Union Square Greenmarket in June. (Photo: mmwm via Flickr)
As summer comes into bloom in 2013, New York’s system of farmer’s markets are a vital part of the city’s food economy and lifestyle.
Greenmarket was started in 1976 through GrowNYC as a way to promote local farms and to provide New Yorkers with fresh produce from their region. Over the years, Greenmarket has grown to 54 different markets and has provided a place for 230 farmers and fisherman to sell their goods. Any unsold product gets donated to City Harvest and other soup kitchens and food pantries throughout the city.
Greenmarket says of its longterm relationship with the city and farmers, as well as school children, chefs, and many other New Yorkers:
This unique relationship between farmers and city residents has not only changed the face of regional agriculture; it has revitalized rural communities and urban spaces, improved consumer health, provided fresh and nutritious food to those most in need through our EBT/Food Stamp and Youthmarket programs, supported immigrant farmers, encouraged crop diversity, educated school children and city residents about the importance of regional agriculture, provided a wholesale opportunity for medium sized farms, inspired new culinary trends, and influenced chefs and eaters in one of the culinary capitals in the world.
Greenmarket locations are open throughout the week. Check the schedule below or see their website.
Once you go to the markets be sure to check out some healthy and sustainable summer recipes!
Urban foraging may conjure images of wading through poison ivy in Prospect Park and picking out leafy greens and berries infused with city fumes. But, with apps like Wild Edibles with Wildman Steve Brill, a condensed guide for iPhone users on how and where to find the city’s 150 tastiest edibles, it now may be easier to navigate pesky bugs and unidentifiable plants.
“Wildman” Steve Brill has long been considered the leading expert on foraging in New York City parks. For over thirty years, Brill has led foraging and ecology expeditions throughout the Northeast. The self-described “go-to guy” on foraging has written three books on wild eating, including The Wild Vegan Cookbook, and has advised some of the city’s top chefs and the New York City Parks Department.
Though Brill is allowed to lead a limited number of foraging tours in the city’s parks, he has come under attack in recent years by conservationists and the Parks Department. Foraging in New York City parks is no new practice, but undoubtedly has attracted a stronger following in recent years as the push to eat locally has gained a wider following. In July 2011, the New York Timesprinted an article relating the ongoing tension between eager foragers and New York City park officials. On one end was a growing cohort of urban foragers that, perhaps motivated by a less than booming economy, took to the parks for food. On the other end was the increasingly disgruntled Parks Department that worried about imbalance in the park’s ecosystem. Maria Hernandez, director of horticulture for the Central Park Conservancy, lamented: “If people decide that they want to make their salads out of our plants, then we’re not going to have any chipmunks.”
Urban conservation biologist and executive director of NYC Wildflower Week Mariellé Anzelone states that incorporating imported edibles into the city’s limited green space presents a special problem for bees. In a recent article in the New York Times, Anzelone argued that a “farm-filled landscape would undermine [bee’s] critical ecological process.” Because wildflowers and native plants provide a more fixed supply of pollen and nectar than imported fruit trees, Anzelone argues that a human-feeding landscape with imported plants remains insensitive to wild bees’ job in the process.
Anzelone is a protector of true native habitats, a surprising amount of which continue to exist intact in the five boroughs alongside all the impacts from eight million people and their surrounding ecological interests of dogs, urban gardens, Starbucks, apartment buildings and highways.
With organizations such as FruiTrees New York pushing to plant urban orchards across the Five Boroughs, Anzelone’s perspective might seem to overlook the positive change that planting urban orchards could bring the city, both in terms of food justice and access to local food. Some argue that wild plants may in fact yield a higher nutritional content. How should policy be set? Maybe an expert panel, including long time advocates like Mariellé Anzelone and Steve Brill, as well as the Parks Department, and perhaps a historically minded ecologist like Eric Sanderson, could help the city map a way for true nature and human landscapes to flourish side-by-side. New York City has one of the ten best urban forests, a tremendous benefit to all kinds of life in the city.
Even since park officials have begun to clamp down on foraging by issuing summons to those who violate the official no-foraging policy in the city’s parks, in no way does there seem to be a hard-line policy towards foraging. Urban foragers largely remain unnoticed in the parks and “Wildman” Steve Brill can still lead private tours. He even reports that some park officials wave at him as he passes in the park. Maybe the berry-seeker should take that as a green light, then, to head out with a bucket–and maybe even an iPhone–to uncover the city’s tastiest, and edible, treats.
Curious about the wholesale price of those bananas that you picked up at your neighborhood bodega? Now, with data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Hunts Point Terminal Produce Market, a clear and effective interactive food map is available for users. You can enter the name of any fruit or veggie, find out the wholesale price, and locate the country of origin on the globe. The information shifts by season, as our food sources move based on harvests. The map provides a comprehensive glimpse into New York City’s food supply and distribution base.
The map shows that a large proportion of produce entering Hunts Point, on its way to a green grocer or bodega near you, is not exactly locally sourced. Enter iceberg lettuce into the map’s search bar, and see that it is sourced from California and New Mexico, for $0.26/lb. Bananas are sourced from Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica and Guatemala for anywhere between $0.36/lb to $0.53/lb, and kiwis come from Chile.
