Street Corner Campaign Stop

A campaign stop on a street corner is a politician's opportunity to connect with voters by speaking directly to them. When you draw a crowd, people walking by tend to stop to see what is happening. It is also an opportunity to produce images for campaign material, so the backdrop can make a difference in choosing the right corner.

In the Norwood neighborhood in The Bronx, one street corner stands out after a couple campaign stops:

It was great to be out in Norwood this morning with our dedicated team of volunteers! Looking forward to many more days like this as we work our way through every corner of our district. pic.twitter.com/Z0vRFIb00x

— Jessica Haller for NYC Council 2021 (@JessicaHaller) August 21, 2020

The mural creates a distinctive, identifiable place, while its bright colors lend positive energy to the scene. The wall without building entrances, combined with a relatively wide sidewalk, make it function well for drawing in a crowd to listen without blocking anyone.

Sitting on Public Stairs

They are a place to rest, to wait for someone you're meeting, to relax and watch the world go by. On a thriving city street, large public stairs are naturally filled with sitting people.

Steps at the New York Public Library https://maps.app.goo.gl/2mDZYiMqBh4AhmRH9

Steps at the Metropolitan Museum of Art https://maps.app.goo.gl/AUwfbgf6ENYpHErr5 

So when I see an image of a large staircase on a busy street with nobody sitting on it, something is wrong with the picture:

The Path of Restoration

Abandoned places in New York City are becoming increasingly rare. On a recent excursion with my son, I intended to go explore an abandoned place I hadn't visited for a few years. When we got there, I discovered that it had been reactivated.

The staircase down from the street had previously been walled off, but now the wall and the fence on top of it had been altered to reopen the stairs onto the sidewalk. The path that wraps around under the railroad tracks to the train station has been cleared and repaved. The vines that had covered the carved stone on the wall have been cleared off. A new fence closes off the train tracks, replacing the ruins of the old iron fence that had been broken and partially consumed by decades of tree growth. Construction debris that had previously been dumped in this area was gone and the place looks remarkably clean. We saw a couple people stroll or jog through enjoying the path and stairs while we were there.

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Policing Graffiti

When the police remove graffiti, it is not about beautifying the neighborhood. It is not even really about crime, either. It is about control.

It is remarkable how often the NYPD publicizes its graffiti cleanups, and troubling how disappointingly ugly the results often turn out. My first reaction is to feel like that is a petty complaint. They are volunteering their time, after all, to do something for the community, right? The thing is, what they are doing is trying to maintain their control over the neighborhood.

Graffiti is a crime and removing the traces of crime makes the neighborhood feel more safe, so the story goes. Often they will throw in the fear of gangs, too. Yet when they remove the graffiti, they often do not actually remove the traces of "crime."

Consider these photos recently tweeted by the NYPD:

Crudely covering over the tags leaves the walls with a mangy appearance. It is still "unsightly," and anybody who glances at it can plainly see that somebody's tags have been covered over. There is a two-part dynamic in these unsightly displays: it symbolically demonstrates the power of the police to remove competing claims to public space, and it preserves a sense of disorder that justifies the need for strong policing. Ugliness is a tool to produce fear, and the police use it to foster a sense of dependence on them for protection.

If there is any doubt that the effect is to exercise control, rather than to create an environment that communicates respect for the law, consider this tweet:

Cleaning up the neighborhood bit by bit. #graffitiremoval pic.twitter.com/s9vEpCwoot

— NYPD 5th Precinct (@NYPD5Pct) August 15, 2020

In both sets of photos, there were illegally parked NYPD vehicles blocking the fire hydrant and the crosswalk. What these images show is that they have little concern about the actual safety or appearance of the law. Instead, they just show that they removed a challenge to their power.

The NYPD has even gone as far as removing a legal mural when they did not like the way they were being portrayed. They called that censorship "broken windows policing," too.

So it really is not surprising that the "Blue Lives Matter" teenager who traveled across state lines to confront protesters, and murdered two of them, was out removing anti-police graffiti before he went on his killing spree.

