Mississippi Water Flow

Harold Fisk

Restoring Dignity to Pennsylvania Station

I could not agree with this piece more. It’s a pleasure to navigate the halls of Grand Central and a misery to traverse the latest iteration of Penn Station. Bring back the glory of the McKim, Mead & White building.

Olmstead in the Midwest

Midwest survey.

Subway Reefs

Sad to hear this program has come to an end.

A decade ago, in a moment of inspiration, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority stumbled on a way to help the environment and its own bottom line: donating retired subway trains to the little-known cause of creating artificial reefs. More than 2,500 obsolete subway cars — including 1,269 of the classic ocher-hued Redbird cars — were packed up, shipped out and then, with a splash, dropped into silent graves at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere off the coasts of six states up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

NYC’s Grid Turns 200

Manhattan’s polarizing grid turns 200. The NY Times has a great interactive map that traces the history of the grid and Manhattan.

An excerpt from the NY Time’s piece: Henry James condemned it a century ago as a “primal topographic curse.” Rem Koolhaas, the architect and urbanist, countered that its two-dimensional form created “undreamed-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy.” More recently, two historians described its map, regardless of its flaws, as “the single most important document in New York City’s development.”

Walkway Over the Hudson State Historic Park

 

Formerly known as the Poughkeepsie-Highland Railroad Bridge, the Walkway Over the Hudson is the longest elevated pedestrian bridge in the world. Been meaning to check this out for a while. Ian Frazier gives it the New Yorker treatment.

Libraries

The Main Branch of the New York Public Library has unveiled the renovated main entrance after 3 years under the cover of restoration.

LIC is getting a Steven Holl designed library that adds some more flavor to Queens.

Still would love to see something in Brooklyn on the scale of Rem Koolhaas’s Central Library in Seattle.

Sprawl

Slide show here.

Norman Foster’s Masdar

Take a tour of Abu Dhabi’s newest suburban utopia complete with a Buckminster Fuller inspired fleet of driverless electric cars that will navigate the tunnels beneath the city. Masdar is a square mile city that’s elevated above the ground.

Corporate Cut-Throughs

New Yorkers have an affinity for corporate cut-throughs, public piazzas, building lobbies or any public (or quasi-public) space that lets you slide north or south through the middle of the street without having to double-back to an avenue.

Here’s a New Yorker piece on this underappreciated art:

The goal: to walk from the Empire State Building, on West Thirty-third Street, to Rockefeller Center, on West Forty-eighth, without ever setting foot on Fifth or Sixth Avenue—to knife through tall buildings in a single bound, or at least in stepwise forays.