Tag: nyc

Mapping NYC Changes

Here’s where New York City’s getting whiter (in green on the map). The red areas are the 25 sub-boroughs with declining white populations—none of which were in the gentrifying neighborhoods identified by the Furman Center. The population of white residents increased in every gentrifying neighborhood from 2000 to 2015. 8 gentrifying neighborhoods logged the biggest increases, topped by Bedford-Stuyvesant, at 1235%.

Beneath Grand Central

Grand Central’s immense underground is comprised of 2 subterranean levels with 44 platforms and 67 tracks, extending over 100 blocks beneath the streets of Manhattan. It is both the largest train station and one of the largest inaccessible underground environments in the world.

This inaccessible landscape is like a cavernous portal into another world. A colossus rich in untouched artifacts, forgotten equipment, and miles of tangled track—all covered in cm of remnant soot, railroad dust, and aging debris. The Vast …Beneath Grand Central is an enchanted landscape, straddling the line between the center of the universe and a feeling 1M km away, being elsewhere unlike any other place in the City. This cavernous environment is both functional and beautiful in its efficiency and utility—duly capable of touching our solitary senses and recalibrating our allegiances to the physical world in one of the most densely populated urban environments in the world.

NYC ATM microbes

Microorganisms associated with mollusks and bony fish predominated in Asian neighborhoods in Flushing and Manhattan’s Chinatown. Traces of microbes linked with chicken appeared more in a largely black community in Harlem. And ATMs in predominantly white neighborhoods were festooned with Xeromyces bisporus, a mold associated with the “spoilage of high-sugar foods such as cakes and confectionaries

Constellation Park

earning your keep after you die

Imagine the Manhattan Bridge twinkling from underneath with 100s of small pods filled with decaying biomass – the final resting place of many former New Yorkers, shining like stars in an otherwise dark sky. There, you might lay flowers near a pod containing the remains of a loved one, until decomposition finishes its course and all that remains is a container to keep as a remembrance. This is the vision that is Constellation Park, a shiny new cemetery proposed by DeathLab, a trans-disciplinary research and design space at Columbia University.

Harbor Ring

I realized that there was a disconnect between the idea of a cars-only crossing and the reality evolving in the region. Bikes are taking off all over the city. We now have waterfront development all along the harbor with parks and bike paths. It’s a whole rebirth, the “new New York.” And the powers that be have repeatedly rejected bike access on the bridge. We started thinking about how we could recast the idea of a shared-use path on the bridge. I’m an urban and regional planner by training, but I’ve been in the family hardware business, and so I thought, “We have to take a marketing approach to repackage Verrazano access.” It’s the missing link in the Harbor Ring. We became the Harbor Ring Committee.

Miscelánea

When you walk down East 4th Street, it is easy to pass by Miscelánea, but that would be a mistake. This unassuming Mexican general store is home to one of the tastiest tortas in the city, plus it’s stocked with south-of-the-border goods such as chile chocolates, salsa verdes and tortilla presses.