July 2011
12 posts
6 tags
There's More to Public Art than Sculptures and...
In By the City / For the City many residents spoke up for the need to beautify New York through color, light, and other non-traditional (read: not-a-sculpture-in-a-plaza) public art. One resident wants people to find new ways to add beautiful color to their neighborhoods.Leni in the West Village hopes that strategically located vacant lots could be filled with light. Laura simply wishes...
6 tags
Better Buses: Going Where the Subway Won't
In 1998, Mayor Giuliani proposed a $1.2 billion package that would build an airtrain to JFK and extend a subway line to La Guardia. The airtrain surived; the N line connection to La Guardia was scrapped. By 2003 the project had been shelved: short on funds, the city succumbed to “Not Above My Backyard” opposition from residents and local political leaders who organized to block elevated track...
5 tags
Creating and Connecting Social Spaces in Forest...
Queens is comprised of distinct neighborhoods that represent an eclectic history and diverse landscapes. Forest Hills, which boasts historic Tudor Architecture with an urban-suburban feel just 20 minutes from the hustle and bustle of Manhattan, is no exception. Two ideas submitted to By the City / For the City addressed major public spaces: one New Yorker wished that Station Square, on the south...
Competition Deadline Extended to July 31st, 2011
Over the past few weeks, with the deadline for the By the City / For the City design ideas competition drawing closer, we have been contacted by many planners, artists, and architects about entering, but for whom early July is a particularly busy time. As a result, we have decided to extend the deadline to July 31st to give everyone working on entries some breathing room!
Our goal in creating By...
8 tags
Greening the Heart of Brooklyn
One of the most ethnically, culturally and economically diverse areas in New York City, Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood is truly worth exploring. Colonial Dutch settlers, rapid urbanization, and immigration are just some of the most influential factors that laid the foundation for this eclectic neighborhood. One By the City / For the City submitter wished that Flatbush had a green and...
5 tags
Public Seating Beyond Parks and Playgrounds
We’ve all been there: exhausted, hot, annoyed, and just looking for a seat! With over eight million people calling New York City home, finding a place to sit outside of parks and playgrounds can be a bigger challenge than one might imagine. Megan in Clinton Hill wishes there were places to sit in public space besides in parks: free, public resting spots on every block for a coffee,...
6 tags
A Stroll Through Herald Square
Several years ago, New York pedestrianized Times Square. In 2009, Broadway was closed to traffic between 42nd and 47th streets as part of the DOT’s “Green Light for Midtown” pilot project. The plaza-ization of Times Square included the initial installation of chairs and tables and painting of the pavement, while IfUD Fellow Craig Dykers’ firm Snøhetta works on a more permanent re-design....
5 tags
Expanding Access to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge
The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, located at the mouth of upper New York Bay, connects Brooklyn and Staten Island and serves as a major link in the interstate highway system, providing the shortest route between the middle Atlantic states and Long Island. The earliest plan for a crossing at the narrows came in the form of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad’s 1888 proposal to build...
6 tags
Crossing the Gowanus: Rethinking the Canal and its...
The Gowanus Canal (aka the Lavender Lake) was once an industrial hub for the city, even serving as one of the primary transportation routes for the Brownstone used to construct much of Brooklyn’s iconic housing stock. Unfortunately, the canal was built without the lock systems that would have allowed flushing and the water quickly degenerated. Today the Gowanus is an infamously odiferous...
5 tags
Steinway Mansion: Uncovering History & Connecting...
Perched on a hill, invoking the feeling of an old country town, sits the historic Steinway Mansion of Astoria, Queens. Originally founded as a recreational and resort destination for Manhattan’s wealthy, Astoria has experienced significant change in subsequent years, but the Steinway Mansion remains as a relic of a forgotten age. The Steinway family, German immigrants who originally...
5 tags
Grand Concourse: Remembering the "Park Avenue of...
French-American engineer Louis Aloys Risse first conceived of the Grand Concourse in 1890, basing the design on the Champs-Élysées in Paris as the City Beautiful Movement swept the US. During the public crowdsourcing phase of By the City / For the City, Ace from Pelham Parkway called for “More Hotels in the Bronx. Why not make one of those beautiful old buildings on the Grand Concourse...
8 tags
Harlemites Call for Social Spaces
Harlem is well-known for its strong sense of community, but its physical landscape is divided by imposing features from towering housing projects to the elevated commuter rail line along Park Avenue. Many Harlemites submitted ideas to By the City / For the City for knitting the neighborhood more tightly together by creating public spaces geared toward building up the existing community and...
June 2011
32 posts
9 tags
Linear Parks: Emergent Opportunities For Green...