As the world’s largest food distribution center, the Hunts Point Terminal Produce Market operates on 690 acres in the South Bronx, a mismatch of open air tents, industrial buildings and refrigerated truck trailers. The market now processes 22% of the region’s wholesale produce sales, or 60% of fruit and vegetable sales in New York City. While this may seem like an impressive statistic, in 1989 Hunts Point captured over 75% of the wholesale produce sales in the region. The reason for the drop in sales since then? Chain stores. Large scale retailers such as Whole Foods, with their own distribution systems, have increasingly located their distribution centers outside of New York City, where rent is lower and space is more available. Hunts Point Market now draws its primary consumer base from small businesses and bodegas that are dependent on the market’s cheap produce.
Does it matter that so much of our healthy food is crossing such huge distances to reach us? That depends on the crop and the method of shipping. Bananas, for example, are a relatively efficient food. Kiwis from New Zealand could have smaller footprints if kites can help propel the cargo ships that carry them — and growers are beginning to consider the question.
Local agriculture does not necessarily come with a smaller footprint, because the farming methods and delivery systems (pick-up trucks driving small loads down from upstate New York, for example) may be much more carbon-intensive than long distance rail or cargo ships, which are remarkably green methods of transport.
From Ecuador, to Hunts Point market in the Bronx (above), to your local deli: travels of a banana. (Photo: NYCEDC)
The food map has been hailed as data collection done right; instead of cataloging produce as domestic when an item is shipped from the entry city to another U.S. city, data from Hunts Point accurately labels the item as international. The map shows the global reach of New York City’s food distribution system, and also shows that New York City remains far from regional food self-sufficiency.
The city has proposed a $332.5 million redevelopment project for the market, and there is little mention of incorporating local food distributors into the market’s network. The project plans to maximize land use on the property by expanding and upgrading the market, as well as updating on-site food safety. Read the Hunts Point Vision NYCEDC plan here, and more about Hunts Point in the New York World. Hunts Point is also included in the city’s discussion of critical networks, in the Special Initiative on Rebuilding and Resiliency (SIRR) report.
In 2003, the first residential green building of New York City, the Solaire, was built in the north end of Battery Park City. The Solaire promoted green living and reduced negative environmental impact by focusing on indoor air quality, water quality and conservation, energy, and more. Ten years later, it is exciting to see that many more residential buildings have followed suit and incorporated sustainable developments that also spur good business.
The booming construction of green buildings isn’t just fueled by the increase in environmental concern or the building’s environmental benefits. Everyone already knows the environmental advantage of green buildings. What is interesting is the WGBC reporting’s on the financial gains and improvements of green buildings; a reality many people simply don’t recognize or still believe to be a false presumption. WGBC’s report expressed benefits that not only applied to tenants of green buildings but also developers and owners. The infograph below is a quick overview of the personal and overlapping benefits received by each.
Many people are concerned about the higher startup design and construction costs associated with green buildings. The caution is reasonable: not only do green buildings look better, they also often incorporate innovative technologies for efficiency. However, these benefits of green buildings don’t always translate to higher costs; people and industries just think they cost a lot more. WGBC addresses this issue as the Perception Gap, where the estimated and actual cost premiums of green buildings were plotted against each other. As you can see, most of the estimated cost premiums centered on a fifteen percent increase whereas most of the actual cost premiums were roughly under a four percent increase.
Looking at green residential buildings specifically, All but one of the design and construction costs of green residential buildings are at or under a three percent increase. The outlier was Zero Carbon Homes in the UK which had a twelve and a half percent increase; a small increase in costs when considering its noble agenda of zero carbon emissions.
WGBC also reported that green buildings are experiencing decreasing costs over time. This is attributed to more experience and efficiency in designing and constructing green buildings and better education, awareness, and assessment of green buildings and sustainability issues. Another factor is that the gap between the baseline standard for building codes and green buildings are diminishing.
The graph shows decreasing and more stable prices.
The innovative technology and alluring appeal of green buildings also make them a valuable asset. The increased appraisal of the asset can be credited to higher rental and lease rates, lower operating expenses, higher occupancy rates, and lower yields (higher transaction price due to lower capitalization and discount rates). The sale prices for green buildings when compared to conventional code-compliant buildings ranged from negative thirteen percent to positive thirty two percent, but was concentrated around ten percent. The study also found that increasing asset value is accompanied by a high standard of green certification. When considering LEED certifications, WGBC stated that “…just being ‘LEED certified’ does not add value- it starts at LEED Silver”.
Two quick facts about the more well-known (operating costs and health) benefits of green buildings:
An upfront investment of at least two percent on construction costs of a project can amount to savings of over ten times the initial investment in twenty years. Source: Kats, G. 2003. Green Buildings Cost and Financial Benefits. Boston: Massachusetts Technology Collaborative.
Productivity and health benefits
New York City boasts quite a few magnificent green residential buildings. The standout in affordable green housing is Via Verde, in the Bronx. (Site here.) Of course, the next expected benchmark is for the features of a ‘green’ building to be adopted as the norm, and for the designation ‘green,’ as successful as it has been for marketing, to vanish completely.
