Yule Heibel's Library tagged nyc →  View Popular, Search in Google

Some amazing captures by Brandon Stanton (see the video). So much diversity, yet the people seem somehow rooted in and belonging to NYC: they're unified as New Yorkers, even though they're often so different. It struck me how often the sitters blended into the background the were posing in front of, as though ingested by the place, literally incorporated, and belonging to it entirely.
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Stanton, who has no formal training in photography, told me that the real barrier to taking street portraits is the very normal human fear of rejection. “Especially when you start, a lot of people are going to say no,” he says. At first, the rejections sting. But he says that after all the thousands of interactions he’s had, he doesn’t really register them any more.
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street_photography nyc brandon_stanton photography cities diversity

Fantastic article by Kay Hymowitz on Brooklyn, NY: history, economics, gentrification, and the importance of land use zoning. Must-read.
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Walentas’s prescience—and patience—put him in an unusual position. Like many successful developers, he was able to make a lot of money: space in the buildings he bought for $6 per square foot now sometimes sells for $1,000 per square foot. But unlike other developers, Walentas owned so much of a neighborhood that he could play God. Also, since he was making so much money from the properties overall, he could give rent breaks to commercial tenants that he viewed as desirable—for instance, upscale retailers like West Elm, the modern-furniture outlet, and Jacques Torres, a high-end chocolatier—while refusing chains like Duane Reade, which, he felt, set the wrong, down-market tone.
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city_journal kay_hymowitz brooklyn nyc urbanism urban_renewal entrepeneurialism

@MarketUrbanism makes the case for a variant of trickle-down benefits of market forces.
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When Ryan Avent’s ebook The Gated City came out, I summed up his thesis as being that if you allow more growth in Silicon Valley, you get more tech companies and tech wages. The same principle is worth a try around Union Square and Dumbo. They’re both urban neighborhoods, but are relatively squat compared to other commercial neighborhoods in the city. They may not be completely “zoned out” for new development, but the amount of developable space is a small fraction of what’s already built, and it’s certainly not enough to keep prices from rising faster than the rate of inflation. In Dumbo, for example, new buildings are barely allowed to rise above the height of a elevator-less walk-up, when they’re allowed at all. In Union Square, the hottest new building isn’t even new, but rather an expensive rehab of an old structure with barely any new square footage. Entrepreneurs, especially in lucrative industries like technology, are willing to shell out more money to be in a talent hub like New York or Silicon Valley, but their ability to pay is not limitless.
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forbes stephen_smith marketurbanism cities nyc urban_development

Short blog post with wonderful video embedded featuring Amanda Burden (NYC planner) who talks about Yolanda Garcia. QUOTE
Via Verde aside, nearly a dozen public housing complexes have been built in Melrose during the last decade, as part of the mayor’s $3 billion initiative to add some 165,000 new subsidized apartments around the city. It seemed like a good idea to make the video to give Times readers a look at a few of the buildings and some sense of the scope of the change that has come to the South Bronx.
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nyc bronx amanda_ burden yolanda_garcia urbanplanning urban_renewal

Some terrific ideas here:
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This summer the Institute for Urban Design asked New Yorkers to submit ideas for making the city's public spaces "smarter, more beautiful and livable." Some 500 responses later, the institute then asked designers from around the world to shape these raw ideas into concrete projects for the city. The results of this "collaborative re-imagining" of New York were revealed during Urban Design Week, which came to a close on Tuesday, with 10 entries declared collective "winners."
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urban_renewal urban_amenities urban_design cities nyc atlantic_cities design

The idea strikes me as bizarre, but also weirdly appealing...
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“Technology enables us to create an appealing green space in an underserved neighborhood,” says Ramsey. The key, he says, is the “remote skylight,” a system that channels sunlight along fiber-optic cables, filtering out harmful ultraviolet and infrared light but keeping the wavelengths used in photosynthesis. “We’re channeling sunlight the way they did in ancient Egyptian tombs, but in a supermodern way.” Ramsey envisions a stand of dozens of lamppostlike solar collectors on the Delancey Street median, feeding a system of fixtures down below.
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nyc low_line parks greenspace urban_amenities nymag

Lovely series of photos of New York City, mostly from the 1940s, some from the 60s.
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Amateur photographer Charles W. Cushman traveled extensively in the U.S. and abroad capturing daily life from 1938 to 1969.

