Autumn beauty
Photographer Nathan Kensinger has posted a set of terrific photos and his impressions of the Freshkills Park site, collected during our photographers’ tour last month. We’ve been doing these tours every few months; if you’re a professional photographer interested in participating in future photo tours, feel free to be in touch.
Concrete Plant Park opens in the Bronx
Recently opened Concrete Plant Park, in the Bronx, sits on the seven-acre site of a concrete plant that operated from the late 1940s through 1987. The park has retained some of its industrial past in the form of newly-painted silos, hoppers and conveyors, structures that once served as mixing facilities and now distinguish the park as sculptural monuments to the site’s evolution. The Parks Department and the Bronx River Alliance partnered to clean up the site, which, for years, remained an abandoned strip of land and illegal dumping ground. The project garnered public support by hosting community festivals and launching public boat tours from the site into the Bronx River. The park’s amenities include a waterfront promenade, a reading circle, concrete lounges, a canoe/kayak launch and restored salt marsh. It will also be part of the Bronx River Greenway, a 23-mile long multi-use path planned to extend the length of the river through the Bronx and Westchester County.
(via NY Daily News)
One endpoint of the NYC waste stream
A landfill in Tullytown, PA ranks third by volume among destinations for NYC's residential waste.
Since the closure of Fresh Kills Landfill in 2001, districts outside of New York City, and as far as Virginia and Ohio, have become destinations for the city’s garbage. Just north of Philadelphia, a 6,000-acre complex of Bucks County landfills–in Tullytown, Falls Township and Morrisville, PA–receive about 2,500 tons of New York City’s trash each day. Along with the waste, these three municipalities have also received millions of dollars from Waste Management, the company that runs the landfill complex and imports waste from New York through a contract with the Department of Sanitation. Tullytown property owners receive an annual check of $5,000 from Waste Management, and the municipality has a $50 billion surplus. Waste Management offers free trash pick-up for Falls Township residents and has donated 4-wheel-drive vehicles to the Police Department of Morrisville.
At 283,902 tons of garbage received annually, GROWS North Landfill in Tullytown ranks third by volume as a destination for New York City’s garbage. Number one is a landfill in Waverly, VA, which received 932,536 tons of trash in fiscal year 2009, almost a third of the 3.3 million tons of residential waste produced by New York City each year.
(via The New York Times)
Walk Staten Island’s South Shore tomorrow
Hey! I’m Walkin’ Here! presents another Staten Island group walk tomorrow, Saturday, November 7th, roaming 15 miles of the island’s south shore. Lots of beach walking and some rock scrambling involved; dress for the temperature and wear sturdy shoes. Participation is free, and Saturday’s walk will start with a meetup underneath the first S in the Staten Island Ferry sign outside the Staten Island Ferry Terminal in Manhattan at 8:45 am.
High Line-inspired projects
Three High Line-inspired projects clockwise from top left: San Francisco's new Bay Bridge and the old structure that park advocates would like to save; The Embankment in Jersey City, envisioned as an open space oasis; and a proposal for a 3- mile greenhouse and hydrogen-generation facility to be situated on Chicago's former Bloomingdale Rail Line.
Inspired by the success of the High Line, proposals to reimagine abandoned rail lines have popped up all over the country.
- Faced with the replacement of a section of San Francisco’s Bay Bridge, Rael San Fratello Architects have proposed the creation of the Bay Line, a hanging neighborhood complete with housing, cultural and commercial buildings and bike and pedestrian paths. Inhabitat notes, however, that the bridge section is being replaced for structural reasons and would have to be stabilized before it could be re-purposed.
- In Chicago, a design collaboration between Gensler and 4240 Architecture envisions the old Bloomingdale Rail Line as a 3-mile greenhouse containing a 100-acre urban farm and, on its underside, a hydrogen-powered generator. The energy source, dubbed the “HYDROGENerator,” would be placed along an old aqueduct that runs under the railway, and would be used to power local schools.
