Crawling out from under a harbor rock

It’s been a hectic few months and I haven’t updated this thing in what seems like half a year. I guess it’s not that far off. I’m officially a Web 2.0 failure. But that doesn’t mean you have to be!

Why not help out the awesome Watercourses project with a few photos and stories of old waterways in New York City? Email your gems to Steve Duncan at steve@undercity.org. He’s amassing an incredible collection of images, histories, maps, and other folklore about the city’s lost streams, ponds, and marshes. The collection grows through collaboration, so dig out your cameras and your steno pads and get to work!

Fun With Google Earth + Viele Map

 I’ve been playing with a Google Earth overlay of the 1865 Viele Map (officially known as the “Sanitary and Topographical Map of the City and Island of New York”) all afternoon instead of, you know, doing productive stuff. I keep telling myself that I’ll use the results in the class I begin teaching in a few weeks (never mind that the syllabus is still rough around the edges).

The folks at the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection have kindly plugged a high-resolution image of the Viele Map into Google Earth, allowing anyone with free time on their hands to figure out whether or not their apartment is built over what used to be a fetid marsh. I’ve been focusing on the area downtown surrounding what the old Collect Pond. Today it’s a maze of government buildings and courts, but years ago this spot was an idyllic retreat for Dutch settlers crowded on the southern tip of Manhattan island. As the city grew northward, The Collect gradually turned into an open cesspool. By the early 1800’s, the pond was all but gone, filled with rubble from nearby excavation projects.

 
I’m posting four images that resulted from an afternoon of goofing off with this thing. Enjoy!

Downtown NY Hydrology

Collect Pond on the Viele Map

The Collect: Yesterday and Today

The Collect Today

Made of Paper: A Mini-Promo for UNCOMMON GROUND

I spent the better part of this afternoon parsing through the introduction to William Cronon’s foundational book, Uncommon Ground, going back and forth about whether to make it a required reading in the class I’m teaching this spring at The New School. It’s been a few years since I sat down with this book, and now I’m glad I finally forced myself to do it. The introduction alone should be required reading for anyone going through an environmental studies program at any level.

An accessible writer and capable storyteller, Cronon succeeds in blowing up centuries worth of cultural misconceptions about nature and the environment. Someday I’ll find the time to come back and post about the introduction at length (maybe after class discussion later this month!). In the meantime, pick up a copy of the book at the library or work your way through the first forty pages on Google Books.

Landscape Architects Cannot Predict The Future

I’m re-reading (for what seems like the tenth or twelfth time) the first essay in Charles Waldheim’s Landscape Urbanism Reader (Waldheim edited the collection and wrote the piece I’m referring to). The premise of the essay is pretty simple: traditional forms of urban planning, design, and architecture are too clunky to grapple with the complexities of sprawling and rapidly changing 21st Century cities. Landscape architecture, on the other hand, has evolved to a point where designers are comfortable with the indeterminacy of the contemporary world and can design projects that thrive in the face of overwhelming uncertainty.

Unlike urban planners (who still pine for the all-knowing and all-encompassing Master Plan) and architects (who can hide behind a single building project while ignoring the massive change surrounding the site they’re working on), landscape architects are walking away from the discipline’s old obsession with creating pretty vistas frozen in time that can only be experienced at a distance. Instead, landscape architects are diving right into the muddle of post-modern/fordist/industrial/whatever society and trying to design spaces that can adapt to change. 

When I was working on the development of parks and greenways in the South Bronx, I grew obsessed with the idea of mutable and evolving green spaces. In a city where the Parks Department is chronically underfunded and park maintenance often depends upon the largess of wealthy benefactors, the South Bronx was (and continues to be) ill equipped to receive the hundreds of new acres of green space that will be coming online over the next few years. Lacking the deep pocketed locals that played such a central role in reviving parks in Manhattan and Brooklyn (Prospect, Central, and Bryant parks are the obvious examples), open space advocates in the South Bronx are scrounging around trying to secure a steady stream of funding to operate and maintain the new parks that they so valiantly fought to develop over the past decade. Every few months, a new scheme is proposed, but so far nothing has stuck. In the meantime, a handful of small scale stewardship projects coming out of organizations like Sustainable South Bronx and the Bronx River Alliance help to supplement public funding for operations and maintenance. 

These circumstances would suggest that new parks and greenways developed in the South Bronx need to be designed for a radically different set of constraints from those confronting landscape designers working in Manhattan. A project that has been beautifully rendered on paper will not look the same just a few months after construction is complete. Plants will die, structural elements will be vandalized, and citizen stewards will be forced to create a patchwork of homespun repairs when the Parks Department cannot afford to do the upkeep itself. That is, of course, if a vibrant cohort of stewards comes forward or if a locally based organization can continue to afford to fund a semi-professional grounds crew (as Sustainable South Bronx has done for over two years in the Hunts Point neighborhood). 

