Next Tuesday evening in the Arsenal Gallery, our Freshkills Park Talks lecture series continues with a talk by Peter Harnik, Director of the Center for City Park Excellence at the Trust for Public Land.  He will be speaking to topics from his latest book, “Urban Green: Innovative Parks for Resurgent Cities,” about the reclamation of a variety of urban sites—landfills, railways, rooftops, cemeteries, schoolyards, highway decks—as parkland. 

The summer group exhibition at Brooklyn artspace Smack Mellon is called “Condensations of the Social.”  It features artistic projects that engage social practice:

artistic projects that refer to the strands of the social that contribute to the formation of culture: pedagogy, ritual/performance, political and ideological engagement, work, and ecology and sustainability as they relate to place.

The New York Times City Room Blog reports that Tuesday morning, workers excavating the site of part of the rebuilt World Trade Center came upon something unexpected in the muck 20 feet below street level: a 30-foot truncated section of an 18th century wood-hulled ship. 

New York Magazine runs down the City’s top 19 playgrounds, with each site qualified by its standout feature.  Among the list: Pier 6 at Brooklyn Bridge Park (Best Sandbox and Swings); Hester Street Playground in Chinatown (Best Tire Swings); the playground at Pier 51 in Hudson River Park (Best Sprinklers); Teardrop Park in Battery Park City (Best Urban Oasis); and Playground 70 on the Upper West Side (Best For Kids of All Abilities).

The ReuseConex Conference, to be held in Raleigh, NC this October, will be the nation’s first conference and expo on materials reuse.  Sponsored by the Reuse Alliance, the conference will explore the societal, environmental and economic benefits of materials reuse and feature keynote speaker Garth Johnson, author of 1000 Ideas for Creative Reuse.

Americans for the Arts announces their annual Public Art Year in Review, celebrating the year’s best public art works in the US and Canada.  The 40 works listed this year are sited in 29 cities and were selected from over 300 entries by curators Helen Lessick and Fred Wilson. 

NYC Department of Sanitation (DSNY) Anthropologist-in-Residence Robin Nagle will be responding to readers’ questions about her work studying the DSNY and the City’s garbage systems this week on the New York Times’ City Room Blog.  Dr. Nagle is a long-time friend and partner of the Freshkills Park project.

We just dug up this great story from the New York Times in 2000 that features the work of Rutgers restoration ecologist Steven Handel at the Freshkills Park site.  Dr. Handel and his students had completed a 16-acre study at the old landfill in the New Jersey Meadowlands when they entered into agreement with the NYC Department of Sanitation to study the rehabilitation of native ecology at the not-yet-closed Fresh Kills Landfill. 

Urban Omnibus offers a review of two newly opened New York City skate parks, the 16,000 sq. ft. “street” course in Corona Park and the 15,000 sq. ft. “flow” course at Hudson River Park’s Pier 62.  Designer and skater Buck Jackson gives both parks the thumbs-up as replacements for the recenly closed Brooklyn Banks and Unisphere Fountain skate areas, thought he notes some concerns about early surface wear, need for additional shading and the use of more environmentally responsible construction materials.

RecycleMatch matches companies with waste products and companies who want that waste in their manufacturing and production processes.  The website acts as a confidential  clearinghouse where companies list their non-hazardous materials; other companies and organizations can then search the site for materials that match their needs and purchase them at a reduced cost.

Thanks to Connie Fishman and all who attended her talk in our Freshkills Park Talks series two weeks back.  It was an entertaining and educational look at the history and development of Hudson River Park, including a look at the never-realized Westway project and its legacy in the civic discourse about the park. 

Last Saturday, we hosted what has probably been the most provocative and unusual program we’ve seen yet at the Freshkills Park site (the gauntlet has been thrown down! Our open request for program proposals is here): choreographer Kathy Westwater‘s movement-based piece PARK, developed with collaborators Jennifer Scappettone and Seung Jae Lee. 

Thanks to all who joined our field trip last Friday, and especially to Tim and Heather at the Greenbelt Native Plant Center for so graciously guiding us through all that the Center does.  They gave us a history of the site (which was formerly the Mohlenoff family farm, itself a storied place) and its operations, explained their Foundation Seed production, soil preparation, seed cleaning, storage and banking, as well as greenhouse operations. 

Landscape architecture and urban design firm James Corner Field Operations has won the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s 2010 National Design Award for landscape design.  The annual awards aim to build national awareness of design as a tool in a variety of fields (architecture, communication, fashion, interaction, interior, landscape, product) by celebrating “excellence, innovation, and lasting achievement” as represented by a body of work. 

Urban Omnibus runs a feature on Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field, a former civilian and military airport on the Jamaica Bay coast that became parkland in 1971.  The story’s contributing writer, a landscape architect, suggests that the site’s post-urban/natural hybrid landscape prefigured contemporary aesthetics in post-industrial redevelopment, and the range of activities it hosts help to reposition the idea of recreation, making the park a model for other sites in the City.

The New York City Waterfront Vision and Enhancement Strategy (WAVES) is a citywide initiative, begun in January, to update the 1992 comprehensive plan for the development and preservation of the City’s 578 miles of shoreline.  There are two components of the initiative: the physical plan (Vision 2020: The NYC Comprehensive Waterfront Plan) the generation of which is being shepherded by the Department of City Planning (DCP), will focus on creating long-term guidelines for land-use along the waterfront; the Waterfront Action Agenda, a set of high-priority initiatives unfolding over the next three years, will be generated by a group of stakeholders and agencies led by the City’s Economic Development Corporation.

Through July 5th, New Yorkers are invited to play any of the 60 donated and artist-decorated pianos that have recently appeared in public locations across the city.  Play Me, I’m Yours is the brainchild of British artist Luke Jerram, who has promoted and managed the project since its inception in 2008 and has since placed pianos in cities all over the world.  

Pressured by the FDA to provide more vigilant oversight and worried that poachers may sell oysters from polluted coastal waters to consumers, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection has halted its oyster bed restoration projects.  This, despite the fact that oyster beds are being deliberately restored to tainted bodies of water throughout the region to rid them of pollutants.

Artist Stephen Vitiello‘s multi-channel sound installation A Bell For Every Minute is a site-specific sound installation on the High Line, in the semi-enclosed passage that runs between West 13th and 14th Streets. It opened to the public yesterday, June 23rd.

On Friday, the Freshkills Park Development Team took a field trip to the town of Hempstead on Long Island to check out the Norman J. Levy Park and Preserve, formerly the Merrick Landfill.  We were drawn to the site by its herd of Nigerian dwarf goats, purchased in 2009 and herded by park rangers to eradicate invasive weeds and overgrowth at the site (The initial herd of five had recently given birth to nine kids, and the names of these kids were announced on Friday, too).