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Mariellé Anzelone

There are few places in Amer­ica where you can you lose your­self in a shaded for­est teem­ing with hun­dreds of diverse species, take a twenty-minute break to enjoy chicharos and empanadas at a Mex­i­can bodega, and then return to the wilder­ness to fin­ish your hike. That is exactly what we did on a Thurs­day after­noon last fall with urban ecol­o­gist Mariellé Anzelone.

Mariellé walked us through Inwood Hill Park at the north­ern tip of Man­hat­tan. Along the way we touched white wood aster, witch-hazel, and shade-tolerant species of gold­en­rod as she iden­ti­fied the plants. Inwood Hill Park is decid­edly urban – over­head, planes momen­tar­ily drowned out Mariellé’s expla­na­tion of earth­worms’ neg­a­tive impact on for­est soils and the sound of fall leaves crunch­ing under­foot, while trusses of the Henry Hud­son Bridge just became vis­i­ble through the shed­ding branches of oak trees. How­ever, after hik­ing ten min­utes into the woods, it really felt like a depar­ture from the city. This is a feel­ing that Mariellé is attempt­ing to bring to a wider pop­u­la­tion of New York­ers, a feel­ing she hopes will encour­age peo­ple to rethink the way we aim to ‘green’ NYC.

What exactly does con­ser­va­tion mean in an urban envi­ron­ment like New York City’s?

Peo­ple imag­ine that urban ecol­ogy is start­ing with a clean slate. They think nature must be “designed in” because no pre­ex­ist­ing part of a city’s land­scape still exists. That’s not true; one-eighth of New York City is com­prised of nat­ural areas. The issue is that nature is com­plex — the def­i­n­i­tion of “nat­ural” and the meth­ods for mea­sur­ing it are less than explicit. It’s much eas­ier to pro­tect things in situ than it is to restore or cre­ate nat­ural spaces from scratch.

Money is abun­dant for restora­tion and inter­ven­tion projects, for bring­ing land­scap­ing into urban sites. There are great “before and after” pic­tures. Peo­ple love the High Line, and I do as well. It’s nature in the city. But, it’s a gussied-up nature for peo­ple to imbibe and digest. It takes people’s atten­tion away from the nat­ural spaces. When a land­scape is designed, it is always dumbed down and sim­pli­fied nature — you get nowhere near the com­plex­ity of a nat­ural sys­tem in a built park.  It’s com­pletely dif­fer­ent from a genetic standpoint.

It’s much eas­ier to pro­tect nature than it is to re-create nat­ural spaces from scratch.

To many peo­ple, nature in NYC is usu­ally about build­ing more parks. For you, what is the dif­fer­ence between build­ing more parks and pro­tect­ing exist­ing nat­ural spaces?

It may not make a dif­fer­ence from an “admi­ra­tion stand­point,” but you don’t see this rich­ness of flora in con­trived land­scapes. I’m really pas­sion­ate about plant con­ser­va­tion and I want to know what we’re los­ing and what’s rare. To me, that’s inform­ing man­age­ment: How we are fail­ing these plants and how can we redress that?

See­ing cer­tain plants also speaks to some­thing. For exam­ple, see­ing that low bush blue­berry ear­lier told me that the soil is low pH and mostly undis­turbed. There are myc­or­rhizae that grow with blue­berry, which is this inti­mate fun­gal rela­tion­ship that they have along their roots and it helps them to uptake more nutri­ents from the soil.

And that level of com­plex­ity is what’s lack­ing in a man­i­cured park or green space?

Yes. A long-term, sus­tained, man­i­cured land­scape relies on con­stant human input. Soils are so com­plex. When you see a place being devel­oped and you see all that native top­soil that has evolved here over 20,000 years being removed… it’s heart­break­ing, if only to me.

 Other peo­ple may be sat­is­fied walk­ing through spaces like the High Line. The High Line is won­der­ful, but to not have sort of unknown places like Inwood Hill Park where we can dis­cover and explore would be really unfortunate.

Let’s say we lose these places that have been rel­a­tively untouched, we lose the com­plex­ity found in these places. What’s the impact?

Remem­ber the Red Admi­ral but­ter­fly that we saw while we were walk­ing around? It’s a migra­tory species, and pulses of them flock through here. The same with a lot of bird species.

Large nat­ural spaces pro­vide many dif­fer­ent lev­els of habi­tat for a vari­ety of species. Poi­son ivy, for exam­ple, is one of the first plants to turn bright red in the fall — the thought is that these plants have really valu­able fruit, and they want to adver­tise their fruit to the birds that are pass­ing en masse.

So that they will eat the berries and spread the seeds?

Exactly, and since birds can’t see the dark blue of the berries, but they can see red, it’s a way to adver­tise that there is some­thing of inter­est down here. So these high-fat berries for­tify the birds for their migra­tory flight, and since they dis­perse the berry seeds by eat­ing them, the plants also win. Who designs for that? When you lose spaces like this, you just lose all of that.

What do you do as an urban ecol­o­gist in New York City?

My work varies depend­ing on which projects I’m engaged in, and the time of year. I teach a class called “Sus­tain­able Gar­den­ing with Natives” at the New School. I’ve been writ­ing op-eds for the New York Times. I founded NYC Wild­flower Week, which I orga­nize every year. I also spent many years work­ing as a plant ecol­o­gist for the New York City Parks Department–most of my work there was in conservation.

I need to share my love for these things with other people —

Is the bat­tle for pro­tect­ing bio­di­ver­sity more of a bat­tle for preser­va­tion than it is for smarter design in green spaces?

We can do both simul­ta­ne­ously, and they feed into each other. But, while there’s not a lot of dis­cus­sion around preser­va­tion, there is a lot of talk about design. Design is sexy, and archi­tects are really excited and ready to jump on the band­wagon for design­ing green spaces. But the most basic level is sav­ing the huge tracts of nat­ural land that we have. PlaNYC, which is a won­der­ful doc­u­ment, iron­i­cally talks about bio­di­ver­sity and about plant­ing trees, but at the same time it is talk­ing about build­ing huge des­ti­na­tion parks in all the boroughs.

Like Freshkills Park on Staten Island? 

Freshkills is one of them, but there are places like Ocean Breeze, also in Staten Island, and Ridge­wood Reser­voir on the Queens/Brooklyn bor­der.  There are sig­nif­i­cant nat­ural areas there already that they want to pave over and make into recre­ational park facil­i­ties. To me, there is a sense of irony there. They are work­ing really hard to plant a mil­lion trees, which is a won­der­ful goal, but why aren’t we pre­serv­ing what we have?

What has to hap­pen to change the way we look at green space so that PlaNYC is talk­ing about con­ser­va­tion, bio­di­ver­sity, and con­tigu­ous nat­ural spaces instead of just recre­ational parks or street trees?

Writ­ing my piece on the Tor­rey moun­tain mint for the New York Times was so utterly dev­as­tat­ing for me, and after it was pub­lished I got a ton of peo­ple email­ing me say­ing, “Your arti­cle made me cry,” and I thought “…good.” It’s not to be mean, it’s that I want peo­ple to feel that dev­as­ta­tion so that maybe down the road they want to be vested in a local land­scape near them, too. In any case, at that point I real­ized I can’t pre­serve the things I love in a vacuum.

I need to share my love for these things with other peo­ple who are going to help me fight the fight. I started giv­ing talks at nature cen­ters around the city on plants–and it would always be about rare plants — rare plants of Marine Park, rare plants of Pel­ham Bay Park, etc, because no one cares about a plant unless it’s rare or a wild­flower. It’s sneaky but this is how you get peo­ple to care.

Once I left the Parks Depart­ment I started some­thing called NYC Wild­flower Week, which, quite hon­estly, is meant to build a con­stituency for these nat­ural areas. I have no hid­den agenda — I want an army of plant peo­ple like me, so that next time some­one wants to develop a salt marsh, there are 100 peo­ple hold­ing signs that say “LEAVE MY SPARTINA ALONE” and “SALT MARSH GRASS FOR EVERYONE.” That would be like a dream.

I want peo­ple to come with me — it’s lonely out there by myself. I try to show peo­ple places that have these won­der­ful plants and make them love them. And it’s a basic edu­ca­tion, but my hope is that over time it gets peo­ple to care to the point where they are also vested in this future, and speak­ing for the trees.

Now, if peo­ple are speak­ing for the trees it’s for street trees. If I hear one more per­son talk about street trees as an urban for­est, I’m going to lose my mind. I mean, street trees are great, but if that’s an urban for­est then what is Inwood Hill Park?

marielle_flower-webSome­thing that advo­cates in all walks of envi­ron­men­tal­ism face is that the gen­eral pub­lic becomes fix­ated on, or inter­ested in, some ele­ment of the move­ment and it takes all of their atten­tion from what might be more sig­nif­i­cant. Is there a solution?

It’s about mak­ing informed choices. For exam­ple, the east­ern ridge of Inwood Hill is pretty eco­log­i­cally intact but the west­ern ridge has a his­tory of devel­op­ment, so it has a lot more inva­sives and exotics. If you’re going to put bike paths through Inwood Hill Park, that’s the place to do it.

