Posts from — January 2007

So this time they’re down–down to the tune of $1.4 billion. Just as we’re getting psyched about the recommencement of construction on the Second Avenue subway line, the yo-yo-like financial fortunes of the MTA have hit yet another low spot.

The series accounting inaccuracies and “discovered” surpluses that helped bring us a transit strike and holiday Metrocards have struck the capital planning program of the agency. The ambitious 2005-2009 capital plan that included the servicing of facilities and new subway cars, as well as super-projects like the extension of the Number 7 line, LIRR connection to Grand Central Terminal, and the Second Avenue subway project are under threat because of steadily increasing costs. A series of poor budgetary forecasting decisions, contractors becoming increasingly selective in what they will take on and ambitious in what they will bid, and the weak dollar have all contributed to the difficulties. One must wince, though, when the MTA cites rapid increases in the cost of construction and materials in New York City as part of the reason for the budget shortfall. We will have to keep a close eye on what projects get delayed or cut altogether, especially as the Times reports that in addition to long-term budget woes, the MTA will face day-to-day operating deficits by next year.

Second Avenue Subway Planning Project (MTA)
Timeline Of Second Avenue Subway Development (NYCSubway)
East Side Access Project (MTA)
MTA Financial Indicators (MTA)
State of the Subways 2006 (Straphangers)

2nd Ave Subway Map by nautical2k on Flickr.

Weinshall To Depart; GW bridge by spectraversa on Flickr.

Weinshall Watch Ends: Alliterative Alternate Anticipated (StreetsBlog)

Burningmoses Mosestock Mosapalooza ‘07 Begins (Columbia)

Another “Gowanus Back In The Day” Post (Gowanus Lounge)

New York The Cheapest Of The Global Cities? (NY Observer)

Time’s Running Out To Apply To Audition For The MTA’s Music Under New York Program (MTA)

NYC Homeless Count Begins Tonight (NY1)

As Cooper Square Continues To Develop, A Look Back At The Astor Place Tower Rising In Slideshow Form (Plaza Construction)

SoBro: On The Move – In Newsletter Form (SoBro Overall Economic Development Corporation)

The winner of the Bloomberg administration’s first juried competition for affordable and sustainable housing is the group of architects and developers Phipps, Rose, Dattner, and Grimshaw. Through the New Housing New York Legacy Project they have an agreement to develop a vacant NYC-owned property in the South Bronx that they’re calling “Via Verde.” It will house 202 residential units, in addition to retail and community spaces, and parking. If you like greenspace and heights, this place will be for you. A series of elevated park spaces will cover the tops many of the structures and will also serve to help insulate the buildings and collect rain-water. See all the “affordable” parts of the this green and sustainable plan below.

As proposed, the Via Verde will consist of both rental and homeownership units affordable to households of four earning from $28,360 up to $92,170 or $19,840 up to $64,480 for a single household. Approximately two-thirds of the housing units will be rental and affordable to families of four earning up to $56,700 or up to $39,700 for a single household. All sixty-three of the homeownership units will be affordable to households of four earning up to $92,170 or up to $64,480 for a single household. The proposal assumes that the rental units will be funded through a combination of the Housing Development Corporation’s (HDC) New Housing Opportunity Program and Low Income Housing Tax Credits, and that the homeownership units will use HDC’s Affordable Co-op Program and New Market Tax Credits. The Via Verde development is part of Mayor Bloomberg’s $7.5 billion New Housing Marketplace Plan to build or preserve 165,000 units of affordable housing over ten years, the largest municipal affordable housing plan in the nation’s history.

More Pictures Of The Project (Rose Companies)
Working-Class Housing Rises as Part of the Greenery (NY Times)
NYC Press Release (HPD)
New Housing New York Legacy Project (AIANY)

You know all those “Don’t let your dog poop here or I’m comin’ after you with a bat” angry neighbor signs and open letters to the neighborhood that keep popping up? Well, here’s the angry neighbor video edition of the same entitled “Brooklyn Man Illegally Disposing Dog Waste.” It is what it is. The guy has got the poop-slinging down to one impressively graceful motion.

If you can’t get enough of illegal doggie dumping in general, be sure to visit New York Shitty.

Street sign shadow on a two-tone wall by limonada on Flickr.

Writing about Moses and his roads in the previous post has gotten the asphalt-juices flowing. There is remarkable amount of information out there about New York City streets and street lighting. You can even take a virtual tour of the path of the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway. Some of the best infrastructure-related resources come from those who document city streets, expressways, parkways, and street lights the same way some meticulously catalog planes or trains.

• NYCRoads.com has been around for years and has comprehensive photo catalogs and histories of the area’s roads, crossings, and exits. Don’t miss the “Unbuilt Roads in NYC” page.

• Another oldie but goodie can be found at Jeff’s Streetlights & Highways Site.

• OldNYC has many virtual tours like the one of LOMEX above.

• The New York Metropolitan Transportation Council compiles many reports, like their new Unified Planning Work Program.

• A look back at the Westway Project from Thirteen’s “New York Voices.”

• A little while back, the City’s Department of Design and Construction and Department of Transportation sponsored a competition to design a new standard NYC streetlight for the twenty-first century. The competition is over, but it’s interesting to see the winner’s design as well as the other finalists at City Lights

Cross Bronx Expwy-Major Deegan Interchange by Zach_K on Flickr.