The Solaire 20 River Terrace, Manhattan
Photo: Arch record construction.com
Filtered air continuously humidified or de-humidified
Waste water and storm water are reused to provide water for toilet flushing, landscape irrigation, and cooling towers
Energy design is thirty five percent more energy efficient than regulation requires; results in a sixty seven percent lower electricity demand during peak hours
Solar panels integrated beautifully into the side of the building
Rooftop garden that provides natural insulation
Photo: joonbug.com
The Visionaire 70 Little West Street, Manhattan
Photo: Americanaldes.com
Constructed with fifty percent recycled materials
Sky-lit swimming pool
Windows that filter out UV rays: minimizes heat loss in winter and heat entry in summer
Solar paneled exterior
Rooftop garden that harvest rainwater for irrigation, reduce storm water run-off, and reduce building heat
Photo: Batteryrooftopgarden.wordpress.com
The Verdesian 211 North End Ave, Manhattan
Photo: Cityreality.com
Air filtration system that removes eighty five percent of particulates
Abundance of natural light with floor-to-ceiling windows
Recycle water for flush system and cooling tower
Photo: Farm8.staticflicker.com
Via Verde 704 Brook Avenue, Bronx
Photo: viaverdenyc.com
City funded affordable complex in South Bronx
Rooftop garden that dissipates heat and absorbs rainwater runoff
A resident of the midsection of the Bronx walks into the one-room visitors center at Poe Park, looks around at the near-empty space and says, Can I offer my talent here?
This is how it happens at the Poe Park Visitors Center, a narrow outfit with a modern design facing the poet’s historic, gothic cottage in his namesake park. Since this quiet facility opened in May 2012, a flurry of neighbors have offered up their skills for free.
tmarch.com
Classical music performances, comic book art exhibits, yoga classes, nonfiction story-telling workshops, and other work has arisen out of these simple walk-ins.
“I think the ambience here kind of brings that out more,” said Lucy Aponte, who oversees the center. “People see it’s a creative place, you know? It seems to be drawing a lot of creative people. That’s what’s happening.”
Activity at the center had a slow start, with the space not opening until about two years after construction finished, and with a shortage of funding to staff it full-time before the Parks Department took it over. While community groups struggled to figure out how to breathe life into it, life happened.
But that phenomenon was seen as a springboard. One of the center’s designers has jumped back in this summer with a low-tech wall installation designed to escalate this trend.
Image courtesy of VisionArc
“We’re trying to encourage even more activity,” said Landon Brown, Director of Vision Arc, a branch of Toshiko Mori Architect, which the Mayor’s Office commissioned to design the center.
Vision Arc’s bureaucratic sounding “Community Mapping Initiative” is akin to a bulletin board. Instead of pins, though, it allows visitors to write their own skills, suggestions or neighborhood needs on paper circles and stick the writing on the wall.
Visitors added to the wall, “I want to learn more English and practice my pronunciation,” “want to give a pasta class,” suggestions for Citibike in the Bronx — and the ideas kept coming.
Brown says the wall is not to just bring in ideas for the space but ideas for the community at large.
“A big shift that’s happening right now in the design community and certainly beyond is asking what is the role of design in addressing systemic challenges.”
Here are some examples of the turnout, provided by Landon Brown.
We Need More…
(Social Services) “A fathers support program for fathers that are bringing up their kids alone”
I Regularly Use
(Food & Nutrition) “Green Market at the New York Botanical Garden”
I want to Learn…
(Skills Training) “To practice my pronunciation”
(Health & Wellness)
“CPR Training & First Aid,” “Deep Breathing, Tai Chi, Yoga”
I Have Skills In…
(Skills Training) “Math tutoring”
I Can Provide…
(Arts & Culture) “…teaching Manga cartoon workshops to introduce Japanese youth culture,” “Craft restoration of furniture…”
The Community Mapping Initiative at Poe Park is part of a wave of community collaborative platforms, which is part of a broader trend called ‘the sharing economy.’ OurGoods.org and Trade School, both founded in NYC, and Yerdle, founded in San Francisco, are online projects with similar goals of opening new pathways from one user to the next, and Change by Us is like a community bulletin board for NYC, for creating participatory projects.
This Sunday the 28th and Monday the 29th, Occupy Sandy and a number of other organizations join together to remember a year of post-Sandy New York, to celebrate what has not been lost, and to demand a just rebuilding of the five boroughs’ neighborhoods and communities.
Sandy hit New York last October 29, 2012 and in many ways our city and citizens are still reeling from the impacts the storm waters and winds themselves caused, and the existing, deep inequalities they revealed.
Events include a march to City Hall organized by Alliance for a Just Rebuilding, Sustainable South Bronx, Coalition for the Homeless, the Sierra Club, 350.org, Occupy Sandy, Red Hook Initiative, Legal Aid Society, and many more; a day of music and healing with Coney Island Gospel Assembly, conferences; a writing workshop; Rebuild by Design receptions at NYU and in New Jersey; the unveiling of a memorial plaque in Staten Island for those lost in the storm; and the release of a book of photographs on the storm and its impacts.
