The Atlantic Cities:

“MoMA Pays Tribute to the Terrifying Beauty of Le Corbusier

Anthony Flint. June 14, 2013

Five years ago, Robert Moses got a thorough revisiting – you could even say his reputation was in some measure was rehabilitated – in a sweeping multimedia exhibition organized by Columbia University, the Museum of the City of New York, and the Queens Museum.

This summer, the Museum of Modern Art is staging a show on the architect who might be described as a chief inspiration for Moses: Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, better known as Le Corbusier.

Like Moses, the Swiss-born visionary of modern architecture is also widely disparaged, by New Urbanists and traditionalists involved in any way in the world of urban planning and urban design. Le Corbusier is blamed for the “towers in the park” of ill-fated public housing projects in cities across America, the devastating slum clearance of mid-century urban renewal, and elevated urban freeways that are being systematically dismantled to this day.”

Image: Courtesey of MoMA

The Atlantic Cities: 

“New York Street Vendors Displaced by Bike-Share Want Their Voices Heard

Sarah Goodyear. May 22, 2013

As the racks for the Citibike bike-share program have been installed around New York in recent weeks, New Yorkers have become aware of their public spaces in a whole new way. Suddenly, people are feeling proprietary about the sidewalks they usually walk over without thinking.

Many of the complaints about the new racks do look like classic NIMBYism. In Fort Greene, some people are disgruntled about the aesthetic impact on landmarked blocks (although they’re apparently unconcerned about the way all the big fat cars look on those same blocks). In Manhattan, some co-op residents say they simply don’t want racks so close to their building entrance.

But there’s one rack that is causing a different kind of problem, and revealing some deeper cracks on the contested sidewalks of New York. On Liberty Street in Lower Manhattan, outside an office building at 140 Broadway, five food carts employing fifteen people have been displaced by a rack installed on the sidewalk there. (In 2011, with the help of customer petitions, vendors on the site successfully fought an attempt by the management of the building at 140 Broadway to get them to leave.)

The Street Vendor Project at the Urban Justice Center, an advocacy group that claims nearly 2,000 of the city’s 20,000 mobile vendors as members, says that while five carts might not seem like a lot, the move raises questions about who has the right to use the streets of the city.”

Photo: Street Vendor Project

New York Observer

“PATH/Fail: The Story of the World’s Most Expensive Train Station

By Stephen Jacob Smith. May 14, 2013

The Port Authority used to set records in good ways. The George Washington Bridge was a marvel of engineering in its day, the world’s longest bridge when it was built, and still the busiest. The Port Authority Bus Terminal, opened in 1950, is to this day the largest on earth by passenger volume.

But today, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey doesn’t brag about the records it sets. One World Trade Center, born the Freedom Tower and taken over by the Port in 2006, will be the most expensive office building in the world. The “Vehicle Security Center,” an underground tour bus garage and road network serving the World Trade Center complex, may very well be the most expensive parking garage in history.”

The Atlantic Cities:

“ One Man’s Obsessive Mission to Draw Every Building in New York

Eric Jaffe. April 10, 2012

James Gulliver Hancock wants you to know about a little personal project of his. It’s nothing big, really. Just something he does whenever he has the chance. The project is to draw all 900,000 buildings in New York City. Like we said, nothing major.

Hancock began his epic effort in April of 2010 along with a personal blog where he posted many of the finished works. More than 500 of the buildings in New York that he’s drawn so far were just published in the very appropriately titled book: All the Buildings in New York: That I’ve Drawn So Far (Universe).”

Illustration: James Gulliver Hancock

The Atlantic Cities: 

The Golden Age of Gondolas Might Be Just Around the Corner

Henry Grabar. April 9, 2013

Laugh all you want (or cower in fear), but cable-drawn aerial transportation just might be the next big thing.

To hear the evangelists tell it, the skyborne pods that have ferried skiers through the Alps for most of the last century are an integral part of the future of urban transport. Cheaper than terrestrial fixed guideway transit and quicker to build, the gondola is finally taking its rightful place in the urban landscape.

“Depending on how you measure it,” says Steven Dale of the Gondola Project, “it is the fastest growing transportation method in the world.”

Comparatively, that is. Until the last decade, the idea of relying largely on gondolas for mass transit was considered comical, if it was considered at all. Into the 1990s, Dale says, “there was no literature. There was nothing.”

Today, as gondola construction accelerates, Dale’s Gondola Project is probably the single most valuable database on the subject. And yet when the talk turns to gondolas, there are still two kinds of people in the world: those who think the gondola is the answer to a city’s short-range transportation needs, and those who can’t understand why everyone is talking about those tippy Venetian boats.”

Photo: Albeiro Lopero/Reuters

The Atlantic Cities:

“How to Protect the Rockaways From Another Sandy

Sarah Goodyear. March 12, 2013

Just over four months after Superstorm Sandy swamped the Rockaway peninsula in New York City, leaving it battered and bewildered, I am standing where the boardwalk used to be with Dan Brown, a filmmaker, and John Cori, an electrician. Both are local guys who grew up in this remote part of Queens. Both are trying to figure out how to save this beach, and this neighborhood.