You will soon have an opportunity to view some great models of what our city might have looked like if Robert Moses had gotten his way. Today the Sun has a piece highlighting the work of Queens Museum of Art conservator Joseph Chiarello as he spruces up some of Moses’ display pieces of the Mid-Manhattan Expressway, the Lower Manhattan Expressway, and (yikes) the Brooklyn-Battery Bridge. Some of the models had been sitting untouched in storage space under the Triborough Bridge on Randall’s Island, kind of like some of those Civil Defense supplies found under the Brooklyn Bridge. It seems that the spaces under bridge anchorages are really the city’s collective storage closet under the stairs–Cold War crackers under the Brooklyn, Moses models under the Triborough–what/who else are we going to find under there? The exhibit of the models will be part of the Queens Museum of Art’s “Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Road to Recreation,” which will open January 28th out in Flushing Meadows Park. On close inspection of the miniatures, it seems that

the model of Moses’s proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, which was to connect the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges to the Holland Tunnel and West Side Highway, has a portion with Lucite handles whereby one can simply lift a neighborhood out and replace it with part of the expressway.

How delightfully convenient–couldn’t you just see him dreaming of a little parting of the Red Sea Broome Street and having it crash down on those pesky Jane Jacobites giving him chase.

Robert Moses and the Modern City (Queens Museum of Art)
Panel: Lessons From Robert Moses (Museum of the City of NY)
RM’s Response To Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (B&T Club)

Whoever Smelt It Dealt It… This week started off badly for Jersey lovers, but it was a golden opportunity for some ritualistic nose-thumbing (ha!) by New Yorkers–unfortunately, AllWaysNY is not immune. According to Charles Sturcken, spokesman for New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection, the first complaints about the noxious scent that eventually blanketed much of midtown Manhattan emanated from the south and west of the city. We’re looking your way, Garden State. The specific cause of the smell is still a bit of a mystery, but the location of its source is becoming clearer and clearer. The Post today quoted Sturcken and Stephen Jones from the New Jersey office of Emergency Management:

We strongly believe the odor came from Jersey, somewhere from Secaucus to Jersey City,” Sturcken said. “That’s where the prevailing wind was coming from when the odor was strongest.” Jones said “it wouldn’t be hard to believe” the smell originated there.

“Not hard to believe”–and that was from New Jersey’s OEM official. They’re still trying to pin down the cause of the non-toxic, but pungent sulphury odor. It seems the general warmth and wetness of recent days has caused something foul to rise and linger in the atmosphere. Take your pick from the experts: Jersey marshlands, clogged sewers, or rotting vegetable matter. Whatever the cause, it’s high time we got some tractor-trailer loads of Gold Bond Medicated Powder flowing west through the Lincoln Tunnel.

Jersey Turnpike by bunkosquad on Flickr.
Path of Odor Graphic from the Post

The deal between insurance giant GEICO and the Port Authority to make the George Washington Bridge and its approaches gecko-country is no more. The New York Times is reporting that the two-year, $3.2 million deal just agreed upon to place GEICO advertising on the bridge, approaches, and tollbooths fell apart after the Port Authority came under criticism from all sides (of the Hudson). The story highlights that:

preservationists and some local officials criticized the deal, complaining that the displays would have destroyed the aesthetics of the landmark bridge. The mayor of Fort Lee, where the toll plaza is situated, said that the Port Authority might have run afoul of local laws governing the placement of signs. But other politicians, including the State Senate president, Richard J. Codey, had more practical concerns: They said the Port Authority could have held out for more money.

Damn skippy! But of course, the real victim here is…the advertisers,

that were expecting to receive $800,000 for their work putting the deal together. In backing out of the arrangement, the Port Authority said the revenue from the advertisements was not worth the hostility the plan had received. “We misjudged the negative reaction to this,” Mr. Sigmund said. That reaction, he added, “was becoming a distraction to the agency, which faces big and serious issues over the next decade.” Despite the criticism, he insisted that the deal was “competitively priced.”

Bronx Terminal Market 2 by larryfishkorn on Flickr.

Inside the Knightsbridge Armory (City Skip)
Street May Be Renamed In Honor Of James Brown (Newsday)
Jets and Giants are out (NY Post)
Archdiocese of New York Celebrates 200 Years (NY1)
Great Trove of Coney Island Signs (Forgotten NY)
Queens Architecture Slowly Greening (Queens Chronicle)
Online Downtown Walking Tours (Skyscraper Museum)
Interactive Map: NYC Zoning, Planning, Etc. (EDC)

Although you would think that with all the walking that’s done to get through a typical day in New York–five flights to apartment; block after block to find a usable restroom; countless subway steps; long-jump leaps over creepy neon-green puddles at street corners–all New Yorkers would be fit as fiddles. Unfortunately that’s not the case according to a new report by the Public Health Association of New York City. In their opinion, New York City residents are afflicted with a bad case of “sedentitis” in which 1 in 4 New Yorkers does not exercise, 1 in 5 New Yorkers is obese, 1 in 13 New Yorkers has diabetes, and 2 in 5 NYC public elementary school children are overweight.

Instead of reminding us to skip that greasy 3:00 A.M. egg and cheese sandwich from the local deli, they lay out some pretty far reaching urban and education planning goals to make our streets, parks, schools, workplaces, and homes more conducive to active lifestyles.

With some recommendations that could have been lifted from the pages of Streetsblog, they urge:

Closing certain streets to motorized traffic at certain times. Extend the hours that Central and Prospect Parks are car-free and bring back car-free Sundays on the Grand Concourse … speed bumps and tables, curb extensions and bulbs, lower speed limits, signal timing to favor pedestrians, diagonal parking, narrower streets, and raised medians … Make funding for parks dependable. Lock in a parks budget (perhaps at 1% of the total city budget — currently it is less than half this) … Encourage forms of transportation other than the private car. Improving public transit, including commuter buses and trains, will reduce car traffic and encourage people to walk to and from transit stops.

Read the full PHANYC report and recommendations here.

Photo: Send a Salami by fiat luxe on Flickr.