Near the Bronx/Westchester border. (Photo: GothamCoyote.com)
“Since the nineteenth century, coyotes have expanded their range north, south, east, and west. Traditionally a species of the open plains, coyotes have come to occupy rural, forested, and urban landscapes. A breeding population on suburban Long Island is all but inevitable, leaving just the question of when. With healthy populations in the northern and western suburbs, New York City lies at the front of the Eastern coyote’s range.”
This remarkable description of our newest four-footed neighbors comes from an evocative blog post by Dr. Mark Weckel, naturalist at the Gotham Coyote Project and researcher at the American Museum of Natural History.
We contacted the experts at the Gotham Coyote Project for more details, and learned the following:
“We don’t have any evidence that they’re permanently residing anywhere other than the North Bronx,” said Dr. Chris Nagy, colleague of Weckel’s at the project.
Let’s back up a second. Coyotes may now live year round in the Bronx? (Not that a coyote would know where Westchester ends and the Bronx begins.)
Originally a Midwestern species, the coyote first arrived in the Northeast in the early years of the twentieth century. It was first sighted in New York State in the 1920s, according to Weckel, an ecologist who studies coyote migration. And sightings have become more common in the northern reaches of New York City, where the Bronx borders Westchester. “By the late 1990s, [coyotes] had come to colonize all of New York State, except for Long Island,” Weckel told us.
A hidden camera in a northern NYC park (gothamcoyote.com)
The Gotham Coyote Project uses remote camera traps to track the local coyote population, and some of their images can be seen on their site. The cameras have helped prove the presence of coyotes, but they are of limited help when it comes to measuring the size of the population, because coyotes are hard to tell apart. Tigers, by comparison, have unique stripe patterns that allow scientists to identify them based on photographs. “With coyotes,” Nagy told us, “you can’t tell the difference reliably.”
But there are other methods to track who is who in the native coyote scene: Nagy plans to use scat surveys. “You can get DNA from the poop, and you can identify individual animals,” he said. Nagy also casts doubt on claims that urban coyotes have a genetic difference from rural populations. “Certainly there’s evidence that they kind of have different life history patterns,” he said, but noted that it was inaccurate to divide coyotes into “the urban guys and the rural guys. “In New York,” he said, “it’s a very very gradual transition,” from urban to natural habitats. And, he added, “There’s intermixing along that gradient.”
“Usually when you’re trying to manage wildlife, it’s really more about managing people and getting the community behind you,” said Nagy. “People are really where the work is located.” So making people comfortable is the best step to smoothing human/coyote cohabitation.
Nagy acknowledged that the risk posed by coyotes is “not zero,” but said that with a few precautions, it is minimal. “Compared to dogs, it’s nothing; compared to vehicles, it’s nothing; compared to pollution, it’s nothing,” he said. Still, researchers agree that studying coyotes has value beyond quantifiable results. Weckel, who has worked to include high school students and interested citizens from the project’s outset, said it helps with “blurring the line” between nature and city.
A coyote plays with a bottle on the frozen Pond, near 59th Street, in Central Park in 2010. (D. Bruce Yolton)
From the coyote packs that may have taken up a steady presence in city parks in the north Bronx (Gotham Coyote Project doesn’t reveal the locations of their research sites, for fear of disturbing the animals), and beyond city lines in Westchester, an occasional migrant comes far south into the metropolis. Several coyotes have traveled down into Manhattan. There was a famous visit to Central Park in 1999, followed by 2006, and then a series of visits in 2010. These wild adventures ended in capture and the carrier case, but with plenty of camera attention and public fascination beforehand.
Coyotes’ adaptability is evident in their very presence around us in the Northeast. After humans wiped out previous top predators in the region, like the Eastern wolf and the cougar, coyotes came in to fill the unoccupied niche. As Mark Weckel puts it, “the coyote is a parable for how Americans have historically interacted with nature…it’s a conservation success story, but there was no conservation plan.” With the kind of drive that suits life in the big city, coyotes are bringing the wilderness to us.
Researchers are continuing to investigate whether the coyote’s adaptability – so evident in its presence in farflung habitats – has shown itself on the genetic level.
Javier Monzón, a postdoctoral fellow at Stony Brook University, led the first study that showed how the Eastern coyote is genetically distinct from its Western ancestors. Drawing on previous research that had identified sequence differences between dogs and wolves, and between dogs and coyotes, Monzón investigated the hypothesis that Eastern coyotes had hybridized with wolves since their arrival.
After finding significant similarities between wolf and coyote mitochondrial DNA, which is only passed from a mother to her offspring, Monzón concluded that male wolves had been mating with female coyotes, but not the other way around. He also found that coyote samples from farther East had more genetic similarities with wolves than their Western counterparts.
Now, Monzón is looking to further his knowledge on the genetic impact of coyotes’ changed surroundings. According to his research, it seems coyote evolution has proceeded rapidly, with variation introduced by wolf hybridization as its “main driver.”
Differing with Nagy, Monzón believes there are measurable genetic differences among coyotes within the Northeast, depending on their habitats. “Urban coyotes are genetically different from forest coyotes,” he said, adding that “forest and urban are different from rural coyotes,” as well.