Bik­ers may not know the dif­fer­ence between an inva­sive like mug­wort and a native aster, so put them through areas that are already degraded.  But choices like that take time and sen­si­tiv­ity, and these choices often come down to eco­log­i­cal sense or polit­i­cal expediency.

For a lot of peo­ple, hav­ing a place to go moun­tain bik­ing in nature is part of hav­ing a liv­able city. What makes a city liv­able to you?

Oh, boy… Well, I love the idea being able to walk places; I walk around a lot with my kids. We live really close to Prospect Park, and we love that. To me, Prospect Park is not the place that I’m going to go and get really excited, or weepy, about plants that I see. But it’s good enough and it’s good enough for my kids. There’s a play­ground, they can, you know, get their ya-yas out. And hav­ing that kind of blend of recre­ation and nature is really good. Hon­estly, that is going to sat­isfy most peo­ple in terms of being out in nature. The ques­tion then is why do we need to be delv­ing into nat­ural areas for moun­tain bike trails?

What do you say to peo­ple who agree with PlaNYC that we should be build­ing parks for peo­ple to play in, even if it means paving over a more nat­ural space to make room?

Why can’t we have des­ti­na­tion around nature instead of ten­nis courts or other recre­ational facil­i­ties? There is a lack of vision and lack of under­stand­ing about what these exist­ing spaces are doing for us. That under­stand­ing isn’t rep­re­sented when deci­sions are being made, and I think that is huge prob­lem. The last time I saw the pro­posal for Ocean Breeze Park, they knew that there are at least twelve, state-listed, rare plant species grow­ing wild there that haven’t been taken into account. That’s cause for concern.

At City Atlas, we’re also pas­sion­ate about the issues you are fight­ing for, but we’re not ecol­o­gists — we aren’t trained in the details of species and their habi­tats.  What can peo­ple like us do?

Doing this kind of thing–talking to ecologists–is really impor­tant in get­ting that mes­sage out. Another thing is bring­ing peo­ple who make deci­sions, who design spaces, and work in green build­ing together with peo­ple who know about ecology.

marielle_trees

Design­ers and archi­tects do have a lot of input on how these spaces ulti­mately end up.

They do, and ecol­o­gists really don’t.

This might get me in trou­ble, but I’ve met with a lot of design­ers and mostly I’ve found them to be really con­fi­dent in their lack of deep knowl­edge. They say, “Oh, we don’t need to work with ecol­o­gists because we have in– house exper­tise.” And I’m think­ing: On local native flora? I promise that you don’t.  It’s just a fact — I mean, how do you define nativ­ity? And how do you under­stand what’s rare and what isn’t? 

Design­ers have so much power and there’s a lot of pat­ting on your own back, as in, “Wasn’t I bril­liant to think of adding native grasses to the green­roof instead of sedum?” Kudos for try­ing to think out­side the box, but there’s this really expan­sive con­ver­sa­tion going on in the ecol­ogy world and you’re not hear­ing it.

There could be a really rich dia­logue between those two worlds. How do you make these peo­ple lis­ten to some­one who has this knowl­edge? That’s why I keep cir­cling back to pol­icy, which I think is so impor­tant. I mean, I can’t make these peo­ple do it, but I’m like, “by God, someone’s got to.”

About Mariellé Anzelone

As a botanist and urban con­ser­va­tion biol­o­gist, Mariellé Anzelone pre­serves and restores the floris­tic diver­sity of the five bor­oughs. Her cur­rent research includes the NYC Native Plant Con­ser­va­tion Ini­tia­tive in part­ner­ship with the Brook­lyn Botanic Gar­den and NYC Depart­ment of Parks & Recre­ation; she also lec­tures exten­sively in the NYC-metro area. Her gar­den and land­scape design work is inspired by the beauty of regional plant communities.

She is a fre­quent con­trib­u­tor to The New York Times, includ­ing writ­ing a botan­i­cal op-art piece on the extinct flora of NYC, “When New York City Bloomed,” and a 14-week series, Autumn Unfolds, report­ing on the changes in a for­est in upper Man­hat­tan. Anzelone is the exec­u­tive direc­tor of  NYC Wild­flower Week, which will hold over 30 events across all of the five bor­oughs, from May 11 – 19, 2013.

A bill that Anzelone helped develop, to sup­port native bio­di­ver­sity in pub­lic land­scapes, was approved by the City Coun­cil and signed into law by Mayor Bloomberg in Feb­ru­ary, 2013.

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Pho­tographs by Mau­reen Drennan

Inset photo, top: blue stemmed gold­en­rod (Sol­idago caesia)

Inset photo, bot­tom: red maple (Acer rubrum)

 

New Yorkers outpace Sandy in tree count

Woman takes tree homeTrees are going up faster than storms are tak­ing them down in New York City.

Dozens of peo­ple lined up in a park­ing lot between some indus­trial build­ings and the Gowanus Canal in Brook­lyn on a recent sunny Sat­ur­day morn­ing to pick up stick-figure-sized Red­bud trees about four feet tall. More than half of the 100 trees ready to go were picked up within the first 45 min­utes of a two-hour stretch, said Sophie Plitt, Forestry Coor­di­na­tor of New York Restora­tion Project.

About once a week in the spring and fall, the NYRP – in con­junc­tion with the city – goes to dif­fer­ent neigh­bor­hoods and gives away trees for free. (See our cov­er­age of this year’s free tree announce­ment for upcom­ing give­away dates and locations.)

Four treesThe last three tree give­aways of 2012 were can­celed after Hur­ri­cane Sandy. The storm knocked down more than 10,000 trees, said Tara Kier­nan, a spokes­woman for the Parks Depart­ment. That’s fif­teen times as many tree casu­al­ties than after 2011’s Hur­ri­cane Irene, which took down about 650 trees.

But since 2007, about 662,000 trees have taken root, or an aver­age of more than 100,000 a year. This growth is a result of the “Mil­lion­TreesNYC” pro­gram, a PlaNYC part­ner­ship between the city and NYRP.

“All in all, I would not say [Sandy] is a sig­nif­i­cant set-back for Mil­lion­TreesNYC,” said Mike Mitchell, NYRP com­mu­nity ini­tia­tives manager.

“Tree loss was fac­tored in at the begin­ning,” he noted, “whether it be from storms, mechan­i­cal dam­age, soils salted from peo­ple clear­ing snow from their side­walk, peo­ple pour­ing con­crete or lay­ing bricks around the base of a tree, etc.”

The new replace the casu­al­ties. Older trees are more vul­ner­a­ble to storms because they have more leafs, said Mitchell. “Because young trees have less canopy,” he added, “their branches are more sup­ple, and they have sig­nif­i­cantly less leaf sur­face area to be blown like a sail.”

How­ever, accord­ing to Kier­nan, the lit­tle guys have more than just youth going for them. “Thanks to new plant­ing meth­ods we’ve imple­mented and care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion given to species selec­tion and plant­ing loca­tions,” she said, “our newly planted trees have been less sus­cep­ti­ble to storm damage.”

In 2011, the New York Times citied stud­ies that said 7 to 11 per­cent of newly planted trees die within two years. How­ever, almost all the trees felled by storms were later reported by the New York Observer to be old trees that pre­date the Mil­lion­TreesNYC program.

Prior to Mil­lion­TreesNYC, the city planted 10,000 trees every year–about the same num­ber knocked by Sandy.

The city’s win­ning bat­tle to add to the esti­mated five mil­lion trees across the bor­oughs can be attrib­uted to the thou­sands of New York­ers who line up to pick up the bark and do the plant­ing inde­pen­dently at home. Only New York City res­i­dents are allowed to take the trees and the rules limit each house­hold to a tree, Plitt said.

The bor­oughs with the high­est turnouts at tree give­aways are Queens, Brook­lyn and Staten Island, said Mitchell. “A lot of the time this has to do with the fact there are fewer house­holds with green space in the areas we do tree give­aways in the Bronx and Man­hat­tan,” he noted.

The focus of Mil­lion­TreesNYC, which started with a tree planted on Teller Avenue in the Bronx,  has been in neigh­bor­hoods with a scarcity of trees. The Parks Depart­ment focuses on plant­ing trees in pub­lic spaces such as side­walks and parks.

From the NYRP site in Gowanus, Forestry Coor­di­na­tor Sophie Plitt speaks about East­ern Red­buds and the expe­ri­ence of giv­ing trees:

Pho­tos and video: Shan­non Ayala

A new word for NYC: bioswales

In the after­math of Hur­ri­cane Sandy the issue of New York’s vul­ner­a­bil­ity to flood­ing has stepped to the fore­front of media con­cerns. And rightly so. With a moun­tain of sci­en­tific data indi­cat­ing the future holds increased threats from global warm­ing, a coastal city like New York can ill afford to ignore the prob­lem of flood­ing. But while the dra­matic scenes of storm surges and the wreck­age left in their wake are what stay in people’s minds, New York has long dealt with a less con­spic­u­ous flood­ing prob­lem brought on by annual rainfall.

