Bem-vindo*
And welcome to this newsletter.
It's where I (John Surico) talk each month about cities & all their discontents: streets, environment, energy, cultures, people, food, form, etc. This month, we cover:
- Retrofitting our public universities;
- Parks’ pandemic generation;
- Community-led stewardship;
& much, much more.
Greening the engine
The City University of New York (better known as CUNY) is the nation’s largest and most effective urban public university, by a few measures. It serves around 225,000 students each year, which is more people than the populations of Little Rock, Arkansas, and Salt Lake City, Utah. Those enrolled are overwhelmingly people of color, low-income, or first-generation New Yorkers—many of whom are the first in their families to go to college. (My mom, a proud Lehman grad, and several family members would attest.) And it is literally the largest: clocking in at 29 million ground square feet across 300 buildings, CUNY is home to 11 senior colleges, seven community colleges, and seven graduate schools. It is massive.
But for what many consider to be the city’s best engine for economic mobility, its campuses are falling apart. At a City Council hearing this month (which I’ll get to in a bit), it was a round robin of testimonies about ceilings leaking, walls cracking, windows not opening, or worse. Students at Hunter College even had an Instagram going for a while about the subpar built conditions there. CUNY—like our mass transit, public housing, and public school systems—is that classic American story of an institution that does so much with so little for so many.
So there’s that, and also this: buildings—with their intensive lighting, heating, cooling, elevators, plugs, outlets, and devices, all operating 24/7, 365—make up nearly 70 percent of the city’s carbon emissions output. The City will have to lead on cutting its own carbon footprint—which it’s doing a decent job of doing already—but a big part of its built portfolio is CUNY. So the pathway to a net-zero future goes right through those college doors.
My colleagues at Center for an Urban Future have been banging the drum about CUNY’s potential and funding shortfalls for years. (I’ve written all about our successful push to start CUNY Reconnect, a program for re-enrolling adult students, in these pages before.) My latest commentary, penned by myself and policy director Eli Dvorkin, looks at how the city and state—which split financial responsibility for the system—can seize this moment of historic investment from Albany and Washington to truly green CUNY, while also confronting its massive state of good repair needs. And the best part: CUNY’s talent pool of students, faculty and researchers can help lead that charge.
Here’s that argument in full and our testimony at that City Council hearing I mentioned, where we call for a major new initiative focused on a greener future.
Tweet-to-towing
There is a short greenway that runs alongside the Queensborough-59th St. Bridge—on the Queens side—and it’s one of my favorite bike paths in the city. It connects the bridge’s growing bike traffic, which saw nearly 150,000 rides this last March, to the borough’s western waterfront parks along the East River, and vice versa. It’s a tree-canopied linear park, with space for both pedestrians and cyclists, sidling Queensbridge, the nation’s largest public housing project.
But more recently, it hasn’t been so great. At some point during the pandemic, a bunch of folks started parking along the grass, using the greenway as a service road, essentially, to get in and out. And then it happened again, again and again, until it became the norm—time will do that to a space. And over time, the greenway started to look… well, not so green.
A few of my neighbors have been talking about it, posting videos online of cars driving along the shared paths where kids used to play and picnic. One day I looked out from the aboveground train, which roars overhead, to see a corridor I once loved degraded to pools of mud. So I found a photo I took of the greenway in its 2018 glory—I took so many!—and asked Miser, a local street safety advocate, for a more recent photo. Then I posted the combined before-and-after shot (shown above) onto X, otherwise known as Twitter.
A domino effect followed. Miser, who has amassed a following online and offline of citizens angry about traffic violence, blew up the photo on canvas print and brought it to a local police precinct meeting. (They also penned an op-ed in Streetsblog.) That was then covered by Gothamist, where reporter Catalina Gonella had a hard time getting a straight answer to the question How did this happen? Elle McLogan at CBS New York had a similar struggle, as we chatted for a TV segment on the greenway just weeks after the tweet. (It’s been a journey, folks.)
Greenway upkeep is the responsibility of the Parks Department (NYC Parks), but bike and pedestrian spaces are also a Department of Transportation (NYCDOT) thing, but towing cars is up to the police (NYPD), and then it’s also technically the property of the city’s public housing authority (NYCHA). Once you know that alphabet soup, you can understand how something like this—a public space ‘slowly invaded by cars,’ as it’s been said—was sanctioned in the first place.
Since then, the coverage has forced a response from the local Council Member, who said she’s working on a long-term solution; a response from NYC Parks, who said they have a ‘barricade plan’ for the area, which is seeing a new park built soon; ‘No Parking’ signs from NYCHA, which were swiftly ripped down; and big construction boulders at each entrance and exit point, placed by one of the entities above. (You can still access the greenway, though, so they’ve done a little.) Who knows what media coverage will bring next. But I have officially found my summer project, that is for sure.
OSA: Liftoff
As of Saturday, April 20th, the 31st Ave Open Street (and lots of other ones, too) is officially back all weekend long, from 12pm to 8pm. Contrary to last year, we’ve had a string of beautiful weather to welcome back the space, which filled with people the minute the barricades came out of hibernation and onto the street. If there is a way to judge the efficacy of this project, it’s the number of neighbors I now see (and recognize) from April to December—officially out on the town.