Claim to the Sidewalk

Last night, the @placardabuse Twitter account posted an observation that a burning police van was parked on the sidewalk. It got me thinking. Streets are famously the contested spaces of protest and revolution, so it may be worth looking more closely at how those struggles are being fought within our public right-of-way. In the conflict over who controls our public space, there is a hierarchy within the streetscape driven by tactical considerations as well as the issue of who occupies the image of the street.

The first thing the NYPD seems to do when trying to "control" a protest is to keep the protesters out of the roadbeds. This has strategic aspects, as well as the potential for abuse.

Often this appeals to a traffic management justification. The transportation rationale implicitly prioritizes the movement of people cutting through the area in cars over anybody using the sidewalk, who becomes trapped on the overcrowded sidewalks. It sets the privileged minority who own cars in New York City above the majority who live car-free. It does also keep the roadways open for emergency vehicles to get through quickly.

Rapid responses may be critical to provide medical assistance for anybody who may be injured by a confrontation or stampeding from the crowd.  It also allows the police to mobilize their own resources, enabling them to respond with overwhelming force, both in terms of bodies and weaponry.

NYPD are keeping people on the sidewalk #GeorgeFloydProtest pic.twitter.com/uDSuCYhe9M

— Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) May 29, 2020

Former Mayor Giuliani once expressed this rather concisely:

I have a zero tolerance for riots. I, you know, took over a city that had two riots in four years and I had none. And they knew they couldn’t riot on me. And when I saw the people on the street in New York City, I said to myself, you’re breaking Giuliani’s rules. You don’t take my streets. You can have my sidewalks, but you don’t take my streets, because ambulances have to get through there, fire trucks have to get through there. People die when you crowd the streets of New York City with protesters. You can do plenty of protesting on the sidewalk.

As the statement by Giuliani shows, there is a hierarchy here between the "streets" and the "sidewalks." There is also a power of ownership ("my streets") at work here, and the protesters are merely allowed use of the lower status portion of the public space by those in power.

Not-So-Safe Streets

During the current global pandemic, there has been a precipitous drop in driving. Traffic has all but evaporated on New York City's streets. Meanwhile, sidewalks and parks are not providing enough space for people to walk for essential trips, including some basic exercise. Repurposing the residual street space for walking is an obvious solution, and one that is increasingly pursued in cities around the world. New York has been slow to follow, with the Mayor resisting the very idea until continuing to refuse to open streets became politically untenable. Under order of the Governor to do something, he initially opened a few random streets and posted lots of police officers on every block. Shortly thereafter, he pulled it, claiming the police costs were too high.

Public and political pressure continued to mount, expecially as examples continued to come in from other cities. Photo after photo of from other cities closing streets with simple barriers without a heavy police presence made it untenable to continue insisting that New York City was so unique that we could not open our streets too. Finally, another small number of short street segments were announced for an initial opening this past weekend.

The charitable way to greet this is that ... it's only a start. They risk making destinations of these streets with slow ramp-ups, though. You can have my street! pic.twitter.com/HQ03v3p4sJ

— Nicole Alone of Silent West Midtown 🌸🐿💐🌺🌹☔️🐥 (@nicolegelinas) May 1, 2020

The first day at the Oval only had a small hiccup. The barriers were placed at Reservoir Oval itself, stopping traffic after it had turned onto the inlet streets, with no good way to turn back around. When the street openings were announced with their mileages, I wondered why DOT had not taken credit for the additional mileage from those side streets. The day before the street opened, my 8-year-old son was even thinking out loud on his own about where the barriers would need to be placed for these streets. Just a couple hours after the Safe Street opening, the NYPD recognized and corrected the situation by bringing out additional barriers to intercept the drivers before turning onto those streets. Still, it was an inexplicable mistake for professionals to make.

The Oval seems to be working well as an open street today. pic.twitter.com/PjPjd1vc54

— Urban Residue (@urbanresidue) May 2, 2020

Barriers Against What?