In the nat­ural world soil plays a vital role in stormwa­ter reten­tion. One of the prob­lems fac­ing a city as heav­ily devel­oped as New York is that it is almost com­pletely paved over so there is no top­soil to pro­vide stormwa­ter reten­tion and rain­wa­ter sim­ply runs off the sur­face asphalt into the storm drains. When those drains are filled to capac­ity dur­ing heavy rains not only does the water pool in low lying areas, but it also floods the sewer sys­tem (to which the storm water sys­tem is con­nected in what is called a Com­bined Sewer Over­flow sys­tem, or CSO) which then over­flows into our rivers and streams.
Bioswale Model

The city has been dili­gently work­ing on an incon­spic­u­ous and cost-effective solu­tion first pro­posed in the PlaNYC doc­u­ment of 2007 to use green infra­struc­ture to com­bat this prob­lem. As the name implies, green infra­struc­ture uti­lizes the nat­ural prop­er­ties of plants and soil to retain water so that it doesn’t over­tax the storm sys­tem. New York receives about 44 inches of rain a year, and as a con­se­quence of changes in global weather pat­terns noted above, rather than being spaced out evenly, those 44 inches are start­ing to come in punc­tu­ated peri­ods of more extreme weather. This is not only worse for the storm sys­tem but also for plants as tem­per­ate weather shifts to extremes of flood and drought, which is always harder on the envi­ron­ment. The Green Infra­struc­ture ini­tia­tive was cre­ated to fig­ure out a way to retain at least 10% of this runoff in order to reduce flood­ing and pol­lu­tion in spe­cific areas of the city so as to meet fed­eral water qual­ity stan­dards in prob­lem areas like Jamaica Bay and the infa­mous Gowanus Canal, to name a few. And the way it accom­plishes this is pri­mar­ily through the use of bioswales and greenstreets.

Bioswale DEP
Think of a bioswale as a large planter buried in the street. It acts as a small cis­tern, strate­gi­cally placed to fol­low the street grade to max­i­mize its effec­tive­ness, catch­ing rain­wa­ter as it runs from an area of high ele­va­tion to low ele­va­tion. The soil in the bioswale soaks up the water like a sponge where it is cap­tured, stored, and released in a con­trolled man­ner through infil­tra­tion into the sur­round­ing soil, evap­o­ra­tion, and evap­o­tran­spi­ra­tion (a com­bi­na­tion of evap­o­ra­tion and being used by the veg­e­ta­tion).
Bioswale

An impor­tant aspect of the bioswales is that they aren’t designed to be sim­ply func­tion as storm water reten­tion. They are active microen­vi­ron­ments for the veg­e­ta­tion that gets planted there. Some of these plants are cho­sen mainly for their har­di­ness or resis­tance to pol­lu­tion and flood­ing, but many are quite beau­ti­ful. Con­se­quently the neigh­bor­hoods in which they are built will see an increase in prop­erty val­ues and hab­it­abil­ity due both the func­tional and aes­thetic value of the bioswales. They pro­vide ben­e­fits in other ways as well by adding shade from the trees as well as cool­ing the area in the sum­mer heat through evap­o­tran­spi­ra­tion. In addi­tion, the green infra­struc­ture ini­tia­tive is actu­ally work­ing in con­junc­tion with the Mil­lion Tree ini­tia­tive, so wher­ever a bioswale is slated to be built it will include a tree.
Dur­ing the plan­ning stages a neigh­bor­hood will typ­i­cally be sited for well over a hun­dred bioswales, but var­i­ous zon­ing restric­tions such as prox­im­ity to stop signs, park­ing meters, bus stops, fire hydrants, catch basins, exist­ing trees, as well as sur­vey­ing results and soil sam­ples, and will typ­i­cally winow this num­ber down by about 60 to 75 per­cent. That’s still a lot of bioswales; enough to have a defin­i­tive impact on water reten­tion as well as the beau­ti­fi­ca­tion of the neigh­bor­hood. Each bioswale can cap­ture about 250 cubic feet of water per rain event.

The other major green infra­struc­ture pro­gram is green­streets. Whereas bioswales are rel­a­tively small, about 20×5 ft (typ­i­cally twice as big as cur­rent tree planters) green­streets are con­sid­er­ably larger aver­ag­ing about 2,000 square feet. (One green­street cap­tured 25,000 gal­lons of water dur­ing hur­ri­cane Irene). Bioswales are also con­structed on side­walk space, whereas green­streets are con­structed in under­uti­lized street space. Green­streets serve the same pur­pose as bioswales, only on a larger scale and they are also equipped with sci­en­tific mon­i­tor­ing equip­ment to mea­sure things like rain­fall, tem­per­a­ture, evap­o­tran­spi­ra­tion, wind­speed, pol­lu­tion, etc, all in an effort to con­tin­u­ally improve the effec­tive­ness of the design of green infra­struc­ture through con­tin­ual mon­i­tor­ing and feedback.

The Green Infra­struc­ture Unit of the Parks Depart­ment also works with local peo­ple to get a bet­ter idea of what they want and how best to serve the neighborhood’s needs. For pri­vate prop­erty own­ers it’s pos­si­ble to apply for a grant to install green infra­struc­ture on your prop­erty, and the city also has an adopt a tree pro­gram where any­one can become a cer­ti­fied tree pruner tak­ing care of your own swale. The hope is that by encour­ag­ing such civic par­tic­i­pa­tion the ben­e­fits of the pro­gram will reach a wider audi­ence and it’s also been shown that trees that have been adopted live longer and are health­ier.
Bioswale construction

So where is this green infra­struc­ture? Well there’s a chance you’ve seen the bioswales already but just didn’t notice them because on the sur­face they tend to look a lot like the street trees we’re all so used, only larger. And while they cer­tainly beau­tify the neigh­bor­hood, they are designed to do so incon­spic­u­ously and unob­stru­sively. But don’t think these are just holes in the ground filled with dirt. From the stones that fil­ter sed­i­ments to the soil bac­te­ria that can actu­ally break down hydro­car­bon pol­lu­tants and ren­der them inert, the exter­nal rus­tic sim­plic­ity of the design belies a com­pli­cated and highly engi­neered sys­tem of hydro­log­i­cal engi­neer­ing, land­scap­ing, and nat­ural water fil­tra­tion that has a defin­i­tive envi­ron­men­tal impact while sav­ing the city hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars in mas­sive, unsightly, and noisy infra­struc­ture projects. As the pro­gram devel­ops, new solu­tions to unique prob­lems are always being imple­mented and the green infra­struc­ture itself is con­stantly evolv­ing to become more effi­cient, more beau­ti­ful, and more cost-effective.
IMAG0062_opt

For a more in-depth look at this topic check out a lec­ture given by Nette Comp­ton, Direc­tor of the Green Infra­struc­ture Unit.

Pho­tos: NYC Parks

Claire Weisz

Claire Weisz is a found­ing part­ner of WXY Archi­tec­ture + Urban Design, an award-winning, multi-disciplinary prac­tice known for the inno­v­a­tive design of build­ings, civic infra­struc­ture, and pub­lic open space around New York City.  

We first inter­viewed her weeks before Hur­ri­cane Sandy struck New York, but we begin with a follow-up con­ver­sa­tion not long after the storm passed.

WeiszPortrait

Your recent work for New York includes many projects that fell in the direct path of Hur­ri­cane Sandy: newly built Trans­mit­ter Park in Green­point, pub­lic build­ings for the beach at Far Rock­away, pub­lic archi­tec­ture in Bat­tery Park that flooded at the tip of Man­hat­tan, and on top of that, you’re now work­ing on the East River Blue­way, again at the water’s edge. Tell us about Sandy’s effect on your work.

The parks per­formed well, and they helped the water­front absorb the impact from the storm surge. The parks have sur­vived in great mea­sure the salt water in the Bat­tery and Green­point and the sand in Far Rock­away. This is tak­ing into con­sid­er­a­tion that they came back within three weeks of the storm with the help of many vol­un­teers and staff, who devoted hours to clean up those areas.

It is the elec­tri­cal and mechan­i­cal infra­struc­ture that didn’t sur­vive the storm surge, and now the city and state are hav­ing to do a great deal to repair and re-install dam­aged equip­ment. Hard hit were the offices of many of our pub­lic and not-for-profit clients – the Bat­tery whose office and archives were dev­as­tated, Jill Weber and her team in the Rock­aways whose offices were severely dam­aged. Many agen­cies have staff who also have dam­aged homes.

Did the storm change the way you think about the city’s water­front? Or might design for the water­front, going forward?

Yes. It gave us a direct under­stand­ing of 100-year, and 500-year, flood lines. This was a real­ity check in time, space, and effect. Now I will never push to have util­ity infra­struc­ture within reach of even a 500 year line. But like other cat­a­strophic events it is impor­tant to not for­get, but to absorb and make a part of all the design deci­sions one has going for­ward. Espe­cially when mak­ing the hard deci­sion of what to choose to do first.

