Built Environment Blog

2010 election cartograms

2010-11-13T04:14:00.003-05:00

Also, election cartograms are fascinating.

This electoral cartogram was made by Michael Gastner. Here's my labeled version of the 2008 election cartogram made by Mark Newman.

not a chicago tatoo

2010-11-13T04:02:00.000-05:00

Just came across a mock-up of a design for a Chicago tatoo that a friend requested a few years ago. He didn't end up getting the tatoo, but I still like the sketch.

link it up

2010-10-28T02:07:00.004-04:00

I've finally got around to updating the other webpages I link to on the Built Environment Blog and I thought I'd highlight a few of the new additions.


Guano Loading Infrastructure, Peru. From Oliver Whiteside via F.A.D.

One of my very favorite reads these days is Free Association Design, a tangent-rich blog based in Portland. I can't remember how I came across F.A.D. at first, but I became a regular reader after reading a post on Reclaiming the Florida Everglades. I was impressed by its surefooted explanations of the complex biological, economic and political forces at work in that unique environment. (I like the posts on goats and bird poop, too.)

Although I've seriously reduced the number of NYC and Brooklyn blogs I read, I've added Urban Omnibus to the list of Empire State blogs I follow. This week I'm particularly delighted to link to them as they feature Underline, a project by a good friend and UC Berkeley classmate. While Underline is a site-specific intervention suspended in the negative space between the Culver Viaduct and the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, the project makes an important point about how we think about leveraging the structures we already have in cities -- an oft overlooked element of sustainable urban design.


Underline Section. By John McGill, via Urban Omnibus

I would be very impressed if any of my readers noticed that the link to the defunct Polis blog, once written by Slackonomics author and Forum for Urban Design executive director Lisa Chamberlain, was replaced with the Polis blog, an international group blog distantly related to the now defunct Where blog, where I was briefly a contributor a couple years ago.

Moving to San Francisco has brought other new awesome stuff to my attention. Ever since they gave me a free membership after I caught them poaching one of my flickr photos without credit for their magazine Urbanist, I've been a huge fan of SPUR. Besides fighting the good fight for San Francisco, the events they put on at their downtown headquarters are lots of fun. (If you haven't seen it yet, you've got two more days to see the DIY Urbanism exhibition.)

Southern Pacific Diesel Shop. Demolished October 2010. Photo by Todd Lappin.

I also have two new favorite San Francisco blogs. I've already posted to a map from Burrito Justice, so it's only fair to link to Telstar Logistics now. (Burrito Justice's "Know Your Trees" post is my go-to guide for San Francisco tree identification.) I must admit I'm totally incapable of categorizing Telstar Logistics into any specific kind of blog -- but it's great. Sadly, sometimes I learn about things from Telstar only when it's too late -- despite driving past it dozens of times, I never noticed the Southern Pacific Diesel Shop. (Another great San Francisco discovery has been the Flickr photostream of Eric Ficsher. His series of US city race and ethnicity maps are powerful.)

I've decided to keep up some of the other links I had on the old blog even though I haven't done the best job keeping up with them. In the process of pruning down the list, for example, I came back across Fogonazos, a Spanish blog I was never really able to fully read due to my mediocre language skills. Fortunately, videos of houses getting blown over in enormous wind tunnels are awesome in any language.

hardly strictly diy wayfinding

2010-10-06T01:16:00.002-04:00

Another foggy weekend, another great festival in the bay. This past weekend I went to my third Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, a remarkable free annual music festival in Golden Gate Park. Investment banker and banjoist Warren Hellman foots the bill every year, calling the event "The closest I'll ever get to heaven."


Banjo Stage. Photo from Steve Rhodes

Besides the consistently outstanding acts and the generally groovy vibe, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass offers a great opportunity to observe how large groups of people can organize themselves in interesting ways. In past years, for example, I've marveled at how people use flags, balloons, and other props to make landmarks within the crowd. It's sort of a do-it-yourself wayfinding exercise pursued without official instructions or sanction.


At 2009's HSB, I was only able to find my friends by virtue of their proximity to an osprey kite.

This year, planning ahead, I brought several lengths of dowels, a roll of duct tape, and a blue handkerchief to Rooster stage, where Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings were due to play at the end of the day. Fashioning a crude flag pole from the dowels and duct-taping it to a steel barricade, I raised my beacon to the crowd and text messaged my friends. By the time Sharon was shimmying across the stage, there were dozens of us dancing under the blue bandana. (Which my phone's auto-spell misleadingly corrected to "blue banana.")

Phone calls were impossible due to the noise and dropped calls, despite cell providers' extra coverage.

While cell phone users now have the ability to georeference themselves and send the location to their friends via FourSquare, Twitter, or Facebook Places, the combination of a relatively old digital technology, text messaging, and an even old communication method, flags, proved to be a remarkably effective means of marking a specific place among an otherwise anonymous crowd.

Photo from James Mourgos

Reflecting on the flag-text combination, I realized that the effectiveness of the endeavor came from the coordination of a physical action in the landscape with a message sent on social media. It was a tiny example "emergent urbanism," a term I have adopted loosely from Dan Hill to describe coordinated action in cities coordinated through digital networks. Regardless of what sort of urbanism may or may not have emerged at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, it was a fabulous show enhanced by great company. I can promise I'll be back next year to continue my research.

Doppelstock-Containertragwagen

2010-09-23T02:26:00.002-04:00

It's been a very Teutonic week for me. It all started when I received a copy of the August issue of Garten+Landschaft, a German landscape architecture journal. Usually I prefer to read about the newest developments in landscape in a language I can understand, but this was different: my Berkeley Master's thesis, Network-Landscape: The Internet and the Urban Site, was featured in the "Campus" section.


The August Issue also features what I can only imagine is a wonderful piece by one of my thesis advisers, Professor Judith Stilgenbauer.

Network-Landscape describes a framework for understanding the relationship between physical places and flows of information over digital networks. In the thesis I describe a typological framework of Network-Landscape interactions that describe how online content can be projected into space or environmental conditions can be sampled and uploaded to the Internet. The graphic featured in Garten+Landschaft illustrates the concept of augmented reality, which is one way that media about a specific place can be projected into mobile network infrastructure. I'm hoping to delve a little more deeply into Network-Landscape in coming posts -- stayed tuned for information about crowdsourcing spatial data, commons-based peer-production, and emergent urbanism.

The arrival of Oktoberfest also delivered another German flavor to my week: beer. I was fortunate to be a last minute invitee to the Tourist Club in Marin, a cabin and beer garden tucked into the hills near Muir Woods.

The Tourist Club

An intense fog that was initially a bummer ended up being one of the best things about the day. Nearly thick enough to swim through, the mist lent the afternoon a supernatural air -- it seemed that we had found a beer garden in the clouds.

To get to the German beer garden, we had to hike through a forest of Australian eucalyptus.

The final German element of my week was a discovery I made as I was checking the traffic on my flickr photostream. I was getting hits from German Wikipedia -- something I had never noticed before. Upon further investigation, I learned that a photo of a freight train I took in Berkeley several years ago had been uploaded.

A double-stack container-train. Or, as they say in Germany, a Doppelstock-Containertragwagen.

While certainly not my most prominent image on Wikipedia, (someone put my photo of the Flatiron's interior on the building's page,) I was delighted to find it. What a fitting wrap up to my German week! Prost!

Re-start

2010-09-11T14:10:00.003-04:00

Heading to Dolores park last week, I noticed parallel marks in the pavement that seemed to be the shadows of an old railroad. As a relatively new resident in the Mission, I commented to my new roommate: "There must have been a streetcar line here."

Dolores Street between 17th and 18th

"No way." My roommate responded. I pondered San Francisco's urban development, the transformation of the city with the arrival of the automobile, and the history buried under the pavement. I bet her a six-pack there used to be a streetcar on Dolores Street and decided to restart the Built Environment Blog.

This map shows that there was a streetcar on Dolores in 1943 -- but not between 17th and 18th.
Map from Central Pacific RR Museum via Burrito Justice, one of my favorite San Francisco blogs.
Bet undecided.

Some things will be the same in this newest phase of the Built Environment Blog. I've still got my independent perspective, and I still take tons of pictures. But after three years of landscape architecture school I'm more into soil and plants than I used to be. I've also gotten to know some fascinating designers and planners, and I've moved to the Mission in San Francisco. I'm still way into old buildings and urban puzzles, though, don't worry.

There may be a post about shrimp farming, at some point.
You can view most photos full-size on my flickr just by clicking them.

I still save an eclectic set of bookmarks at my del.icio.us page and I've also joined Twitter. I tend to retweet more than I post original content, but I find the whole twitter phenomenon fascinating.

Please feel free to post critiques and questions in the comments, or e-mail me through the link at the top right of the sidebar. This should be fun!

where am I

2008-11-02T14:00:00.000-05:00

After a roughly year-long break, I've decided to start blogging again. Instead of keeping things going full time here at the Built Environment Blog, though, I'll be contributing several posts a month to Where, which has evolved into an interdisciplinary forum on urbanism with 11 international writers. Needless to say, I'm thrilled to be involved -- it promises to be an interesting endeavor. (I also got to design the banner!)

not so superblock

2007-10-19T18:36:00.001-04:00

In an interview with the New York Observer several months ago, the Atlantic Yards' landscape architect Laurie Olin dismisses the common stigma against superblocks as clichéd "1960s language." His own arguments for them, however, echo the naïve idealism of planners from that very era. "If I put a street through here," he states, "[then] I have less space for people and I have more cars… When people say 'superblock'— what's wrong with what this is? Because I don't see how adding one car in here is going to make it a better space. I think space on streets is actually useless space."

The current plan for Atlantic Yards involves the demapping of several streets and the creation of a residential superblock. Site Plan via Atlantic Yards Report.

The superblock, put very simply, is a development form larger than a traditional city block. According to civic-minded urban theorists in the mid-20th century, residents of superblocks would be liberated from cars in their everyday life, living freely as denizens of self-sufficient pedestrian communities. The scale of these superblocks, wrote Bauhaus urban planner Ludwig Hilberseimer, would allow them to "preserve an organic community life" in the face of automobile-based cities of the future. (The Nature of Cities, 1955.)

Concept for Heerstrasse and University of Berlin, 1937. Ludwig Hilberseimer. Scanned from The American City: What Works, What Doesn't by Alexander Garvin. Hilberseimer worked with Mies van der Rohe on the United States' most successful superblock project: Lafayette Park in Detroit.

In practice, completed superblock projects rarely approach Hilberseimer's utopian vision: for the most part, superblock projects are boring and institutional. At worst, the designs encourage crime and neglect.

The NYU Silver Towers project north of Houston between Mercer and LaGuardia demonstrates the detrimental effect that the demapping of streets to create superblocks can have on the public realm. Despite an elegant design by I.M. Pei and a plaza with public art by Picasso, the modest superblock is a dead zone in the Village's otherwise vibrant public realm. Compared to neighboring SoHo – which has streets filled with a jumble of people and uses – the Silver Towers are a public realm failure.

NYU’s Silver Towers, a superblock created by the demapping of Wooster and Greene Streets, lacks the vitality of the smaller blocks that surround it. Photo by Hubert Steed.

With the rise of New Urbanism and the canonization of Jane Jacobs, superblocks became a sort of urban design taboo – the quintessential example of high-minded architectural theory failing in real world application. Thus of the myriad flaws in the plan for Ratner's Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn, perhaps the most surprising, from a design perspective, is its return to the superblock form. In the words of the Manhattan Institute's Julia Vitullo-Martin, "Do we not all agree with Jane Jacobs that the urbane mixtures of buildings of varying age, condition—inevitably swept away by the superblock—are a necessary condition of thriving urban life?"

Apparently not.

One dissenter, it seems, is Olin. In the past, Olin has demonstrated an incredible ability to create beautiful public space enclaves in crowded urban environments. At the Getty Center in L.A., he worked with Richard Meier to create a hilltop oasis for art; at Bryant Park, he collaborated with William Whyte to carve a cozy community park from the mind-boggling intensity of Midtown Manhattan.

Bryant Park. Photo from Forgotten NY.

Unfortunately, Olin's talents do not always translate well into projects meant to integrate into the fabric of the city, rather than stand out from it. At Canary Wharf in London – like Atlantic Yards, a mixed-use high-rise development on a post-industrial site – the public spaces planned by Olin are impersonal and lack activity. Despite crowds of people working in the area, the wharf's public spaces are often nearly deserted. (It's said that the Radiohead's Fake Plastic Trees is about Canary Wharf, even though the trees are real. For more criticism, see the Project for Public Space’s Hall of Shame.)

Canary Wharf Tube Station, London, U.K. Image from yuki*.

In the chapter of The Death and Life of Great American Cities entitled "The Need for Small Blocks," Jacobs bemoans the "myth that plentiful streets are 'wasteful.'" She argues that it is, in fact, large blocks that lead to wasted space by constricting "economic use [to] only where [people's] long, separated paths meet and come together in one stream." The consolidation of economic activity to confined geographic areas leads to a "depressing predominance of commercial standardization... [and] the Great Blight of Dullness." Ultimately, it is the presence of streets where things can "start up and grow" that lead to economic vitality and vibrant public space.