In his study, he sampled 427 coyotes, from agricultural, forested and suburban/urban testing sites. To account for coyotes’ range, he allowed a radius of approximately nine kilometers from the sampling site. He found genetic differences in one urban group of coyotes, which included samples from suburban/urban sites near Cape Cod, Boston, Albany, and Portland, Maine.
How fully ‘urbanized’ could Eastern coyotes get? Daniel Bogan, an animal behaviorist at Siena College, who studies coyotes in Westchester (and leads workshops on how to coexist), isn’t ready to draw conclusions. While he said coyotes might adapt their behaviors within their lifetimes, “I don’t think that there are major evolutionary changes occurring just yet in their interactions with people.”
“In a large scale, if you’re thinking about all of New York State, they’ve been moving from more natural areas to more urban and rural landscapes,” he said, acknowledging that “because the natural areas are chopped into small pieces, they end up having to using multiple remnants,” forcing coyotes to travel through developed areas.
But, according to Bogan, coyotes rarely linger near development, and have not adapted to a trash-intensive diet as they move closer to cities.
Still, he said, “It’s just amazing to me how capable this animal is of just existing in so many different landscapes.” While he was not ready to draw conclusions, he tentatively pegged coyote’s success to factors like their reproduction, which occurs rapidly, begins early in their life cycles, and yields many offspring.
“At a time when urban conservation is red hot and we talk about farming rooftops, greening our streets, or restoring wetlands, all with an eye to a more sustainable, resilient, ‘natural’ city, the coyote should be our mascot, our flagship species.”
It’s graduation season and many graduating art majors are choosing between running towards or away from New York City. Whether staying or leaving, the young artists we interviewed all seem to agree that New York’s mecca-like quality is related to its human capital. The city’s diverse inhabitants create a rich culture.
Young artists still move to New York regardless of the expense because of the endless energy generated from human interactions. As Will Moritz, a young musician who moved to NYC, said: “You sort of pay to be around tons of people.” For him, it’s not only important to connect with established musicians in the city, but to meet others who are just starting out.
Yet, Moritz speculated that the city will gradually lose its spell on artists in the coming five years due to upscale gentrification. As wealthier people move in, the cost of living will continue to rise and young artists will be priced out of the city. In addition to the rising rents, in a piece about the decline of New York’s artistic talent, David Byrne wrote that “the cultural part of the city—the mind—has been usurped by the top 1 percent.” And his daughter, Malu Byrne, wrote a NYT column detailing how New York is not a supportive place for up-and-coming artists.
Other artists believe that New York will continue to draw aspiring talent. Shawn Rutkowski, a photographer who moved to NYC from Philadelphia just a few weeks ago, believes that the city will remain an artistic mecca as long as its core and driving force—the human capital—is still there. He is now living in his uncle’s apartment and acknowledges that having initial connections in the city helps artists to establish themselves, and can reduce the high cost of living.
Many New York City artists, including Shawn, have day jobs (or night jobs) to sustain their creative work. Zack Graham, a writer who moved here last year after graduation, told City Atlas that, “The vast majority of artists are too poor to support families. That is a major anxiety of artists everywhere. I am not currently a professional artist, and therefore do not know if it is as fulfilling as I’d imagine it might be.” The challenges of balancing a day job and an artistic career might encourage some to leave, but Zack plans to stay for quite a while.
Zack hopes that in the future when New York loses valuable land and architecture due to rising sea levels, the artists of the city will “create a floating island where lower Manhattan used to be where they can create, and that this island will be isolated from the capitalist thirst that makes the city less than it could be.” Communal living, working, and social spaces already allow artists to create the kind of communities they want within the greater city.
Although there are artists who think these kinds of networks can now exist on the Internet, some argue that the Internet isn’t always enough. Danlu Peng, who studied sculpture at Columbia University, believes that there’s a huge difference between appreciating sculpture in a gallery and looking at it in online photographs. Artists in the city not only learn from the surrounding people and art, they can also influence and contribute to their communities.
But artists may also dilute the city’s historic and ethnic culture when they move into new neighborhoods, as seen in the East Village and Williamsburg. The increased rent that follows an influx of artists not only stirs up dissatisfaction among local inhabitants, but also forces poorer artists to move to further marginalized areas.
The non-profit Artspace is currently transforming the former Public School 109 in East Harlem into affordable housing for artists. At least half of the units will be reserved for current East Harlem residents to preserve El Barrio’s traditional Latino culture. However, at the site groundbreaking in 2012, two protestors shouted, “This is about gentrification — it’s not about art.” As reported by DNAinfo New York, the spokeswoman for Artspace countered that, “What Artspace does is the very opposite of gentrification. We create affordable permanent housing so that artists can’t be gentrified out of their neighborhoods.”
Both young artists and the city face the question of long term sustainability.
Artists often move into and then positively contribute to a neighborhood. In the Bronx, a group of artists started the Bronx Documentary Center. It is a non-profit gallery located on the ground floor of a recently revitalized building in the South Bronx. This center aims to create an engaging environment for artists, but will also run educational programs for kids living in the local community.
