Dreams of bringing streetcars back to Brooklyn that extend back to the 1980s may soon be realized thanks to a nod received recently from Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez. The support is for a line that would extend from Downtown Brooklyn to the neighborhood of Red Hook.

In May, Valazquez requested $10 million in the surface transportation bill for the design and construction of a lightrail system. Bloomberg included the line as one of his ideas for an overhaul of the city's transportation system.

The Department of Transportation (DOT) has initiated a $259,000 feasibility analysis to explore running street rail in Red Hook, DUMBO and elsewhere.

I spoke with Bob Diamond of the Brooklyn Historic Railway Association. He was, as expected, pleased by the news. His group worked with Polytechnic Institute at NYU to come up with routing for a downtown Brooklyn loop and for the Red Hook run. More, the group has purchased several streetcars from Boston and hopes to return them to Brooklyn streets. He says the Market Street Railway model of having the volunteer group restore and maintain cars for the city to run could be implemented in Brooklyn.

Diamond, who also advocates restoring ferry service between the South Street Seaport and the Brooklyn waterfront, says since the 1950s streetcars have been missed from Brooklyn's streets because they provide a unique kind of transportation that allows residents to move around the neighborhood. Streetcar systems are making a comeback in the U.S. because of their unique ability to serve both residents and tourists.

Diamond is known in Brooklyn for having discovered the world's oldest subway tunnel. Once thought to be filled in, looking at old maps and listening to a radio program, Diamond realized it had only been sealed off. There's also a rumor a stream engine is buried in a portion of the tunnel near the waterfront that was filled in. He says there are unaccounted for units on rosters from the Long island Railroad, the company that constructed the tunnel.

Anyone wishing to voice support the initiative should email the DOT commissioner from their web site.

Eric Miller on 08.27.09 @ 10:56 AM PST [link]  

Downtown Altoona may soon lose another historic building. A five-story brownstone and brick structure known as the Eagles Building has been marked for demolition. A last ditch effort by the online web magazine The New Colonist has been launched to try to save it.

"I've heard about more than one building thought to be unsalvageable come back and become a tax-income producing structure and a valuable historic asset to the community," says Newcolonist.com publisher Eric Miller. "It's even more important to save the remaining historic structures in towns like Altoona that have lost so much."

Despite its being heavily used well into the 1980s, the Eagles Building was lost to the County of Blair over nonpayment of taxes and sat in the tax repository for several years. This past winter, the roof collapsed in its entirety during a snowstorm.

MORE

Eric Miller on 08.25.09 @ 06:20 AM PST [link]  

Investment in cycling infrastructure can mean a better economy! NC editor Rick Risemberg has an editorial on the economic returns from investment in bikepaths, bike racks, and more, in the Los Angeles Business Journal this week--read it here.

And there are links to some good source data as well.

Richard Risemberg on 08.24.09 @ 03:26 PM PST [link]  

Eric Miller on 08.20.09 @ 01:12 PM PST [link]  

Here's a nice audio story from NPR, about the charms of picking wild blackberries in the urban jungles of the Puget Sound:



Urban agriculture, from green roofs to allotments to community farms to actual working farms within city limits, will be one of those strongest pillars supporting the sustainable city. And as we learn here, wild foods can be part of it as well.

Richard Risemberg on 08.20.09 @ 09:11 AM PST [link]  

Eric Miller on 08.20.09 @ 07:51 AM PST [link]  

As a follow-up to my article a few months ago, Losing Altoona, I learned recently that another building, an Eagles Lodge, will soon be demolished. I wrote to City of Altoona Deputy Director and Planning Administrator Lee Slusser who confirmed the bad news. Like the Woolworth's Building I wrote about before, Slusser says the Eagles Building is beyond saving.