Potential pedestrian paths on large blocks (left) vs. potential pedestrian paths on short blocks (right.) From The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs.

In his defense of the Atlantic Yards superblock, Olin ignores the lessons of Jacobs while also revealing a fundamental misunderstanding of Brooklyn's streets. In vibrant neighborhoods like those surrounding Atlantic Yards, streets are more than a means of reaching a destination: they are the destinations themselves. Besides providing a place for cars to drive, Brooklyn's streets host a diversity of restaurants, stores, and cultural institutions – all of which serve customers arriving via public transportation or on foot. Moreover, the borough often closes its avenues completely to traffic to host festivals and fairs, events that have helped to give Brooklyn the value that Ratner, the Atlantic Yards' developer, is so eager to capitalize on. By asserting that "space on streets is actually useless space," Olin demonstrates a profound ignorance regarding Brooklyn's urban form.

The Atlantic Antic, Brooklyn, NY. (This festival takes place on Atlantic Avenue -- the northern limit of the of the Atlantic Yards development.) Photo from Apollonia666.

Perhaps what is most surprising about the Atlantic Yards' superblock plans isn't the designers' defense of the concept, but the support it has from its developer. Small blocks, Jacobs makes it clear, are better for business. If he knew better, Ratner would be pushing for more streets – not fewer. Indeed, the superblock is neither a pedestrian-friendly design statement nor a wise investment – it's just a mistake.

prison payola

2007-10-08T04:28:00.000-04:00

The Next American City just released an issue focusing on crime for which I wrote an article on prison privatization. It was a fascinating topic to research, but also incredibly frustrating: there are lots of examples of what doesn't work well and very few of what does.

Photo from NY Times

If you haven't seen The Next American City, check it out -- it's an interesting organization and the magazine has a thoughtful, interdisciplinary approach to urbanism.

If you're interested learning more about prison privatization, there's lots out there. Crime Pays is an award-winning radio documentary about private prisons. The New York Times featured a great article on the topic earlier this year. Finally, for a rigorous analysis of the ethics of private prisons, see State Punishment and Private Prisons, a piece that appeared in the Duke Law Journal in 2005.

hiatus

2007-08-29T04:32:00.000-04:00

I had been wondering if grad school would leave me enough time to keep writing the Built Environment Blog, and after one day in the studio I have my answer: no.

Also, an earthquake hit yesterday -- my first! It was apparently a 3.0, but I didn't really feel it, I just heard a big rumble.

Even though I won't be writing long posts like fireproof or Grand Army Plaza, Built Environment Blog won't be totally static. The links from del.icio.us and photos from flickr will keep updating, and I'll try to share interesting discoveries about the Bay Area as I make them.

Berkeley Rose Garden

If you're looking for something interesting to read online, there's still no better place than BldgBlog. Things Magazine is another source for awesome stuff, and Where keeps getting better.

cross country

2007-08-13T03:29:00.001-04:00

I recently completed a two-month trip across the country. There were two legs of the journey and I took lots of photos on both of them. The first part, from Brooklyn to Chicago by car, took place at the start of the summer. The second part, from Chicago to the Bay Area by plane, took place at the end. Each leg provided a distinct perspective on the American landscape and I had a window seat for both.

Freight train, Ohio.

From the car, I saw a thin slice of the country, but from quite close. In addition to hearing the horns of freight trains, I could also smell the chicken coops. (It makes you wonder what they do in there...)

From the airplane, I saw a broad swath of the country from a great distance. On the one hand, I could really appreciate the geography of the American West. (I was particularly drawn to its dams and reservoirs.) On the other hand, I didn't get to go to any of the places I saw.

Farmland, California.

On both segments of the trip I saw farms. There are, I learned, lots of different kinds of farms.

Farmland, Pennsylvania.

Some farms are center pivot irrigated -- watered by sprinklers that rotate around a central point. From the ground, these sprinklers look a bit a like a suspension bridge, fork-lift, and garden hose all rolled into one device.

Center pivot irrigation sprinkler, Ohio.

The true beauty of center pivot irrigation, however, is only visible from above. By virtue of their radial design, farms using the system have crops arrayed into circles. Sometimes the countryside looks like it's covered in pie-charts.

Center pivot irrigated farms, Southwestern US. (Central pivot irrigation has been used to grow crops in the Sahara!)

Another kind of 'farm' I saw didn't grow anything at all: it produced power.

Wind farm, Pennsylvania.

The first wind farm I saw was in western Pennsylvania. The towering three-bladed turbines were a striking juxtaposition to the traditional dairy farms on the ground. Nonetheless, windmills seemed like a good fit in Amish Country.

On the approach to Oakland Airport, I got another look at a wind farm when my plane flew over Altamont Pass. Constructed in response to the 1970s energy crisis, the Altamont Pass Wind Farm was once the largest in the world. From above, it's almost impossible to see the propeller blades move; instead of looking like power plants, the turbine arrays look like battalions of toy soldiers. (Fighting for the environment, of course.)

Altamont Pass Wind Farm, California.

Despite enjoying the journey west -- as well as the two month layover in Chicago -- I'm glad it's over. It's nice to be finally be here in California.

sail to the crib

2007-07-07T20:43:00.001-04:00

Last Monday, I decided to have my class sail out to the the Wilson Avenue crib. Sailing to the crib is good practice navigating in large waves -- it also makes the kids more independent and gets them comfortable being further from shore. Getting somewhere on a sailboat is fun, too, instead of just going around buoys.

A boat practicing trapezing on the way to the crib.

Accompanying my sailors in a safety boat, the trip also afforded me a close look at a work of historic engineering. Built in early 1900s, the Wilson Avenue crib is part of the massive hydrological infrastructure that gives Chicago its drinking water. (The most famous part of the system is the Sanitary and Shipping Canal, which reversed the flow of the Chicago River in 1900.)

The Chicago Sanitation District, 1925. (Now known as the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago.)

When operation began in 1866, the first crib pulled clean water through pipes from two miles offshore to a water tower at the corner of Michigan and Chicago Avenues. Meant to equalize water pressure, the water tower gained great fame as one of the few structures to survive the Great Chicago Fire in 1871.

To this day, the land between the water tower (above) and the two-mile crib (which no longer exists) is conspicuously unbuilt -- only the Museum of the Contemporary Art has been built above the old pipes' path.

Though the original crib is long gone, others, like the Wilson Avenue crib, remain in operation today. These cribs collect lake water and send it ashore to be purified. One of Chicago's chemical purification plants, the Jardine Water Purification Plant, is the largest in the world.

The Wilson Avenue crib, from just beyond the restricted area created after 9/11.

As a place, the crib feels very surreal. In some ways, it's familiar: I see the crib almost every day. At the same time, though, viewing it from the far side -- and from so close -- make being there totally foreign.

Seeing Chicago's skyline from the crib always makes me feel a bit like an astronaut seeing earth from the moon.

Some of my students call the crib "Azkaban," the wizards' prison from Harry Potter. Although the residents weren't prisoners, the cribs were once inhabited by tenders. Today, however, the systems are automated: no one has lived on the structures for decades.

Chicago from the Wilson Avenue crib.

As a waypoint, a historic building, and a place, the crib is fascinating. I always love to sail to the crib.

(Full photoset of the trip here.)

got the t-shirt

2007-06-17T23:44:00.001-04:00

Before starting landscape architecture school in the fall, I thought it would be a nice change of pace to coach sailing in Chicago this summer.

Belmont Harbor.

Even though the whole plan was to avoid design work for a few months, I couldn't help but get excited when my boss offered $100 to the instructor that designed the best sailing school t-shirt.

Living in Chicago for the first time in 7 years, I've found that the Hancock Center has supplanted the Sears Tower as the city's favorite skyscraper. I decided to incorporate the tapered tower into my t-shirt design.

The Hancock Tower.

Pondering the iconic building's distinctive cross-bracing, I couldn't help but think of one of my favorite sights in sailing: two boats crossing tacks upwind. After some online searching, I was able to find a great piece of graphic design from the 1987 America's Cup.

Duel, by Keith Reynolds. (From AllPosters)

Initially, I thought that the graphic would be a bit sparse with only one tower, so I decided to incorporate two other iconic Chicago buildings.

The Sears Tower. (From LensImpressions)

The Smurfit-Stone Building. (From ChicagoSage)

When I finished the design, however, I thought it was a bit busy.

I took out the Sears Tower and the Smurfit-Stone, but I'm not sure it's better. Which one do you like?

We'll see what the other instructors come up with...

under construction

2007-06-06T02:14:00.000-04:00

Last year I moved into a new apartment in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. I loved the place, but there was one problem: a new building was under construction next door. When I complained about the noise, however, my dad made a good point: 'At least you can learn how they build apartment buildings.'

June 1, 2006.

When I visited the apartment for the first time, contractors were clearing the remains of old garages that had been demolished on the site.

August 15, 2006.

Within a few weeks, the builders were digging foundations for the new building.

September 13, 2006.

For about a month, a pumping truck poured concrete into wooden frames to build the foundation.

October 14, 2006.

Once the foundation was finished, prefabricated concrete floor plates were lifted on top. When the floor plates were anchored into place, workers built cinder block walls to support the next level.

October 26, 2006.

As each set of walls were completed, a new set of floor plates were lifted by a crane into place.

November 18, 2006.

And then another level of cinder block walls was added...

December 6, 2006.

The large crane that lifted the floor plates into place is visible in this photo. On days like this when the floors were being installed, the street was filled with 18-wheelers carrying prefabricated concrete plates.

February 10, 2007.

During a powerful windstorm in February, several strips of plastic blew off the roof and over the side of the building. They made a loud whipping sound that kept me up at night -- it was quite annoying. It was the only time that it seemed like anything went awry in the process, though. Overall, I was very impressed with the efficiency of the construction.

February 26, 2007.

By the time winter started flexing its muscle, most of the structural elements were finished. As snow fell on the site, the construction workers were installing elements of the building's interior.

March 3, 2007.

On the night of March 3rd, the construction site was lit by a partial lunar eclipse. It was a surreal sight.

April 10, 2007.

April 19, 2007.

By mid-April, work had begun on the cosmetic elements of the building's exterior. Exposed cinder block walls were covered in brick and the window panes were put in place.

May 21, 2007.

May 31, 2007.

365 days after I first photographed the construction site, the lease on my apartment expired. After I finished moving out, I made sure to return one last time to take a final picture. Soon the building will be finished, but I won't get to see it. Nonetheless, my dad was right: now I know how they build apartment buildings.

Full construction photoset here.

ride to the sea

2007-05-25T18:51:00.000-04:00

This week I fulfilled a long-time wish and rode my bike down Ocean Parkway to Coney Island.

This tree-lined path starts just south of Prospect Park and continues about 5 miles until reaching the Atlantic Ocean. It's a lovely ride, if a bit bumpy.

Culturally, the route was dominated by orthodox Jewish communities: it seemed that there was a Hebrew school or Synagogue on every block. The most unique of these buildings, from an architectural perspective, was the Mirrer Yeshiva, which seemed to have been redesigned mid-construction. At first glance, I thought that the school was adding a rooftop addition to take advantage of unused FAR, but closer examination revealed that the steel had been exposed for some time. I've never seen a building quite like it.

There are basketball courts on the roof of the brick structure below the two steel floors. Oy, what a design!

Ocean Parkway also passes several unique features of Brooklyn's built environment. In between Avenue H and Avenue I, for instance, the boulevard passes over the Bay Ridge Line, an underutilized freight line that once linked the piers of Sunset Park to a rail hub in western Brooklyn at Broadway Junction.

The Bay Ridge Freight Line.

Several years ago at an old job, I examined the feasibility of re-using the Bay Ridge Line as a cross-Brooklyn light rail route. Adapting the right-of-way for light rail would be a relatively inexpensive way to link areas without transit service to existing subways.

Combined with other efforts, such transit improvements could spur substantial economic development in the area. Ultimately, however, the proposal was dropped from the final report I was working on. I still think it's a great idea.

Brooklyn Google map with subways, via OnNYTurf. The Bay Ridge Line is the hatched double black line curving from east to west. The route of my ride, Ocean Parkway, is between the orange and yellow/orange lines in the center of the map.

But back to the ride...

At Avenue U, in a landscape of single-family homes that bore little resemblance to the Brownstone Brooklyn I left at the start of my ride, I passed a mysterious cast-iron tower unlike any I'd ever seen in the city before. I wondered if it was perhaps a remnant of Brooklyn's once comprehensive trolley system, but found no evidence that Ocean Parkway ever had streetcars. As it turned out, the tower had a far less romantic origin.

Obsolete sewer ventilation tower. Many thanks to Forgotten-NY's Kevin Walsh for the explanation.

