Feed

Kit Dillon

By Kit Dillon 11/20/12 2:31pm

recovery mode

A freak show of another sort. (Getty)

Coney Island Is Still Devastated, From the Boardwalk to the Neighborhood Parks

We have all had that moment, post-Sandy, where the breadth of the storm’s damage has finally sunk in.  For New Yorkers for Parks, that moment came on Nov. 9, when the group was asked by the Coney Island Development Corporation to do a survey of the neighborhood’s public spaces. What its staff found shocked them.

“The open spaces of Coney Island felt forlorn and forgotten when the staff of New Yorkers for Parks arrived,” wrote the group in an account on its site. “Scenes were eerie as we began our assessment. The neighborhood seemed frozen in a moment of shock. Formerly flooded cars were parked hopelessly with open hoods. Residents waited on corners below broken traffic lights, asking when food would arrive. Some lingered by waterlogged couches, chairs and dining room sets waiting for garbage pickup. Boxes of rotted bananas, once slated for delivery, stretched half a block near the Haber Houses. There was little moving, other than the occasional utility truck or emergency vehicle. The next day, several hundred volunteers would arrive, eager to help. But that Friday provided a tragic post-Sandy snapshot.” Read More

By Kit Dillon 11/16/12 12:24pm

recovery mode

Should we be living here anymore? (Getty)

‘This Is a Challenge to Our Democracy:’ Kimmelman and Planners on the Tough Choices After Sandy

For a hurricane, Sandy has held many different titles: Frankenstorm, Superstorm, Wake-Up-Call. It’s the last one that concerned the architects, designers and bureaucrats who gathered last night at the AIA’s Center for Architecture for a fundraiser and debate about New York after Sandy. With some 520 miles of shoreline facing rising sea levels and increased storm severity, New York faces some serious questions of how to best protect our city in the future.

“This is an existential crisis for New York,” said Michael Kimmelman, The Times‘ architecture critic who moderated the panel. “I should say we can look at solutions—seagates, soft and hard edges, new regulations and zoning codes, maybe porous streets with catchment basins, water proof vaults for power equipment on the streets. None of these solutions alone are the answer but many of them combined may well be.”

It’s what designers love to call, and they did last night many times, the holistic or slow design solution. A solution, which tries to remain adaptable and democratic while at the same time looking towards longer cycles of human behavior. Though within the design world, as those buzzwords begin to lose their meaning from overuse, that can mean almost anything. Read More

By Kit Dillon 10/29/12 7:00pm

Storm Provisions

cheeseburger

Cheeseburgers in Paradise: Stopping for Lunch Inside the Evacuation Zone

Chasing hurricanes is hard work. Luckily, on Cropsey Avenue, just one block south of the Shore Parkway, sits Parkview Diner. It’s one of those 1950s throwbacks, all neon and chrome, that exist across this city, serving up hearty dishes—rain or shine. The weather was not an insignificant detail to Gus, the owner, as he took orders for delivery over the phone.  Because today, The Parkview, was one of the only diners still taking orders anywhere inside Coney Island, Zone A –the evacuation zone. Read More

By Kit Dillon 10/29/12 2:44pm

Frankenstorm

Rain, rain, go away, spare the Rockaways be. (Kit Dillon)

Bridges Over Troubled Waters Will Still Cost You: MTA and Port Authority Keep Tolls in Place During Frankenstorm

A mandatory evacuation from the Rockaways will still cost you $3.25.

The mayor announced earlier today that all city employees are expected to come into work today at the discretion of their departments. The same goes for a few unlucky MTA and Port Authority employees manning the city’s bridges. While weather conditions may become so severe that the bridges have to be shut down, for now, the toll booths are manned, and tolls remain in effect. For once, the banks are being kinder than the toll man. Read More

By Kit Dillon 6:17pm

Making History

I'm about to get archival on your... (Wikimedia Commons)

How Deep Is Your Web? The National Archives Opens a New Branch on Bowling Green

Yesterday a room of sharply dressed archivists, librarians and book conservators burst into laughter at a joke about mildew. They’re a funny bunch, these keepers of our national record, excited by different things than you and I. When they mention the billions of records, of which only a sliver has been digitized, currently stored in limestone caves in Lenexa, Kan., their eyes light up like deep-sea explorers contemplating the ocean. They all have stories to tell.