There have been dire warnings recently that car manufacturers might try to exert their influence to take over city streets at the expense of pedestrians (again). A recent flare up followed the suggestion that some executives were considering the installation of gates at intersections to keep pedestrians from crossing against the light and interfering with autonomous vehicles. The backlash from urbanists was immediate: We should not repeat the mistakes of the past when cars were first introduced into cities. People should not be penned in on the sidewalks like cattle. Etc.

A couple of examples:

Pedestrians enclosed behind gates that only open so often.

Cities reordered to a potentially "antiseptic" level to accommodate self-driving cars.

This is what AV industry reps are telling the New York Times they envision.

Pretty alarming stuff 😱https://t.co/27brdgWAUa

— Streetsblog USA (@StreetsblogUSA) August 2, 2019

An autonomous car is still a car, and they're still out to ruin our cities.

"One solution, suggested by an automotive industry official, is gates at each corner, which would periodically open to allow pedestrians to cross." https://t.co/dXeYwJjyxX

— Mark Bennett (@md_bennett) August 2, 2019

Caution is warranted, of course. The ability of autonomous cars to successfully navigate dense pedestrian areas is dubious, and some of the materials released by the auto industry have been outright frightening (see below). I agree with the need to be vigilant about the policies that may redesign our cities very quickly, setting new patterns that may hold for generations to come. In this case, though, it seems like a knee jerk response of the "if it's good for cars, it must be bad for pedestrians" variety. The idea surfaced, after all, as a solution to the potential problem of pedestrians interfering with the automated vehicles, which might become paralyzed if people deliberately walk in front of them, knowing that safety procedures designed to avoid injuring people will make them stop.

Ford Hub at the World Trade Center is not inspiring much confidence in @Ford's attention to pedestrian-vehicle interactions... pic.twitter.com/a5NexUexXd

— Urban Residue (@urbanresidue) February 15, 2017

Nonetheless, I am fairly optimistic that automated vehicles can be leveraged to transform the places we live for the better, and I see crossing gates as an acceptable tradeoff. Likely enough, they could become a welcome addition to our streetscape.

Programmed Out

Not long ago, I was at an event where a wealthy developer spoke for a few minutes to a group responsible for making public improvements in a local community. He proudly described how he had worked to "program every linear foot to make sure there was no space available for street vendors." This was expressed as though it was a self-evident truth that vendors along the curb would be a blight on the neighborhood.

I was horrified. The prospect of such complete design that it admitted no emergent activities sounded rigid and dull. Worse, it expressed a disdain toward the lower-income entrepreneurs whose daily labor anchors a vibrant street life in busy neighborhoods. While it is true that poorly regulated street vendors do sometimes contribute to sidewalk congestion in the densest areas, they also meet needs for cost and convenience that will surely be lacking in this man's new development.

I had little doubt that the intent of the design is to keep out both the working class businesses and the customers who would be attracted by their cost and convenience. This developer also mentioned racing his sail boat, and he was clearly building a neighborhood for the sort of people who can afford a yacht to go out sailing like him.

It is a vision of luxury that relies on exclusion for its sense of validation. It is a vision we should reject for New York City.

Chronicles of Stolen Space - Pedestrianized Pine Street

This is a designated pedestrian street in Lower Manhattan

The quality of our public spaces in New York City is so much worse than they should be. By all appearances, this is due to a negligent municipal government that has failed to shoulder its responsibilities to safeguard these spaces for public use.

Take for example the case of a pedestrianized block of Pine Street between South and Front Streets. This street was pedestrianized in 1978, yet in recent memory, it has increasingly been used for car parking. It seems that the permission for "service vehicles," clearly intended originally to allow for garbage pickup, provided a foothold for parcel services to use the street for their parking needs. Gradually, others followed suit until the whole space has now become filled with cars.

