The Parks Department has been working on a number of renovation projects, as part of PlaNYC. In the South Bronx, the 205-acre Soundview Park is undergoing a large PlaNYC capital project, which includes the restoration of natural areas, playgrounds, a running track with synthetic turf field, a new comfort station, and a new performance lawn. The work is set to be completed in the Fall of 2013. This summer, Soundview Park is hosting Summer Stage music performances, as well as a summer movie series. Situated where the Bronx River opens into the East River, the park also offers great water views.

In Northern Manhattan, Highbridge Park is home to a $62 million restoration of the High Bridge, the oldest bridge in New York City. The National Landmark was completed in 1848, as part of the part of the Old Croton Aqueduct. It was transferred to the Parks Department in 1960s, after the decommissioning of the aqueduct. The bridge has been closed since the early 1970’s.  It will be restored and reopened for pedestrians and bicyclists in 2013. This summer, High Bridge Park offers great views of the Harlem River, as well as outdoor fitness and wildlife exploration tours.

In Greenpoint, McCarren Park is home to another PlaNYC rehabilitation project. The McCarren Pool was one of the many pools built around the city by Robert Moses. It was closed in 1984. The rehabilitation project includes a redesigned swimming pool, a pool “beach”, as well as a recreation center. Salvaged wood from the Coney Island Boardwalk is being used in the construction. The work on the pool is almost complete, and the pool will be open for the Summer 2012 season.

Images courtesy of http://www.nycgovparks.org/

As the Earth’s human population becomes predominantly urban, cities hold a key to the future of environmental conservation and sustainability initiatives. Policymakers, urban planners, and advocates are tackling environmental challenges, but that discussion is largely seen as outside of the public discussion of how we live in cities.

The City of New York has situated itself at the forefront of urban sustainability, starting with the release of PlaNYC in 2007, and its participation in C40 Cities collaborating on climate change and with more recent initiatives like its Green Infrastructure Plan.

What is the role of the public in this conversation? The Mary Miss/City as Living Laboratory (MM/CaLL) Framework engages the public as science learners whose behaviors, actions and decisions have direct impact on the future of the environment. During the fall of 2011, the MM/CaLL installation BROADWAY: 1000 Steps at Montefiore Park in upper Manhattan engaged visitors with urban infrastructure systems, and helped them rethink their relationship with consumption and place.

The panel will take place on Tuesday, June 5, 2012, from 6 to 8pm.

Please RSVP at – http://artandenvironment.eventbrite.com/

Location: Hunter College Student Dining Room, Hunter West Building, 3rd floor, Lexington & East 68^th St., New York, NY 10065. Enter through the West Building Lobby on the SW corner of 68th Street and Lexington Avenue. (Photo ID required).

If you have any questions about your environmental project idea, email tgif@hunter.cuny.edu. Check out the 2012-2013 grant cycle announcement here.

596 Acres has created a website and a mobile app, presenting raw city data in a comprehensive and accessible way.  By providing access to data about public vacancies, and resources to guide community groups in the negotiation process with the city, 596 Acres encourages people to organize and re-envision their neighborhoods.

The Java Street Garden Collaborative in Greenpoint is a garden project that has gotten support from 596 Acres. The lot – 59 Have Street –has been vacant for 10 years, and is owned by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. While the group was able to get approval for the garden from Community Board 1, the garden is likely to be temporary.  In the long term, the lot will become a site for an affordable housing development, once funding is secured by the developer, the North Brooklyn Development Corporation. The collaborative has decided to address the temporary nature of the garden by creating a “roving garden group”. The group will create a productive space on the empty lot for a short amount of time, and then easily move to a next lot when the time comes. The group is focusing on container gardening for the Java Street lot.

Other garden projects affiliated with 596 Acres include 462 Halsey Community Garden, A Small Green Patch, and Myrtle Village Green. Currently, 596 Acres is fundraising to expand to the other four boroughs. Check out their project on Ioby.

Image Source: http://596acres.org/news/

There is a broad range of activities at the conference: some are focused on food justice on the regional and city level, others on nutrition and healthy cooking habits. The Conference has a networking/organizing component, with time reserved for neighborhood-based meetups.

Here are some highlights from the schedule:

Manufacturing Food in a Big City: Diverse Perspectives on NYC’s Landscape: Come learn about the unique opportunities and challenges facing NYC’s food manufacturers, and the diverse range of actors who play a role in this world. From real estate to entrepreneurship to sourcing, this panel will provide a variety of perspectives on the issue.

The Buzz About Bees: Have fun and learn about the plight of the honeybee with nycbeekeeping.org. Observe live honeybees at work in a Plexiglas-enclosed escape-proof mini-hive. Adults can meet local beekeepers, learn about the life of the bee, what the group does, and how you can participate and support urban beekeeping. Kids can try on a bee suit and veil, enjoy a treasure hunt, role-play, coloring, drawing, and writing activities.

Diversity of Indian Cuisines: Sanjay will discuss the diversity of Indian cuisines, usage of basic spices, the layering cooking technique, and how to maintain health and taste balance. He will prepare 3 potato dishes in different ways to represent 1 cuisine each from North, South, and East India.