Artists’ sustainable lifestyles can also contribute to the resilience of the city. Zack says, “Being an artist is the best thing for the planet. The more people create and the less they reap for themselves, the better it is for the planet.” And artists who live in the city consume even less than those who live in the suburbs. According to David Owen, the author of Green Metropolis, in the city “the tightly circumscribed space creates efficiencies and reduces the possibilities for reckless consumption.”
The dense human capital in NYC also creates the perfect environment for a sharing economy, which can further reduce consumption and the cost of living. OurGoods.org is a barter network for the creative community in NYC to trade skills and objects. Its aim is to help artists achieve their artistic goals without spending money. Caroline Woolard, the co-founder of OurGoods.org believes that by building up community trust, a sharing economy can lead to social justice and a more equitable society.
An Alliance for the Arts report shows that the arts industry is also a vital, important part of the traditional New York City economy. According to the report, “The arts invest in local economies by hiring a local workforce, engaging local businesses and paying local and state taxes. Beyond that contribution, every part of the industry plays a role in attracting visitors from other parts of the country and the world, making arts-motivated visitors one of the strongest components of New York’s growing tourism market.” In addition, the arts draw in other new residents, both young and old.
Artists do not move here only to be with other artists. It is the electric, immense, varied entirety of the city that attracts so many newcomers. And once they are here, artists become a fundamental part of New York City as a whole, spending and sometimes making money and, of course, making and sharing art.
Big U, the winning Lower Manhattan coastal protection proposal from Rebuild by Design
New York City is a city of innovation, of wealth and poverty, of great public spaces and of great social needs. The cityscape is shaped by the pressures and challenges of city life. It’s no surprise that the city’s response to the shocking damage wrought by Hurricane Sandy, and the reality of future sea level rise, includes world class projects for storm protection. Here are the central projects under discussion.
Rebuild by Design is an initiative spearheaded by The United States Department of Urban Housing and Development (HUD). This project is an on-going search for policy-based solutions for protecting vulnerable coastal cities.
As the more extensive set of plans, we’ll look at Rebuild by Design first.
The multi-stage design competition began with a pool of 148 entrants in June, 2013, narrowed to ten teams that August, and this June six finalists, with fully developed plans slated for construction, were named.
Advisors to the Rebuild competition include William Solecki, director of the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities and science advisor to City Atlas, and Klaus Jacob, whom we interviewed here.
In the yearlong development process, the Rebuild teams designed proposals for increased protection against storms like Sandy in the regions of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Teams consisted of multi-national and multi-disciplinary groups; engineers, world leading architecture firms, community planners, and scientists from institutions including Rutgers University and the Urban Ecology and Design Laboratory at Yale.
International participants include One Architecture, a Dutch firm, which collaborated with the team led by Bjark Ingels Group (BIG), a fast rising firm based in Denmark with several large projects underway in New York. One Architecture also has international work that includes revitalizing a 1950s monastery into a state-of-the-art health center, and a development plan for turning Les Halles, Paris’s traditional central market, into a green and efficient park and shopping center.
The world-class talent assembled, a virtual “Dream Team” of designers and engineers, might seem to risk a highly publicized initiative disconnected with local impact. But each team conducted deep, careful, research into the needs of the local community, and into the larger environmental context of the challenge. The study that went into developing the projects remains accessible in the research pages of the Rebuild site.
On October 22, 2012, a tropical wave formed in the Caribbean Sea and quickly grew into a tropical storm with frightening potential. It was the hottest year in recorded human history, and the sea water was unusually warm. Strong winds whipped the wet Caribbean air into a frenzy as the storm moved North and West, and on October 24 the system had become a hurricane. Meteorologists named it Sandy, and predicted it would sweep through the Caribbean islands and make landfall somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. When it did, Sandy turned out to be more dangerous than anyone initially anticipated. The “Superstorm” intensified and grew as it moved across the Caribbean, ultimately covering an area more than one thousand miles in diameter, making it one of the largest hurricanes in U.S. history. Its winds were both punishingly severe and painfully slow, and the steady, relentless tempest seemed to pause whenever possible, as if it aimed to inflict damage on nearly everything in its path.
With the experience of Sandy as a starting place, the competing team members met with experts to learn about the local businesses and environments their coastal solutions would protect. The Municipal Art Society, as a lead partner, helped guide the Rebuild teams in outreach to New Yorkers. Residents and business owners were given the opportunity to directly voice their opinions to the teams through community workshops and public events.
As an example of how the designers learned from local organizations, the project borders of one group, Big U, extend under the jurisdiction of the Battery Conservancy. The Conservancy was able to work with the design team to determine the best ways the design could suit the various regions of Lower Manhattan and the organizations at risk for flooding. The community responded positively to the Big U proposal, believing that the designers took into account the concerns of the residents. Rebuild also created programs like “’Scale it Up,” which sought to better explain the design concepts to local audiences.
rebuildbydesign.org
Rebuild by Design’s mission is less about basic storm protection, and more about creating multi-purpose infrastructure that provides yearlong community benefits. For example, one project proposal, named Living Breakwaters by its SCAPE/ Landscape architecture team, is for a system of breakwaters strategically placed along the South Shore of Staten Island. These would protect local communities, while providing certain area parks with beneficial flooding. The proposal also highlights a community education center that would tie residents with local marine life and sustainability.