Five seasons in, it’s become business as usual—we’ve got programming already scheduled nearly every weekend, regular markets resuming soon, and a scaled-up operation. Our group has amassed some 150-plus volunteers, with more joining each week. (Our volunteer social tripled in attendance compared to last year.) And while the city still continues to struggle with the backend—permitting, paying us back, etc.—groups, most of which are volunteer, have taken it upon themselves to keep the program going. That includes us: we recently received 501(c)(3) status as a nonprofit (which is crazy to say!), allowing us to do a whole lot more with fundraising. That has major implications for what a scrappy little group of nerdy neighbors can get done on our block.
So watch this space. Open Street season is here.
*If you’re a reader who finds themselves in western Queens this week, I’ll be speaking on behalf of 31OSC alongside QNS Collaborative and Earth & Me—two of my fave local groups—about a more circular economy on Thursday evening, something I’ve discussed here before. It’ll be fun!
Bright Side: The pandemic’s parks
When Frederick Law Olmsted first began designing what would become his marquee project—Central Park—he thought of his son, John, who never made it out of infancy due to tuberculosis. Olmsted was one of the many 19th-century thinkers who started to piece together public space and public health; that the access to clean air, open terrain and nature could be a holistic remedy for dense urban areas, where disease was then running rampant. In many ways, it was pandemic that launched the public parks movement we know today.
I’ve written a lot about this concept—that it wasn’t surprising that public spaces had this renaissance during our latest pandemic; in fact, it would’ve been historically strange if they hadn’t. And years out, we’re still seeing the tremors, from new COVID-to-permanent programs to what appears to be not just boomlets, but booms, be it in park visitors, cycling, or walking—trends that have stuck around perhaps longer than forecasters thought. But more recently, I’ve taken stock of projects that are quite literally resulting from the pandemic—much like Central Park and others did over a century ago.
This is happening across the country and world—practically every public space project today is underpinned now with a Covid-related quote. But two stand out closer to home. The first is Gotham Park, which is a vision to reactivate the long-lost spaces underneath the Brooklyn Bridge, on the Manhattan side, which have been closed to the public for years. It was three years ago that Rosa Chang, a local resident, first noticed the abundance of land—nine acres, in total—when space came at a premium. “Everything was closed up due to the pandemic,” she told me. “And I’m walking around being like, wait, there’s space right here.” With City Hall’s support, Chang and her team, who run the nonprofit trying to reclaim these spaces, have made admirable progress so far—one acre reopened this year, and another few are set for later this year.
The other is The QueensWay, an idea that has been kicked around for some time. Its proponents hope to turn an underutilized rail line in the heart of Central Queens into a thriving active travel and green corridor. (It contends, also, with QueensLink, another more transit-oriented vision for the land. But that’s a story for another time.) Ruben Ramales, an architect who is one of the group’s board members, said the idea had thin political support until March 2020. “The pandemic changed everything,” he said. “Elected officials started to really understand why spaces like this are important.” (The city put in funds for Phase I, and recently won $116 million from Washington for Phase II—something we called for in our report on funding parks, at Center for an Urban Future.)
Much like any progress, these projects happen either suddenly or slowly. This is just the first class of pandemic-era parks we’re seeing. But likely not the last.
On the Radar
Bronx River Foodway
Foraging is not permitted on public land in New York City—a ban many believe is steeped in a racist past, to deny sustenance to residents of certain classes and neighborhoods. You can pick all of the food and herbs that you want in your own garden—if you’re lucky enough to even have one—but the minute it touches city property, it becomes a punishable offense. (This is why waitlists for community gardens, which have allotments for growing, are often long.)
But it does exist in one place, and that is the Bronx River Foodway at Concrete Plant Park. The ‘edible food forest’ grows garlic, onions, mugwort, chestnuts, echinacea, and lots more. The garden is maintained by neighbors, but generally guided by employees of the Bronx River Alliance, who help teach residents in one of the poorest Congressional districts in the country how to grow their own food. It’s a pilot project with NYC Parks, even though it opened in 2017. The hope is that it’s the first of many to sprout up (pun!) across the city.
I visited the Foodway with the cohort that I’m a part of for the Urban Design Forum’s Rewire initiative, where we’re exploring novel ways to add biodiversity to our city of concrete and steel. The work done to bolster the community’s stewardship of the Bronx River, which has gone from a polluted hole in the borough’s landscape to a source of pride for what’s possible there, is remarkable. Practically every part of the years-long process was led by residents. So much so, organizers told us, that when crews came to excavate abandoned cars and train cabooses from the waterway, local teens went around in canoes, pointing out where they could be spotted. As it turns out, they knew best.
Streetbeat Gig Board
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Street Plans, the firm to which I have the humble honor of writing a book with at the moment, is hiring for a few positions. (Los Angeles; Miami; and New York)
Central Park Conservancy, my old stomping grounds, needs someone to run their social media, which really just means that you get to hang out in the park a whole lot. A dream. (New York, New York)
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