Finally, I reached Coney Island. The ocean was beautiful.

Coney Island Boardwalk.

On a whim, I departed from my plans and headed east, away from Coney Island. Before long I reached Brighton Beach, one of New York's classic Russian neighborhoods. The boardwalk wasn't crowded, and the few people I saw certainly weren't speaking English.

At least I could understand the URL at the bottom of the sign.

Eventually I made it to Kingsborough Community College, which has a beautiful campus at the entrance to Jamaica Bay. Across the water I saw Breezy Point, where I helped plan a marina that would have hosted sailing if New York had won its NYC2012 Olympic bid. I eyed the shore sadly, thinking about what an amazing venue it would have been.

Rounding the tip of the peninsula, I reached Sheepshead Bay, one of my favorite parts of the city. Besides City Island in the Bronx, Sheepshead Bay is the most 'New Englandy' part of New York City with active fishermen and a harbor filled with bobbing sailboats. (Check out the blog Sail Brooklyn for more about Sheepshead Bay.)

You can just see the top of the Verrazano Bridge in the distance.

Riding slow to soak in the scenery, I was nonetheless going fast enough that an unseen speed bump flipped me neatly over my handlebars, almost ending my ride. Refusing medical attention from a startled security guard, a quick survey found my bike and body functional enough to continue -- my helmet had spared me a trip to the hospital. Bloodied but not beaten, I headed back to the beach.

The New York Aquarium. Stupid place for a wall.

Back on the Coney Island boardwalk, I noticed the sorry state of the New York Aquarium, which was once located at Castle Clinton in Manhattan's Battery Park. Fortunately, the Aquarium is about to be rebuilt with a design by Enrique Ruiz-Geli, my favorite of a new crop of Catalonian architects transforming Spanish design.

Ruiz-Geli's design for the New York Aquarium. (Via Gowanus Lounge)

The new plan, which I love, interacts with the boardwalk much more than the existing building and has the potential to create a powerful waterfront-based aesthetic experience like that of the Milwaukee Art Museum, which was designed by Ruiz-Geli's Spanish compatriot Santiago Calatrava.

Further down the boardwalk, I felt conflicting emotions as I checked out Astroland in its final year of operation. On the one hand, I fear that new developments might destroy the kitschy charm that has given Coney Island its unique character for so long. On the other hand, I felt that some aspects of the boardwalk are ready to be retired. 'Shoot the Freak', for instance, which encourages children to fire paintballs at a 'live human target', is best left in the past.

Astroland Park may be closing, but the world-famous Cyclone roller coaster will survive, thankfully.

Heading back to Ocean Parkway and concluding my adventure for the day, I reflected that there was nowhere in the world quite like Brooklyn. I had seen but a thin slice of the borough on my bike ride, but witnessed a rich diversity of landmarks created by the people of the city. From temples and trains to roadways and restaurants, the environment of Brooklyn was one truly reflective of the broad range of people that live there.

The Coney Island Parachute Jump.

Sadly, I'm leaving Brooklyn soon to move west. It's tough to leave, but this unique city will always have a place in my heart. Will I miss Brooklyn? Yes. Will I remember it forever? Fugghedaboutit.

williamsburg cinco de mayo (in pictures)

2007-05-06T22:29:00.000-04:00

I spent my Cinco de Mayo in Williamsburg. The weather was perfect and I took a lot of photos. (As always on this blog, you can click the photo to go to its source. All photos in this post are from my flickr account.)

I started the day at Peter Luger's where I met some friends for hamburgers. Luger's has some truly delicious burgers.

Parting from my buddies, I wandered to the waterfront where I admired the beauty of the Williamsburg Bridge. It differs from NYC's other suspension bridges in two ways. First, its canted towers tilt towards the center of the bridge instead of going straight up. Second, only the center span is suspended by cables -- the approaches are supported from below by steel supports.

Walking north, I soon came to the Domino Sugar Refinery, an extremely endangered historic building. I'm worried it will meet the same fate as the Revere Sugar Refinery that was demolished earlier this year in Red Hook.

I managed to take one picture of the hulking factory as a spandex-clad cyclist zipped by on a recumbent bike.

Past the sugar refinery I was delighted to discover Grand Ferry Park, a tiny spot of public space on the waterfront I'd never been to before. Great people-watching.

Sneaking past a chain link fence, I found an abandoned dock on the riverfront side of a big warehouse. I think this crane is great.

Continuing into Greenpoint, I noticed this rusting contraption on the roof of a building. It reminded me of the Becher's industrial photography.

I made sure to swing by the ruins of the Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse.

And I also checked out the Eberhard Faber Pencil Factory, which looks like it will be designated as a historic landmark soon.

Eventually I made it to the rooftop BBQ I'd been headed to all along. Great views of the city.

buzz off

2007-05-06T17:05:00.000-04:00

Across America and Europe, honeybee colonies are collapsing from an unknown cause. Some beekeepers in the eastern United States are reporting 70% loses in the past year. Bees are critical for the pollination of many crops including apples, almonds, and tomatoes. The widespread collapse of their hives has serious implications for the world's food supply.

A honeybee laden with pollen. Photo by mommamia.

No one is sure of why the bees are vanishing, though there are many theories. Some believe that radiation from cell phones is to blame. Indeed, the industrialized nations suffering from Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) are among those with the highest cell phone usage.

Cell tower in Massachusetts. What are they trying to hide? Photo from Haynes.tv. More antenna camouflage here.

The science behind cell phone radiation is questionable, however, and most apiarists think other factors are to blame. (In fact, the authors of one oft-cited study say their findings were misinterpreted and and they "cannot explain the CCD-phenomenon itself and want to keep from speculation in this case.")

An 18-wheeler being loaded with beehives for transport. Photo from Wikipedia.

Some believe pesticides are to blame for the current rash of colony collapses. In a great article for OnEarth Magazine, Sharon Levy shadowed beekeeper Jeff Anderson as he travelled across the country with his colonies as a pollinator-for-hire. On his annual transcontinental migration, he rigorously avoided farms in areas where pesticides like Sevin and Penncap-M are used, even though many such chemicals are legal. If just one bee harvests pollen from plants sprayed with these compounds, the poison can spread through the whole hive.

A healthy colony abuzz with workers, stored pollen, and eggs. Photo by Dan Winters.

Others believe that some form of parasite is to blame. Varroa mites, first discovered in the US in 1987, have reduced bee populations but they aren't thought to play a large role in the current collapses. Instead, researchers are focusing on bacterial, viral and fungal infections. In some cases, however, so many pathogens are found in the dead bees of collapsed colonies that it suggests the infections are a symptom of weakened defenses, and not a cause.

Bee-made vase by Tomas Gabzdil Libertiny of Studio Libertiny. Via Inhabitat.

In his journal, David Byrne, asks: "[could] GM agribusiness could be trying to eliminate bees"? Whether there's a conspiracy against the bees or not, a German study found that one variety of genetically modified corn with DNA from bacteria may have "altered the surface of the bee's intestines, sufficiently weakening the bees to allow the parasites to gain entry." At the same time, the director of the study admits, "perhaps it was the other way around. We don't know."

The Ancient Beekeeping Museum, Stripeikiai, Lithuania. Photo via Wikipedia.

Perhaps there is no one reason the bees are disappearing. Maybe we've reached a critical tipping point in the fragile symbiosis of plant, bee, and human. For millennia, beekeepers have worked at the intersection of the built and natural environments. As humans explore new ways to manipulate that boundary with techniques like industrial farming and GM crops, we may be upsetting the balance. As a society finally acknowledging our role in global warming, we know that we can no longer protect nature passively: we must actively manage the relationship between the built and natural environments.

axiometric tribeca

2007-05-02T16:40:00.000-04:00

An e-mail from an old co-worker reminded me how much I love axiometric maps. (I also like axonometric projections. I'm not totally sure what the difference is...)

I wonder how different this map would look today with all the new construction. Check out this axiometric comparison of DUMBO in 2002 and 2005.

The 1994 axiometric map above from MapPoster emphasizes a point I made in the Built Environment Blog last year: Tribeca is defined by its edges. (Wish I'd found this image for the original post.)

busy april

2007-04-24T23:31:00.000-04:00

I just came across this visionary redesign of the New York subway map on Gothamist and wanted to share it with everyone.

Kick Design's new subway map is a dramatic simplification of the existing design. More about the Kick Map in the NY Times.

I haven't been able to contribute much new writing to the Built Environment Blog recently, but that shouldn't suggest there hasn't been a lot going on. Earlier this month, for instance, Chicago was selected as the USOC's bid city for the 2016 Olympics.

Apparently the Hancock has displaced the Sears Tower as Chicago's most recognizable skyscraper.

Based on my experience with the NYC2012 bid, I thought that any US bid for the 2016 Games would have trouble defeating Buenos Aires. (There's never been an Olympics in South America.) As it turns out, however, Buenos Aires isn't even going for 2016. "Madrid, Prague, Rio de Janeiro, Rome and Tokyo are expected to be in the mix," says the NY Times. Though it is a South American city, Rio lacks many of Buenos Aires' strengths as a bid city, and all the other cities have issues as well. I think Chicago could really win this.

Bloomberg introducing PlaNYC 2030. Photo from NY Times.

In other news, Mayor Bloomberg just released the PlaNYC 2030 report, a sweeping vision for New York City's future. It's an ambitious and controversial plan that the NY Times calls "an agenda that in some ways resembles the Olympic plan in a green dress." Indeed, there were several key players involved with both efforts. I'm thrilled that the plan has been released, but the initiatives need a powerful political force behind them. Much of the work lies ahead.

I hope to be writing for the blog again soon, perhaps on the 2016 Olympics or on the planning of New York City. In the meantime, feel free to check out Libraries that Matter, an article I helped write for PPS's Libraries and Civic Centers newsletter.

good to go

2007-04-12T00:19:00.000-04:00

I wrote an article for this month's issue of Good Magazine: 'Decongestion:
5 innovations in urban transportation that you won't find in America, yet.' Good is different from other magazines in that the $20 from your 'subscription' goes to the non-profit organization of your choice, not the publisher.

You can download a pdf of the article here. (1.5 MB)

Copenhagen, Denmark. Streetsblog's Aaron Naparstek contributed some great photos to the article.

I also scanned a a copy of the article with the cover and table of contents; you can download that here. (3 MB)

lost and found

2007-04-02T17:55:00.000-04:00

Lost Magazine has published a new version of 323 Prospect Place, a piece that originally appeared here in the Built Environment Blog. The new version incorporates information from several great comments on the blog post -- many thanks to Showhank, Fakeisthenewreal, Robert Baptista and everyone else who added their thoughts. Special thanks to Paul Proulx who essentially solved the mystery with the map below.

This is my edited version of the original map that explains the orientation of 323 Prospect Place.

new links

2007-03-29T10:51:00.000-04:00

This week I finally got around to reorganizing my links. I also added a bunch of new ones.

Album cover by Tavet Gillson for Enjoy New York, an upcoming compilation by Premier Cru Music.

Of the new links, here are some of my favorites:

Fogonazos is a bilingual blog with a unique perspective on the built and natural environment. I really like the post on the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The Princeton Architectural Press publishes well-written and visually stunning books. For folks fascinated by materials, like me, Liquid Stone is a must-read.

Fab Prefab is a resource for modern prefabricated design. Container Bay, one section of the site, is an incredible index of designs for habitable shipping containers.

fire in the slope

2007-03-29T08:54:00.000-04:00

March 25, 2007.

March 28, 2007. Photo by E-Liz.

going up

2007-03-27T16:42:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite comedians, Mitch Hedberg, had a bit about escalators:

"An escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. There would never be an 'Escalator temporarily out of order' sign, only an 'Escalator temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience.'"

Escalator (permanent marker on escalator, 2003) by Ulrich Vogl. Via Bird to the North.

Escalators are, in fact, incredible machines. They give their users a status somewhere between pedestrian and passenger, providing a remarkably public mode of personal transportation. Ubiquitous in the world's subway stations and department stores, new escalators continue to shape both transit and retail.

Jesse Reno's 1891 design for the moving stairwell at Coney Island. Ladies were expected to ride 'sidesaddle.' Via The Elevator Museum.

Escalators as we know them today were introduced at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris, an event better remembered for the introduction of 'Talking Films'. Built by the Otis elevator company, this escalator improved on several earlier versions of inclined people-movers, including one at Coney Island that used seats like a bicycle's.

The Otis moving stairway at the Exposition Universelle, 1900.

Though materials, safety, and efficiency have improved throughout the history of the escalator, the fundamental method of operation remains the same. Rather, the innovation in escalators has emerged in their application.

Hong Kong is home to the world's longest and most innovative escalator system, the Central-Mid-Levels Escalator. Linking Des Voeux Road in Central Hong Kong with Conduit Road in the Mid-Levels, the escalator winds 800 meters above crowded streets, dramatically bridging the two neighborhoods. Opened in 1994, the introduction of the escalator has spurred economic development on cross streets where people can disembark, revitalizing commercial districts.