His works have been donated to and maintained by Cushman's alma mater Indiana University, which has kindly given us permission to publish his gallery of New York City photos taken in 1941, 1942 and 1960.
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nyc charles_w_cushman photography street_photography manhattan

More on urban planning and social media/ input by the people:
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The NYC Dept of Transportation continues to re-imagine traffic throughout the city; employing a system of bike paths, street closings and new traffic alignments to create public space and make traffic safer and more efficient. The task was to imagine the public spaces created by the new traffic alignments, and design a language of street furniture and planting that helped to define the space. Before beginning to develop our design principles, the design team first had to ask, what should a public place be?

The aim was to engage a wide audience in answering this question. Forty Dutch urban design students and their professors, landscape architect Erik de Jong and planner Arnold van der Valk, happened to be in town and were eager to discuss urban public space in the American context.

These young designers joined Balmori Associates staff and the client in a design discussion. The team also extended the conversation to a worldwide public through live video and twitter. The discussion touched on topics that including ecology, funding, furniture and materials, program, public/private, public amenities, scale, and circulation/traffic. In the Twitter forum, the discussion focused on sharable space, urban decorum, and contextual appropriateness. These topics helped us to develop our design principles.
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open_source placemaking streets reclaiming_streets urban_design urbanplanning balmori nyc

A real "wow!" post by Scouting New York on getting a tour of Manhattan's 5 Beekman Street, boarded up for decades. Click through for stunning photos.
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In 1940, the atrium was boarded up due to firecode violations. Completely hidden, later tenants would never know of its existence, seeing only a walled corridor (though according to a recent NY Times article, a secret door offered those who stumbled upon it an amazing discovery).
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5_beekman_street manhattan nyc architecture heritage restoration adaptive_reuse

Interesting semi-permanent art project, by Miranda July (who's primarily a novelist):
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...a new public art installation, the comparatively terse “Eleven Heavy Things,” organized by Deitch Projects, which opened late last week in New York’s Union Square Park. (The installation will remain in the park through October 3rd.) The sculptures, many of which revolve around a line of text written in July’s own hand, prod the viewer into audience interaction. “What I look like when I’m lying,” reads one, a white tablet through which the viewer can stick his head. A trio of pedestals — labeled 'The Guilty One,' 'The Guiltier One,’ and ‘The Guiltiest One’ — asks participants to gauge (and flaunt) their general culpability. Three of the sculptures are wordless “headdresses,” decorative sculptures that July compares to the dialogue-free stretches of a movie: “The shapes are those parts of this piece.”
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art sculpture public_art miranda_july installations nyc

Completely agree with Benjamin Hemric's critical comment (below), about Benjamin Schwarz's article (which in turn is a review of books by Sharon Zukin and Michael Sorkin and their collective take on Jane Jacobs.
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While I agree that there is much to criticize in Michael Sorkin's and Sharon Zukin's lamentations about gentrification, it's very disheartening to see that in his article, writer Benjamin Schwarz seems to accept the very same myths about Jane Jacobs that Sorkin and Zukin appear to subscribe to. I think that if one looks at what Jane Jacobs ACTUALLY WROTE (rather than accepting at face value what people "say" she wrote) one will quickly see the differences between Jacobs and Sorkin and Zukin -- and also see why Sorkin's and Zukin's critiques are so misguided.

It seems to me that the following, in order of appearance in the article, are the pernicious myths that Mr. Schwarz has, sadly, incorporated into his article:

1) Myth incorporating statement #1: "She [Jacobs] largely formed her conclusions in "Death and Life . ." . . by closely reading the neighborhood life around her house on Hudson Street . . . "

The name of Jacobs' first and most famous book is "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," NOT, "The Death and Life of Greater Greenwich Village." In it, Jacobs writes about many sections of New York City (e.g., East Harlem, W57th St., Rockefeller Center, Yorkville, etc.), AND about parts of a lot of other American cities too (e.g., the North End of Boston; Rittenhouse Square, Benjamin Franklin Parkway and the four Center City parks of Philadelphia; Back of the Yards, Chicago, etc.).

