The Conglomeration of Greenwich Village

Everyone knows the charm of Greenwich village – though old timers will tell you that its already gone – its how, somehow despite Manhattan’s megapolis it is able to remember itself in these tiny villages that make living and working their livable.  Its the way in which if you live in the neighborhood you know your local deli-owner, and you can buy bread down the street from someone who baked it for people 50 years ago. Its where you still can find a shoe repair shop, littered with all the unfinished and forgotten work, thick with the patina of all those that have gone their before.

Those in the village know that this has been deeply changing for years. Vesuvio bakery of 90 years merely retains its facade at the tip of Soho, but posh and out-pricing Blue Ribbon Bakery has come to claim the day. Like a movie set – and it is odd how much Greenwich village actually has been a movie set – the village heart is beating less and less. And it is specifically these kinds of micro climates that once made Manhattan livable, even cherishable.

Fleeting Thoughts Now Never Lost has a nice blog post up on a major movement that has been contributing to the commercialization of Greenwich Village NYU: The New World Power. The purple flags that were already ubiquitous in a halo around Washington Square Park are now ready to spread their royal wings. She writes in response to what was first reported by the New York Times:

New York University is proposing the largest expansion in its history, with a new tower on Bleecker Street and three million square feet of new classrooms, dormitories and offices in the Greenwich Village area. The plans also call for creating a new engineering school in Brooklyn and a satellite campus on Governors Island, complete with dorms and faculty housing.

The projects, which would expand N.Y.U.’s physical plant by 40 percent over the next 20 years, are aimed at accommodating a growing student body and competing for money and prestige with other universities. They will require approvals from city agencies and have already met with a skeptical response from some neighbors and preservationists. read the rest here

Fleeting Thoughts writes:

Increasing by 4o percent is a lot, and Greenwich Village is only so big. Having classrooms and dorms all over the place isn’t all that great either, especially when you don’t live near a building you have class in or when you have only 15 minutes in between classes to get your stuff together, make your way out of a packed auditorium, walk a good 10 blocks, and get to your next class (from Skirball to Palladium, I’ve had to do it before. Not fun, to say the least). And as a commuter, some days I took a train further than the usual W4 stop and transferred to another to avoid walking on a bad weather day. That’s how far apart things are….

Making New York and Breaking the Village

“For New York to be a great city, we need N.Y.U. to be a great university,” Mr. Sexton said. “What does it mean in the 21st century to build a great city? Let’s be the lab and thinking space for it, the center in the world for thinking about cities.”

Um, OK? No offense here, Mr. Sexton, but I don’t think people automatically associate NYU with NYC. Unless, of course, NYU ends up taking over NYC, with its purple flags waving on the sides of every building around, but I don’t think that it’s NYU’s place to do this. Let others worry about building this city, while you ,dear NYU, worry about your students and academics. Bottom line: NYC doesn’t revolve around NYU. It’ll do just fine with the dozens of other tourist attractions there are. Sorry to break it to you.

What is starting to revolve around NYU though is Greenwich Village. A while ago, when a neighbor asked me where I go to college and I said NYU, he replied “That’s in Greenwich Village, right?” Right. I don’t know how many New Yorkers are starting to make the association, but it’s sort of hard not to. The Village is a place of great history, and even though some of it was lost over time, it’s still there, but how long will it stay before NYU takes over that too?

….I love going to NYU, love getting off at W4 and walking the few blocks to “campus,” love going to classes, studying in the library or the park, interacting with my friends and complete strangers and just living life. NYU is great, and it obviously wouldn’t have gotten to where it is now if it had listened. That’s how things get revolutionized and changed, by people not listening, doing what they believe in, fighting for what they want, by thinking outside of the box and using their thoughts and wisdom for the better good. Mr. Sexton is right, there is a lot of wisdom in the community that should be taken advantage of. But the holder’s of this wisdom need to be wise about this and they have to know where to draw the line, too. Too much of anything is never too good, and things have to slow down before all of the good backfires. NYU is in a great position right now. Why not be happy with it?