It's also lots of fun to ride. You can see the platform I took this picture from here.

In New York City, innovative escalators are playing a central role in the introduction of big box retail, until now a distinctly suburban phenomena. At stores like the 23rd Street Home Depot and the Atlantic Terminal Target, special escalators allow shopping carts to move between floors. The urbanization of big box retailers represents a new direction in commercial development. Indeed, the phenomena is a challenge to both existing urban retailers and the sprawling superstores of the suburbs -- a challenge manifest in escalators.

Target. Brooklyn, 2007.

When escalators break, they 'become stairs.' When they work, they can change how people live.

Fireladders of SoHo

2007-03-21T16:33:00.000-04:00

I just learned about a great collection of drawings of fire escapes in SoHo (via Gothamist). They are a good follow-up to the Fireproof post of several weeks ago. Hope you like them as much as I do.

82 Greene. From Greg Martin's Fireladders of SoHo.

323 prospect place

2007-03-14T00:32:00.001-04:00

Last fall, I was walking through Prospect Heights when a residence caught my eye. The building was a fairly standard one -- a classic 3-story Brooklyn brownstone built, in this case, from brick. Rather, what caught my eye was its position: it was rotated about 60 degrees from the rest of the street grid.

323 Prospect Place

Buildings don't build themselves, and whoever built this one located it the way they did for a reason. Especially in brownstone Brooklyn, where rowhouses are the dominant architectural feature, buildings usually face the street. In this case, either someone decided to build it differently or the street it once faced no longer existed.

Corner of Prospect Place and Underhill Avenue

Stepping back, I noticed that the building next door, which appeared to have been built more recently, was angled like its neighbor despite a corner that fit the existing street layout. Moreover, a new building under construction was also similarly rotated -- clearly the plots of land in this area were oriented towards some feature of the urban landscape that's no longer there.

323 Prospect Place in the red box. Viewed from above, it seems that a whole block has been dropped from a different street grid into that of Prospect Heights. Why?

My initial hypothesis involved Brooklyn's longest and oldest street: Flatbush Avenue. The road that is now Flatbush Avenue was originally the southernmost section of an ancient Native American path. Broadway, in Manhattan, also follows part of this path, which reached as far north as Albany.

I thought that before Brooklyn evolved into its present layout, maybe Flatbush Avenue had been further north -- perhaps this block was oriented to face the old right-of-way. Yet as I examined old maps like the one below, I found that the road had changed remarkably little over time.

Brooklyn, 1766, 'Road to Flatbush' in red. This map is from the outstanding collection assembled by the Brooklyn Genealogy Information Page. Note the intersection of the 'Road to Flatbush' and 'Road to Jamaica' in the southeastern quadrant of this map -- the intersection basically survives today where Atlantic Avenue meets Flatbush Avenue.

My next theory was influenced by the High Line, an abandoned freight line on Manhattan's West Side. At the turn of the century, the Vanderbilt railyard (now better known as the Atlantic Yards) was ringed by Brooklyn's meatpacking industry. To facilitate the movement and loading of freight, the Armour Packing company built an elevated freight line to cross Atlantic Avenue.

Atlantic Avenue looking west towards 5th Avenue, circa 1908. (You can just see the since-demolished 5th Avenue elevated line.) From Arrt's Arrchives.

Unfortunately, I could not find any information on where the freight line went after it crossed Atlantic Avenue. Perhaps, I imagined, the freight line cut through what is now the residential neighborhood of Prospect Heights. Perhaps there was a turning loop at the corner of Prospect and Underhill -- this would explain both the park at the corner and 323 Prospect Place! Sadly, there is no evidence of this whatsoever -- my best guess now is that the elevated line ended not far from where it started: near the yards.

For several months, I gave up on explaining the unusual placement of the 323 Prospect Place. Then several weeks ago, a reader wrote me asking about the original shoreline of Manhattan. (I love reader e-mails, by the way.) I e-mailed her the link for the Brooklyn Genealogy Information Page, which also has maps of the other boroughs. I found myself poking around old maps again, but this time I saw something I hadn't noticed before.

Left: 1866 Johnson's Map. Right: 2007 Google Map.

On an 1866 map, there was a street that doesn't exist today. Most likely, the street didn't exist yet in 1866 either, but the fact that it was mapped gave me an idea. I realized that the area was probably redesigned by Olmstead and Vaux as they planned Prospect Park and Grand Army Plaza -- perhaps this would explain 323 Prospect Place.

Unfortunately, the 'mini-plaza' mapped to the north of Grand Army Plaza is still a block from where the rotated building sits. Indeed, even if the buildings were built according to the abandoned Olmstead and Vaux plan, there's no explanation as to why they'd be at such an angle.

Maps from before the planning of Prospect Park show a grid of streets continuing east -- later maps show the same. Yet in the 1860s and 1870s, the plan for the area underwent several changes. An early plan for Prospect Park by Egbert Viele, chief engineer of Central Park, called for the park to extend as far north as Warren Street. (Prospect Street today.) According to this plan, 323 Prospect could have had faced Prospect Park. (Yet it wasn't built that way...)

Egbert Viele's plan for Prospect Park, 1861. From NYC-Architecture.com.

After the Civil War, Olmstead and Vaux were commissioned to redesign the park -- it is their initial design on the 1866 Johnson Map. Yet theirs was not the final plan. The reservoir was replaced by the Brooklyn Museum and Eastern Parkway was cut through though area.

I have yet to find a concrete explanation of why 323 Prospect Place is oriented the way it is. Part of me, I think, hopes I never figure it out. Just the same, I'll keep trying.

NOTE: An newer version of this post (with new revelations) can be found at Lost Magazine.

powers of 10

2007-03-02T00:00:00.000-05:00

I just learned that the Eames' Powers of Ten film is on YouTube. This short film provides a great sense of perspective.

Rediscovered via Cool Hunting

Apparently the original Powers of Ten film has been removed. Instead, check out the official Powers of Ten website or the Simpsons' parody of the video, itself a rather clever piece of work.

UPDATE: You can watch Powers of 10 at Google Video!

new feature

2007-02-23T00:34:00.000-05:00

I'm trying out the google reader widget. I'll be sharing cool posts from other blogs -- you can see the links on the right. For the full reader, click here or the 'read more' link at the bottom of the list. Enjoy.

'Faultline' by Andy Goldsworthy, at San Francisco's de Young Museum.

fireproof

2007-02-19T17:12:00.000-05:00

'Form follows function,' said Louis Sullivan. The simple phrase sums up a tenet of modern architecture, but begs an important question: what is the function of a building?

One obvious function of a building is to remain standing. In a textbook case of form following the function of support (without literally contributing to it), Mies van der Rohe added I-beam window mullions to express the underlying structure of his 860-880 North Lake Shore Drive apartment buildings in Chicago.

860-880 North Lake Shore Drive, Chicago. Photo from timkuo.

The reason that the structural I-beams needed to be expressed through ornamental mullions -- the actual beams were encased in concrete to protect them from fire -- suggests another function of a building: it shouldn't burn down.

Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse Fire, Brooklyn. May 1, 2006. Photo from sgoralnick.

Fireproof design (or, more accurately, fire-resistant design) is often overlooked as an integral element of modern architecture. In part because of its ubiquity and in part because of ever-evolving strategies to hide its appearance, fireproof design is largely transparent to the casual observer.

New York is an excellent place to study the influence of fireproof design on urban form. Much of the city was developed at the turn of the century when insurers and the government were just starting to require fireproof construction. Today, many elements of fireproof design remain visible throughout New York, instead of camouflaged or hidden as they are in more recently developed cities.

Tile vaulted roof at the Christopher Street Station, New York City.

The distinctive vaulted ceilings in many of New York's subways are a perfect example of form following fireproof function. Most of New York's subways were constructed with the cut-and-cover technique, a method that depends on strong beams to support the roadway overhead. Steel, with its high strength/weight ratio, was the ideal construction material but for one flaw: it melted quickly and lost its strength in a fire. (See this photo of steel in a fire.)

To improve the structural performance of steel in a fire, engineers developed tile vaults that would both insulate the steel from heat and brace the I-beams from flexing. Tile vaulting, originally developed for fire protection, evolved into an architectural form in its own right through the work of Spanish architect Rafael Guastavino. While the city's finest tile vaults are hidden in the 6 train's abandoned City Hall station, there are several places where beautiful fireproof tile vaults remain out in the open.

Brooklyn Bridge station entrance, lower Manhattan. Photo from NYCviaRachel.

Besides tile vaults and other 'slow-burning' techniques meant to help a structure last long enough for help to arrive, another key element of fireproof design was the introduction of sprinkler systems.

Sprinklers systems were invented in the mid-19th century for the factories of New England. Textile mills, filled with dry, flammable materials and high-speed equipment, were particularly susceptible to fire. Following documented successes of sprinklers saving industrial buildings from fire, insurers began encouraging the introduction of sprinklers in all commercial buildings at the start of the 20th century.

West 35th Street, New York City. Photo from Number Six.

Even the best sprinkler systems, however, are useless without water pressure. To augment the public water supply, which cannot reach above the 6th floor of most structures in New York, buildings pump water into a tank installed on their roofs. When heat triggers a sprinkler head, water pours from the roof onto a fire, extinguishing it before it spreads. (The tanks also provide pressure for other uses as well.)

View from the Flatiron Building looking west towards the Hudson. I count 35 water tanks.

Over time, some tank-based sprinkler systems have been replaced with pressurized 'dry pipe' sprinkler systems, discreetly located in basements. Still, most tanks have survived and their prevalence, when one looks, is astounding.

Although rooftop water tanks are a defining element of the skyline, their influence on New York City's urban character pales in comparison to another element of fireproof design: the fire escape.

Mott Street, Chinatown, New York City.

Following a series of deadly fires in the early 20th century, (notably the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911), the New York Building Code required that all buildings have redundant emergency stairways. For older buildings, this usually meant building a fire escape.

Few fire escapes have been built since 1968 when the building code was revised to encourage indoor stairwells. Nonetheless, fire escapes have become a critical element of New York's gritty aesthetic experience. Criss-crossing the city's facades, fire escapes are an iconic fixture of Manhattan's urban landscape.

The urbanistic impact of fire escapes extends beyond aesthetics. Fire escapes are the balconies of the people -- the verandas of the working class. Before the advent of air conditioning, entire communities congregated above the street in the evening, cooling off in a sort of vertical public realm. While air conditioning has diminished the role that fire escapes play on hot summer nights, they remain an important place for many New Yorkers. (The NY Times featured an article about an Inwood community centered around its fire escapes in 2004.)

Fire Escape Garden, New York City. Photo from CoolCheech.

Fireproof design unobtrusively permeates modern architecture. Elegant tile arches are hidden underground -- ubiquitous wooden water tanks are perched inconspicuously on the roof. Even fire escapes -- often located on the very front of a building -- somehow blend into the background. To gain an extra appreciation of the subtle fireproof forms that give modern cities like New York much of their character, one need only remember their function: to save lives.

windy city

2007-02-13T22:19:00.000-05:00

October 7, 2006

February 13, 2007

trolley dodgers

2007-02-08T01:13:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time, Brooklyn was a city of baseball and railroads. Following the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, the borough became home to several ballparks and a comprehensive rail network. The traffic near one stadium was so dense that the home team was nicknamed the 'Trolley Dodgers.'

Washington Park, 1898-1914. This photo is of the 'New' Washington Park at 4th Avenue and 3rd Street, which replaced an older stadium across the street. (More at mlb.com.)

Today, Brooklyn hosts only one minor league baseball team and not a single trolley line. I recently made a pilgrimage of sorts to the site of Ebbets Field, where the Brooklyn Dodgers played from 1913 to 1957. Ebbets Field was the beloved home of a renowned franchise, but it was demolished anyway in 1960.

In one sense, the Dodgers' popularity was the cause of the stadium's demise: owner Walter O'Malley realized he could fill a much larger stadium with fans -- he moved the team to L.A. when Brooklyn's government refused to build one for him.

Ebbets Field (from Project Ballpark)

Ebbets Field was a unique stadium with a rich history. A defining element was the Shaefer's beer sign in right field -- the official scorer would relay hits and errors by lighting letters in the ad: 'h' or 'e', depending on the play. Besides being the venue of the first televised baseball game, Ebbets Field was also site of the most significant moment in baseball: when Jackie Robinson took the field in the top of the 1st against the Boston Braves on April 15th, 1947, it changed the game forever.

Ebbets Field, from Lost Ballparks, by Lawrence Ritter. This is the corner of Sullivan Place and McKeever Place, near the eastern edge of Prospect Park. Here's a map.

Just one year after the Dodgers won the 1955 World Series, the last of Brooklyn's trolleys were replaced with buses. The very next year, the Dodgers played their last game in Ebbets Field. In 1960, the stadium was torn down to make way for a huge housing development. (The wrecking ball was painted white with red seams.)