In April 2014, the teams presented their projects online and to attendees in New York and New Jersey, with each project forwarded to HUD, who made the final call. In June, six finalists were chosen. Of the winning projects, two are oriented towards protecting New Jersey residents from future flooding, with the remaining winners focusing their efforts on Long Island and the New York City area. The projects divide a total of $920 million in HUD funding as follows:
Manhattan: BIG U, a 10 mile protective system around Lower Manhattan that includes a berm — a raised bank to protect against storm surge—and new park expansions and routes to enhance outdoor life in the area. $335 million of funding.
Long Island: Living with the Bay, a comprehensive plan for strengthening storm barriers that includes added marshlands and small streams in communities designed to drain flooded tributaries in Southern Nassau County. $125 million.
The Meadowlands, New Jersey: The New Meadowlands, a marshland restoration project that includes the creation of a publicly accessible Meadow Park, added berms, recreational improvements, and a public access point called the Meadow Band. $150 million.
Hoboken, New Jersey: Resist, Delay, Store, Discharge, a project designed to build up both natural and artificial infrastructure to deal with flood prevention and flood drainage. The proposal includes installing pumps and creating drainage routes, infrastructure to slow the speed of runoff, and a “soft landscape for coastal defense.” $230 million.
The Bronx: Hunts Point Lifelines, a system designed to protect a major regional food supply hub that includes education for communities to create their flood and storm infrastructure, emergency supply lines for coastal traffic, and Cleanways that “re-center the neighborhood around transit and connect it to the waterfront greenway. New infrastructure improves air and water quality, provides safe passage for pedestrians through truck routes, and increases local access to food.” $20 million.
Staten Island: The Living Breakwaters project, a chain of breakwaters along Staten Island’s South Shore that seeks to both prevent storm inundation and foster increasing biodiversity in the calmer water pockets. There is also an initiative in place to create educational community facilities focused around these new areas, from kayaking to bird watching stations. $60 million.
Despite being funded largely by HUD’s CDBG Disaster Recovery program, Rebuild appears set on supporting proposals that do more than keep out storm water. And while some of the designs are idealistic, they all have a real-world timeline, and budget. Team BIG U claims the largest piece of the pie for phase one of construction, approximately $335 million. As quoted in Gothamist, Mayor De Blasio expects construction to begin on the six New York projects within “four or five years.”
Are these sometimes elaborate—and most definitely expensive—projects what flood-prone areas actually need? The winners all boast sustainable proposals that will offer an increase in public amenities, with these features being the most prominently advertised aspects of the publicly viewable proposals. Could the designers be adding unnecessary or even unwanted features to their projects?
Preceding the Rebuild by Design competition, Seaport City came out as part of the City’s SIRR report, in June, 2013. Seaport City emphasizes economic development in addition to storm protection. With a sixty-five year construction plan, the barrier would be able to withstand nineteen-foot storm surges and would reclaim 500 feet of land. However, community members fear that the rush to develop the area could leave little room for direct community involvement.
Manhattan’s coastline over the years. Seaport City study area shown in dotted lines. (Via NYCEDC/Arcadis.)
In a recent presentation on June 2nd, community officials were displeased with the rendering of what looked like high-rise buildings, which would hinder efforts already in place to restore the historic South Seaport. Damaged by severe flooding during Sandy, the cobblestone marketplace and historic early 20th century buildings have been receiving a gradual facelift; the goal for the community is not to destroy the local character, but to keep it alive and thriving. The Seaport City situation, officials argue, adds to the already, “frantic pace of development in Lower Manhattan,” and an eagerness for newness that ignores the main purpose of the levee, which is to protect New York’s already established infrastructure, not remove it.
Teams from Rebuild have also had their projects come under criticism. The Meadowlands project, which was awarded $150-million to launch its first phase, has regional scientists arguing about the effectiveness of the design. Environmentalists argue that the embankments could actually push storm waters into surrounding communities. In addition, the long-term effects on altering the marshland remain to be seen, with an unknown effect on the local birds, who are still recovering from years of garbage buildup. And some question the effectiveness of the fixed-height berms being implemented, which could become utterly useless if sea level rise is higher than predicted.
Despite these concerns, the Rebuild teams are breaking ground in creating flood protection systems that are custom-built for the unique coastal areas of the metropolitan region. The aforementioned Living Breakwaters, for example, does more than construct a wall.
Philip Orton—an assistant professor at Stevens Institute for Technology and an expert on Physical Oceanography—is a member of the design team who spoke to City Atlas about the emphasis on creating an effective system for Staten Island. (See the full interview on Orton’s blog.)
[pullquote align=”right”]Rebuild by Design projects begin with coastal protection but also may include economic and educational opportunities[/pullquote]“The project isn’t really about “protecting” Staten Island,” Orton argues. “It aims to improve the area’s resilience in a much broader way, including economics and coastal storms. We do this by restoring Staten Island’s historical water culture, reducing flood and wave risks, reducing erosion, improving educational and recreational opportunities at the shore, and thus making the ocean tides and waves (and their risks) more visible and tangible.”
