Tags: parks

The City of New York has announced a $15 million project to clean up 38 acres of wetlands adjacent to the Paerdegat Basin Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) Facility on Jamaica Bay in Brooklyn.  According to the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, the project–slated for completion in 2012–will begin this Spring to improve water quality in the Paerdegat Basin by re-introducing native plants to the salt marsh and grassland habitats.

A recent New York Times piece features a valuable piece of NYC Parks property: the Alice Austen House, a National Historic Monument located in the Rosebank section of Staten Island.  Accompanying the story is an audio slide show narrated by caretaker and curator Paul Moakley, a freelance photo editor and photographer who maintains the house, museum and grounds in exchange for free accommodation in the house’s upstairs apartment.  

The post-holiday season can result in a lot of waste.  Groups around New York City are offering a host of upcoming recycling and composting events to ensure that not everything simply ends up in a landfill.

• Parks all over the five boroughs will be participating in MulchFest this weekend, allowing you to bring your Christmas tree to a designated location to be chipped into mulch. 

Landscape architecture and urban design firm James Corner Field Operations has prepared three new design proposals re-imagining Cleveland’s Public Square.  The downtown park is bisected by two roads and perceived, in its current state, as a dead zone between skyscrapers. 

A new study by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) is underway to assess the role US forests and soils can play in limiting emissions through carbon capture. The first phase of the study found that forests in the lower 48 states currently store about 90 billion metric tons of carbon and continue to capture about 30% of the country’s fossil fuel emissions each year.

City planners in Guelph, Ontario have approved a master plan to transform a 200-acre decommissioned landfill into the world’s largest pollinator park.  The former Eastview Road Landfill, which operated as a municipal dump from 1961 to 2003, has been capped and outfitted with a methane capturing system that converts landfill gas into usable energy. 

Eli Cohen gave a terrific talk Monday night on his work, as director of Ayala Water and Ecology, using plants to remove pollutants and contaminants from water, soil and air.  We’re grateful to the huge crowd that poured into the Arsenal gallery for the event, to Laura Starr and Yamit Perez for putting us in touch with Eli and, of course, to Eli himself for sharing his work and his thoughts.

James Corner, founder and director of landscape architecture and urban design firm Field Operations, will speak about the firm’s current projects this evening at Cooper Union, hosted by the Architectural League of New York.  In addition to designing the Freshkills Park master plan and first phase projects, Field Operations continues to tackle a number of diverse and high-profile projects including The High Line and the 4,500-acre Shelby Farms Park in Memphis. 

The first phase of development is underway for 1,347-acre brownfield transformation project Orange County Great Park.  $65.5 million will fund the expansion of a 27.5-acre “Preview Park,” which opened in 2008 and features an observation balloon providing visitors a high-flying view of the entire site. 

[vimeo= http://vimeo.com/6686323]

LentSpace is a 37,000 square foot temporary park and cultural space at Canal and Sullivan Streets in lower Manhattan.  The site opened to the public on September 18th–Park(ing) Day–and is on loan to the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council for three years from Trinity Real Estate, which hopes to build on it when the City’s real estate market improves. 

Semakau Landfill, the world’s first offshore landfill and Singapore’s only waste destination, has been described by Singapore’s government as “Scenic Waste Disposal.”  The site has been open to the public for recreational activities since 2005 and has been envisioned as an eco-park featuring renewable energy generation and educational facilities. 

In a roundtable conversation hosted by The Architects’ Newspaper, four New York City Commissioners–Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, Design and Construction Commissioner David Burney, Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden, and Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe–discuss recently designed and developed projects as well as what they believe is achievable during Mayor Bloomberg’s next four years, especially given tightening fiscal constraints. 

Recently opened Concrete Plant Park, in the Bronx, sits on the seven-acre site of a concrete plant that operated from the late 1940s through 1987.  The park has retained some of its industrial past in the form of newly-painted silos, hoppers and conveyors, structures that once served as mixing facilities and now distinguish the park as sculptural monuments to the site’s evolution. 

Inspired by the success of the High Line, proposals to reimagine abandoned rail lines have popped up all over the country.

• Faced with the replacement of a section of San Francisco’s Bay Bridge, Rael San Fratello Architects have proposed the creation of the Bay Line, a hanging neighborhood complete with housing, cultural and commercial buildings and bike and pedestrian paths. 

The New York Times runs down recent initiatives aimed at making New York City parks more accessible and accommodating to immigrants.  These efforts have been accelerating as a result of the city’s language-access plan and a report from New Yorkers for Parks called Parks for All New Yorkers: Immigrants, Culture and NYC Parks. 

Submissions to NYC BigApps are currently being accepted for software applications that make the City’s data sets accessible and usefully legible to the public, with the goals of  fostering greater accountability and transparency of government operations as well as providing better tools for public policy advocacy and grassroots action. 

The American Planning Association has released its top ten list of great public spaces for 2009.  #1 is New Haven Green in New Haven, Connecticut, which, it seems, was selected as much for its aesthetics as for its political significance:

General George Washington spoke here during the American Revolution.

The Indianapolis Museum of Art is in progress developing the largest museum park in the US: 100 acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park.  Formerly a construction site and gravel pit, the 100-acre parkland has evolved naturally into woodland and wetland areas and includes a 35-acre lake. 

A master plan by Grant Associates of the UK has been selected from an international competition for the design of Singapore’s largest garden project to date, Marina South Gardens.  The architecture and landscape for the ambitious plan are inspired by orchid anatomy and include a series of micro-ecosystem conservatories to house plants from Mediterranean, temperate and tropical climates.  

The Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation will be leading free public tours of one of its first phases of park development this Sunday, October 4th, as part of the Atlantic Avenue Development Corporation’s Atlantic Antic street festival.  The Pier 6 section of the park, which connects with Atlantic Avenue, is scheduled to open in early 2010, will include a 1.6-acre playground, a dog run, a promenade, a restaurant and three sand volleyball courts.