Ebbets Field Apartments (from local.live.com)

The demolition of Ebbets Field came at the cusp of an era of great change for Brooklyn. Suburbanization was shrinking Brooklyn's population, and the remaining communities were growing increasingly segregated. Many banks redlined entire African-American neighborhoods, effectively killing the real estate market. Burdened by poverty and neglect, Brooklyn developed a reputation for crime and disorder by the 1970s.

Today, Brooklyn is changing again. The population is growing for the first time since the 1950s and developers are constructing new buildings in virtually every corner of the borough. While the new growth isn't without its problems -- residential displacement and traffic congestion, for instance -- it represents a truly remarkable economic recovery.

Brooklyn's Population in Millions, 1910-2000

As Brooklyn regrows, there have been calls for both new sports teams and improved transit within the borough.

Before disintegrating into a rigmarole of subsidies, superblocks and heavy-handed design, the Atlantic Yards development looked to be a great opportunity to return professional sports to Brooklyn. Partially financed by Jay-Z and built on a vacant rail yard, the Nets' basketball arena could have been an enormously popular project. Instead, disengagement from the community and a disregard for the existing built environment have made a disaster of the project. (Hopefully, Brooklyn can still save this one at the buzzer.)

Development model of Nets Arena and surrounding buildings from the Barclays Center website.

While the Nets' arena remains controversial, the movement to restore trolley service is virtually dead. Despite several efforts to bring trolleys back to the waterfront -- especially recent efforts to incorporate streetcars into the planning of Brooklyn Bridge Park -- Brooklyn's only remaining trolleys are rusting on a dock in Red Hook.

Three PCCs in front of the Red Hook Fairway.

There is greater potential for transportation improvements to emerge from a planned BRT demonstration project. While BRT may lack the romance and history of streetcars, it is a practical option to improve Brooklyn's transportation network in the short term. In fact, implementation of a BRT corridor on Nostrand Avenue is slated to begin this year.

Brooklyn, it seems, is evolving from a city of baseball and trolleys into a borough of basketball and buses.

links

2006-11-23T00:38:00.000-05:00

I've been occupied with non-blog activities and I'm facing more of the same. In lieu of a new post of my own, I thought I'd offer some links to other sites I like.

5th Avenue in Brooklyn at 10th Street, 1909. From Forgotten NY.

Forgotten NY is the first (and usually only) place I go to answer my questions about the history of New York's physical environment. The site is, in fact, much of my inspiration for starting the Built Environment Blog in the first place. Not only is the content brilliant, but the balance of imagery and prose is almost perfect. Also, the new Forgotten NY book by Kevin Walsh looks like the best thing ever.

Photo by Mitch Epstein from Pruned.

Pruned is probably my favorite blog. (Polis and Bird to the North are great too.) The guy that runs this site has a pretty amazing perspective on the world; he's changed my definition of what a landscape is and my understanding of how people shape it. Be careful going to this site, it's possible to get lost there for hours.

'Painted Ladies' in San Francisco from Witold Rybczynski's column on Slate.

I first encountered Rybczynski's work in my freshman year of college when I had to read City Life for an introductory Urban Studies course. It won the bronze for my favorite book of the class, losing only to The Death and Life of Great American Cities and The Social Life of Small of Urban Spaces. Several years passed before I discovered Rybczynski wrote for Slate -- now it's hard to endure the weeks between each post.

The Rolling Bridge by Thomas Heatherwick Studios.

A versatile designer who reminds me of Charles and Ray Eames, Thomas Heatherwick is at the start of what is hopefully a long and prolific career. Equally skilled in sculpture, design, and architecture, Heatherwick's work is a study in clever elegance. I first encountered his work watching a TV special that his discussed rolling bridge in London. My favorite project of his now is probably the Blue Carpet, which was built with the support of England's Commissions North (which almost made this list in its own right.)

Screen shot from Tekkon Kinkreet from PingMag.

PingMag is a Japanese design zine. I have an infatuation with Asian design and these guys seems to have their finger on the pulse of it. Even if I'm not riveted by the topic of every piece they publish, the design and writing is consistently high quality.

contain yourself

2006-11-15T02:26:00.000-05:00

Container shipping is awesome. The containers themselves look like colorful building blocks, but they're hardly playthings. Without them, globalization would not exist as we know it today.

Photo by MarielleDeLosAngeles

In 1956, the first container ship set sail from Newark for Houston with 58 standard inter-modal containers. Today, 90% of the world's manufactured cargo is carried in containers -- in 2005 18 million containers were carried on the world's ships, trucks and trains.

Kowloon Container Port in Hong Kong, China

Unlike the infamous urban docks of the 1800's, the container ports of the 21st century are places of precision. The giraffe-like gantry cranes that ring every container port hoist containers directly onto trucks, trains, and shuttles. The entire process is conducted without goods ever leaving the containers and cargo is loaded and unloaded at an unprecedented pace.

Port of Oakland from BART

Perhaps due to the specificity of their design, container ports are particularly susceptible to disasters. In 1995, the Great Hanshin earthquake hit Kobe Japan, one of the world's busiest container ports.

The earthquake turned reclaimed land around the city's waterfront to mush: retaining walls tilted towards the sea and the ground level dropped. Almost all of Kobe's 77 gantry cranes were rendered inoperable, their outer legs perched on the retaining walls and their inner legs sinking into the fill.

Kobe, Japan (1995)

Container ports are also a US national security vulnerability. Their whole advantage, however, lies in operating at an efficiency that even the smoothest bureaucracy would have trouble keeping up with.

Earlier this year, Congress indirectly prevented a Dubai-based company from operating U.S. container ports. This jingoistic maneuver, which provided a false sense of security but little else, highlights the challenges of creating effective security policies for container ports.

Port Elizabeth, New Jersey

One of the best ideas in containers is just that. In 2001, Australian architect Sean Godsell came up with the Future Shack, a temporary housing unit recycled from an old cargo container. Self contained, easily transportable, and assembled in less than 24 hours, it has potential to help nations deal with disasters that displace large populations -- disasters like Hurricane Katrina or the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami.

Godsell has also designed a Bus Shelter House where the homeless can spend a night in comfort.

On the one hand, designing with containers seems to somehow miss the point. Containers are just part of a system -- it is the design of the system that can change the world. On the other hand, maybe container-based designs could lead to the greater globalization of ideas, not just products.

viet nam

2006-10-29T01:08:00.000-04:00

Earlier this year, I visited Vietnam. It was, for lots of reasons, an interesting trip to Asia.

Photo by Jay Brown, Lijiang Studio

In many ways, Vietnam's physical landscape typifies the parts of the planet once known as the 'third world.' Like many developing nations in the midst of industrialization, it features the startling juxtaposition of intense poverty and concentrated wealth.

Located next to a modern office tower, the Cho 19-12 market sells some products not available in American stores.

At the same time, Vietnam's unique history and diverse cultural influences combine to make it a place unlike any other. The architecture of the nation reflects this singularity, and in the fabric of the built environment one can read the legacy of the various nations which have occupied it throughout its rich and varied history.

The Vietnamese History Museum, a French designer's interpretation of Chinese forms, epitomizes Hanoi's architecture.

In the United States, the name 'Vietnam' tends to conjure up the worst of the cold war. Especially in film, Vietnam is seen primarily as a battleground where the innocent youth of America were sent to kill the innocent youth of southeast Asia. That so many on both sides died for such unclear reasons only adds to the tragedy.

Hoa Lo prison (aka the Hanoi Hilton.) Built by the French for political prisoners and later adapted to hold US POWs. (Including John McCain.)

In Vietnam itself, a region which has dealt with invasions for millennia, the American war is but one facet of a long era of foreign occupation. Before the United States had a political interest in the area, both France and China made Vietnam a colonial battleground, and the mark of all three powers can be found in the physical character of the nation. (With a strong Soviet influence thrown in for good measure.)

A recent article in the New York Times documenting the impact of globalization on Vietnam made me recall my time in the country, and reinforced my belief that the Vietnamese are adept at not only surviving colonial occupation, but embracing the strengths of each occupying force and using them to their advantage.

Nha Trang, burgeoning resort capital of Southern Vietnam. The far building under construction will be a Club Med.

One particularly interesting element of Vietnamese society is its street life. With pho (noodle) vendors on every corner and many wonderful public markets, there is much to celebrate. Still, it would be inaccurate to say that the streets were dominated by anything but the motorcycle.

In the two big cities I visited, Hanoi and Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City for my communist readers), motorcycle traffic exists at a density I would not have thought possible. Witnessing the apparent chaos at a busy intersection simultaneously reaffirmed and challenged my faith in the power of the invisible hand. I'm still not sure whether I think system 'works' or not.

I highly recommend visiting the Global South Mobility Library on YouTube. (via Bird to the North blog.)

Stop signs, traffic lights, and directional guides are rare, yet the motorcycle bound masses plow on. The phenomenon is especially interesting when considered in the context of new transportation planning theories advanced by David Engwich and Hans Monderman.

In his book Mental Speed Bumps, Engwich argues that by removing street signs, striping, and other delineations between automotive and pedestrian space, roads are actually made safer because drivers realize they are operating in places for people on foot. In practice, these theories have met with tremendous success in the Netherlands, where Dutch planner Hans Monderman has implemented them. (See Wired or the NY Times for a better explanation.)

Compare the video of Saigon to this footage from Groningen, Netherlands.

While I consider the work of Engwich and Monderman to be incredibly compelling and I think there is much to be learned from their ideas, it is critical to realize that their transportation plans are dependent upon the cultural norms of where they are applied.

Thus while it is the knee-jerk reaction of many New York planners to exclaim "'mental speed bumps' would never work in New York!", a more convincing argument, I think, is that they don't work in Vietnam.

I can watch these videos for hours, they're mesmerizing.

City plans of any sort, transportation or otherwise, must be based on a thorough understanding of the environment for which they are made. Engwich acknowledges this fact in Mental Speed Bumps. Wondering how the Dutch can share their public space so effectively, he points out the extent to the Dutch allow passersby to see into their living rooms from the sidewalk.

The Vietnamese, precisely because of their distinctive (and non-Dutch) culture, would probably have a different reaction to the removal of traffic organizing devices. This isn't to say that innovative transportation policies have no place in Vietnam -- it's just that those policies will need to be Vietnamese. (Interestingly, on my way to the airport in Hanoi, I did notice a BRT system.)

Toto, we're not in Rotterdam anymore.

Good planners anywhere, be it Vietnam, the Netherlands or the United States, must be intimately aware of the nuances and culture of the cities they work in. While very important lessons can be learned from studying the successes of city plans around the world, it is critical that those plans be harmonized with the place of their implementation. Vietnam, with its history of absorbing bits of Chinese, French, American and Soviet culture, provides a valuable lesson.

grand army plaza

2006-10-20T19:32:00.001-04:00

On October 17th 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake shook San Francisco for 15 seconds, killing dozens in the Bay Area and causing an estimated $6 billion in damage. (It was the costliest disaster in US history at the time.)

One of the infrastructure elements seriously damaged by the earthquake was the Embarcadero Freeway, an elevated highway dating from the 1960s. Contentious from its very first days, the highway cut San Francisco off from its waterfront, yet was considered a critical arterial link to the Bay Bridge.

When the earthquake shut down the freeway, however, a remarkable thing was discovered: people could get around just fine without the elevated highway. In what would prove to be a defining element of the city's incredible regeneration in the years following the earthquake, San Francisco tore down the Embarcadero Freeway and replaced it with a mixed-use boulevard, relinking the downtown to the harbor.

While not despised in Brooklyn as much as the Embarcadero Freeway was in San Francisco, the intersection at Grand Army Plaza is still far from being popular. The Gordian Knot of an rotary is terrible to drive through, terrible to walk through, and terrible to bike through. If DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall and the Bloomberg administration are as serious about changing New York's streets as they say they are, this would be an obvious place to start.

Despite its problems, Grand Army Plaza has a lot going for it. Straddling the border of Park Slope and Prospect Heights, it is the primary entrance to Prospect Park, Olmsted & Vaux's other New York City masterpiece. Every weekend when the park's drives are closed, the plaza hosts a wonderful farmer's market in its southern corner. The Soldiers' and Sailors' Arch, a towering icon honoring Union troops in the Civil War, sits near the Brooklyn Library.

Unfortunately, any chance of a pleasant experience when visiting on foot is obliterated by the absurd number of streets that intersect in Grand Army Plaza. Eastern Parkway, Union Street, Prospect Park West and Vanderbilt Avenue all terminate in Grand Army Plaza; Flatbush Avenue, the transportation aorta of Brooklyn, passes straight through.

Five neighborhood streets and the Prospect Park Drives also enter the intersection, meaning that while some drivers are trying to shoot through at 45 miles an hour, others are looking for parking spots.

At the same time, two rail corridors pass directly beneath the site: the 2/3 and 4/5 trains on the old IRT right-of-way, and the B/Q trains on the BMT.