As a designer of pub­lic space, if you were to boil down your reac­tions to the event, and came up with one take-away mes­sage for peo­ple to think about, what would it be? What would you like to see the city, and the coun­try, do going for­ward? Are there adap­tive meth­ods or infra­struc­ture would you like to see put into accel­er­ated use?

Pri­or­i­tize the envi­ron­ment by invest­ing in the resiliency of cities and their res­i­dents, and this includes not just New York, but all impor­tant water­front cities.

As a coun­try we have to real­ize that the best way to save the planet is to sup­port the fact that our cities all over the coun­try — from Detroit to New Orleans — present the best oppor­tu­nity for low­er­ing our car­bon foot­print and are crit­i­cal play­ers in safe­guard­ing our rural spaces and agri­cul­tural lands.

We need to make cities — and peo­ple who live and work in cities — a national pri­or­ity, and invest in inno­va­tions in social and civic infra­struc­ture like pub­lic hous­ing and trans­porta­tion and all types of pub­lic open spaces on and near the water­front. This will be the best invest­ment we can make in light of the unpre­dictabil­ity of cli­mate change. It was amaz­ing how grate­ful peo­ple were that the 2011 revival of East River ferry ser­vice was there to fill in when the sub­ways weren’t run­ning yet.

Do you think the city should build sea gates?

I hope that we will inno­vate in many areas and this might include sea gates. It is going to test the city and state’s abil­i­ties to har­ness a coor­di­nated effort to do all types of envi­ron­men­tal work that is not on the table today, because of per­mit­ting and cur­rent reg­u­la­tions. New York City in all the five bor­oughs needs to raise the level of many of the water­front lands for storm pro­tec­tion and raise crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture in our pub­lic hous­ing, hos­pi­tals, sewage treat­ment and util­ity buildings.

We need to put back and increase the dunes, invest in cogen­er­a­tion and a dis­bursed power and data net­work, and even build new sea gates, salt marshes, planted berms and other ini­tia­tives. This increases the local exper­tise with ris­ing sea lev­els; engi­neers, archi­tects and ecol­o­gists might come up with a range of mea­sures that even the Dutch haven’t tried yet. As impor­tant as sea gates might also be state-of-the-art local energy gen­er­a­tion and data hubs.

Our first inter­view with Claire Weisz took place weeks before Hur­ri­cane Sandy struck New York. That por­tion follows:

WeiszRockaway1

Can you tell us about some of the cur­rent projects you’re work­ing on in the city, like the Rock­away project?

The Rock­away project is the archi­tec­tural piece of a mas­ter plan for a very unusual park. It was basi­cally a lit­tle tiny park attached to a very large park­ing lot that was really part of the dunes and was used for dump­ing, from Beach 9th Street to Beach 30th Street.

When you say it was used for dumping…

Peo­ple thought it was derelict land and they’d leave things there. The Rock­aways is so chal­lenged envi­ron­men­tally from threats of storms and also because it’s such a mix of high poverty areas, rel­a­tive trans­porta­tion iso­la­tion, and beau­ti­ful envi­ron­ment. It’s become an afford­able place for peo­ple to move, but it also has real eco­nomic chal­lenges and it doesn’t have all of the ser­vices and ameni­ties. So one of the tar­get parks that the Bloomberg admin­is­tra­tion focused on was to cre­ate a real amenity out there. So, every­one wanted a pool, but they got instead lots of water play, a skate­board park, more play­grounds, a big lawn for con­certs, a foot­ball field.

The idea is that you have a func­tional thing, the main­te­nance office, a com­fort sta­tion, but then you have this space and there’s kind of a dune park over here.

Attached to a com­fort sta­tion is an open air class­room or com­mu­nity meet­ing space — some­thing that can be a shade struc­ture when noth­ing is hap­pen­ing, but that also becomes the beach pavil­ion shared by everyone.

Was the intent to ser­vice mainly just that com­mu­nity? Or to allow other peo­ple from other com­mu­ni­ties to use it as well?

The intent was to actu­ally do some­thing sim­i­lar to what hap­pened in Bat­tery Park City. They cre­ated the best play­ground around and every­one from the whole city showed up there, which is not sur­pris­ing. That was a sim­i­lar goal in the Rock­aways. To open up the neigh­bor­hood. And it’s already hap­pened appar­ently. Peo­ple are show­ing up at the skate park [from all over].

Tell us about another project you’re work­ing on.

Another project — also a water­front park — is called Trans­mit­ter Park. It’s part of the Green­point mas­ter plan, and it ties together…have you seen the zip­per benches?

Down at the Staten Island ferry terminal?

Yes. We were doing the mas­ter plan for the park, and try­ing to fig­ure out the urban design and zon­ing issues of mak­ing peo­ple feel like the esplanade was going to be pub­lic. We started to explore this idea of a bench that then turned and took you somewhere.

Then we real­ized that that idea of the benches had a lot to do with some of the things we felt urban design needed to do. One is encom­pass­ing an envi­ron­men­tal idea of pub­lic — what they shared, what things, like trees, need to be pro­tected, and how to occupy space and make really good relationships.

Out of that mas­ter plan we’re doing one piece of [Trans­mit­ter Park] as a park with Dar Walkovitch of A-com, the land­scape archi­tects. And we’ve designed the pier and you’ll see all of the rail­ing, and the benches, and this pretty inter­est­ing pier. Only half of it’s being built. It’s actu­ally a branch­ing idea. So it’s an idea of sav­ing money actu­ally to do piers, where you only put the pile foun­da­tions, the piers, at what we call pods, and then you have these lit­tle bridges that con­nect the pods.

 And that’s just phase one?

Well, already, you’ll go down if you take the ferry, already pieces of it are being built,  and as each devel­oper devel­ops prop­erty parts of the esplanade will be built. And Bush­wick Inlet Park is also part of that mas­ter plan.

And what else is on the docket for the mas­ter plan? How far into the future does the plan reach?

The whole thing is ongo­ing and it’s hap­pen­ing as we speak. It’s really inter­est­ing to see that pub­lic realm being built one piece at a time. And I have to say, on Trans­mit­ter Park, I went there the other week and there’s this fan­tas­tic new lit­tle cof­fee shop in a place that was a dead end street.

It must be sat­is­fy­ing to see these spaces being occupied.

Com­pletely sat­is­fy­ing to see… peo­ple have all these ideas. What’s also fun about Trans­mit­ter Park is it’s a site for the Nuit Blanche fes­ti­val, so that’ll be out there.

The other big project that we have under con­struc­tion is the san­i­ta­tion garage and salt shed on Spring Street, and that’s also worth talk­ing about.  That’s a big indus­trial, city project to house three garage units, main­tain vehi­cles, store salt, refuel garbage trucks, house san­i­ta­tion per­son­nel. And you can see the steel going up.

So what kind of things are you think­ing of for the san­i­ta­tion garage?

Well the san­i­ta­tion garage is designed and it’s now under con­struc­tion and really that was devel­oped kind of twofold. How to do a beau­ti­ful, but yet, not aggres­sive build­ing; a build­ing that was very calm and could feel like a good neigh­bor. But the excit­ing thing about it is that all the guts of it are kind of shielded by lou­vers which are kind of com­posed to make sub­tle dif­fer­ences on the West side and on the South side.

Is that to dis­guise the build­ing from the rest of the neighborhood?

In a way. In a way it’s to not say in super graph­ics, “here’s a big garage here” towards the neigh­bor­hood, but towards the West Side High­way it’s very appar­ent. But the idea is to not make it look like an office build­ing — to actu­ally make it look like the piece of indus­trial civic archi­tec­ture that it is. [But] there won’t be any pub­lic access to it if you’re not a san­i­ta­tion worker.

We’re try­ing to really enhance the indus­trial qual­ity of it and make peo­ple want to go in, and we hope there will be tours actu­ally, of the trucks and every­thing because there’s a lot of poten­tial for that. And to be able to have kids really access and see how big these machines are, what it takes to kind of clean them. So when they see a garbage truck going down the street pick­ing up recy­cling they’ll have a whole new appre­ci­a­tion for it.

What’s your background?

I grew up in Canada, and I went to the Uni­ver­sity of Toronto for archi­tec­ture. Got my pro­fes­sional degree there. Then, the econ­omy was ter­ri­ble — so basi­cally, on a lark, I decided to go to Los Ange­les. Los Ange­les at that point was an inter­est­ing place to be as an archi­tect. Frank Gehry had just fin­ished his lit­tle house, there was all sorts of dia­logue about down­town LA, and peo­ple were look­ing at city halls as community.

I felt very lucky; I worked for archi­tect Charles Moore at the Urban Inno­va­tions Group and really got inter­ested in the idea of how design and com­mu­ni­ties and kind of new things happen.

So that’s always been a real inter­est, but very much as an archi­tect. I would say at a core I am inter­ested in form, space, light and inhab­it­abil­ity, I’ll call it. I’m inter­ested in archi­tec­ture being the kind of ‘art of people.’