Two Sides of the Same Woods

On one side of the road, you have tourists reading plaques about trees. On the other, gay men circle the woods looking for potential hookups. The Bronx River Forest is one of the few remaining sections of the great woodland that once covered the New York region. While we tend to consider the plants and animals that populate wooded areas like this as "wild," this landscape is highly shaped by the physical interventions and social activities of humans. It is easy to overlook how much human action can shape the "natural" environment, but the differences created by separate jurisdictional control over trails winding through the woods along the Bronx River on each side of Allerton Avenue create a stark contrast.

People duck under a fallen tree (covered in poison ivy) on the Blue Trail north of 204th Street in the Bronx Forest managed by the Department of Parks and Recreation

Tourists stop along the trail in the Thain Family Forest in the New York Botanical Garden to read facts about the trees 

South of Allerton Avenue, the Bronx River flows through the New York Botanical Garden. Since the 1890s, this land has been City parkland, part of Bronx Park, which is administered by a private institution specifically charged with the development and maintenance of a great living museum. To the north, the parkland is under conventional control of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

There are some physical differences in terrain between the two sections. To the north, the river passes through a floodplain. After flowing into the garden, it quickly drops into a ravine with some moderately steep slopes down to the river. Nonetheless, the main distinctions between these two sections is how the land is managed and access is controlled.

The Rain Garden That Wouldn't Grow

Recently, my wife and I were out on a date and taking a stroll through Harlem before dinner when we stumbled on a dog relief area at the corner of Manhattan Avenue and East 122nd Street. I was excited and my wife was, well, glad to see me enjoying myself.

A few years ago while musing about planning for pets, I came across the French canisites. Now I had stumbled on one in my own town, and I hadn't even heard about it!

It is a wonderful little example of the transformation of a residual space. Initially it was a hatched area in the roadway where northbound traffic is diverted as Manhattan Avenue becomes a southbound one-way street. It was just the sort of dead space that was long common on our paved streets. In 2012, it was converted into a rain garden to improve storm water management and probably contribute a few count toward the Million Trees program, but the plants just wouldn't grow on the street side of the triangle. After a few years of the vegetation struggling and consistently dying off, it appears somebody had the genius to stop fighting the inevitable and repurpose the space to address the dog poop problem that is chronic on sidewalks throughout New York City.

The Performance on a Dirty Corner

There was no lack of spectators for the performance down on the corner. Many even returned to watch the show on its second and third days. "I've lived here for 30 years," or "I've lived here for 40 years," several of them stopped to say, "and I'm so glad you're doing this."

Creating a mural is a public performance. Of course, the finished artwork is a permanent installation, but the process of transforming a space in the middle of daily street life becomes performance art in its own right.

Watching @BigeyesWorld work on the Norwood mural, you realize this type of project is largely performance art. The community is spectators enjoying the show as the piece progresses. pic.twitter.com/MNa82Ao7li

— Urban Residue (@urbanresidue) September 2, 2018

East 207th Street and Bainbridge Avenue has always been an unremarkable and rather dirty corner.  The side of the bodega is a blank wall that consistently attracted juvenile tagging, which local anti-graffiti group Norwood Against Graffiti (NAG) routinely rolled over with fresh paint, seemingly refreshing the canvas for the next set of tags. Meanwhile, the sidewalk and tree pits had long accumulated trash. A couple local characters spend their afternoons sitting on the corner with a drink in hand. It was the leftover backside of a small commercial building, a little place that had mostly been abandoned for decades. It was a place that people shuffled through, dulled by the mundane ugliness.



While most people were resigned to walking by the griminess on this corner as an immutable fact of life, something they had effectively tuned out, Elisabeth von Uhl saw the possibility of creating a place that had more to contribute to the community. It took a few years of effort and a couple false starts, but with some perseverance and persuasion, she eventually partnered with ArtBridge and secured funding from Councilmember Andrew Cohen. ArtBridge brought in artist Laura Alvarez who designed and painted the mural.