Getting Produce to High-Needs Brooklynites—One Cart at a Time! How does healthy food move through the supply chain to Brooklyn communities where access is most needed? What are the logistics of getting fresh food to residents? NYC Green Cart vendors— entrepreneurs operating produce carts in underserved areas—are one important link and serve as a model for other strategies.

The Conference is free. However, you can pre-register here, to avoid waiting at the door–5,000 people are expected to attend.

The Green Initiative Fund (TGIF) is a new mini-grant program on campus, open to all undergraduate students.  TGIF is currently accepting applications and will award grants on a competitive basis. The application deadline is Monday, October 17^th. You can download the 2011-2012 TGIF Application here.

TGIF at Hunter is based on a successful model for a recurring environmental project fund that has been established on campuses across the country. The money for TGIF comes from undergraduate student activities fees. In April 2010, 93.8% of students voted in favor of a referendum establishing The Green Initiative Fund at Hunter College (TGIF). The referendum at Hunter reallocated approximately $43,000 annually from the Student Activity Fee – $2.00 per undergraduate full-time student per semester and $0.80 per undergraduate part-time student per semester – toward TGIF, in order to advance sustainability on campus.

Since this is the inaugural year for TGIF, it is unclear exactly what campus community members will propose. It is likely that projects will focus on the following thematic areas: Energy, Transportation, Waste Management, Food/Agriculture, and integrating sustainability into teaching, research, and service at Hunter College.

Some examples of potential projects include – rooftop garden; a recycling education workshop; a research project about the life-cycle of Hunter’s cafeteria food; a proposal to integrate sustainability into the curriculum of a department; a public art project; a multi-media project about public space use around Hunter; an art project encouraging the Hunter community to walk or bike to work. TGIF is open to projects sponsored by outside non-profits or by Hunter clubs, as long as they involve undergraduate student participation.
If you have any questions or want to apply for a TGIF grant, please visit the TGIF website, our facebook page or email us at tgif[at]hunter.cuny.edu.

TGIF will be hosting an application Workshop on October 5th, 2011 from 1.30-2.30pm in room 407W (Hunter West). Learn more about TGIF, get help with your application, find new members for your project group and share your ideas for a greener campus. Hope to see you there!

The current phase of the project will connect “the Long Island Rail Road’s (LIRR) Main and Port Washington lines in Queens to a new LIRR terminal beneath Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan”. The tunnel boring machine (TBM) that began its journey in 2007 on 63^rd Street, reached its destination at Grand Central recently. While a lot of work still needs to be completed in Queens, the new LIRR concourse is beginning to taking shape under Grand Central. According to an MTA press release, the concourse will provide LIRR commuters with 91,000 square feet of public space, including shops and pathways to Grand Central Terminal, the subway system and the street above. The project is set to be completed in September 2016. Here is a photo tour of the process.

An interesting tidbit about this project – which is bound to enter NYC lore like sewer alligators, the original City Hall station and the South 4th Station – is the ceremonial burial of one of the TBMs. The 200-ton machine will be left 14-stories below Park Avenue. According to the New York Times, the TBM “will be sealed off by a concrete wall; the chamber will then be filled with concrete, encasing the cutter in a solid cast, Han Solo-style, so that it can serve as a support structure for the tunnel.” The ceremony accompanying the pouring of the concrete is expected to take place on Wednesday.

It is cheaper to leave the 6-8 million dollar machine underground than to pull it out. In New York, TBMs are generally excavated and sold for scrap. While it is generally a money-losing process, the New York underground is extremely crowded: buried wires, sewage pipes, pneumonic tubes, current and future subway tunnels take up a lot of space. Park Avenue and 37^th Street, the final resting places for one of the East side TBM, is a unique spot because it does not interfere with any major infrastructure project, yet. Once the commemorative plaque on Park Avenue disappears, the TBM will inevitably be forgotten and re-discovered by engineers, planners or subterranean explorers sometime in the future.

Images courtesy of New York Times and Streetsblog

Here is a great video from DEP about how the wastewater treatment process works at the North River Plant. The plant utilizes gravity to bring sewage to the plant: wastewater runs downhill to the plant from the higher elevations of Washington Heights and Inwood. An artificial slope is created to bring the wastewater up from Lower Manhattan: “a sewer line about six inches below the street at Bank Street gradually drops to a depth of 50 feet by the time it reaches the Upper West Side.” Once it gets to the plant, the wastewater is pumped five stories up by engines like the one that caught fire last week. As the sewage slowly descends, “it goes through aeration and settling tanks, as well as a biological process that digests much of the waste”.

When the fire shut down the North River plant, the city temporarily returned to dealing with Manhattan’s West Side sewage as it had prior to the Clean Water Act in 1972: dumping it directly into the Hudson River and Harlem Rivers. Here is a list of the 56 outfall locations, through which the waste water rushed out into the rivers. The sight of raw sewage in the water on Friday made me appreciate the 14 sewage treatment plants that were built with federal funds after 1972.