Orton also touched on SCAPE’s plan to rebuild natural oyster beds—which also trap carbon and filter water—around the breakwaters, which will allow the system to grow along with sea level rise, eliminating the design height limitation often experienced with levees. Recalling the events of Hurricane Katrina, Orton points out that when a flood exceeds the levee “you have abrupt rushing water filling in the ‘protected’ area, which can make the hazard MORE deadly than a gradually rising water level. In New Orleans, this occurred many times over and over through history, not just in 2006.”
Coupled with a desire to reconnect Staten Island residents and students with the water through outdoor classes and maritime skill-building, the Living Breakwaters team aims to offer a proposal that not only is a “visible and tangible” alternative to dunes or levees, but is also a system that could theoretically be used in other bay landscapes such as Jamaica Bay, Barnegat Bay, and Great South Bay.
SCAPE’s winning Living Breakwaters Proposal, rebuildbydesign.org
It’s still early in Rebuild by Design’s history to make snap judgments. However, for the time being, the concern remains, in a post-Sandy New York, what the life span of elaborate coastal defenses might be. With the inescapable reality of sea level rise, there is always the background understanding that all of this coastal buffering may eventually be overwhelmed by the ocean. The crucial factor determining that outcome is mitigation — radically cutting the amount of carbon we put into the air — as is also noted in the Rebuild by Design research pack itself.
But these ambitious designs give the metropolitan area hope that their projects might allow us to continue living in the city safe from foreseeable extremes of flooding, while the deeper problem of energy and emissions are solved on the global, national and local levels. The beauty of these design responses to Sandy is that they can also actually improve daily life in the city we all love.
[Correction: an earlier version of this post had the ten team selection of Rebuild by Design in June, 2013, when the selection was made in August, 2013.]
On November 20, Intersecting Imaginaries, an art exhibition curated by the community art group, No Longer Empty, opened in the South Bronx. The exhibition explores the intersection between culture, change, and community in the South Bronx, and falls at a particularly relevant time.
A few weeks before the show opened, Brian Lehrer of WNYC reported on the “rebranding” of the South Bronx as “The Piano District,” a reference to the piano factories that were plentiful in the area in the late-19th century. As part of this rebranding a controversial and exclusive Halloween party was hosted in the area under the theme of “The Bronx is Burning.”
The neighborhood is changing fast – new condos are sprouting up, and bidding wars are being waged on historic pre-war properties around Yankee Stadium. Simultaneously, many long-time residents are left below the poverty line, are deprived of adequate access to open space and quality schools, and struggle with the environmental hazards, such as poor air quality, that are inherent to the neighborhood. These residents also fear the disruption of a neighborhood where tenants are being priced out and then bought out; it has been reported that some landlords already have been trying to buy residents out of their rent-controlled apartments.
Adding complexity to the situation, the South Bronx is home to a large concentration of the city’s affordable housing, built to resurrect neighborhoods on city-owned land acquired after the fires and large-scale abandonment of the 1970s. But even these policies have had their flaws.
In a city with such an aggressive and competitive real estate market, gentrification is almost inevitable. However, there is hope that new, market-rate redevelopment of the South Bronx will not be entirely destructive to the existing community, as long as development practice is conscientious and self-effacing.
Intersecting Imaginaries attempts to evoke conversation about this complexity. The show includes many pieces by artists of the community, which speak to the lives of the people that reside there, like a series of photos telling the stories of local residents, and a wall-hanging mural made of items found on the street. Other pieces address issues of gentrification and redevelopment head-on, such as a video of a performance piece where local teens confront tourists leaving a Yankee game.
Despite its good intentions, the exhibition in some ways reflects and contributes to the changes in the community. A significant share of the people who attended the opening were not from the area, and arguably would not have ventured to the South Bronx if not for the gallery opening – or a Yankee game. However, the curators are aware of this, and actively incorporated local artists into the exhibition and artists from other neighborhoods whose work expresses a similar narrative.
And the curatorial team built the exhibition around public programming; in addition to inviting local community groups to the opening, they are hosting private viewings and workshops for the neighboring senior center as well as hosting several “family days” to involve local families and youth in the dialogue around the exhibition, as well as providing art-making workshops. Most notably, the exhibition presents a graffiti wall in the gallery for free expression by the patrons. Grievances are not only expected, but also welcomed.
Intersecting Imaginaries is an important show that uses the narrative force of art to tackle a tough dynamic – income polarization, inequality, and the gentrification that follows – that threatens the South Bronx and much of the integrity of New York City. Too often art is a one-sided venture, aimed at one affluent audience, and this one-sidedness can be dangerous to the spaces in which it is imposed. Intersecting Imaginaries is a multi-faceted visual conversation that encourages thought and criticism while paying homage to the vibrant community that hosts it.
The exhibition will be open until December 13th, 2015 in the historic and abandoned lobby of 900 Grand Concourse.
Drawing by So Yoon Lym, part of Intersecting Imaginaries.