Thus fixing Grand Army Plaza is a bit more complicated than tearing down the Embarcadero, and there's been no singular event to force the issue. Nonetheless, I think it is crucial for the long term cultural and economic vitality of the area that the plaza not only be reorganized, but fundamentally redesigned.

A noteworthy precedent can be found in Chicago. In the 1990s, Lake Shore Drive was rerouted to allow the construction of Museum Campus, a pedestrian plaza linking the Field Museum of Natural History, Shedd Aquarium, Solider Field and Northerly Island. The project created a new waterfront district virtually overnight. (Northerly Island, formerly the site of Meigs Field, became available in 2003, when Mayor Daley had the runways at Meigs Field ripped up -- with 16 airplanes still parked on-site.)

Lake Shore Drive (foreground) used to go in between the Shedd Aquarium (left) and Field Natural History (right).

While changing the traffic pattern in Grand Army Plaza will certainly have an enormous effect on the borough's overall transportation network, it is the only way to reclaim the space for people. As the lessons of San Francisco and Chicago show, reducing the amount of automobile infrastructure and reclaiming land for pedestrians can have a dramatic and wonderful effect.

So how do you do it? Let's take another look at how things are now:

As with most photos on this blog, click the image for a link to its flickr page; you can then click 'All Sizes' for a larger view.

One of the biggest problems with Grand Army Plaza is that there's so much unused space -- remarkable, given the number of landmarks, streets, and residences in the area. A lot of the unused space is paved, such as the area between the arch and the fountain in the center of oval.

Let's walk to the library!

Even more space is wasted on the raised berms that ring the interior oval. Originally designed to protect the residential buildings from bothersome traffic noise, these huge piles of dirt aren't even open for dog-walking. Given what I'm paying per square foot for my apartment nearby, this is absurd. Wouldn't it be a better solution to just get rid of some of the traffic rather than block the noise?

Traffic! Photo by MarielleDeLosAngeles

Another problem is that high-speed traffic passing through the plaza is forced to mix with low-speed local traffic, creating confusion and disorder in a space that should be comfortable for pedestrians. Any potential change to the plaza must therefore:

Adjust auto routes to separate local traffic from through traffic and reduce wasted surface area
Aggregate areas not needed for auto traffic to make comfortable pedestrian space
Use that pedestrian space to link the neighborhoods and landmarks that ring the plaza

As it turns out, I thought of something that might work...

Another homemade transportation plan. The subway routes are approximate.

The key to this plan is the construction of a shallow tunnel to the east of the subway lines that would link Eastern Parkway to Flatbush Avenue. Flatbush Avenue itself will still pass through the plaza, but with both directions of traffic on the same strip of pavement. The perimeter roadway will also still circle the plaza, but it will connect to Flatbush and Vanderbilt at just the northern corner of the plaza, ensuring that it is used for local traffic only.

This plan accomplishes all three goals: the arterial roads are kept apart from neighborhood roads by moving some traffic into a tunnel and the rest onto a single above-ground roadway. The pedestrian space is combined into two sections (as opposed to the five there are now), the larger of which links the Brooklyn Library to the central plaza and the sidewalks of Prospect Heights. With the fields of Prospect Park so close, I envision this space as more of a European-style plaza than a green space; perhaps something like the recently developed Oval Basin in Cardiff, U.K.

This used to be a basin for coal barges. It was filled in the 1960s and redesigned in 2000.

There will still be a couple messy points -- the intersection of Union Street and Prospect Park West will still be a bit tricky, for example -- but overall, I think it would be a dramatic improvement. The smaller of the two pedestrian spaces could be used to make the city's biggest dog run, a sculpture garden, or even developed with housing to finance the project. (Wouldn't the politics of that be fun?)

Flatbush Avenue would still cut the entrance of Prospect Park from the plaza, but I think a wide pedestrian bridge aligned with the opening of the arch could overcome that problem in a way that produced some incredible sight lines in both directions -- the sort of vista that Olmsted is famous for, but was never fully realized at this site.

The spot in the middle of the plaza, though virtually inaccessible, is actually quite pleasant. It's also one of the most popular spots in Brooklyn for wedding photos.

The point I'm trying to make here is not that I know how Grand Army Plaza should be arranged, but that it needs to change. Despite my general wariness of new urban tunnels as a solution to urban planning problems, (see The T) in this case, I think tunnelling warrants some consideration: a relatively small tunnel could potentially make a huge difference.

In any case, Brooklyn is at a turning point in its history, and the city's leaders have an opportunity in Grand Army Plaza to make a bold statement: make yourself comfortable.

design/policy/chicago

2006-10-10T23:45:00.000-04:00

Cities are shaped by many factors -- geography, economics and weather, just to name a few. Urban planners, by which I mean the broad range of professionals whose job it is to change cities, have two primary means through which to wield their influence: policy and design.

I recently spent a weekend in Chicago, which is an excellent laboratory to study the different ways that policy and design can alter a metropolis. Birthplace of the skyscraper and second home of Mies van der Rohe, Chicago has always been a center of modern design. It also has a history of innovative municipal policy, and though not every experiment was a success, everything Chicago has done is influential.

The creation of the Chicago Sanitation District is a good example of innovative policy. Signed into existence by the Illinois State Legislature in 1889, the Sanitation District was a legal entity designed to bypass the bureaucracy of the local government to provide the city's residents with safe drinking water. (For many years, sewage drained into Lake Michigan, which also happened to be the city's source of drinking water.)

With a board appointed by elected officials and the ability to sell bonds, the Sanitation District planned and financed a monumental engineering project that reversed the flow of the Chicago river in 1900. Later, it pioneered the use of chemical sewage treatment and built the world's largest drinking water purification plant.

On the left edge of the photo, note the dark colored sewage in the Chicago River's North Fork being diverted from Lake Michigan.

The Chicago Sanitation District's basic funding mechanisms and board composition have had a huge influence on structure of later regional management organizations like the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (1921) and BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit District (1951).

On the other hand, the Cabrini Green projects epitomize the worst of 20th century American urban renewal policies. They're finally being torn down.

For the most part, Chicago is flourishing today. While much of the recent success stems from national economic and cultural trends, Chicago's urban planning deserves at least partial credit. Implementing thoughtful design in harmony with innovative policies, Chicago's planners are achieving popular and sustainable goals: safer streets, greener buildings, and more engaging public spaces.

Due to a bit of policy I don't understand, Millenium Park is closed at 11:00pm. It did mean that I had the place to myself after sneaking in.

Chicago's newest design icon is 'the bean.' A key component of the recently completed Millennium Park, Anish Kapoor's ultra-reflective blob both engages the public and pays homage to the incredible skyline of its home. It somehow reduces inhibitions in its viewers -- adults spontaneously dance in its distorted reflections and strangers strike up conversation with one another. It is a remarkable example of almost pure design reshaping the public space.

Elsewhere in the city, the influence of pure policy can be seen. On virtually every street with commercial use, cafes and restaurants have moved beyond their storefronts to take advantage of a sidewalk patio ordinance that encourages businesses to use public space. It's a simple law, but it has made an amazingly broad impact, improving the pedestrian experience in business districts across the city.

In most cases, planners use a combination of policy and design to achieve civic goals -- it's not always sidewalk ordinance on the one hand and 110 tons of polished steel on the other. At its best, planning is transparent -- you have safe drinking water without thinking much about it. At its worst, planning can interfere with lives, damaging communities or forcing people from their homes. Chicago is perhaps the ideal case study for urban planners, as there is so much to learn from.

brownstone brooklyn

2006-10-01T21:25:00.000-04:00

Architecturally, there are a few different Brooklyns. In Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Bushwick, industrial forms dominate the urban landscape. In some east Brooklyn neighborhoods, charming single-family homes contribute to a character that can feel a little bit more 'Long Island' than 'New York'.

Park Slope Sunset

Growing up in New England, my first impressions of Brooklyn came from the Cosby show. Perhaps that's why today, no building says 'Brooklyn' to me like the Brownstone.

Clinton Hill afternoon

Following the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, there was a construction boom of three-to-five-story row houses to accommodate the burgeoning commuter population. Barged in from quarries in New Jersey and the Connecticut River Valley, brownstone was carried directly up Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal and then carted to nearby areas. Accordingly, the neighborhoods surrounding the canal (like Carrol Gardens, Park Slope, and Fort Greene) are of a remarkably consistent scale and style. This is Brownstone Brooklyn.

Prospect Heights morning

Ironically, some of the most interesting spots in Brownstone Brooklyn are the places where the ubiquitous row houses are absent. One of these is the Gowanus Canal itself. Odious noises and smells from industry has discouraged residential development over the years, but things could change soon. Declining urban industry, the waning of the aforementioned odor, and increasing land values suggest things will not stay the same.

Developers have been snapping up properties in the area along the canal for years now, but it's still unclear just what sort of development will take place. While it once seemed that the large scale development of the area was inevitable, lingering environmental issues and a lack of public transportation have slowed the process. Gowanus Lounge blog even doubts whether the famous (infamous?) Gowanus Whole Foods will ever get built.

Union Street drawbridge

Gowanus has a number of cool old buildings and some really great bridges. The Carroll Street Bridge is one of the only remaining retractile bridges in the country and the monolithic steel viaduct at 9th Street is the highest point in the New York City subway system. It's even home to the Empty Vessel Project, a fascinating seaborne community arts experiment. Very few Brownstones, though.

Looking ahead, it's tough to imagine that Brownstone Brooklyn will remain unchanged as it heads deeper into the 21st Century. While the skyrocketing prices of brownstones in neighborhoods like Prospect Heights and South Park Slope should discourage the demolition of existing buildings (landmarking or contextual zoning laws protect buildings in some areas as well,) there are very few new rowhouses (of any material) being built. It is particularly unlikely that areas with lots of development potential -- Gowanus and the areas around Atlantic Yards, for example -- will be developed as low-rise housing given the market conditions.

Park Slope doors

Despite my love of brownstones, I don't think the introduction of new forms to Brooklyn is necessarily a bad thing. The brownstone emerged as a dominant style because of economic forces in the 1880s and 1890s, not because everyone thought it would be cool to build matching row houses. Working within the existing context, developers can produce structures that fit into Brooklyn's contemporary economy with a modern design vernacular. This means the area may change somewhat in appearance, but the underlying middle-class character can survive. The dangers lie at the extremes: preventing new development will cause prices to rise, turning Brownstone Brooklyn into an enclave for the wealthy; developments that ignore the existing context can interfere with the streetscape and diminish what made the area so wonderful in the first place.

Debates over development tend to be polarizing -- the best solutions usually lie somewhere in the middle. Hopefully, Brownstone Brooklyn can balance preservation with innovation as it grows into the 21st century.

best view in midtown

2006-09-25T22:36:00.000-04:00

I've always thought that corners produced good architecture. Like Gehry's Fred and Ginger dancing in Prague or the Smurfit-Stone building's split diamond overlooking the Chicago waterfront, buildings on corners have the special ability to express themselves with two faces.

The world's most famous corner building may be New York's own Flatiron building. Built in 1902, Daniel Burnham's masterpiece slices 5th Avenue from Broadway at 23rd Street, its blade-like prow standing in contrast to the open space of Madison Park. One of New York's very first steel skyscrapers -- Burnham was a Chicago-based architect and planner -- the Flatiron building is an icon of Modern American design.

As much as I love looking at the Flatiron Building from the outside, I think the view is even better from inside. Thus I especially enjoy visiting my friend who works in a publishing firm on the 17th floor.

For an icon of Modern American design, the Flatiron building can be somewhat lacking in creature comforts. With a layout planned before the advent of the cubicle, offices and hallways often overlap. The elevators, despite their beautiful wrought-iron detailing, are among the slowest I've ever been on. Parts of the interior feel more like a Victorian house in Chicago than a midtown high-rise in Manhattan -- the structure is essentially an office tower designed before the modern office was invented.

One quickly forgets about the quirky layout approaching a window, however, for the views from the Flatiron are incredible.

Nudging one's nose into the curved glass at the tip of the building, 270 degrees of unobstructed views present themselves to the observer. Down Broadway, past Herald Square, lies the southern tip of Times Square; up 5th Avenue, one can just pick out the green of Central Park. On port lies the Hudson, to starboard the East River. The spires of the Empire State Building and Chrysler Building punctuate an undulating skyline. In the immediate foreground teem the crowds of Madison Park (and the line for the Shake Shack.) It is the best view in midtown.

It still looks good from the ground too.

triangle below canal

2006-09-18T16:52:00.000-04:00

This weekend I spent an evening in TriBeCa, marking the first time that I've spent more time than it takes to eat a meal in the area. Despite being bordered by the vibrant neighborhoods of SoHo and Greenwich Village, TriBeCa lacks the consistent sense of place present in most other Manhattan neighborhoods. Despite a ton of awesome restaurants and some really outstanding industrial buildings, TriBeCa always feels empty to me.