Due to the recent redevelopment of the High Line and Hudson River Parks, great attention and excitement is heating up around the idea of linear parks. These spaces are particularly interesting in that they often augment or re-use existing infrastructure of different scales and types, like railroad tracks, canals, natural waterways, highways, and arterial roads. This often has long-standing...
7 tags
Creating Connections, Exploring Culture: Staten...
Located at the northeastern tip of Staten Island, St. George is a community set upon hills and is home to a mix of art galleries, local businesses, historic architecture, and cultural attractions like the St. George Theater, the Staten Island Institute of the Arts and the Sciences, and the National Lighthouse Museum. On a typical weekday, 65,000 passengers utilize the Staten Island Ferry;...
5 tags
Westchester Square: A Cultural Microcosm
Italian, Pakistani, Irish, Vietnamese, Puerto Rican: no, these aren’t tonight’s dining options, but rather the ethnic traces that can be felt throughout the community of Westchester Square. Founded in 1654 by English settlers from Connecticut, the area grew with the arrival of the subway in the early twentieth century. Today, Westchester Square sits at the heart of the most...
8 tags
New York's Industrial Past: The Foundation for a...
Around every corner, under every bridge, and in your community, New York City’s industrial history can still be seen and felt. Many New Yorkers asked architects to develop more innovative, adaptive, functional strategies for reusing these old industrial spaces so they can match the social, ecological and economic climate of today.
The students at CUNY’s Spitzer School of...
7 tags
Social Equity: We're All in This Together [Part...
New Yorkers concerned with increasing Social Equity often spoke about increasing the richness of the public realm: bringing communities together more frequently and in a more concerted fashion, and creating more opportunities for sharing with their neighbors. The kinds of community spaces and what they wanted to share differed by borough.
BRONX: Residents of the Boogie Down want to see more safe...
7 tags
Social Equity: We're All in This Together [Part I]
We here at the Institute for Urban Design are big believers in the importance of creating a more Socially Equitable city, so we were extremely encouraged to see that it’s a goal shared by so many of our fellow New Yorkers! Here are some strong trends we saw in ideas submitted across the city.
PLACES FOR PEOPLE: The call for more human-scaled public spaces was clear and sustained throughout...
7 tags
Enjoyment: So Much to Do, So Little Time [Part II]
Exactly what New Yorkers are hoping to enjoy more of often depends on which borough they’re in. Here are some borough-specific trends focused on increasing Enjoyment of the cityscape.
MANHATTAN: If you’ve ever walked around Midtown on a business day, you probably won’t be surprised to hear that there were many ideas submitted for making that particular experience more enjoyable....
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Enjoyment: So Much to Do, So Little Time [Part I]
If they made nothing else clear through their suggestions to By the City / For the City, one thing New Yorkers communicated en masse was that they really value their city’s varied opportunities for Enjoyment. In fact, when we looked at how people explained their ideas, “enjoy” was far and away the most commonly-used verb. Some trends:
PARKS & REC: Green space is definitely...
8 tags
Connectivity: Let's Get Together [Part II]
Perhaps we privileged it by including “Wouldn’t it be great if there were an easier way to get from Queens to Brooklyn?” as one of our sample ideas, but New Yorkers really took to the idea of better-connecting the only two boroughs to share a landmass. You can read a full list of their ideas on that subject here, but as we were sifting through the results we noticed an...
6 tags
Connectivity: Let's Get Together [Part I]
The ideas that New Yorkers shared for increasing connectivity in their city generally fall into one of three groups: physical connectivity, and transportation-related connectivity, and social connectivity. Here are some of the most interesting ideas from those groups.
PHYSICAL: One Lower East Sider thinks it would be great if the public space along Allen Street were reconfigured and connected...
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Beauty: Making New York Easier to ❤ [Part II]
Especially given the current public debate on the merits and drawbacks of historic preservation, it was interesting to see that many New Yorkers equated historical architecture with Beauty. We noticed an especially-high level of interest in the preservation and re-use of historic structures in two boroughs: Queens and the Bronx.
QUEENS: In Astoria, Michael wished for someone to come up with...
6 tags
Beauty: Making New York Easier to ❤ [Part I]
When people talked about adding beauty to the city, they mostly thought on the local, neighborhood level. Here are a few trends in the ideas that people shared for beautifying their corners of the city.
INFRASTRUCTURE: Getting the most out of small, cramped spaces is a competitive sport in New York. That’s true not just of interiors, but extends to the public realm, as well. Many ...
6 tags
Accessibility: Opening Up The City [Part II]
Accessibility means different things depending on where you are: what one borough may have plenty of, another may lack completely. Here are a few trends that we noticed in how residents of three different boroughs thought about access.
QUEENS: It gets leafier as you get further out, but Queens residents still want more access to green space. Malba Gardener wants to see Francis Lewis Park,...