I went back to school at Yale and that’s where I met Mark Yoes, who is my cur­rent part­ner. After I grad­u­ated I worked for Agrest and Gan­del­sonas, who are very inter­ested in…I’ll call it ‘acupunc­ture plan­ning.’ The idea that you kind of can read a city and do cer­tain things at cer­tain points that will change the city more. They’re very anti-master plan. I was very com­pelled by that, so I worked for them. 

What do you think New York needs more of? Just more green spaces, or some­thing com­pletely different?

I think what New York always needs more of is pas­sion­ate, vision­ary sup­port­ers, and essen­tially clients for design, like Friends of the High Line, like Robby Ham­mond, Joshua David, and Rory Price at the Bat­tery, and Betsy Bar­low Rogers.

There are younger peo­ple who get ideas in Jamaica, in Far Rock­away, and see some­thing and they want it to be bet­ter than any­thing in the neigh­bor­hood — whether it’s bet­ter food, bet­ter seat­ing, bet­ter shade, bet­ter wi-fi — on some level I think that’s what’s really fun about New York. There exists an engage­ment in expec­ta­tion, and that’s really what we need more of.

There are so many tal­ented peo­ple who have ideas about how to make things and do things. The other piece is sup­port­ing local tal­ent in the indus­try — peo­ple who make clothes and peo­ple who make rail­ings — and try­ing to find a way to cre­ate afford­able spaces so that peo­ple can make new things.

So there’s no real fixed idea in your head of what New York should be — it’s just sort of a never-ending poten­tial of what could happen?

To me it’s really about the dynamic — this dynamic of say­ing, mak­ing a liv­ing and mak­ing money and doing well — that ambi­tion to cre­ate a busi­ness that’s suc­cess­ful is fan­tas­tic. But, cou­pled with that, we want it to be the BEST inte­rior restau­rant, we want it to be the best… those two things work­ing together, not just one or the other. I think it’s that. Then you get the unexpected.

___

More recent design work from WXY includes a pop­u­lar plan for the devel­op­ment of Pier 40 on the Lower West Side of Man­hat­tan, as shown in this video:


And a plan for the rede­vel­op­ment of the blocks around Grand Cen­tral Ter­mi­nal, as part of the Munic­i­pal Art Society’s new report on the future of East Mid­town:

 

About:

Claire Weisz founded WXY Archi­tec­ture + Urban Design and has focused on cre­at­ing inno­v­a­tive approaches to pub­lic space, struc­tures and cities. She co-founded with Andrea Wood­ner The Design Trust for Pub­lic Space and was its co-executive direc­tor. Claire is cur­rently on fac­ulty at New York University’s Wag­ner School of Pub­lic Ser­vice and a vis­it­ing critic at the Uni­ver­sity of Toronto, and she has also taught and lec­tured at Yale Uni­ver­sity, Par­sons’ Grad­u­ate Pro­gram in the School of Con­structed Envi­ron­ments, Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity, NJIT and The Pratt Insti­tute. She has served on numer­ous design award and com­pe­ti­tion juries and was co-editor of AD magazine’s “Extreme Sites: Green­ing the Brown­field” issue. Fre­quently cited in the media and pro­fes­sional cir­cles, Claire is a reg­is­tered archi­tect in Cal­i­for­nia, New York and New Jersey.

Por­tait of Claire Weisz by Jes­sica Bruah; all other images cour­tesy: WXY

Emerald ash borer comes to New York State

WhiteAshEAB

An insect that is sus­pected of arriv­ing in the United States on a ship­ment of East Asian lum­ber in 2002, the emer­ald ash borer has now made its home across the Amer­i­can Rust Belt, and has expanded to New York State. These glassy-eyed invaders have already forced a fed­eral quar­an­tine from Iowa to west­ern New York and are now mak­ing their way down New York Thruway 87, hav­ing been iden­ti­fied through­out the Hud­son Val­ley in Albany, Greene, Ulster and Orange coun­ties. This month, the New York Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Con­ser­va­tion announced its lat­est expan­sion of the quar­an­tine adding all or part of 22 coun­ties rang­ing from the South­ern Tier to the east­ern state bor­der. This means no unprocessed wood can be trans­ported across state bor­ders. For the pub­lic, this refers par­tic­u­larly to fire­wood which can har­bor insect lar­vae. So far, this will exclude Rock­land and Westch­ester County, as well as New York City, where the bee­tles have not yet colonized.

These tree-eaters have already amassed sig­nif­i­cant dam­age in the mid­west, capa­ble of con­sum­ing forests of ash in a span of five years. Cur­rently, there are thir­teen states either entirely or par­tially quar­an­tined under the fed­eral order. New York’s forested areas include 900 mil­lion ash trees, which com­prise approx­i­mately 10% of New York City’s 5 mil­lion trees. In a worst case sce­nario, los­ing the ash would have quite an envi­ron­men­tal impact. New York’s urban for­est takes in some 1,350,000 tons of car­bon annu­ally, more than any other North Amer­i­can city, and sav­ing the city an esti­mated $8 mil­lion in pol­lu­tion reme­di­a­tion spending.

The issue is made more per­ti­nent by their rapid spread and impres­sive, if not wor­ri­some repro­duc­tion rates. In their short two month lifes­pan, a female emer­ald ash borer can pro­duce 100 eggs, of which half are female. This means after 10 years, a sin­gle female will have 50 tril­lion descen­dents look­ing for that near­est ash tree. Detect­ing the half inch, flu­o­res­cent green insects and infected trees is dif­fi­cult and often, ash trees won’t bear symp­toms until it’s too late.

Look no fur­ther than the base­ball dia­mond to see the effects out­side of a for­est con­text. Louisville Slug­ger has long pro­vided America’s base­ball heroes with white ash bats, pre­ferred for their light, and small porous nature. As of now, the ash borer has closed in on within one hun­dred miles of the company’s source for­est in west­ern Penn­syl­va­nia, threat­en­ing to endan­ger the ash base­ball bat. Fur­ni­ture mak­ers are like­wise wor­ried. Forest-related man­u­fac­tur­ing adds approx­i­mately $9 bil­lion to the economy.

To reduce unnec­es­sary tree dam­age, the DEC urges cit­i­zens to learn how to prop­erly iden­tify the emer­ald ash borer and infested trees before tak­ing any reme­dial action. The DEC’s infor­ma­tion page on the invader includes infor­ma­tion on iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and how to report sight­ings and infestations.

Photo: Forestry Images

New York City named one of ten best U.S. cities for urban forests

(Photo: Dawna Jones)

Always a refresh­ing respite from the con­crete jun­gle, Cen­tral Park and it’s acres of wel­com­ing trees are highly val­ued by most New York­ers, but few know the incred­i­ble sus­tain­able effects of this urban for­est. Last week, New York City was named to the Amer­i­can For­est organization’s list of top ten U.S. Cities for Urban Forests.

As New York’s pub­lic parks come in many shapes and sizes, it’s help­ful to have a work­ing def­i­n­i­tion of an Urban For­est. The Amer­i­can For­est orga­ni­za­tion defines ‘urban for­est’ as “ecosys­tems of trees and other veg­e­ta­tion in and around com­mu­ni­ties that may con­sist of streets and yard trees, veg­e­ta­tion within parks and along pub­lic rights of way and water systems.”

Like all forests and green­spaces, urban forests have a mas­sive capac­ity for seques­ter­ing car­bon and remov­ing pol­lu­tion from the atmos­phere, which has both sus­tain­able and eco­nomic ben­e­fits. New York City’s urban for­est stores “1.35 mil­lion tons of car­bon at a value of $24.9 mil­lion and removes 2,000 tons of pol­lu­tion each year for $10.6 mil­lion in value.” The results speak for them­selves: it has been esti­mated that “every $1 invested in urban trees results in $2 to $4 in benefits.”

All indi­ca­tors sug­gest that New York’s urban for­est will con­tinue to grow. Mayor Bloomberg has man­dated that one mil­lion trees be planted in New York by 2017, and the city is well on its way to meet­ing that goal with over 650,000 trees planted. Cur­rently, the city has an esti­mated for­est canopy of 21 per­cent, but the esti­mated poten­tial canopy is 43 per­cent. Imag­ine the amount of car­bon that could be sequestered if New York’s urban for­est dou­bled in size!

Selected from the 50 most pop­u­lous cities in the United States, the top ten list was gen­er­ated by exam­in­ing sev­eral cri­te­ria includ­ing “civic engage­ment in main­tain­ing the urban for­est … Acces­si­bil­ity of urban for­est and green­spaces to the pub­lic, … and over­all health and con­di­tion of the city’s urban for­est.” The other top cities are Austin, Char­lotte, Port­land, Den­ver, Sacra­mento, Mil­wau­kee, Min­neapo­lis, Seat­tle, and Wash­ing­ton, D.C.

To learn more about New York City’s Urban For­est, visit the Amer­i­can For­est web­site and check out their New York City fact sheet.

Photo: Dawna Jones

“Dirt! The movie” — Free Green Film Screening

Dirt movieJaime Lee Cur­tis nar­rates this film about the envi­ron­men­tal, polit­i­cal, eco­nomic and cul­tural rela­tion­ships to dirt.