In his book The Image of the City (1960), Kevin Lynch produces maps by interviewing residents of Boston and asking them to sketch the city's layout. He divides the urban structures people describe into 5 categories: Paths, Edges, Districts, Nodes, and Landmarks. The distinctions between categories can be fuzzy sometimes -- the Brooklyn Bridge, for example, has the characteristics of both a path and a landmark -- but overall these 5 categories are a very effective way of describing urban space.

Map of Boston by Kevin Lynch derived from interviews with Bostonians.

TriBeCa is defined by its edges. Even the name -- Triangle Below Canal -- comes from its northern boundary, not a landmark like Flatiron or a geographic characteristic like Cobble Hill. It is this lack of a uniting feature, geographic or constructed, which causes TriBeCa to feel so decentralized and empty. While I'm reluctant to make a normative judgement and say that this is a 'bad' thing, I do think that every neighborhood deserves a heart.

As with virtually every other neighborhood in New York, TriBeCa is growing rapidly. New buildings in the area are generally high rise apartment buildings without a lot of character. I suppose it's OK to have one neighborhood in Lower Manhattan without a bustling street life, but I don't see how helping TriBeCa to develop a more cohesive feel could make the area worse.

As millions of dollars are poured into the World Trade Center on the southern border of this neighborhood, planners might want to think about TriBeCa as more than just a geometric form. On the other hand, maybe the neighborhood could use a square.

you can't get there from here

2006-09-14T01:21:00.000-04:00

On Wednesday it was reported that the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation (GIPEC) had scrapped every plan submitted in response to its widely publicized master plan RFP for being too expensive. (Crain's via Polis)

Home of the one of the first Dutch Settlements in the harbor, in 1698 the island was set aside by the British for Governor Lord Cornbury and the name stuck. Controlled by the military for most of its history, Governors Island served as an important strategic base for many years. More recently, the island was home to a military jail.

The southern half of the island is reclaimed land made in the 1910s with material excavated during construction of the Lexington Avenue Subway. Despite the presence of Manhattan soil, the 172 acre island only became New York property when Bill Clinton, in one of his final acts as President, designated 22 acres of the island a National Monument, setting in motion a series of events that led to the sale of most of the island to New York State and New York City for $1 in 2003.

The GIPEC, with board members appointed by City and State, requested proposals for the development of the island, receiving in response 25 plans that ranged from the visionary to the inane. (Nickelodeon helped to put together one of the proposals. Seriously.)

Whether they miscalculated when they wrote the RFP or simply didn't get any realistic proposals, the GIPEC is back to the drawing board.

A key challenge that must be overcome to stimulate development on the island will be finding a way for a critical mass of people to reach the island easily. While there's some potential in using ferries, I don't think that the system that serves the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island would work for Governors Island, which lacks a singular attraction.

At the same time, new bridges like the one to support Calatrava's gondolas are prohibitively expensive. To keep costs down, a transportation system to Governors Island must:

Use as much existing infrastructure as possible
Be incorporated into a network that improves NYC's transportation as a whole
Be creative

Fortunately, I've got an idea which meets these criteria. So, without further ado, my homemade Governors Island Transportation Plan:

Background Google/MTA mash-up map from NewYorkOnTap.com, which also tells you where to find bars. Great site -- I want it for my cell phone.

As some readers may have anticipated, this is a plan for bus rapid transit, or BRT. (See previous posts The T and take the bus for more thoughts on BRT.)

The key to this plan is adapting the ventilation tower of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel to provide pedestrian surface access. The ventilation tower -- the large white building which appears to stick out of the north-eastern tip of the island -- would have to be outfitted with some kind of escalator or elevator system to move people from an underground station to the surface. While this certainly wouldn't be cheap, I have trouble seeing how this could be more expensive than building a whole new bridge.

The rest of the plan is remarkably simple. It involves designating restricted lanes on the West Side Highway, Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, and Prospect Expressway for buses to create a new mass transit line. Stations could be created at locations where the route enters or exits a tunnel (Bowling Green, Columbia St) or where the line crosses a subway route (4th Ave in Brooklyn).

Besides linking Lower Manhattan to Governors Island, this would also provide a transit link to Red Hook, allowing residents of that neighborhood with a quick way to reach subway lines in Lower Manhattan or open space in Prospect Park.

Once a transit link is established, it opens the door for any number of creative development ideas for the parts of the island not protected by National Monument designation. One idea I find particularly compelling is the New Globe's vision for a Shakespearean Theater.

It turns out that Castle Williams, one of the two forts on the island, has an open courtyard with dimensions almost identical to London's Globe theater. Buoyed by an impressive list of supporters, the New Globe Theater has developed a plan featuring a new theater designed by Norman Foster inside Castle Williams. It is this sort of creative idea that could make Governors Island into an iconic place for New Yorkers and tourists alike.

I'm sure people will be able to find lots of technical problems with my transit line, and that makes sense because I'm not a civil engineer. I don't know the details of what it would take to convert the ventilation tower to some kind of elevator hybrid, but I'm mostly trying to get people thinking so I don't have to. Given the new public spaces being developed by cities like Chicago and London, the cost of inaction regarding Governors Island is too high for New York to bear. With some new thinking and a willingness to take a chance, Governors Island could become an amazing place.

concrete jungle

2006-09-13T13:22:00.000-04:00

There are many theories regarding the cause of the construction boom taking place in New York and other American cities right now. Lost in the debate over social change and gentrification, however, is the simple fact that advances in concrete technology are making reinforced concrete construction cheaper than it's ever been before.

Concrete has made huge impacts on the built environment before. The biggest difference between ancient Greek and Roman construction, for example, was that the Romans used concrete to bond their masonry -- a slushy mixture of gravel, water and chemicals that cured as hard as stone. Without concrete, we wouldn't have the Pantheon or the Colosseum.

Modernity's big contribution has been the addition of rebar: steel bars embedded in the liquid as it cures that dramatically improve the material's tensile strength. Reinforced concrete has been around since the 1850s, but it wasn't used very much for residential construction until Frank Lloyd Wright's cantilevered structures, which are only possible with steel rebar, became popular in the mid-20th century.

While the construction materials used today are basically the same as those from the 1950s, there are several recent technological advances like pre-stressing which have changed how reinforced concrete is used. In New York, the most relevant of these innovations is the introduction of the concrete pumping truck.

These awesome machines are basically fire engines that pump concrete instead of water. They can either pump concrete across a long distance or up to the top of a tall structure without the use of a crane. In addition to reducing the requirements for equipment and labor, they also permit faster construction, reducing the carrying costs for a developer for a work-in-progress.

I'm cautiously optimistic about Richard Meier's new apartment building on Grand Army Plaza, which is being built with a concrete pumping truck. (The 'Putzmeister', I was delighted to learn upon closer inspection.) Though construction on this structure also used a crane, I doubt that this project would have had the budget for a starchitect like Meier without the use of pumping trucks to reduce costs.

One potential pitfall of this new technology, however, is that it can make it cheaper to build a new structure than to rehab an old one.

New development along Washington DC's U Street Corridor.

One principle of Smart Growth is to reuse existing buildings as much as possible for sustainable development. With the economics of construction as they are now, it's easy to see why big developers have yet to fully sign on to this concept. Hopefully new construction technologies can reduce the cost of rehabilitating old structures as well in the near future.

In the meantime, I'll still get a kick out of watching the pumping truck that works all day behind my apartment.

unused FAR

2006-09-12T01:08:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite development phenomena is the construction of a new building on top of an old one.

The primary metric used to govern building size in the New York City Zoning Resolution is Floor Area Ratio (FAR). Rather than being measured by their height or volume, buildings are measured by their FAR, which is equal to the total floor area of a building divided by the lot area. Thus a three story building that covers half its lot will have an FAR of 1.5.

Three Buildings with 1.0 FAR

One strategy developers use to make money is to look for buildings below the maximum allowable FAR in an area where there is high demand for housing. Then they buy the buildings with a low FAR, tear them down, and build a bigger building (with the maximum allowable FAR) in their place. This is a lucrative business in many neighborhoods. (And not just in NYC.)

The problem is that by tearing down the buildings, developers can change the character of the neighborhood, eliminating the feel of the place which made the area popular in the first place. New York's Department of City Planning (DCP) has made several efforts to combat this problem. The introduction of transferable air rights, for example, allows developers to transfer floor area from smaller buildings to other nearby sites. This discourages the demolition of existing buildings, but it has the side effect, for better or for worse, of creating things like the Lower East Side's new Blue development.

Rendering from Curbed.com. THOR is The Hotel On Rivington. I'll get a photo of the work-in-progress soon.

That's why it's so great when instead of tearing a building down, a developer chooses to simply add to a building's FAR by building on top. Sometimes, this addition can be very small. Imagine having a permanent tent on your roof that you lived in. I think it would be pretty sweet.

Sometimes these additions can be quite well designed and attractive. The best one I've seen in New York is just south of the Puck Building, at 285 Lafayette St. (The Broadway-Lafayette stop on the BDFV trains is just to the north of the photo below.)

The addition was made with the redder brick. This image is from http://local.live.com/, the coolest thing Microsoft has ever made.

Throughout New York, there are many areas where this kind of construction is taking place. (Take a look at Dumbo next time you're taking a train over the Manhattan Bridge.) Still, I think the city could do more to encourage this kind of development. Besides preserving the character of a streetscape, it also has relatively low capital costs, which means that many more people can become 'developers.' A few thoughtful zoning amendments could make thousands of existing buildings threatened by demolition into the foundations for new houses.

Something to think about, anyway.

washington mews

2006-09-09T18:40:00.000-04:00

If I'm walking crosstown in the village I always pick a route that takes me down Washington Mews. It's just one block north of Washington Sqaure Park between 5th Ave and University. It feels like it's from another era. Approached from the east, this is the first taste of Greenwich Village.

The buildings were built as stables and have been converted to houses and some of the NYU language departments. If you keep walking further west, little nooks like this appear more frequently until you get to Christopher Street where all hell breaks loose in the street layout.

Forgotten NY has a ton of stuff on little alleys, or any other topic related to historic New York for that matter.

mew

–noun

a cage for hawks, esp. while molting.
a pen in which poultry is fattened.
a place of retirement or concealment.
mews, (usually used with a singular verb) Chiefly British.

(formerly) an area of stables built around a small street.
a street having small apartments converted from such stables.

–verb (used with object)

Archaic. to shut up in or as in a mew; confine; conceal (often fol. by up).

The T

2006-09-07T01:13:00.000-04:00

Decided to combine some feedback on the bus post with questions about the 2nd Ave Subway.

The map below shows the planned route of the 2nd Avenue Subway, which will be designated the "T".

The purpose of the 2nd Avenue Subway, according to the MTA's website, is to "reduce overcrowding and delays on the Lexington Avenue Line, and to improve mass transit accessibility for residents on the far East Side of Manhattan." The 2nd Avenue Subway will probably achieve these goals. The question, in my mind, is whether these goals are worthy of the $6.3-$7.8 billion the project is estimated to cost.

For that much money, why not a higher mission? Sure, life on the East Side of Manhattan has its challenges, but aren't there people in other parts of the city that could use the transit investment even more? For a project that's costing about $1,000/resident of NYC, how many people are going to get a tangible benefit from this effort? If the MTA was a private company, soley concerned with cutting a profit, then I'd say they can spend their money however they want. But the MTA is a quasi-public agency -- it has a certain responsibility to serve the people of New York. Less than a year ago, in fact, the city's taxpayers ponied up a ton of money by voting for a $450 million bond act. (An act of goodwill promptly rewarded by the transit strike.)

Urban tunnels are REALLY expensive. Boston's 3.5 mile Big Dig, like the 2nd Ave Subway, was originally estimated at a cost of about $1 billion/mile. It ended up having a whopping $14.6 billion price tag. And now chunks of the ceiling are falling off and killing people. I'm not saying that the 2nd Avenue Subway will turn out like the Big Dig, but I wonder if all that money wouldn't be better spent on something else.

In 2000, Bogota, Colombia created the Transmilenio -- a 40 mile BRT system which was carrying 1 million people/day by 2006. (You can see a photo of the main trunk line at the bottom of the previous post.) The cost? About $240 million. While it's unlikely a system in an American city could be produced as cheaply, there are certainly things to be learned from the cost-effectiveness of the Colombian example.

Stay tuned for more transportation week!

take the bus

2006-09-05T13:52:00.000-04:00

For most of history, there's been one way to get around: walk. At some point, thousands of years ago, people started sailing boats, riding horses, and training pigeons to fly around with little notes tied to their legs. Until relatively recently, those developments (along with the wheel) were humankind's biggest innovations in transportation.

Thus it's difficult to wrap one's mind around the scale of the changes which have been taking place in transportation over the last 200 years ago. Since the invention of the steam engine, circa 1800, a remarkable number of new transportation modes have appeared. Let's review briefly:

1000 BC to 1800 AD (2,800 years): bigger boats, faster horses, rounder wheels
1800 AD to 2006 AD (206 years): trains, cars, helicopters, 18-wheelers, jumbo jets, space shuttles, nuclear submarines, etc

One transit mode poised for a huge comeback is the bus. While perhaps lacking the charm of a trolley or the class of a limo, buses are remarkably efficient people movers and can often get you from point A to B for cheaper than anything else.