Yes, why not be happy with it indeed.  There is something to living that makes living right important. Community must hold together and preserve its own memory, not merely as facade.

Communications for bestplace2move

Green Architecture and the Greening of Urbia

Guest blog posting

Building a green infrastructure is no longer a new idea.  Going “green” is actually becoming quite popular.  However, the ways that people go about doing it can be new and unique.  City developers are beginning to incorporate some creative strategies of their own.  Specifically, there has been a recent spike in the level of interest that communities have had in developing their parks and outdoor recreation areas.  While incorporating and maintaining them has always been an important priority, especially within densely populated cities, the latest trends show that community developmental plans are now incorporating “green” design.   They are realizing that there is an opportunity to provide people with a necessary recreation area while creating a positive impact on the global environmental crisis.

For people living in Manhattan Green concerns are becoming a larger and larger focus of their life-value choices. The urban crunch threatened to be swallowed by impersonal suburban sprawl may suggest to Manhattanites that there are a shrinking number of Green sensitive building strategies and environments in the city, and within commuter distance. At first blush it feels much the same to city-bound inhabitants  throughout the nation. But this is not the case as Green awareness has become a deepening architectural and urban planning trend in the last half of the decade. In fact currently there are a number of projects taking place in major metropolitan areas in an effort to reverse the negative effects that humans have had on the environment. Within city spaces one project that is currently gaining publicity is the green rooftop.

Green rooftops utilize commonly unused space atop buildings and convert them into green zones, where gardens or turf are planted. These roofs help reduce the heating and cooling costs it takes to power a building, and also create a habitat for birds and insects.  An additional benefit is that green rooftops reduce the amount of contaminated runoff water that can collect in local sewer systems and waterways. Even major companies and organizations have taken notice and are beginning to implement similar environmental strategies. For instance the Ford motor company installed a 450,000 square foot green rooftop on their new Dearborn Truck Plant in Michigan. Recent studies conducted comparing green rooftops to conventional asphalt or concrete roofs show that temperatures on the green rooftops can be as much as 32 degrees lower than the conventional black-top roofs that populate much of the Manhattan apartment and office skyline. Green rooftops are thus proven to help reduce the “urban heat island effect” which occurs when black-top buildings absorb solar energy and then radiate that energy in the form of heat.

Another sustainability initiative that is becoming increasingly popular in urban (as well as suburban) areas is the rain garden. Rain gardens are planted near areas of high storm water runoff. Instead of allowing the excess water to travel into the sewer, (which can cause backup and increased water contamination) water flows into strategically placed gardens, thereby reducing troublesome overflow problems. In this vein, currently in the District of Columbia the department of Agriculture has been spearheading an initiative to increase the number of gardens that are sustained by the community, termed “people’s gardens.” Rain gardens are part of this initiative along with planted community vegetable gardens whose produce is donated to local soup kitchens. Also being contemplated are rooftop bee hives to aid in the pollination of the plants. In Portland, Oregon local policy makers are taking another approach and creating Green Streets. A number of city and suburban streets were identified as being excessively wide and creating too much run-off water. In response to this problem Portland officials created curbside gardens that allow for the organic collection of street storm water. The gardens collect water at the surface and disperse it amongst vegetation thus allowing for a gradual and natural water filtration process to occur.

While the public sector has started to take on green initiatives, private developers have also joined forces to implement change. Even though NYC is literally wall to wall with buildings, architects with a soft spot for the environment have been able to incorporate a green atmosphere in areas that many believed had no room left for design changes.  On the West Side of Manhattan a new park built on the old High Line stands 30 feet above street level.  Landscape architect firm, James Connor Field Operations, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, worked with designer, Piet Oudolf, to create this elevated oasis. The architects were able to integrate vegetation into the existing structures left from the railroad to create a beautiful natural setting for both locals and visitors.