Today, there is a cold wind blowing in from the Atlantic, gusting up to 50 miles an hour. Waves of 8 to 14 feet are predicted. The National Weather Service has issued a coastal flood warning. Facing into the stiff breeze is a little like being blasted with a cold hairdryer that is blowing sand.

We retreat for protection between concrete stanchions, former supports for the boardwalk where every day last summer thousands of New Yorkers walked, rode bikes, toted surfboards, ate ice cream, and washed the sand out from between their toes. That seems a long time ago now.

This is a relatively mild nor’easter, but here at Beach 86th Street the storm is driving the waves well up onto what is left of the beach, collapsing the chain-link fence that the city’s Parks Department has erected to secure the ruined concession stands. As the three of us talk about what we’re seeing, shouting to be heard over the surf and wind, we sometimes have to clamber up onto the crumbling cliff of sand next to the bare stanchions to avoid getting caught by the frothing water.

John Cori knows this beach as well as anyone. He grew up here. Over the course of his lifetime, he has watched the waves go in and out and the level of the sand rise and fall. “In the 70s, when I was a kid, we used to play under here,” he says. “There was probably 10 to 15 feet less of sand here. We used to swing out into the waves on a rope and ride the surf back into the boardwalk.”

The sand was replenished at times, but as for all beaches in the area, erosion is a constant problem. As Maura O’Connor wrote in an extensive article about the post-Sandy Rockaways last November in the New York World, Cori has been working for years to get anyone in power to listen to what he had to say about the Rockaways’ vulnerability to storm surges. Studies were commissioned and some sand was moved in, but a comprehensive response never materialized.”

Photo: Sarah Goodyear

Architizer: 

“Can New York Turn Its 11,000 Payphones Into Public Smartphones?

Lamar Anderson. March 7, 2013

When Mayor Bloomberg announced New York City’s Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge last winter, we were excited to see how designers would reimagine these idle relics of last century’s infrastructure into something other than a shading device for smartphone-browsing in sunny weather. From the looks of the finalists, which Bloomberg announced Tuesday, tomorrow’s payphone could have a lot of app-style features, from weather reports and wayfinding to voice and gesture control.

A handful of New York’s roughly 11,000 payphones already serve as wifi hotspots thanks to a pilot program (PDF) launched by the city last summer, so the leap to hyperconnectivity isn’t as far-fetched as it may seem.”

Image: Best Creativity: NYC Loop, by FXFOWLE.

The Atlantic Cities: 

“4 Months Later, the Poor Are Still Suffering Disproportionately From Sandy

Amanda Erickson. March 8 2013.

When Superstorm Sandy hit last October, its surge reached a whopping 760,000 buildings, or nearly 10 percent of New York City’s homes. Four months later, we’re starting to get a clearer picture of the impact on the city’s housing stock.

Four percent of households, or 150,000 homes, have applied to FEMA for help paying for repairs, replacement housing, or other costs. And unfortunately, the poor and working class are disproportionately well represented.

According to a report released by the Furman Center this week, 68 percent of the renters who applied to FEMA were families earning less than $30,000 a year. A third of all homeowners applying also earned less than $30,000 a year. This is much higher than in the city overall, where 41.6 percent of renters and 16.9 percent of owners earn less than $30,000 a year. The median income of FEMA applicants was $82,000 for owners and $18,000 for renters.”

Photo: Reuters

The New York Times:

Cuomo Seeking Home Buyouts in Flood Zones

By Thomas Kaplan. February 3, 2013

ALBANY — Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is proposing to spend as much as $400 million to purchase homes wrecked by Hurricane Sandy, have them demolished and then preserve the flood-prone land permanently, as undeveloped coastline.

The purchase program, which still requires approval from federal officials, would be among the most ambitious ever undertaken, not only in scale but also in how Mr. Cuomo would be using the money to begin reshaping coastal land use. Residents living in flood plains with homes that were significantly damaged would be offered the pre-storm value of their houses to relocate; those in even more vulnerable areas would be offered a bonus to sell; and in a small number of highly flood-prone areas, the state would double the bonus if an entire block of homeowners agreed to leave.

The land would never be built on again. Some properties could be turned into dunes, wetlands or other natural buffers that would help protect coastal communities from ferocious storms; other parcels could be combined and turned into public parkland.”

Photo: Karsten Moran for The New York Times

The Atlantic Cities:

“Will Climate Change Alter the Geography of New York’s Public Housing?

Richard Greenwald. Jan 3, 2013

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Sandy last October, a renewed public and journalistic focus on public housing emerged that left many questions unanswered. Writing on December 3 in The New York Times, Jonathan Mahler asked what might have been the most basic questionon people’s minds on the topic: “How is it possible that the same winding, 538-mile coastline that has recently been colonized by condominium developers chasing wealthy New Yorkers, themselves chasing waterfront views, had been, for decades, a catch basin for many of the city’s poorest residents?”

Mahler’s answer was a restatement of our common belief. “New York,” he wrote, “started building housing projects on the waterfront because that’s where its poorest citizens happened to live. It continued because that’s where space was most readily available. Finally, it built them there because that’s where its projects already were.”

But Mahler only finds half the answer. What really drove this process was the impact of early de-industrialization.”

Photo: Reuters