Tags: New York City

Four new species of bees have been identified in New York State. Among them is  Lasioglossum gotham, discovered at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, as small as a grain of rice. It burrows its home underground. The species was distinguished  from other tiny look-alikes through DNA bar coding and digital imaging.

With landscape architects riding a wave of creative post-industrial reimagination in New York City–rail lines, concrete plants and landfills are all turning green–it was perhaps inevitable that underground park spaces were next. And so it goes that a team of design speculators have taken on the challenge of re-envisioning the Lower East Side’s former Williamsburg Bridge Trolley Terminal as a sun-lit subterranean park, dubbed “The Delancey Underground.” 

The New York Times profiles Ed Toth, Director of the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation’s Greenbelt Native Plant Center (GNPC), a greenhouse and nursery operation that provides seed and plant material for restoration projects across the city’s 1,700 parks. 

A recent study by scientists at the Wildlife Conservation Society has found that urban parks are comparable stopover landscapes to non-urban sites in providing refueling grounds for migrating birds. Researchers examined migrant stopover biology in Prospect Park, Inwood Park and Bronx Park to better understand how birds use city parks during migration.

Over the course of the various stages of its history, a wide range of professionals have spent time working on or thinking about the Freshkills Park site: sanitation workers, engineers, equipment manufacturers, scientists, policymakers, architects, designers, artists, philanthropists. There are countless layers of expertise to mine in understanding the site. 

Amid all the talk about green roofs, it’s easy to forget about white roofs, also called cool roofs.  Cities are full of heat-trapping black surfaces, including roofs as well as roads, that intensify the urban heat island effect, raising temperatures up to 22°F warmer than in neighboring suburbs. 

The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation‘s Daily Plant runs an interview with Richie Cabo, Director of the Citywide Nursery and designer of the O2 Composter, a new compost bin that could increase efficiency of leaf management operations in parks throughout the city. 

Another gem from the archives: an article in the Saturday Evening Post from 1938 written by Parks Commissioner Robert Moses extolling the then-in-process transformation of the City’s Corona ash dump into the stately Flushing Meadows Park.  We’re reminded of how much the outline of the story prefigures Freshkills Park, where Moses, himself, was the catalyst for landfilling operations, with the endgame of constructing housing, parkland and industrial space.

The NYC Department of Environmental Protection has announced a $400 million upgrade to the 26th Ward Water Pollution Control Plant (WPCP) in Brooklyn that will reduce the amount of untreated sewage overflow entering Jamaica Bay  during storm events by 1.2 billion gallons a year.

Nuit Blanche New York’s (NBNY) 2011 Bring to Light festival will fill Greenpoint, Brooklyn with light, video, sound and sculpture-based installations “exploring innovative approaches to temporary public art that transform landscapes, re-imagine public space and foster civic dialogue.” The one-night festival will run concurrently with similar events in Paris, Brussels and Toronto on October 1st, as part of sponsor NBNY’s global event network. 

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXABlDk4cYU&w=507&h=370]

A clip from 2008 History Channel program “The Works” features Staten Island’s Pratt Industries, where more than half of New York City’s paper is recycled.  This is a terrific clip that explains the infrastructure required for paper collection and processing as well as spelling out the steps of paper recycling. 

The new year-round East River Ferry Service, provided by NY Waterway, offers passage between 11 stops in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and Governor’s Island along the East River.  The scenic commuter service, now only a few weeks old, hatched from a City initiative to create more viable, private mass transit alternatives for the City’s growing waterfront populations, especially those underserved by bus and subway capacity.

Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field, a former civilian and military airport on the Jamaica Bay coast, is now poised to become New York City’s largest campground. The site was taken over by the National Park Service (NPS) in 1971 after being decommissioned for aircraft, and as part of the Gateway National Recreation Area has since played host to a variety of activities: organized sports, model and full-scale airplane hobbyism, motorcycle practice and Brooklyn’s largest community garden. 

After facing challenges finding a private wireless provider, the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation has signed a five-year contract with AT&T to provide free wireless internet access in 19 new park locations throughout all five New York City boroughs.  Currently, 13 parks in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens provide Wi-Fi; arrangements for access in the additional 19 parks will be made by the end of the summer.

The Dirt runs a great interview with Joyce Lee, Director of the Active Design Program at the NYC Department of Design and Construction (DDC).  DDC’s Active Design Guidelines, released last year, is a manual produced for architects and urban designers with the aim of designing buildings, streets and urban spaces that best promote health and activity. 

re-fashioNYC  is a new, free program sponsored by the Department of Sanitation and Housing Works and focused on collecting, reusing and recylcing unwanted clothing, linens, shoes and clean rags.   Program goals include:

• reducing the 200,000 tons of textile and apparel waste each year;
• contributing to PlaNYC 2030‘s goal of diverting 75% of solid waste from landfills;
• boosting the small fraction of textile recycling by American consumers.

City Parks Blog runs an excerpt of Peter Harnik‘s Urban Green: Innovative Parks for Resurgent Cities on schoolyard parks, spaces reserved for schoolchildren during school hours and used by the whole community at other times.  Examples cited include:

• The Boston Schoolyard Initiative, through which about $320,000 buys a each schoolyard a new drainage system, plantings, hard surface area, play equipment, fences, decorative art, and mini-landscapes for environmental education;
• Denver’s slightly larger Learning Landscapes, which include a field, play structures, a hard-surface court and aesthetic upgrades for about $450,000;
• Houston’s Spark (School Park Program), which spends between $75,000 and $100,000 per site to provide modular play equipment, picnic tables, benches, outdoor classrooms, gardens, trails, native plantings, murals and mosaics.

The Freshkills Park Talks lecture series continues next Tuesday with a presentation by elementary school science teacher Howard Warren.  Out of sheer interest and commitment, Howard has become one of the City’s leading experts on the history and present condition of Barren Island and Dead Horse Bay, at the southeastern corner of Brooklyn. 

On our trips through the Staten Island Ferry Terminal in Lower Manhattan over the past two weeks, we’ve been happy to pass through the recently completed Peter Minuit Plaza.  The 1.3-acre plaza fronts the ferry terminal and serves as a nexus of transportation modes and public space at the tip of the island: ferry, subways, buses, bikeways, benches and outdoor tables and chairs are all present here. 

The Wall Street Journal reports on the state of large-scale composting initiatives in New York City.  Though tons of food waste are funneled into citywide collection streams, there is no place in the City to process all those scraps.

GrowNYC, the nonprofit that oversees the city’s 54 Greenmarkets, recently started collecting kitchen scraps at seven locations to be turned into nutrient-rich compost.