From vil­lages bat­tling cor­po­ra­tions, to the rise in organic farm­ing, to edi­ble school yards, peace of mind through hor­ti­cul­ture in pris­ons and solu­tions to health crises, this film explores world­wide efforts to recon­nect with this ancient thing.

(More info)

Revisiting the Rising Currents solutions: creating buffer zones for the city

As a series of posts on City Atlas have shown, the storm that swamped New York on Octo­ber 29th pushed cli­mate change onto the national agenda in a way that no other weather event has.

“You can’t say any one sin­gle event is reflec­tive of cli­mate change,” William Solecki, the co-chairman of the New York City Panel on Cli­mate Change (and adviser to City Atlas), “But it’s illus­tra­tive of the con­di­tions and events and sce­nar­ios that we expect with cli­mate change.” (NYT, 10/31/12)

In fact, a NY Times pro­file of Dr. Solecki, writ­ten a decade ear­lier, opened with these pre­scient details –

“SITTING on Bill Solecki’s desk at Mont­clair State Uni­ver­sity was a study out­lin­ing the prob­a­ble effects of global warm­ing toward the end of the cen­tury: more fre­quent severe win­ter storms, send­ing flood­wa­ters surg­ing into such places as Jer­sey City and entrances to the Hud­son River tunnels.”

Cli­mate change adds mois­ture to the atmos­phere, which sug­gests that more fre­quent and more exten­sive coastal flood­ing is in store for the New York area, what­ever the strength of any oncom­ing storms. Other fac­tors behind our region’s changes include warmer oceans, which add energy to trop­i­cal storms, and a dimin­ished jet stream that may make the path of those storms dif­fer­ent that they were in the past.

Image: PlaNYC

Dr. Solecki, and his part­ner in chair­ing the New York City Panel on Cli­mate Change (NPCC), Dr. Cyn­thia Rosen­zweig, shared their thoughts on a panel in the New York Times on whether, and how, the city should pro­tect itself:

“Now that New York has expe­ri­enced dev­as­tat­ing coastal flood­ing, how can we recover and rebuild in a way that will enable infra­struc­tural resilience to inevitable future storms, while min­i­miz­ing a loss of life and liveli­hoods? Both ‘hard’ engi­neer­ing inter­ven­tions – like sea walls and inno­v­a­tive sub­way and tun­nel clos­ings – and ‘soft’ approaches – like recon­structed wet­lands and smart designs for coastal com­mu­ni­ties – are needed.”

Image: MoMA

The idea of a ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ approach reawak­ens a forward-looking exhi­bi­tion called ‘Ris­ing Cur­rents: Projects for a New York’s Water­front’ that addresses this urgent ques­tion. It was col­lab­o­ra­tively orga­nized by the Museum of Mod­ern Art and P.S.1 con­tem­po­rary art cen­ter in 2010. Five mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary teams of archi­tects, land­scape archi­tects, engi­neers, ecol­o­gists, and artists were chal­lenged to re-envision areas of coast­lines around the city; and this arti­cle is par­tic­u­larly focus­ing on lower Man­hat­tan, which is Zone 0, the New Urban Ground. Here is a brief rein­tro­duc­tion to this inno­v­a­tive think­ing about the future of the city.

Image: MoMa

 

1. Back­ground

New York has the longest urban water­front on Earth, with 500 miles. If sea level con­tin­ues to rise, a huge expanse of coastal land would be inun­dated. Recent stud­ies on cli­mate change con­tinue to pro­duce more alarm­ing fig­ures, as ris­ing seas cre­ate a higher base­line for future storm surges. The pro­jected sea-level rise by 2080 is 2 feet, under nor­mal con­di­tions; in a Rapid Ice Melt Sce­nario, the rise in sea level would be dou­bled, accord­ing to “Cli­mate Change Adap­ta­tion in New York City: Build­ing a Risk Man­age­ment Response,” the 2010 report pre­pared for the city by the NPCC.

Image: MoMA

Beyond sea level rise, there would also be more fre­quent and vio­lent rain­storms that fur­ther put the city in dan­ger of inun­da­tion.  Man­hat­tan used to have marshy edges, but those have been grad­u­ally erased since 1600s, when Dutch colonists built docks to facil­i­tate trade, for­ti­fi­ca­tions to pre­vent attack, and sea­walls to pro­tect the grow­ing city from its watery life­line. To make mat­ters worse, cur­rent sea­walls will not be able to with­stand the pre­dicted storm surge level.

2. Prospec­tive Plan

Com­bin­ing soft and hard solu­tions, New Urban Ground is a new par­a­digm for city infra­struc­ture in Lower Man­hat­tan. Nor­mally, the city is crowded with mass con­crete with dark sur­faces that absorbs heat and gen­er­ate urban heat-island effect. In the plan, the area is paved with a mesh of cast con­crete and plants selected for their tol­er­ance to pol­lu­tion and salt­wa­ter. These porous green streets act as a sponge for rain­wa­ter in a new organic sys­tem designed to respond resiliently to daily tidal flows and occa­sional storm surges

Image: Ris­ing Currents

i)                    Coast­line

New Urban Ground cuts into the island and cre­ated urban estu­ar­ies; includ­ing upland parks, fresh­wa­ter wet­lands and salt­wa­ter marshes, which make the shore­line a new, con­tin­u­ous ecosys­tem. The urban estu­ar­ies sup­port­ing salt­wa­ter and fresh­wa­ter wet­lands alter­nate with areas zoned for devel­op­ment, cre­at­ing a bal­ance between eco­nomic and eco­log­i­cal sus­tain­abil­ity. Streets within the storm-surge flood zone are engi­neered for 3 dif­fer­ent water-carrying capac­i­ties: absorp­tion (Level 1), dis­tri­b­u­tion (Level 2), and reten­tion (Level 3). In south­ern­most tip of Man­hat­tan, there is the Bat­tery Break­wa­ter which is a field of islands, con­structed of sediment-filled geo­t­ex­tile tubes and designed to mod­er­ate the forces of storm surges, in which located in a shal­low salt­wa­ter marsh. The East side of lower Man­hat­tan is extended with land­fill by one block to cre­ate an esker, or ridge, par­al­lel to the shore­line, as well as a park and a salt­wa­ter marsh. A lin­ear for­est below street level runs along the East River to Brook­lyn Bridge, pro­vid­ing a defense from storm surges.

Image: Ris­ing Currents

Con­sider the urban estu­ar­ies, at North Moore Street, a salt­wa­ter marsh mit­i­gates the force of incom­ing water in the event of a storm surge because it is a Level 2 street designed to carry runoff and storm surge flood­ing off the land and out into the har­bor. At Lib­erty Street, the steep bathym­e­try of the har­bor neces­si­ties cuts into the urban land­mass to cre­ate shal­low water. Shal­lows sup­port the plant and ani­mal ecosys­tems that ame­lio­rate the impact of upland runoff. A series of ele­vated walk­ways cre­ates a plat­form for recre­ation, allow­ing peo­ple to occupy the estu­ary with­out dis­rup­tion the nat­ural habi­tat. The urban edge is raised accord­ing to the heights of tide. There are also fea­tures like Water­shed parks, ferry stop, boat basin, and blue/green roofs that hold water and release it grad­u­ally into the streets. Much of the area is trans­formed into a net­work if green spaces as auto­mo­biles give way to mass tran­sit. This type of Level 2 Street absorbs rain­fall and dis­trib­utes it to local plant­i­ngs and wet­lands. There are even pile-supported walk­ways con­nect to the city streets called trans­verse, and struc­tured salt­wa­ter marsh threads though the city block, pro­vid­ing con­ti­nu­ity in the har­bor ecosys­tem and a diverse urban experience.

Image: Ris­ing Currents

ii)                  Infra­struc­ture, Roads and Transportation

West Street is recon­structed and renamed West­ern Park­way. Much of its width is given over to green space, a light-rail tran­sit loop, pedes­trian walk­ways, and bike paths. Water Street is a level 3 street which runs par­al­lel to the shore­line. It is designed to hold storm-surge vol­ume and drain back to the har­bor. The Plants in these zones are selected for their capac­ity to with­stand higher lev­els of salin­ity due to inun­da­tion from storm surges. Coen­ties Slip pro­vides a first line of defense against a storm surge.

Image: Ris­ing Currents

In Broad­way and Hanover Square, the pub­lic and pri­vate util­ity infra­struc­ture is housed in acces­si­ble water­proof vaults beneath side­walk, in which the vaults con­sist of pri­vate util­i­ties (dry sys­tem, like elec­tric­ity and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions) and pub­lic util­i­ties (wet sys­tems such as water, gas, and sewers)

Image: Ris­ing Currents

The exhi­bi­tion demon­strates great exam­ples in con­struct­ing a flood-tolerant city with both hard and soft approaches. I believe we can make this city more sustainable.