Early Morning Haunts

The early hours are haunted times. Sometimes it seems still, but in that eerie silence something is always quietly moving about. At other times, activities go on regularly in the dark without us, as we slumber in our beds unaware of the activities occupying our regular places. Familiar places become foreign to us during these irregular hours, with a heightened sense of awareness.  At these times, I am often haunted by Jean Anouilh's Antigone returning home and describing the early morning:

De me promener, nourrice. C'était beau. Tout était gris. Maintenant, tu ne peux pas savoir, tout est déjà rose, jaune, vert. C'est devenu une carte postale. Il faut te lever plus tôt, nourrice, si tu veux voir un monde sans couleurs... 

Le jardin dormait encore. Je l'ai surpris, nourrice. Je l'ai vu sans qu'il s'en doute. C'est beau un jardin qui ne pense pas encore aux hommes... 

Dans les champs c'était tout mouillé et cela attendait. Tout attendait. Je faisais un bruit énorme toute seule sur la route et j'étais gênée parce que je savais bien que ce n'était pas moi qu'on attendais. 

From walking about, nurse. It was beautiful. Everything was gray. Now, you can't tell, everything is already pink, yellow, green. It's turned into a post card. You must get up earlier, nurse, if you want to see a world without colors... 

The garden was still sleeping. I crept up on it, nurse. I saw it without it suspecting. A garden that isn't thinking about men yet is beautiful... 

In the fields it was all wet and it was waiting. Everything was waiting. I made a huge noise all alone on the road and I was bothered because I knew that it wasn't me it was waiting for. 

Truth be told, my memory probably embellishes on Anouilh a bit. My imagination makes it more mythic, perhaps, than the actual text itself. Perhaps that is part of how haunting works.

Recently I found myself in Weehawken at the corner of 19th Street and Boulevard East at four in the morning, where I was again visited by this familiar memory. I experienced the sense of being bothered by the world's indifference to us, and this time it wasn't waiting for anything, although I rather expected it to be.

Popping up on Parkside Place

Major changes have been announced for Norwood with new construction planned for a rocky slope that residents had always believed was parkland. This has raised concerns.

The site is a long, narrow rock outcropping that separates Parkside Place from Webster Avenue in The Bronx. It is near my home and I know it well. Almost nobody ever climbs up on the rocks above Webster Avenue. There's no reason they would. I am one of the few who has. I was curious about a stair that extended from 207th Street down to Webster Avenue on old maps. It was unclear if it was merely planned or if had actually been built and then removed at some point long forgotten. I went looking for any remnants under the vegetation. There is some concrete that might have been part of a stair, although I can't be sure, as well as some mortar used to stabilize the rock outcropping to avoid a collapse onto the street below.

A stair location is indicated on the Borough President's street title map

Parkside Place is a short, three-block-long street that climbs over and back down those rocks. It splits off from Webster Avenue, climbs the hill to 209th Street, continues to 207th Street, and then drops back down to merge back with Webster. It takes its name from the tree-covered rock outcrop that it climbs over, which has never been a real park, but is park-like as a visual resource.

Recently, somebody started clearing the trees off the rocks. Local residents became alarmed. It was commonly believed this was City parkland (in no small part because the Department of Parks and Recreation showed it as parkland on their interactive parks map), and now it was being clearcut without warning. 

Chronicles of Stolen Space: Fake Enforcement

After closing the Privately-Owned Public Space for months of reconstruction to fix subsurface problems, the Millennium Hilton is now reopening its POPS with the same non-compliant design and illegal operations that degrade our public realm. And as before, despite some pretense that they are responding to complaints, the enforcement agencies empowered and entrusted to safeguard our public space are allowing the owners to shirk their responsibilities and steal space from the public:

• Required public seating and other features were not installed
• The parking garage has resumed using an area that is supposed to be public seating to temporarily park vehicles
• The parking garage continues to illegally encroach on the sidewalk and park an extra vehicle that blocks an egress door.

The Department of Buildings, after an insanely prolonged battle, did finally issue a violation for the missing public space amenities. That turned out that was only a token gesture. They listed a demerit and issued a small one-time fine. Then they let the building's owners continue with business as usual. If the Department of Buildings were serious, they would require the owners to meet their obligations under the Special Permit or revoke their Certificate of Occupancy. By all appearances, the Department of Buildings is still siding with unscrupulous building owners against the public.