4 tags
Accessibility: Opening Up The City [Part I]
New Yorkers talked a lot about gaining access to places and things currently beyond their reach when they were sharing their ideas through By the City / For the City. Here are a few citywide trends:
WATER: New York City contains more than 600 miles of coastline, and people want access to more of it! Bronx Community Board 7 suggested the development of new public green space along the Bronx side...
The Question of Scale
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The most common scale selected by New Yorkers was Neighborhood, which was chosen for 56% of the 483 ideas shared. Citywide followed close behind with 54%, while only 28% of ideas were identified as Block-level issues. These were most commonly identified by the IfUD to be related to Streetscapes and Green Space, while Neighborhood and Citywide issues were...
Grab Bag: A delightful assortment of offbeat...
Wouldn’t it be great if…
Making Commuting Fun
There was a slide from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade to Brooklyn Bridge Park. [Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn]
A summer express train, painted like a clown, ran to Coney Island Amusement Park. [Coney Island, Brooklyn]
there were ziplines crossing the east river? [Greenpoint, Brooklyn]
people could be flung to different parts of the...
Rail Transit: New routes, extensions, and creative...
Wouldn’t it be great if…
Light Rail
the Triboro RX ran through at the moment, how about BRT or better yet, streetcars that travel through the same route of the Triboro RX. All subway lines (except G) would be connected! [Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens]
It would be easier to get across Brooklyn to get to JFK and southern Queens. [Bay Ridge, Brooklyn to JFK, Queens]
there were a bus...
Airport Connections: You can't get there from here
Wouldn’t it be great if…
there were a subway tunnel across the East River allowing the E train to run to JFK and add impetus to improve Atlantic Avenue corridor. [JFK]
you could take a fast, frequent express train directly from JFK to Manhattan like other major cities have? [JFK]
it would be easier to get across Brooklyn to get to JFK and southern Queens.[JFK]
an east-west...
Bicycles: Salvation of the city, or terror on two...
Wouldn’t it be great if…
Bike Share
the city implemented a bike share system. [Redhook, Brooklyn]
There were bike renting stations around the city so I wouldn’t have to bring one in from New Jersey! [Citywide]
NYC had a bike-sharing program like the Velib in Paris? And more safe bike parking lots? And office buildings had facilities to encourage employees to bike to work...
From A to B: Bridges, Buses, and Ferries
Wouldn’t it be great if…
Bridges
all of the pedestrian bridges in the Bronx were improved so that they were safer to use and not so closed off with blind corner. [Bronx]
The MTA ran a new line from Brooklyn over the Verrazano Bridge into Staten Island? [Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn]
the pedestrian access to the Brooklyn Bridge was highly visible. [Civic Center, Manhattan]
A...
Over & Under: Public spaces beyond the streets
Wouldn’t it be great if…
Below the Tracks
The passage along 138th Street under the Grand Concourse in the Bronx were open and inviting and colorful? [Mott Haven, Bronx]
highway underpasses had light installations-slash-pigeon repellers. [Cobble Hill, Brooklyn]
We could reclaim the underutilized spaces adjacent to the Franklin Ave Shuttle train? [Crown Heights, Brooklyn]
...
City as Incubator: Spaces for collaboration
Wouldn’t it be great if…
we built high-tech, multi-use, environmentally-instructive, flexibly-designed library-parks in our most impoverished neighborhoods. [South Bronx]
The city created a new public building combining spaces for design and the arts with environmental/green R&D? [Gowanus, Brooklyn]
the empty lot across the street became a usable space - perhaps for a new...
Walkability: Too much is never enough!
Wouldn’t it be great if…
Car-Free Zones
Macon Street was pedestrian (at least on weekends) [Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn]
they closed traffic to the access road on Eastern Parkway between Washington Ave and Underhill. [Prospect Heights, Brooklyn]
we could walk through all Manhattan without being disturbed by any vehicles and experience the city from different angles by going up and down...
Digital City: More pixels, less potholes
Wouldn’t it be great if…
we built high-tech, multi-use, environmentally-instructive, flexibly-designed library-parks in our most impoverished neighborhoods. [South Bronx]
we can understand how the virtual world works in order to create a better reality? The digital world is becoming today’s culture, connecting us in the global way. [Red Hook, Brooklyn]
Harlem had a free...
Preservation & Adaptive Re-Use: You can teach an...
Wouldn’t it be great if…
Preservation/Restoration
We had more Hotels in the Bronx? Why not make one of those beautiful old buildings on the Grand Concourse into a Hotel AND in its lobby, create a museum to the Concourse of old!!! [Fordham Heights, Bronx]
more people knew about Echo Park, and more tourists and visitors came to the neighborhood to experience it. [Mount Hope,...