“I’m hope­ful that not only will we rebuild this city and met­ro­pol­i­tan area but we use this as an oppor­tu­nity to build it back smarter. There has been a series of extreme weather inci­dents. That is not a polit­i­cal state­ment; that is a fac­tual state­ment. Any­one who says there’s not a change in weather pat­terns I think is deny­ing real­ity… We have a new real­ity when it comes to these weather pat­terns; we have an old infra­struc­ture, and we have old sys­tems, and that is not a good com­bi­na­tion. That’s one of the lessons that I am going to take from this, personally.”

–Gov­er­nor Cuomo, Octo­ber 30, 2012

More infor­ma­tion can be found in arti­cles at Archi­tec­tural Record, Metrop­o­lis Mag., and Art­info.

Exploring Biophilic Cities

Ren­der­ing of Via Verde devel­op­ment in the Bronx: Jonathan Rose Companies

The terms, Bio­philic Design and Bio­philic Cities, are not yet ubiq­ui­tous within the sus­tain­abil­ity con­ver­sa­tion, but per­haps we should be pay­ing more atten­tion to them. Bio­philia, a term coined by Har­vard Uni­ver­sity myrme­col­o­gist and con­ser­va­tion­ist E.O. Wil­son, describes the innate con­nec­tion humans have to nature and other forms of life. There is a plethora of research to sup­port this idea of nature as offer­ing humans emo­tional and psy­cho­log­i­cal ben­e­fits. Research has been shown that expo­sure to nature has the poten­tial to reduce stress, aid in the recov­ery from ill­ness, enhance cog­ni­tive skills and aca­d­e­mic per­for­mance, and appease the effects of ADHD, autism, and other child illnesses.

Bio­philic Design, as the term may sug­gest, seeks to inte­grate build­ing design with nat­ural fea­tures and qual­i­ties. This may include design­ing schools, homes, and apart­ments that offer abun­dant day­light, nat­ural ven­ti­la­tion, plants and green­ery. As a result, Bio­philic Design dif­fers greatly from green build­ing, which extols the ben­e­fits of energy effi­ciency. The idea behind Bio­philic Design is to think beyond nature’s func­tional ben­e­fits – green rooftops, wet­lands for man­ag­ing stormwa­ter, and trees for mit­i­gat­ing air pol­lu­tion– and to rec­og­nize the deeper qual­i­ties offered by nature.

The appli­ca­tion of bio­philic design to city plan­ning offers much poten­tial to the future of cities, par­tic­u­larly as the pop­u­la­tion of cities con­tin­ues to esca­late. There is no sin­gle answer to what a bio­philic city might look like, except that it will force us to reval­u­ate cities as places where nature meets urban­iza­tion. As the web­site on Bio­philic cities reports:

Bio­philic Cities are cities that con­tain abun­dant nature; they are cities that care about, seek to pro­tect, restore and grow this nature, and that strive to fos­ter deep con­nec­tions and daily con­tact with the nat­ural world.

To learn more about Bio­philic Cities, see the web­site on Bio­philic Cities or see the film Bio­philic Design.

[Other resources on City Atlas that relate to bio­philic design: our inter­views with land­scape archi­tect Diana Bal­mori and ecol­o­gist Eric Sander­son, and new zon­ing that will spur bio­philic development.]

 

 

The High Line enters its final stage of development

The High Line has quickly become one of the most beloved and iconic pub­lic spaces in New York City. As any­one who has vis­ited the site can attest, it’s always thronged with peo­ple: New York­ers, out-of-towners, for­eign tourists, you name it. It man­ages to seam­lessly com­bine the inces­sant hum of the city itself with the peace and tran­quil­ity of a much larger pub­lic park. Even devel­op­ers love the site as adjoin­ing spaces are attract­ing star­chi­tect design tal­ent and fetch­ing ridicu­lous prices on the hous­ing market.

Every­one now has cause to rejoice anew as the third and final stage of the High Line project is now under­way. Known as the High Line at the Rail Yards, this last sec­tion will go from W. 30th to W. 34th streets in a large arc around the rail yards, end­ing in an abut­ment of the West Side High­way. The offi­cial ground­break­ing for this stage of the project was on Thurs­day, Sep­tem­ber 20th and this sec­tion will be open to the pub­lic the first two week­ends of Octo­ber for those who have reg­is­tered.

The final stage is sched­uled to be com­pleted some­time in 2014 and with the High Line being such a renowned suc­cess, who knows what sim­i­lar projects will fol­low it. That par­tic­u­lar area of the city has been a hotbed of devel­op­ment con­tention for years with plans hav­ing been pro­posed for an Olympic sta­dium, the Moyni­han sta­tion expan­sion of Penn Sta­tion, the cur­rent exten­sion of the 7 train, and myr­iad other projects. The com­ple­tion of the High Line will be a small but sig­nif­i­cant step in the right direc­tion for the revi­tal­iza­tion of the area.

Image: the​high​line​.org

The renewable resources of Don Quixote // El Quijote y los recursos renovables

A wind­mill is a machine that con­verts the energy of wind into rota­tional energy by means of vanes called sails or blades. Or giants… depend­ing on your source. Along with solar power and tidal power, wind­mills are con­sid­ered one of the best sources of renew­able energy. Europe has been a leader in har­ness­ing wind power, and in the United States use of wind is grow­ing rapidly — and  Repub­li­can and Demo­c­ra­tic sen­a­tors alike recently joined forces to pre­serve the incen­tives that are help­ing wind power to develop.

The major­ity of the wind­mills are located in Texas and Ore­gon, but New York has its own wind­mills, too, and New York City is already reap­ing the ben­e­fits of this kind of energy. Accord­ing to a CUNY study,  ”New York City’s largest com­mer­cial con­struc­tion firms say that energy effi­cient and sus­tain­ably designed con­struc­tion is firmly in place, and not a trend wait­ing to hap­pen at some time in the future. It is being dri­ven both by cus­tomer pref­er­ence and lead­er­ship from the pub­lic sec­tor, through reg­u­la­tion and role modeling.”

It would not be fea­si­ble to build gigan­tic wind­mills in the crowded Man­hat­tan, but it’s impor­tant for cit­i­zens to be mind­ful of where their energy comes from, and opt for both greener energy providers and local green energy solu­tions.  My home­town in New Jer­sey has installed street­light posts that are pow­ered by solar pan­els. It’s more than an eco­log­i­cal mea­sure— although costly up front, these solar pan­els will save the city and cit­i­zens money through oper­a­tion sav­ings and green ini­tia­tives. NYC is the per­fect place to exper­i­ment with new tech­nolo­gies for high den­sity locales.

It is impor­tant to spread good sus­tain­able ideas, but also to put such ideas into prac­tice. I’ve already opted for another greener energy pro­ducer com­pany, and I encour­age oth­ers to explore more sus­tain­able energy options. The US Depart­ment of Energy pro­vides a com­pre­hen­sive list of green power sup­pli­ers across the US; Con Ed also has an infor­ma­tional site.

Research what your energy provider is doing to become greener. The impact that we have on the envi­ron­ment is not a mat­ter of affect­ing oth­ers in some dis­tant future, but a mat­ter of imme­di­ate effects on the planet and on each of us, right now. It’s time to be smart about where we get our energy. The tech­nol­ogy is here, but now it’s a mat­ter of will. Now we just need to stop fight­ing windmills.

CA_line break_small

Sabes que es un Molino de Viento? Un Molino de Viento, según Wikipedia “es una máquina que con­vierte la energía del viento en energía rota­cional a través de hélices lla­madas velas o cuchillas”. Los mis­mos moli­nos de viento que Don Qui­jote imag­in­aba como gigantes con los que debía batallar.

Junto con la energía solar y la energía de mar­eas, los moli­nos de viento han sido con­sid­er­a­dos como una de las mejores fuentes de energía ren­ov­able en el mundo. Y Europa ha sido uno de los países que mejor uso ha hecho de este tipo de energía.  Sin embargo, como muchos otros países con­scientes de los prob­le­mas ecológi­cos, Esta­dos Unidos se ha unido al grupo en un esfuerzo con­junto por ser más amable con el planeta.

Y aún cuando la may­oría de los moli­nos de viento están en Texas, Port­land y otros esta­dos (dado que dichos moli­nos requieren grandes can­ti­dades de acres vír­genes), N.Y.C ya esta reci­bi­endo los ben­efi­cios de dicha energía ren­ov­able, y el mismo estado de Nueva York tiene ya sus pro­pios moli­nos de viento. Sí, y los mis­mos Neoy­orki­nos, tienen la posi­bil­i­dad de escoger la com­pañía de energía que más les guste a la hora de pagar por este servicio.

Según un estu­dio real­izado por  CUNY,  ”las fir­mas con­struc­toras más grande de la ciu­dad de Nueva York afir­man que la ener­gia efi­ciente y la con­struc­ción dis­eñada sostenible­mente es algo real, y no una moda esperando a suceder en un futuro cer­cano. Es un hecho que esta haciendo desar­rol­lado tanto por con­sum­i­dores como por el sec­tor pub­lico, a través de mod­e­los de regulación”.