On the lower end of Manhattan stands another structure, The Visionaire, which focuses on bringing New York to the forefront of green initiative. Designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects, it stands as the greenest residential skyscraper in the US. The architects incorporated a highly insulated wall system with insulated glazing and low energy reflective coatings. They also overcame the lack of horizontal space that New York buildings are allotted by successfully creating a number of terraces using green rooftop techniques. The building boasts a wastewater recycling system where all tainted water is cleaned within the building using a membrane filtration system and is then reused in the buildings toilets, green rooftops and cooling towers. Lastly, the building uses solar panels, a natural gas-powered turbine and byproduct heat recycling amongst other energy-efficient, low impact building and utility strategies.

Cities across the nation are developing creative and effective solutions to our global sustainability problem, and locally in Manhattan and its commuter-reach towns these solutions are beginning to have their effect. By creating and implementing a green infrastructure and building practices, urban and suburban communities can contribute to the overall “greening” of the planet.

Written by Kathryn Brennar in collaboration with Kevin Duuglas

Kathryn Brennar is a communications coordinator for Friedland Realty, a commercial realty agency specializing in the lease and sale of Manhattan and Westchester office space. Friedland has held an exemplary standard of real estate knowledge and expertise for the past thirty plus years and continues to bring their customers the best in commercial real estate service.

Kevin Duuglas is an editor of this blog and a marketing researcher for bestplace2move.com

What’s Happening Hudson Valley – Facebook

Just want to alert you all to the What’s Happening Hudson Valley Facebook group. The stated hope is to make the page a “to-do guide” for everything Hudson Valley, a place to bring your personal recommendations and experiences, a collective of local wisdom about what makes the Hudson Valley life great.  You’ll find notes on everything from Wine & Food fests to video of hiking, swimming and camping trips.

Commuter Art: New York Subways Celebrated

Art/Bite(s) New York tells it beautifully…

Oh, MTA, I do appreciate your Arts For Transit program, which pays for subway station art installations and for the posters on the train, which apparently you’ve been putting up since 1991.  Really? Thank you, MTA, for the deviation from staring at the “1-800-Divorce” and bunyon surgery ads. What a novel idea! Put some art in the trains to look at instead! Could we just have some more of it, MTA? Oh, yeah, you just cut $400 million from you budget; I’m going to go ahead and guess that more art is not in the cards...more

There is something mournful yet celebratory about Art/Bite(s) thoughts, something all of us know who have commuted within the subway system. We are surrounded by a collective beauty that is hard to perceive, as if we are absorbed by it. The art was always there, but did we see it? Indeed the MTA deserves to be applauded for populating our subways with color, beauty and form, rather than ads and steel. How much less the subways and trains would be without it. But as well, our commutes ARE our lives, not just in between zero-time as we pass from haven to work and back. For one I always loved driving up the Palisades parkway during my bartending years, back home as the last of night hung over trees everywhere. Our commutes must be filled with life.

Interesting to think how social media are doing something to that, as well. We are “commuting” more than ever these days, and our need for art in that travel may be greater than ever as well.

The Glory of Hudson Valley Life: Wine and Water

guest blogger Debbie Lessner-Gioquindo

As I took my morning walk on this beautiful Saturday, I stopped at a place on my road and just stared at the view. WOW! What a view of the Hudson Valley, I am so lucky to live in this area. Many times we take things for granite and I think living in the Hudson Valley is something I take for granted every day and have to remind myself how lucky I really am.

Today I am going to attend Millbrook Vineyard & Winery’s Tocai Release Party. Millbrook is one of the few wineries in the United States that grows Tocai Friulano. Tocai is a medium bodied aromatic dry white wine that is nice and crisp. The event is being catered by Amici’s Restaurant, which is a wonderful restaurant located in Poughkeepsie down by the Metro North train station. After the Millbrook event, Arlington Wines & Liquor is having a “Grand Tasting.” They do this twice a year and this tasting is a focus on New York State Wines.