On top of the uncertainty associated with spotty funding, landscape architects working in areas like the South Bronx must take into account the community’s evolving relationship with parks and open space. For decades, the only park in Hunts Point was miles away from the peninsula’s residential core and smack dab in the middle of an industrial waste land. The park itself was really just an outgrowth of an ancient cemetery that offered too few opportunities for active recreation or creative re-use. Up until the opening of Hunts Point Riverside and Barretto Point parks a few years ago, folks in the neighborhood were simply not used to having open space within walking distance of home. With crime still a significant concern and local air quality impaired by fossil fuel emissions from nearby highways, spending time outdoors — even in a beautiful new park — can be a daunting proposition. That doesn’t mean that new parks in the South Bronx won’t be used if they’re built. It simply means that the ways in which new parks are used will continue to change as people grow more comfortable with spending time in them. 

This brings me to a great quote by Rem Koolhaas in the Waldheim piece. The quote refers to Koolhaas’ design for a new urban park in Paris that faced some of the same constraints I’ve outlined here (former industrial/commercial site, etc):

“It is safe to predict that during the life of the park, the program will undergo constant change and adjustment. The more the park works, the more it will be in a perpetual state of revision. The underlying principle of programmatic indeterminacy as a basis of the formal concept allows any shift, modification, replacement, or substitutions to occur without damaging the initial hypothesis.”

The quote speaks for itself, though I have to wonder what an open space designed for indeterminacy and change would actually look like, if only because that would be the primary concern for residents in any neighborhood slated for a major landscape redevelopment project. People want to see pictures. Before-and-after pictures, preferably. Show up to a community board meeting with complex (though visually stunning and beautiful) graphs and maps that describe the indeterminate evolution of a new park over time and you’ll end up getting booed off the stage. So how do you work around that contradiction? And is there a bigger role for communication designers to play than landscape architects in that part of the process? That’s something I want to explore.

Screw You and You’re Feeble Landscape Image!

I don’t really have the time to explode all of the ideas that come out of the passage I’m about to quote, but I hope I’ll get back to it soon. In the meantime, I leave it here as a placeholder for things to come.

The passage is from “Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes” by James Corner. It’s a chapter in the larger volume titled Recovering Landscapes: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture which Corner edited.

Most of the short passage is actually a quote from Jonathan Smith’s article “The Lie That Blinds: Destabilizing the Text of Landscape” in Place/Culture/Representation.

Here it is:

“As Jonathan Smith writes, ‘When closely observed, every self-image humans have into the landscape will betray its pretensions with ironic affirmations of an order that is both wider and weirder.’ In other words, the landscape construct is inherently unstable, an indeterminate dimension that can be opened up through artistic practices and made to reveal alternative sets of possibility [pp.157-158].”

Corner is dealing with the futility of landscape projects that start by assuming a withdrawn viewer gazing upon an unchanging scene (essentially the core definition of “landscape” according to most people). Those sorts of landscape projects assume a place that is frozen in time, beautiful and uninterrupted and derisive of everyday life in its seeming perfection. His answer to this traditional approach to landscape — as both a theorist and a practicing landscape architect — is to blow up the static scene by highlighting or reintroducing some element that reminds us of the dynamism of the place.

In many instances, this could mean putting humans — specifically, human culture – back in the picture.

I can think of an endless series of activities — “operations,” to Corner — that would accomplish this goal. There are so many ways to play the trickster and destabilize any and all of the totemic landscape images that float around in out culture. That doesn’t mean these activities necessarily have to be playful. You can imagine a shrine for an automobile accident victim on the side of a major highway destabilizing the pastoral pastiche of all those shrubs and grassy hills. The action should, however, be a little unsettling. Or, at least, as Jonathan Smith said in the passage that Corner quotes from, it should grip the viewer and yank him back into an experience of reality that is “wider and weirder.”

Performance Art

The process of taking care of street trees is a kind of performance. It’s a spectacle. You stand in the middle of a sidewalk and go through a choreographed sequence of elaborate gestures. People stop and stare. They ask you what you’re doing. The act elicits emotional responses from the audience that range from doubt to hope. Sometimes you’re applauded.

Today I prepped two street trees in front of my community garden for the winter. Five or six people stopped to talk about trees and ask about organized tree care efforts. At least twenty people walked by during those two hours, and all of them slowed down and deliberately looked at what I was doing as they passed. Aerating soil, plowing compost, and raking mulch in a street tree pit are interesting enough to pull flaneurs out of their daydreams and practiced disinterest.

This mid-autumn clean-up put a definitive end to the summer. I started taking care of these two young oak trees in April, laying down a new bed of mulch and pouring a few gallons of warm water on their roots. Unfortunately, I had too little time to attend to them throughout July and August. At some point, other members of the garden planted perennials in the tree pits, and for a while the overgrowth got out of hand. I should have yanked them out in August and replaced them with less invasive annuals, but I never got around to it. Instead I spent the better part of this morning prying thick and woody roots out of the soil with a pitchfork and tossing them into a paper bag for the compost heap. My back may be aching, but at least I put on a good show for the neighbors.

