitors a day.

Borderlands: Traveling the Brooklyn-Queens Divide

Joseph Heathcott traces New York City's only major internal land boundary and draws out the social and spatial conditions of this largely invisible urban seam.

A More Resilient Neighborhood, Just Beyond the Grid

Aaron Reiss dives into Beyond the Grid, an ambitious plan underway in the Two Bridges neighborhood of Lower Manhattan to create a more resilient, connected, and sustainable Lower East Side by fusing heating, power, and communications infrastructures.