In trying to fit everything into my day, I will be heading down to the Poughkeepsie waterfront tonight to watch the lighting of the Walkway over the Hudson. The Walkway over the Hudson is an old railroad bridge that suffered a fire in 1974 and has been unused since. Thanks to Fred Schaffer and his passion to make something of the bridge, they raised funds, repaired the bridge and it’s a pedestrian bridge that goes from Poughkeepsie NY to Highland NY. One might say, OK, once I cross the bridge what do I do. Well, there are wonderful restaurants that are in walking distance of either side and great hiking trails on the Highland side. The Hudson Valley is the Oldest Wine Region in America and is a beautiful area, rich in history, outdoor activities, wonderful restaurants and a Metro North ride away to New York City. You can spend the summer exploring 14 wineries in the Hudson Valley with the Hudson Valley Summer Passport Ticket. Ticket can be used for free tasting at the 14 participating wineries from June 1 – August 31. Limit is one tasting per winery, but you have the entire summer to get to all 14. Ticket can be purchased at www.hudsonvalleywinecountry.org and is $30.

Debbie’s media:

The Importance of Walkable Neighborhoods in Our Future

 

Fascinating article on the housing trends in The Atlantic  suggesting that the solution to the crisis suburban price drops is that new developers construct their own infrastructure to make more walkable communities:

This problem has a solution, one that could be borrowed from U.S. history, and that might help our economy get up more quickly off its knees: What if developers and property owners build the transportation infrastructure themselves?

In the early 20th century, every town of more than 5,000 people was served by streetcars, even though real household income was one-third what it is today. By 1920, metropolitan Los Angeles had the longest street-railway network in the world. Atlanta’s rail system was accessible to nearly all residents. Until 1950, our grandparents and great-grandparents did not need a car to get around, since they could rely upon various forms of rail transit. A hundred years ago, the average household spent only 5 percent of its income on transportation.

How did the country afford that extensive rail system? Real-estate developers, sometimes aided by electric utilities, not only built the systems but paid rent to the cities for the rights-of-way.

via Here Comes the Neighborhood – Magazine – The Atlantic.

The writer, Christopher Leinberger, does a fine job sketching out the current archery target scenario of housing price falls with urban renaissance as the bulls-eye. There can be no question that the long-lasting effect of community suburbanization is under a kind of deep revision, not only in terms of “image” but infrastructure as well. It seems more important than ever for those looking to relocate beyond the immediate halo of the city to understand both the history of a community, but also its long-term prospects for survival and service. This article is included in their yesterday-released special edition, The Future of the City.

Four Students set to Design a Better Facebook

David Goldman for the NY Times

Compelling NY Times article on four students who decided to start a New Facebook, one not encumbered with all the privacy issues (found via Rick M on twitter):

The terms of the bargain people make with social networks — you swap personal information for convenient access to their sites — have been shifting, with the companies that operate the networks collecting ever more information about their users. That information can be sold to marketers. Some younger people are becoming more cautious about what they post. “When you give up that data, you’re giving it up forever,” Mr. Salzberg said. “The value they give us is negligible in the scale of what they are doing, and what we are giving up is all of our privacy.”

The Diaspora* group was inspired to begin their project after hearing a talk by Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia University, who described the centralized social networks as “spying for free,” Mr. Salzberg said.

via Creating a Network Like Facebook, Only Private – NYTimes.com.

Facebook has really damaged its brand in its greed move. Its lost its innocence (and innocence is a large part on which commerce trades, the essential trust of fair experience). Big mistake.

For those of us looking to organize community interest online, this is the perpetual challenge, to preserve the innocence that drives agreements, and the example of these students who just take up whatever means around them to solve the problems of that failure is a shining one.

You can follow them in support on Twitter at: joindiaspora and see their blog and website at diaspora*