Buses are hardly new. The first 'omnibuses' (From the Latin: 'for all people') were introduced in European and American cities in the mid-19th century. The horse-drawn carts were soon replaced by streetcars -- iron-wheeled vehicles of a similar design which were towed on rails. With the introduction of overhead wiring and electric motors, the world had its first form of mass transit: the trolley. (Cable cars are actually a different early mass-transit technology that didn't really catch on outside of San Francisco.)

The Trolley Stop has tons of information and great pictures of trolleys.

To make a long story very short, electric streetcars and passenger rail evolved into subways and elevated trains while the high costs of trolley operation (and a conspiracy...?) led to their replacement by diesel buses and private cars. (The economics of this shift were greatly influenced by the 1956 Eisenhower Interstate Highway Act.)

Buses haven't changed much since the end of the streetcar era in in the 1950s. You've still got your yellow school buses, your lurching local buses, and your regional coach buses. There are a few changes afoot in the world of buses, however, which could set the bus up for a huge comeback.

Much as it took a bare-bones airline (Southwest) to shake up the aviation business, it's taken the 'Chinatown Bus' companies operating on the Northeastern corridor to change the economics of regional transit. (Does anyone have experience with Chinatown buses in California or elsewhere? I'd be curious to hear what it's like.)

On a particularly boring Bonanza bus ride to New York several years ago, I listened in on a conversation wherein a bus driver explained how various companies -- Greyhound, Peter Pan, Trailways, etc -- had divided up regional routes amongst themselves so as to maintain pseudo-monopolies on specific corridors. I'm not sure where this chap was getting his information, but when I looked into it, there were a lot of one-bus-company towns. (So there was nothing to stop them from jacking up the price.) You can see how the Chinatown bus, which gets me to DC for $20 (about 42% less than Greyhound), is screwing up this system.

BRT: The Future of Urban Transit

The other way buses are making a breakthrough is BRT. Bus Rapid Transit is so simple it's stupid. There are two big steps.

Designate lanes specifically for bus use. Ambulances and emergency vehicles can also use these lanes -- but the big deal is there's never any traffic.
Set up stations where passengers can pay before boarding.

Follow these two steps and BAM! you've got a system which can transport almost as many people per hour as a subway for a fraction of the cost. Most cities already have the buses and the roads -- it's just an issue of modifying how they're used. Furthermore, buses can travel on local connector routes before joining the dedicated lanes, reducing the need for transfers and hub stations.

The ease of creating BRTs hasn't escaped the notice of municipalities with limited funds for transit, and cities across the world are developing BRT sytems right now. Some of the buses used in these systems won't resemble traditional buses very much. They'll be articulated, powered by hybrid or alternative fuel systems, and quiet.

The bus is back, baby.

transportation week!

2006-09-04T23:54:00.002-04:00

Transportation is a funny business. In one sense, it's an industry uniquely based on service -- transportation customers pay not for a specific good, but for the movement of something from point A to point B. At the same time, transportation is all about machines. Without vehicles (and corridors to operate them on) we'd be walking everywhere. Needless to say, this is not the case. We have a great many transportation forms that we use to get around, and these varied forms have profoundly shaped our society.

I am a huge fan of subways, cars, airplanes, buses, trains, bicycles, trucks and most kinds of boats. Thus I am really looking forward to this week of blogging when I'll be discussing the impact of transportation on the built environment. In some posts I'll discuss how transportation systems affect settlement and land-use patterns; in other posts I'll ruminate on the transportation systems themselves.

There are some important distinctions to keep in mind when discussing transportation. One of the most important is what is being transported. Here are three categories of things I'll use to break up the week's blogs posts:

People. People move around for lots of reasons. The vehicles that move them can have a certain romance to them. The Orient Express? The Titanic? A Shelby Cobra? All people movers.
Freight. Freight can be any material that isn't a person: crude oil, sunglasses, chewy nougat, whatever. I'm particularly interested in container shipping, which has made as big an impact on the globalization of industry as any other technological advance from the last 50 years.
Information. For most of human history, sending information meant writing on a piece of paper and then paying someone to schlep the letter. This is no longer true. I'm going to see if I can't identify some marks in the built environment made by the internet.

sticking with it

2006-09-01T02:52:00.000-04:00

I've reorganized the links somewhat. Though some of the distinctions are arbitrary, I think it's stupid to mix in all the boring research links with cool stuff like the awesome map of Chicago at Radical Cartography. In any case, I'd like this blog to be interesting and maybe even useful, so if you're curious about a topic or want to hear my opinion on something, go ahead and post a comment. I'll do my best to respond to topic requests or questions.

I'm also planning some field trips in the coming weeks (a friday night on a deserted street in hasidic williamsburg; a bike ride to the sunset park waterfront...) so let me know if you want to go for an adventure.

stuy kind of town

2006-08-31T17:59:00.001-04:00

Been thinking a lot about the sale of Stuyvesant Town. Stuy town is pretty fascinating place. When it was built, it marked one of the first attempts in America to develop 'towers in the park,' an urban vision inspired by the designs of Le Corbusier. (Corbu, as the cool kids call him.)

This is a plan Corbusier made for the development of Paris. (Orientalarchitecture.com has an amazing photo of Corbu's vision realized more recently in North Korea.)

When the Federal Housing Act of 1949 rolled around and freed up huge amounts of federal dollars for urban renewal, the recently completed stuy town (opened 1947) stood as the primary example of a large scale working-class housing development in the country. Its influence is at least partially responsible for why America's cities are now filled with high-rise public housing projects instead of low-rise public housing projects.

One thing that irks me about the discussion of the stuy town sale is that it doesn't seem like anyone's considered subdividing it. Everyone's hooting and hollering about the $5 billion price tag -- the largest real estate deal in the history of the United States -- and no one's discussing whether people renting in the buildings might be better served if some smaller companies could get involved with the bidding. $5 billion is a lot of money, only the very biggest real estate companies will have the capacity to bid at all.

All the discussion of low-income housing that the stuy town sale has stirred up also got me thinking about the state of affordable housing in New York City. It deserves its own blog post at some point so I won't get into it here, but I will say that I think there are many facets of the system which could use some tweaking. The money spent on subsidising housing in Manhattan could be used to subsidise housing in other boroughs AND pay for education. A better education system would probably reduce the need for housing subsidies in the long term... More on that at some point in the future.

love those mills

2006-08-29T15:08:00.000-04:00

I love industrial buildings. With no other building type are designs so consistently dedicated to function as with those made for industrial production. The economics of industrialization demand that such buildings be free of any ornament that interferes with production or adds cost.

So perhaps it's a surprise that these buildings bereft of 'pretty' design are so timelessly beautiful. Or maybe it makes sense. The mills of New England, especially those driven by water, are probably my favorite buildings in the world. Built before the advent of electricity, designers knit these structures into the landscape well before Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater made the concept popular. Their open floor plans (to accommodate evolving technology) and huge windows (to facilitate longer working hours) define the aesthetics of modern architectural design. Even as the global economy rendered them obselete for their original purposes, many of the sturdy mills survived.

Since the 1960s, western society's emerging creative economy has encouraged the conversion of many post-industrial buildings to artists' lofts and galleries. One of the most ambitious conversions started in 1986 when a collaboration of elected officials, private donors, and the Williams Art Mafia began planning for a renovation of the recently abandoned Sprague Electric factory. Several designs, a failed Dukakis presidential bid, and about 20 years later, I got to visit the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art last weekend.

As stunned as I was by the scale and impact of the spaces made possible by the building's industrial origins, I was equally struck by the inability of most of the art in the museum to fill it. It's not that the art at Mass MoCA was particularly bad or small, it's just that it's tough to find a football-field's worth of museum-worthy art. Over and over, the spaces themselves overwhelmed the art -- the best pieces were those that worked explicitly with space itself (and, accordingly, failed to transcend that same space.) On the one hand, this may just be a paradigm shift for curators, but I suspect that a more powerful underlying force may be at play.

Years ago, when I first started reading about the adaptive re-use of post-industrial buildings, I saw SoHo as both the prototype for the process and case-study for challenges of making such arts-based re-use survive. Today, SoHo is an arts district in name only -- very little, if any, cutting edge art is being produced there now. Once, I saw this as a sign that such neighborhoods needed protection, but after my experience at Mass MoCA, I began to wonder: is arts-based adaptive re-use sustainable?

With this thought swirling in my mind, I looked more closely at the numerous post-industrial buildings scattered about the Berkshire landscape. Galleries, museums and artsy shops all filled post-industrial buildings... on the first floor. Upper stories remained shuttered or filled with cobwebs while ground-level retail thrived. Yet there were some mill buildings which were fully occupied. Some even had functioning mill ponds and dams -- and all these had something in common. They were being used for industry! Globalization be damned, they're making paper in New England! And pre-fab concrete! And baked goods!

The above photo shows the Hurlbut Paper Company's Willow Mill, established in 1806. This facilty's mill pond and turbine are now components of the Massachusets Technology Collaborative's Clean Energy Project. Electricity not needed for the paper recycling operations that take place in the mill is added to the regional power grid, reducing the drain on fossil fuels and nuclear power. For lack of a better description, that's frickin awesome.

I don't have any concrete conclusions, but it's my blog so I don't need any.

residence #13 by the pool

2006-08-29T01:01:00.000-04:00

Much of my time this weekend was spent in Stockbridge, MA where I was lucky enough to stay in a cozy cabin built by Miss Gertrude Robinson Smith and Miss Miriam K. Oliver of New York City.

The story of the cabin is fascinating. Challenging the hegemonic model of vacationing, Miss Smith and Miss Oliver -- two unmarried working women -- decided to build the house themselves in the spring of 1919. (April 13th, to be precise.) The challenge, met months later on July 13th, has survived as a testament to the futility of superstition. (Though the address has since been changed from 13 to 8 as other buildings were built on the road.)

Were the women feminists? lovers? architects? The imagination leaves room for all three. A newspaper article from the day encourages hypotheses...

"'Do you never allow and male creatures in your elysian dwelling?' I asked them. 'Certainly,' they replied at once, 'we have a man around all the time. His name is George Washington. You may have heard of him.' They introduced me to that worthy gentleman, clad in his Colonial uniform, standing stiffly as only an iron general can stand. For George is the door-stop!"

Inquiring of the construction, the reporter asks:

"'Weren't your skirts in the way?' 'We didn't wear skirts,' came the revelation, 'We wore blue jean trousers.'"

In any case, the little house is charming. I don't know what became of Miss Smith and Miss Oliver, but I'm glad they got together for at least a little while.

long weekend

2006-08-28T22:00:00.000-04:00

Just got back from a spontaneous weekend in upstate NY and western MA. I slept in some houses with interesting stories, swam in the NYC water supply, and spent some time in 19th century mill buildings. As some readers may already know, I am a big fan of 19th century mill buildings. Stay tuned in the coming days for posts on such topics as:

Reservoirs. New York's water is delicious. And frigid, it turns out.
Gendered Architecture. I slept in a cabin built by two high-society 'Jills.' The building itself was charming, but the story is deeper...
Non-Adaptive Re-Use. While I expected many of Western Massachusetts' post-industrial buildings to be adapted for use as art galleries or museums, I was stunned to see the number of old buildings being used for... Industry! Paper mills, chemical plants, processed food... Who knew?!

density: the map

2006-08-23T17:52:00.000-04:00

The previous post got me thinking about density. This map color codes population density (purple=high yellow=low) and overlays open space and subway lines. Kind of amazing how NO ONE lives around the Newtown Creek, isn't it? (Newtown Creek is the boundary between Brooklyn and Queens.)

an issue of scale

2006-08-23T16:13:00.000-04:00

I like these photos as a comparison of the housing density of uptown Manhattan to that of brownstone Brooklyn. Compared to the rest of the nation, Brooklyn is really densely settled. Compared to the Upper East Side, it's downright roomy.

moving along

2006-08-23T13:34:00.000-04:00

After trying for awhile to categorize various links I want to post (blogs, resources, news, etc...) I gave up and, in mad burst of creativity, decided to make a section for 'links.' Hopefully other bloggers won't be offended by sitting in a list with map data clearinghouses. Some of these links are pretty cool. If you're curious about demographic shifts and you've got some time to kill, check out some of the time series maps on the Social Explorer webpage. Or, if you're lamenting how far you have to walk to get to the Q train when the 4/5's not running to Brooklyn, marvel at the once vast coverage of streetcars on the NYCSubway.org historical maps page. I'm almost done with the layout -- you can expect me to start dropping pearls of wisdom on you any day now.

ruminations on the mission

2006-08-22T19:16:00.000-04:00

This blog will feature observations, comments, and questions about the places people make for themselves. There will probably be maps and photographs. Hopefully, someone finds it interesting.