After @NYC_Buildings closed out 10 earlier complaints over 11-month period saying there was no problem...https://t.co/uK2pXFFdI1

— Urban Residue (@urbanresidue) April 3, 2017

While it was nice to hear "DOB is aware of this issue and has been monitoring the site," issuing a small fine and letting them resume using the public space as a parking spot is not sufficient. pic.twitter.com/ivlYYTcEqn

— Urban Residue (@urbanresidue) March 27, 2018

Meanwhile, the New York Police Department is still letting the parking garage operator break the law and possibly endanger lives. In response to 311 complaints, they have claimed to go out in an attempt to take care of the problem, but those responses are obvious falsifications.

I understand that the parking garage is using the space in front of the hotel's emergency egress door and part of the sidewalk as a parking space, @NYPD1Pct. That's the problem! pic.twitter.com/L7jUCBxLqu

— Urban Residue (@urbanresidue) March 31, 2018

The result is a poor pedestrian experience for the city's residents, workers, and visitors due to wealthy business owners abusing our public space and possibly even putting the lives of their own paying guests in danger.

Previous chronicles in this saga:
http://urbanresidue.blogspot.com/2016/09/chronicles-of-stolen-space-new-york.html

http://urbanresidue.blogspot.com/2016/11/chronicles-of-stolen-space-department.html

http://urbanresidue.blogspot.com/2017/03/chronicles-of-stolen-space-department.html

Staring at the Pole

I was recently at Frederick Douglass Circle at the northwest corner of Central Park. Every time I go, I am bothered by a detail that detracts from the relationship between the plaza and its surroundings. I am not sure if the detail was on the drawings I first say many years ago, but if it was I certainly missed it.

Back in 2003, I attended a public meeting for neighbors skeptical about the transformation of Frederick Douglass Circle into a public space. At the conclusion of years of participatory planning and a design competition, residents of Towers on the Park emerged with last-minute objections to various aspects of the reconfiguration of the previously dysfunctional intersection (the circle was previously cut through by traffic, creating far too many movements as well as lane drops in the middle of the intersection...). I spoke in favor of the project, convinced it would create a great new public space.

Then construction stretched on for many years. It was disruptive for everybody in the area and continued long beyond what any resident would consider reasonable. I second guessed myself for speaking up after seeing the ordeal I had helped to put these people through. I hoped the quality of the built space would eventually make up for the disruptions in so many lives.

Since the first time I was finally able to visit the plaza some time around 2011, I have been bothered and deeply disappointed. For me, the execution of the concept was seriously compromised by one poorly placed traffic signal pole.

The overall concept for the plaza was strong, and much of it has in fact turned out very well. It would be unfair to call this urban space a failure. Yet while the statue of Douglass was symbolically positioned to face Harlem, the gesture is undermined by that traffic signal. Instead of looking up the avenue that carries his name, Douglass just stands there staring at a steel pole a few feet in front of him.

Under the Roadway - Inspiration from Bethesda Terrace

It seems to be an article of faith among many contemporary planners that grade separation is an
ti-pedestrian and inherently anti-urban. In practice, this has been the case all too often; pedestrians have been forced to use uncomfortable overpasses and underpasses, diverted from a direct route to a grossly inferior detour. It is indeed a miserable experience when you're forced to climb steep stairs to walk across a narrow concrete pad over noisy traffic with a sharp wind cutting through the chain link fence, or to pass through a claustrophobic, musty, tunnel adorned solely by the exposed electrical conduit for the dim lights. Yet when we accept these bad places as our model for grade separation, we forget the concept's original vision and early success. This troubles me again each time I visit Central Park.

The ideas and work of Frederick Law Olmsted set much of the foundation for urban planning. His transverse roads in Central Park continue to successfully overlay a rustic park environment on a busy street grid. They make it possible for an expansive urban park to coexist with the city's street system. This is the baby we should not throw out with the bathwater.