For a number of years prior to writing "Death and Life . . . ," Jacobs was a writer for a prestigious, glossy, national publication, "Architectural Forum," and she visited, researched (e.g., explored and interviewed government officials, etc.), and wrote about cities all over the country. Furthermore she herself credited experiences in Philadelphia and, especially East Harlem, with really opening her eyes to the

atlantic_monthly benjamin_schwarz benjamin_hemric cities nyc urbanism jjacobs gentrification

Way to go:
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The New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority is not usually held up as an example of a public agency leading the way in the open data and transparency movement. It’s perennially attacked by New Yorkers and the local media as a bloated, inefficient agency that struggles just to keep the trains and buses running, let alone do anything innovative. Yet, the MTA’s recent efforts to open up its data and reach out to developers demonstrate that even the most bureaucratically and financially challenged public agencies can be leaders in embracing new media.
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nyc transit opendata gov2.0

Excellent post by Ephemeral New York on "Three ways of looking at Delancey Street," that is, 1919, 1975, and today. One of the commenters puts it best when he writes that the 2 modern pictures show "sewers for cars." (h/t @davewiner)

nyc delancey_street ephemeral_new_york traffic automobile cars urban_design

Sharon Zukin takes on gentrification (in Harlem especially), while Harlem-ites dismiss her critique. "Gentrification" v. "authenticity" - which one is better?

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It should also be said that these talented, innovative African-Americans are forging a new entrepreneurial path that was too often closed to their ancestors. Jai Jai Greenfield, co-owner of Harlem Vintage, a wine store that opened on Frederick Douglass Boulevard in 2004, designed it as an homage to her grandparents, longtime Harlem residents whose elegant photographs from the 1930s were featured in the store's initial promotional literature. She says that Ms. Zukin is missing the point. "We brought to Harlem something that had never existed here—a store that is for and about the wine. [Ms. Zukin] seems to think that to be legitimately ghetto our store should look a certain way—bullet-proofed windows and grates. To be authentic, in her view, I would need to go with a couple of concepts—fried chicken or maybe a nail salon."
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authenticity gentrification sharon_zukin harlem nyc socialcritique

Flavorwire's interview with Michael Sean Edwards, who moved to the East Village from Toronto in 1977 and has been documenting it ever since. A set of his images from 1978 to 1985 is now available on Flickr. Flavorwire also includes a slide-show with commentary by Edwards.

michael_sean_edwards photography cities nyc east_village street_photography art flavorwire

Great review by Howard Husock of 2 new books about Jane Jacobs: Anthony Flint's Wrestling with Moses, and Glenna Lang and Marjory Wunsch's Genius of Common Sense.

Love this quote, which Husock provides, from Jacobs: “To approach a city or even a city neighborhood as if it were capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art is to make the mistake of substituting art for life.”

Why do I single this one out? Because it takes aim at the "aesthetes" who infest our midst (even in Victoria, BC, at the City council level and beyond).

howard_husock jjacobs anthony_flint nyc urbanplanning city_journal

Susan Sontag chatting with Philip Johnson in NYC's Seagram Building. Johnson makes NIMBY noises about how his view will be blocked when a surface parking lot across the way finally gets redeveloped. Too funny. (This video is from ...?, the 60s.)

video philip_johnson susan_sontag seagram_building nyc architecture nimbyism

Interesting docu-project by Richard Howe: photographing every street *corner* in New York City.

nyc photography richard_howe street_scape usage

Another fascinating New York Magazine article, showing that 1 out 2 apartments in Manhattan are occupied by singles ...and that their occupants are not lonely or alienated.
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Manhattan is the capital of people living by themselves. But are New Yorkers lonelier? Far from it, say a new breed of loneliness researchers, who argue that urban alienation is largely a myth.
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urbanism manhattan nyc myths loneliness demographics nymag

Looks to be a great & informative article, but it's annoying that New York Magazine spreads these pieces over so many many pages. File under "will read later"?

nyc architecture buildings critique nymag justin_davidson