While the infrastructural improvements precipitated by the Clean Water Act have significantly improved the quality of our waters, New York City, like many other older urban areas, has a combined sewer system. This sewer system is a result of 19^th Century engineering, which could not have foreseen modern rates of water usage. The system does not separate clean rainwater from dirty wastewater. During heavy rains, when a lot of rainwater enters the sewers, the capacity of the sewer system becomes exceeded. The excess water is discharged directly into the rivers, similarly to what happened last week when the North River plant was out of commission. Even though the amount of wastewater dumped into the water— 360 million gallons—  is horrifying to think about, the Combine Sewer Overflow (CSO) sends a similar amount of wastewater into the water after a few days of very heavy rainfall.

Now that the plant is running again – thanks to one hundred people working overtime on an extremely hot day – the raw sewage will decapitate in a few days, making the waters safe for usage. As far as long term solutions to the CSO problem, the most sustainable options are those that decrease the amount of water that enters the sewer system (source-control), rather than “end of pipe” controls, which attempt to deal with the wastewater after it enters the system (large holding tanks, for instance). Here are some figures from Riverkeeper about green solutions to the CSO problem:

• Greenstreets could decrease CSOs by 14,800 gallons
• Street trees could decrease CSOs by 13,170 gallons
• New green roofs could decrease CSOs by 810 gallons; retrofitted green roofs could decrease CSOs by 865 gallons; and incentivized green roofs could decrease CSOs by 12,000 gallons
• Rain barrels could decrease CSOs by 9,000 gallons.

Images courtesy of Gotham Gazette, New York Times and Wikipedia

Food trucks allow entrepreneurs to bypass crippling commercial rents in New York, opening up small-business ownership to a wider range of people. The trucks add to the cultural landscape of the city, allowing people to interact with public space in a novel way. Finally, many food trucks produce cheap, innovative and delicious food. On the other hand, the restaurant owners who are paying the crippling commercial rents are not pleased with competition springing up on their doorstep. Idling trucks are terrible for the environment, and there are many people who are mad about the lost parking spaces.

While the city has been struggling with whether to encourage or discourage the seemingly exponential growth of food trucks, some real estate developers have looked to the recent clampdown as an opportunity.   The Rockrose Development Corporation has recruited a group of food trucks to set up shop on a lot in LIC, Queens.  Some vendors who will be using the lot are the same ones who got kicked out of Midtown.  Food truck courts have long been a fixture in other cities, including Austin, Portland, and Los Angeles.  A comment on a New York Times article about the new food-truck court in Queens reveals the contested nature of space in New York City, even outside of Manhattan:  “as a rent paying, fixed space, local restaurant owner, can’t say I am happy about the news.”

The contest over street space between vendors, the city and business owners is an age old battle.  It will most likely continue, as long as real estate in New York remains an expensive commodity.  A few days ago, the food vendors along Forsyth Street and the Manhattan Bridge have been evicted, most likely temporary.  The city has a tumultuous relationship with vendors on 125^th Street and booksellers on West 4^th Street for the last twenty-five years. The Essex Street Market – still in operation on the Lower East Side–was open in the 1930s by Mayor LaGuardia to reduce pushcart congestion in the neighborhood.  In fact, pushcart vending in New York has been regulated here since 1691, when it was a tiny Dutch colony.

Images courtesy of www.newyorkstreetfood.com and www.ourfoodshed.com

Frequently referred to as “non-traditional” households (carrying a tinge of midcentury morality), households consisting of single people, unmarried couples without children, roommates, and seniors are gaining visibility in cities and suburbs.  Policy makers, planners and developers have to creating policies, plans and housing stock that caters to the needs of these households. In some suburban developments, the era of McMansions is fading into memory. Transit Oriented Developments (TODs) – with varied and compact housing options – are indirectly responding to these shifts.

However, subtle changes in urban environments are also necessary. For example, a two-bedroom apartment with a master and junior bedroom does not make that much sense, if two unrelated adults are sharing it, rather than a young couple with a child. Our Zoning Resolution, written in 1961, is based on a separation of uses:  commercial /manufacturing from residential. What about those New Yorkers who work from home?

This issue comes back to a core question within urban planning – How can we create plans that are flexible and adaptable to social changes we cannot anticipate? The planners working on the 1961 Zoning Resolution, or the developers building the first suburbs could not have foreseen the New York metro area as it is today.

An example of legislation which effectively addresses demographic change in cities is the designation of Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities(NORCs) .  NORCs are communities with a sizable senior population, which were not purpose-built as senior communities. Once a community meets the NORC designation criteria, it becomes eligible for local, state, and federal funds for elderly support services. In New York City, many NORCs are located in public housing and moderate income co-ops – like the Sheepshead Nostrand Houses and Amalgamated Warbasse Houses – adapting a modernist housing model to a new demographic need. The Artists Loft Law, which grants protection to illegally converted manufacturing lofts to live/work spaces, is an older example of adaptive legislation, though one that comes with a host of baggage associated with gentrification.

Since we cannot yet predict the future, adaptivity and flexibility should be key, for both housing development and planning in general.

Images courtesy of www.infrastructurist.com   and http://urbanomnibus.net/