And then there's Bethesda Terrace, the architectural showpiece of the park. It is an amazing progression of space, a place that is experienced by movement through a sequence of spaces. Grade separation here is not some mere functional layout. It is not just a safety feature. The experience of descending, the transition through a dark, constrained space that frames the view of the Angel of the Waters, and the reemergence into the open, sunny space is the design.

The Road to a Park System for the Future

I drove with my family to Wisconsin and back for Christmas, with a minor detour through Chicago each way. Four days on the road gives you plenty of time to mull things over, and as I passed through the transitions between urban areas and open countryside, kicked in and out of cruise control interacting with the mixture of cars and trucks on the highway, and detoured through Chicago, I found myself thinking a lot about how park systems may look in the future. This may take some explanation, but please come along with me for this ride.

Driving in and out of urban areas is generally just drab. More often than not, buildings become more mundane and spread out, commercial signage grows larger and taller, and then eventually just seems to give up. Most people usually just call it "urban sprawl," even if it's a term without a real definition. But there are a few cities that have great gateways. New York did, once upon a time. Passengers arrived in the harbor by ship, passing alongside the welcoming Statue of Liberty as the skyline took shape as individual skyscrapers continuing to push impossibly higher as you drew nearer. Dramatic as it is to pass through the cut in the Palisades and emerge onto the George Washington Bridge, the city is a mere glimmer in the distance before disappearing into a bewildering tangle of ramps. Likewise, the helix of the Lincoln Tunnel provides impressive glances at the Midtown skyline, but then grinds through a toll plaza and squeezes through the tube before emptying onto congested, nondescript Manhattan intersections.

But Chicago has its moments. We drove along Garfield Boulevard on a side trip going both ways on this trip. Among my strongest memories in life is peering out the window as my cab drove from Midway Airport along the tree lined boulevard on my first trip to Chicago, when I moved to Hyde Park sight unseen to begin college. Exiting the Mad Max world of the Dan Ryan onto Garfield Boulevard invokes a somewhat similar sense of calm and wonder, a definite moment of arrival. Yet while the broad green space and regular spacing of mature trees is still great drama, each time I visit the boulevards on the South Side, the more acutely I feel they have been stripped down to mere scenery. In practice, the boulevards seem to do little to connect any activities between the parks. There is no flowing use of a system of parks, and the roadway design seems to cut off much opportunity. Yet even without the reality of real connective use, the mere vision is compelling and the spacing of greenery contributes to a more legible and enjoyable neighborhood structure. There is much still to be learned and built on from this old Olmsted pattern as our streets continue to evolve.

Vinyl on the Crash Blocks

When I was out the other night, I enjoyed the simple design intervention on the security barriers made from concrete blocks and jersey barriers around the Empire State Building. This was a welcome addition and customization of the NYPD Urban Design.




With some nylon covers and a handful of zip ties, they have created more a sense of place than the bland, white chunks of concrete. These are low-cost materials that are easy to install. Hiring a designer may have cost nearly as much as the fabrication and installation.

My Secret Rose Garden

Between the lanes of traffic, a quiet path through a rose garden hides in plain sight. I have gone for a stroll there on several lunch breaks, and yesterday was the first time I have had any interaction with anyone at all. In essence, I have had a rose garden all to myself in the midst of America's busiest city.

The garden runs the length of several blocks of medians on New York City's West Street, otherwise known as the West Side Highway. Broken by intersecting streets, it is more accurately a series of gardens, although their character is mostly consistent from block to block.

There are no real entrances to the paths, making it ambiguous if they are actually open for public use. The purpose of the path is unclear, but it is likely there to provide access for the landscaping workers to maintain the sprinkler system and tend to the roses. To gain entry, you must step up a couple feet over a low stone wall. The path is plainly visible and there are no signs prohibiting entry into this publicly-owned space, but the lack of steps communicates that it was not intended as an entrance. It certainly does not meet the ADA requirements for a place designed for use by the public.

Over the course of the summer, some of the rose bushes began to overgrow the path. The ambiance of a lost place grew stronger as the plants seemingly took over the space.