Secret Highway

I snapped this picture at the junction of Routes 34 and 537 in Monmouth County, NJ during an apple/pumpkin picking expedition two weeks ago. My childhood memories of this area are filled with horse farms and apple groves. Little wonder that I got lost on the way to the farm and accidentally drove the Zip Car into a naval weapons station. Despite efforts by state government to curb suburban sprawl in rural, working landscapes surrounding New York City, I was surprised to find that Route 34 was looking more and more like neighboring Routes 35 and 36. Old farms were swapped with strip malls and housing sub-developments. The landmarks that I depended on to navigate were mostly gone.

As I looked at the high voltage power lines that cut across Route 537 just before the intersection with Route 34, I started thinking about where those lines started and ended. How many towns could you pass through if you hiked along the towers, logging miles on a secret highway flanked on both sides by trees and shrubs? Would you run up against any of the development that was sprouting along Route 34? How would the landscape change as you approached a city or the ocean? I’ve spent a few minutes trying to figure it out on Google Maps, but i keep losing the trail in the trees. I’m not going to try much harder. There was a bit of mystery to the whole thing that prompted me to take the picture in the first place. For those few seconds at the red light, I felt like a grade school kid again, standing next to a creek in Holmdel, NJ, wondering what path the water took to reach the harbor and the City.

In Case You Hadn’t Figured It Out For Yourself…

Catching Up

I haven’t written here in over two weeks and I’m beginning to doubt my ability to keep up with the rigor of blogging. Who really has time for all this? Maybe I’m a little old fashioned. It’s difficult for me to write without the comfort of drafts and revisions.

So why “Ecotone Projects?” It’s an idea that’s been bouncing around in my skull for about a year now. So many of my interests around issues of ecology, geography, and anthropology exist in the borderlands. And an ecotone, according to Wikipedia, is “a transition area between two adjacent ecological communities.” I’d like to borrow the term and use it a bit more expansively to describe any liminal, overlapping, enfolding state between two incongruities. Or, to put it in Web 2.0 terms, ecotones are incredibly complicated mashups. They’re the gradual fade of the city into the countryside. They’re the wetlands that introduce storm water to the estuary. They’re the mulchy brown maple leaves that indiscriminately carpet the sidewalk, the street, and the tree pit.

Ecotone Projects, therefore, are projects that celebrate that feeling of being in two situations at once. They emphasize indeterminacies and force the viewer/participant/instigator to experience a resonance where only moments before, logic would have insisted on presenting him with a contradiction. Ecotone Projects go out of their way to create more of these overlapping borders, by linking people, places, and materials across space and time. The toolkit for an ecotone project contains the assemblage, the montage, the collage, and the bricolage. Ecotone Projects trace, with a fat red permanent marker, the ghost left behind by the space of flows. They jog along the railroad tracks and stalk through the thicket on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike.

I know. I know. All of this is too abstract and borders on the absurd. But that might be the point. The description of any ecotone will always depend on some suspension of disbelief. How else can you say that a place is both one thing and something else at the same time? You need to be ready to step into the metaphysical when the topic comes up. You need to be ready to walk through the circle of sycamores and enter the black lodge.

My obsessive fascination with New York harbor has, in recent years, become something of an Ecotone Project in and of itself. I’ve lived or worked near all of the major rivers (eight by my count, if you include the Bronx River) and there are times when I feel as if I can grasp the entirety of the region by just getting my feet wet in one spot. The region itself is one massive ecotone, with thick geographic wrinkles of overlapping urban and rural, land and water, transportation and settlement, decay and growth.

These are the themes I want to grapple with here, in one form or another. So expect more photos of street trees and postcards of highways. Don’t be surprised if it all turns into a year-round Valentine to Sandy Hook and the Raritan River.

Natural’s Not In It

The NY Times grapples with the challenge of restorative landscape architecture in a recent article on coastal pollution in a region of Italy sandwiched between Rome and Naples. The article covers Alan Berger’s efforts to re-engineer the regional lanscape in order to arrive at a site that is ecologically functional without negating the thousands (millions?) of years of human culture inherent to that place.

I’m thrilled (yes, it doesn’t take much to thrill me) that the Times is writing about restorative landscape architecture without getting too bogged down in a back-and-forth about “artificial nature.” Nor do they treat Berger like a crackpot or a maverick. The article makes a cogent case for transformative (as opposed to strictly restorative) landscape architecture in urbanized ecosystems, and the lessons could easily be applied to the NY/NJ harbor region.

The lesson for both coastal areas is simple (or, at least, it should be). The NY/NJ harbor estuary is not going to revert to the pre-Columbian Eden that made this such an attractive place for dense human settlement in the first place. We can, however, adapt our relentless manipulation of the region’s landscape to be both culturally significant (in the form of economic growth) and ecologically sound. If the environmental health of the megalopolis is based on a zero sum game of Humans vs Nature, then all bets are off. Once we start to aim for something in between the two extremes, we’ve got game.