- Just across the Hudson from the High Line, The Embankment Preservation Coalition has been advocating for the preservation of an elevated stonework structure that runs a half mile and spans 6 acres in downtown Jersey City. The Embankment is part of what was once a freight railroad line comprising seven tracks of the Pennsylvania Railroad. It’s envisioned as part of the 2,600-mile East Coast Greenway: a traffic-free path spanning from Florida to Maine.
(via Inhabitat, BLDGBLOG and High Line Blog)
Wrestling with Moses
This Friday, journalist and land policy expert Anthony Flint will be discussing and signing his new book, Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City at the Greenbelt Nature Center on Staten Island. The book recounts how urban activist Jacobs helped prevent the construction of an elevated highway through her West Village neighborhood.
Robert Moses was a key player in the development of Staten Island’s highways and bridges, as he was in the rest of New York City. He was also influential in the opening of the Fresh Kills Landfill. Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, was an influential urbanist and vocal critic of Moses’ ambitious urban renewal plans. Should be a fun event and a lively discussion.
Friday, November 6, 7:30 pm at the Greenbelt Nature Center, at the intersection of Brielle and Rockland Avenues on Staten Island. Light refreshments will be served. Tickets are $15. Call (718) 351-3450 to reserve.
Freshkills Park team member profiled
New York Times feature Entry Level profiles Freshkills Park’s Programming and Grants Manager, Raj Kottamasu. In addition to being part of the planning and implementation team for the project, Raj works with artists to develop onsite projects, initiates and organizes programs and events, manages and seeks grants for park projects and edits and designs our publications.
Parks and immigrants
The New York Times runs down recent initiatives aimed at making New York City parks more accessible and accommodating to immigrants. These efforts have been accelerating as a result of the city’s language-access plan and a report from New Yorkers for Parks called Parks for All New Yorkers: Immigrants, Culture and NYC Parks. The Parks Department has installed over 7000 signs in parks so far in languages including Spanish, Korean, Italian, Chinese, Russian and Haitian Creole, and it has begun an initiative to hire more bilingual and multilingual city parks workers. The City has also begun addressing demand for sports facilities that accommodate internationally popular sports such as cricket, netball and bocce ball through construction of new facilities, and there has been a trend toward more international cuisine among food vendors, to complement more traditional park snacks like hot dogs and pretzels.
First launch into the water
Last week, the Parks Department’s Freshkills Park team and Staten Island Urban Park Rangers took a canoe trip through the site’s creeks and wetlands. We put in at “The Point,” near the Isle of Meadows, and headed east through Fresh Kills Creek to Main Creek, where we got up close and personal with the William T. Davis Wildlife Refuge. This was our first brush with waterborne recreation at the site, and it afforded some awesome perspective of its scale and beauty. Our thanks to the Department of Sanitation for granting us access and sending us off! We hope to be able to offer public canoe tours in the near future, but for now, be sure to check out some of the photos from our afternoon on our flickr page.
We’ve also put up an album of new photos of the site looking its autumn prettiest.
New efforts to bridge government-community divide
Submissions to NYC BigApps are currently being accepted for software applications that make the City’s data sets accessible and usefully legible to the public, with the goals of fostering greater accountability and transparency of government operations as well as providing better tools for public policy advocacy and grassroots action. Mayor Bloomberg announced the contest in June, about six months after the Obama administration put out a Transparency and Open Government memorandum. Inhabitat runs down a few existing crowd-sourced local planning projects: dotNeighborhoods, The Open Planning Project and OasisNYC.
Another recent initiative to give local actors more agency is the creation of the Livable Communities Task Force, a congressional group that will focus on partnering with community actors and planners on quality of life initiatives. Among items the agenda for the task force is an Act that would provide federal assistance grants to local efforts supporting urban parks, recreation facilities and social service programs.
(via Inhabitat and City Parks Blog)