Stories like the time they found a trove of Walt Whitman documents written while he was a clerk in the Attorney General’s office. They were forgotten documents, which were only identified by a scholar who recognized the handwriting and made the connection. Or the photo unearthed of FDR standing beneath the newly laid keel of the USS Arizona in 1913, while the then-secretary of the navy was touring the Brooklyn Navy Yards. The same ship, of course, whose destruction in Pearl Harbor 28 years later would lead to arguably FDR’s most famous speech, and with it a declaration of war. As with any explorers, when they talk about the often serendipitous thrill of discovery, their enthusiasm is infectious. Read More

By Kit Dillon 10/19/12 3:22pm

Greensward

Everybody say "Promenade." (Spencer Tucker/Mayor's Office)

Olmsted Redux: Prospect Park Looks to Its Future by Restoring Its Past

In 1867, Frederick Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed a formal concert area in Prospect Park and called it Music Island. It stood as a curved arena of grass around a central island where musicians would disembark from row boats to play for an expectant and enthralled audience. It was beautiful, stunning—and broken. Nobody could hear a thing.

Nearly a hundred years later, Robert Moses, would use most of the granite and iron of the surrounding esplanade as landfill when he paved over, as was his want, the pastoral and put up the practical in the form of the still popular Wollman Rink. The funds for which had been a gift by the same eponymous philanthropic family.

And now, thanks to another different wealthy family, we’re just about done putting the crazy thing back together again.  It’s a topsy-turvy world this philanthropy game. One, that has the rich keeping everyone on their toes and, at least temporarily, off the ice. The new indoor-outdoor rink is still under construction. And naturally one of the city’s wealthiest was there today to cut the ribbon. Read More

By Kit Dillon 10/18/12 12:05pm

THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD

Can new and old business thrive in Harlem? (MAS)

Shaking the Shuffle: Harlem Small Businesses Contemplate the Future

Gentrification has taken hold in every corner of the city over the past decade or two, but few places have felt it as acutely as Harlem. Demographics, tastes and prices are all shifting and skewing, for better and worse, often all at once. Last week at Harlem’s Studio Museum, a confab of the neighborhood’s business owners and power brokers came together to try and figure out what comes next for their community.

Hosted by the Harlem Park to Park Initiative, a self-styled community improvement association and business alliance, the conference brought together city officials, real estate developers and noted executives from the dining, hospitality and entertainment worlds. Among them were the CEO of the country’s largest African-American real estate development company, R. Donahue Peebles, and Tren’ness Woods Black, the third-generation owner of Sylvia’s Restaurant. Read More

By Kit Dillon 10/17/12 5:18pm

building stories

Keep digging. (DumboNYC)

Billionaire Boys Club: Bloomberg Produces $1 B. Out of Thin Air For City Infrastructure

Remember shovel ready projects? Thought they were so 2009? Well, you’d be wrong, at least here in New York, where Mayor Bloomberg, Council Speaker Christine Quinn and the ever financially creative City Comptroller John Liu have done some juggling with the city’s capital construction program to fast track $1 billion worth of infrastructure work. These projects will begin in the coming months, rather than in the coming years. Let’s hear it for putting people to work. Read More

By Kit Dillon 10/12/12 12:38pm

In the Rezone

Goodbye desolation, hello development. (Flickr)

The SPURA Has Landed: City Council Approves 47-Year-Old Urban Renewal Project

Yesterday, in a unanimous vote 47 years in the making, the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area has finally been approved by the City Council. SPURA, that massive parcel of barren (or in City Council speak, “under-developed”) city-owned land in Lower Manhattan, will now become a 1.65 million square foot mixed-use development. It’s a change that, according to the project’s backers, will create 1,000 housing units, 1,000 permanent jobs and 5,000 construction jobs. Read More

By Kit Dillon 10/11/12 3:04pm

Planes Trains & Automobiles

M60: Not stuck in traffic anymore. (The Daily News)

It’s No Sky Train, But LaGuardia Airport Is Getting a Speedy Bus Service

Castles, trains, there are a lot of things we’d like to build in the sky, but it’s just not going to happen. So while LaGuardia Airport may not be getting a sleek new air train anytime soon, it will at least be getting some select bus routes.

The city announced today that there will be three new potential Select Bus Service routes to LaGuardia Airport as well as local bus service improvements, including a faster crosstown service on 125th Street. The new services could potentially reduce travel times to the rather disconnected airport by anywhere from 10 to 40 minutes. Read More