Quality of Life: Stop, look, listen, and enjoy
Wouldn’t it be great if…
Noise
The city planted trees along the west side of Bay Ridge and Fort Hamilton along the Verazano Narrows. The wide bike lanes, benches, piers and walking paths are great, but there is absolutely no shade. Also, some sort of sound barrier would be nice to isolate the traffic noise. [Bay Ridge, Brooklyn]
there was a way to thoughtfully shield train noise...
Art in the City: Building an inclusive and...
Wouldn’t it be great if…
Street Art
people found new ways to add beautiful color to their neighborhoods! [South Bronx]
art could be freely exhibited? [Central Park, Manhattan]
there was GRAFITTI PARK where artists can go to tag their works on walls and spaces maintained by a staff. The works could be done on a rotating schedule that artist can sumbit their ideas to. [Harlem,...
Expressways: Who needs 'em anyway?
Wouldn’t it great if…
the Brooklyn Queens Expressway was demolished or buried in North Clinton Hill. [Clinton Hill, Brooklyn]
they just covered the BQE trench with a solid slab of concrete? No grass or anything expensive. Just put a lid on it. It would no longer be a neighborhood divider, and it would be much quieter. [Cobble Hill & Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn]
we greenroofed...
The Brooklyn-Queens Connection: A tale of two...
Wouldn’t it be great if…
there was a bike line on Metropolitan Av. [Williamsburg / Kew Gardens, Brookly]
It would be easier to get across Brooklyn to get to JFK and southern Queens. [East Flatbush, Queens]
the G Train connected with something useful in Queens, like all the trains a 1/2 mile away at Queens Plaza? Or ran up the N-W track and across the existing RR bridge to...
Multi-purpose Infrastructure: Killing two birds...
Wouldn’t it be great if…
General
The Gowanus expressway had art integrated on its base rather than that terrible green paint? [Gowanus, Brooklyn]
all the street corners with sink holes and permanent puddles from overloaded sewers and storm water runoff were redeveloped as rain gardens and bioswales. [Harlem, Manhattan]
The bike-paths did more? Like: Have pervious surfaces at...
East River Parks: Hidden in plain sight
Wouldn’t it be great if…
there were more restaurants along the waterfronts with views water and skyline. [Williamsburg, Brooklyn]
the East River Park were extended with landfill to the north side. [Alphabet City, Manhattan]
the FDR was buried into tunnels and the space above reclaimed as private spaces to fund the project and public spaces beyond that, linking the city to the...
Clean City: From the air we breathe to the trash...
Wouldn’t it be great if…
Pollution
neighborhoods can be more connected in Gowanus, Brooklyn by a green park/riverwalk w/ bike paths and pedestrian walkways that can also help prevent toxic water runoff into the polluted Gowanus Canal. [Gowanus, Brooklyn]
only small electric vehicles were allowed within small-scale, pedestrian-oriented, and historical districts of Manhattan and...
May 2011
4 posts
Navigation: Getting better at getting people from...
Wouldn’t it be great if…
Cityscape
maps of Manhattan included all of Manhattan? [Manhattan]
There were a citywide hierarcy of singage and street furniture. [Citywide]
there were small information kiosks throughout the city that could inform generally, but be there for emergency information, specifically. [Citywide]
you could walk on the street and have a touch screen map of...
2 tags
Vacant Spaces: Finding new uses for un-loved...
Wouldn’t it be great if…
Vacant Lots
NYC turned available spaces, from empty tree wells to vacant lots, into sustainable gardens of native trees and plants? Or provided approval and resources for community members to do so themselves?! [Clinton Hill, Brooklyn]
lighting can enliven and secure a vacant site throughout the different stages within its development cycle? [Crown...
17 tags
The Borough Breakdown
While yesterday’s post looked at categorical trends across the city, today we’ll dig a bit deeper to examine unique conditions in each of the five boroughs. Is green space on the top of the list for concrete jungle-residing Manhattanites? Are the good people of Brooklyn as achingly unorthodox as the blogosphere seems to portray them as? Read on to learn about how each borough stacks...
17 tags
By the City / For the City: By the Issues
Over the course of four weeks, New Yorkers shared 483 ideas (and counting) for improving their city through the Institute for Urban Design’s first-ever By the City / For the City crowdsourcing project. We were thrilled to see the ingenuity and thoughtfulness people brought to the question, and now it’s time for designers from around the world to respond to the challenge: We’re...
April 2011
2 posts
By the City / For the City
We have just launched the fist phase of our competition By the City / For the City! From April 11-30, we’re gathering up ideas: from improving local parks and streets all the way up to rethinking whole systems, like transit and trash disposal. You can explore, discuss, and debate everyone’s ideas on our website: http://www.urbandesignweek.org/by-the-city/
In May, we’ll rally...