Y aunque sería poco  factible con­struir estos moli­nos de viento gigantes en esta ciu­dad repleta de edi­fi­cios, es impor­tante que seamos lo sufi­cien­te­mente recep­tivos a todo tipo de ideas ecológ­i­cas ven­gan de donde ven­gan, si lo que quer­e­mos es hacer de N.Y.C una ciu­dad mejor y más res­pirable.  Por lo menos, la ciu­dad donde yo vivo en NJ, la may­oría de los postes de luz en las calles fun­cio­nan con energía solar. Algo que no es sim­ple­mente una medida eco­log­ica, sino un ahorro para la ciu­dad y los mis­mos ciudadanos.

Sin embargo, como no soy una experta en el tema de la energía ren­ov­able y las políti­cas sobre elec­t­ri­ci­dad que exis­ten en cada ciu­dad, esto, es mas bien  un lla­mado no a ser opti­mis­tas, sino a ser cre­ati­va­mente real­is­tas. Yo creo que  N.Y.C  es el lugar per­fecto para ser recur­sivo, dado el grado de mul­ti­cul­tur­al­i­dad y la cri­sis económica que aún se esta viviendo.

Es impor­tante dis­em­i­nar bue­nas ideas de sosteni­bil­i­dad, pero sobre todo, pon­er­las en prác­tica. Per­sonal­mente, yo ya opte por cam­biarme a una com­pañía energética más com­pro­metida con el medio ambi­ente  y espero qeu esto le sirva no sólo a la ciu­dad, sino al plan­eta entero. Tal vez es tiempo para que cada uno de nosotros empiece a pen­sar que com­pro­m­e­terse con el medio ambi­ente no es más una cosa de otros y del futuro, sino de cada uno de nosotros ahora.

US Depart­ment of Energy Guide

Mid-Summer Workshop Saturday July 14th

It’s mid-summer and thanks to the per­sis­tent sun, the sun­flow­ers are doing great this year. Enor­mously tall, they are tak­ing over the entire plot. We will be at La Finca this Sat­ur­day from 11-2pm to dis­cuss the project and phy­tore­me­di­a­tion in gen­eral. Please join us, pick up a copy of the field guide, learn more about La Finca and agri­cul­ture in the Bronx and lend a hand water­ing in these dry hot days.

Direc­tions:

Battery Urban Farm changes landscapes and mindscapes

In real estate it’s all about loca­tion, loca­tion, loca­tion, and the same is true for sus­tain­able envi­ron­ments. The land­scapes peo­ple encounter and inter­act with daily are the ones that need to be greened, not those on the fringe that require peo­ple to devi­ate from their usual paths just to get there.

Bat­tery Urban Farm oper­ates in con­junc­tion with Bat­tery Park Con­ser­vancy Credit: Rachel Northrop

In Bat­tery Park, com­post is decom­pos­ing, veg­eta­bles and herbs are grow­ing, stu­dents are learn­ing, and urban land­scapes are shift­ing. A mere stone’s throw from the 4/5 Bowl­ing Green sta­tion is a small urban farm that yields herbs, veg­eta­bles, and fer­tile soil from com­post. Last Wednes­day, at a fundrais­ing din­ner held by NRDC, din­ers enjoyed a meal made entirely from the farm’s yield. Bat­tery Urban Farm is sus­tain­able in its prac­tice and its design; the bam­boo fenc­ing is entirely reclaimed from last summer’s rooftop instal­la­tion at the Met.

Bat­tery Urban farm is clearly a suc­cess, with hearty green plants, veg­gies and herbs in full bloom. Man­hat­tan is ripe for har­vest. Credit: Rachel Northrop

Walk­ing off the side­walk into the grass around the farm is refresh­ingly un-Manhattan-like. The dif­fer­ence in sur­face between pave­ment and earth is notice­able, but most New York­ers in their daily bus­tle don’t have the chance to expe­ri­ence both.

Many incred­i­ble NYC farms are in the outer bor­oughs or Harlem, and there­fore off the radar of many. While Bat­tery Urban Farm is mod­er­ate in size (it feels more large veg­etable patch then farm), it is com­pletely vis­i­ble, cen­trally located, and 100 per­cent open to any­one to see, smell, and touch. You can pass by build­ings hous­ing incred­i­ble rooftop farms and never know it from street level, but hun­dreds of thou­sands of com­muters head­ing to and from South Ferry pass the farm daily, and thou­sands more Wall Street employ­ees see it as they enter and exit mas­sive office buildings.

Curi­ous New York­ers explore a new, sus­tain­ably urban land­scape near their offices. Credit: Rachel Northrop

Bat­tery Urban Farm marks the inte­gra­tion of sus­tain­abil­ity into a famil­iar, cor­po­rate and con­crete land­scape of Man­hat­tan. Nearby school­child­ren use the farm as a liv­ing class­room and vol­un­teers work along­side Bat­tery Con­ser­vancy employ­ees to main­tain it, but those most sig­nif­i­cantly affected by the farm are those who will prob­a­bly never par­tic­i­pate in it but sim­ply see it.

The more vis­i­ble and per­va­sive sus­tain­abil­ity becomes, the more likely it also becomes that res­i­dents who are not par­tic­u­larly “green” will begin to con­sider their own liv­ing and work­ing envi­ron­ments in new, more sus­tain­able ways.

Bat­tery Urban Farm pro­vides a ref­er­ence point from which more urban farms inside exist­ing city parks can stem. Imag­ine if Cen­tral Park, Bryant Park, Thomp­kins Square Park, Wash­ing­ton Square Park, Union Square, Madi­son Square Park, and Mar­cus Gar­vey Park all also had small urban farms to edu­cate local stu­dents and feed nearby res­i­dents (think dona­tions to food banks, even localer green mar­kets, or even sales to restau­rants).  The entire com­po­si­tion of the city could shift–CAN shift–as soon as we look places like Bat­tery Urban Farm and con­ceive that it’s possible.

More details about the farm, here.

View slideshow: Bat­tery Urban Farm

This arti­cle orig­i­nally appeared at exam​iner​.com.

Why The High Line is Even More Impressive Than You Thought

You may not real­ize it, but when you walk the High Line, below your feet is an intri­cate drainage sys­tem that helps to reduce storm water runoff and helps to keep our plant­ing beds healthy.

The High Line’s land­scape uses some of the same under­ly­ing tech­nol­ogy as green roofs, and has the same envi­ron­men­tal ben­e­fits: a reduc­tion of storm-water runoff by up to 80%, a medi­a­tion of the “heat island” effect cre­ated by hard, reflec­tive city sur­faces, and healthy plant­i­ngs that cre­ate shade, oxy­gen, and habi­tat for insects and birds.

The aver­age depth of the soil on the High Line is about 18 inches, with the depth rang­ing between 8 inches at its shal­low­est to 36 inches in the raised plant­ing beds near Gan­sevoort Street, the 23rd Street Lawn, and in the Fal­cone Fly­over, between West 25th and West 27th Streets. Because of the shal­low­ness of the soil, water is of spe­cial con­cern – it’s easy for the mois­ture bal­ance in the soil to become too dry or con­versely over­sat­u­rated. Thank­fully, the design team, led by land­scape archi­tects James Cor­ner Field Oper­a­tions, designed a green roof-style drainage sys­tem that both deals with the issues of excess rain­fall or drought and helps to cre­ate a health­ier envi­ron­ment for the High Line’s plants.

The con­crete path­way sys­tem you’ll find through­out the High Line was designed both to reduce storm water runoff and reduce the amount of water­ing needed for the plants. The paths are made of open-jointed pre-cast con­crete planks that allow rain water to drain between planks and into adja­cent plant­ing beds. Per­fo­rated metal pan­els located between the plant­ing beds and the area beneath the walk­ways allows for rain water to drain into the plant beds. The strate­gic loca­tion of drains at low points in the plant­ing beds means that water can be absorbed into the beds when it’s needed, or drained out in the case of the soil being oversaturated.

Beneath the finer more nutrient-rich top­soil that our plants call home, there are many other lay­ers that help max­i­mize healthy water drainage, while slow­ing and reduc­ing the flow of runoff. After the ini­tial top­soil, there is a thick layer of specially-mixed coarser, clay-based sub­soil. Below the sub­soil is a fil­ter fab­ric that helps pre­vent soil from being washed away where it might clog the drainage sys­tem. Fol­low­ing the fil­ter fab­ric is a drainage mat filled with crushed gravel to tem­per the flow of excess water into the sewer system.

The drainage mat also acts a reserve of water that can be called upon when needed. When excess water drains all the way through the plant­ing bed, some water is retained in this bot­tom­most layer, in the egg carton-shaped cups of the drainage mat. These cups retain water that can be reab­sorbed by the soil dur­ing drier times.

Sim­i­lar types of drainage sys­tems can be found in many other green roof projects around the world. The High Line’s drainage sys­tem means that less rain­wa­ter is mak­ing its way into our sewer sys­tems and less water is needed from the city to water our plants – mak­ing for both a greener New York City and greener plant­ing beds on the High Line.

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via High Line Blog, visit for more behind the scenes images!

Photo cour­tesy nycloves­nyc