"This past winter the roof collapsed in its entirety during a snowstorm," Slusser wrote. "The weight of the relatively heavy concrete roof falling took each of the five floors with it as it fell into the basement, leaving four five-story-tall exterior walls leaning only on each other for support (literally, you can open the front door, look down into the basement to see the roof, and look up to see the sky...). Inevitably, the four exterior walls began to lean forward towards 12th Avenue."

As downtowns around the country are enjoying new life, Altoona is still losing buildings to neglect. Another building Slusser identifies as being in possible danger was bought on ebay, but a partnership fell apart and the elements are taking their toll.

I'd like to pose questions to our readers, many of whom are in city planning departments around the U.S. and elsewhere, have you saved buildings in this condition? What can municipalities do to keep buildings from getting into this state? Is there a way to affordably save the facade?

Slusser also wrote with more discouraging news. The owner of the lot where the Woolworth building stood has approached the city about using the lot for parking (which is what I feared would happen once the building was gone). The city says there hasn't been interest in reusing these buildings. The city requires three stories and 75 percent lot coverage, but the owner is appealing to the City Zoning Hearing Board. Absent another option, my guess is he'll get his parking.

More photos of the Eagles Building

Slusser is looking for reader input, ideas and options. Send them to newcolonist@newcolonist.com and we'll forward them.

Eric Miller on 08.19.09 @ 10:00 AM PST [link]  

It took Woodstock to close the New York State Thruway. It took Mayor Bloomberg to close Park Avenue!

Eric Miller on 08.15.09 @ 01:45 PM PST [link]  

After driving his daughter 25 miles to a soccer game, Dave Mann sat in a parking lot, viewing the "geography of nowhere" surrounding him, and began to muse about the spaces we've made for ourselves, and how much they've become a part of his interior geography as well....

Read more at "Concrete Demesne" in the New Colonist.

Richard Risemberg on 08.14.09 @ 05:02 AM PST [link]  

Frankenstein Productions is looking for volunteers and interns both to organize community screenings and to help design and operate a social marketing program for the film, Eating Alaska. In their words:

We are also interested in a volunteer or intern who is creative, motivated, cause oriented and eager to be involved in social marketing with a desire for a genuine real world experience.

If you are a writer, artist, activist, student or volunteer looking to make an impact and in particular help generate conversation on what we eat, where it comes from and how our choices make an impact on the environment -then this is for you! Help us network and set up screening events around a fun and serious documentary film about what we eat and where it comes from. This is also a chance to help take part in a movement to change the way we eat as a nation.

Please visit the film's website at eatingalaska.com to familiarize yourself with the project, then contact them using the phone number or email provided there.

Richard Risemberg on 08.11.09 @ 12:41 PM PST [link]  

The insults of petroleum dependency aren't limited, of course, to global warming, watershed destruction, and the decimation of community: there are the little big things that affect us directly as individuals even at home...one of our own little fissures in the "death of a thousand cuts" that we are inflicting on the earth and its civilizations is shown below, in this view from our living-room window, taken this morning before 7AM:



It's one of many huge delivery trucks that pulls up for the Smart & Final grocery and janitorial store across the road, or for the adjacent Rite-Aid. It's refrigerator truck, which means that it's reefer unit is running--loudly--all the time it's here. And much of the time the tractor's diesel keeps running too--why, in this slightly-less-unenlightened era, I don't know. But it's LOUD, and it stinks, and it's early in the morning.

The trucks are here every day--many of them, in fact, not just the one in the photo--disgorging a pallet or two, and then rolling on. Delivering sometimes necessities, but much more often the kind of crap--Coke, chips, snacks, even flavored ice cubes!--that combine with motorhead sedentarism to make Amurricans the fattest folk on earth.

And to deposit layers of nearly-ineradicable grime on our windowsill, in and out, and probably in our lungs as well.

Day after day, hour after hour, the same huge trucks pull up, and excrete a relatively tiny pallet of sugar and grease labeled "food."

Why don't they deliver more merchandise less frequently? Ah, the corporatists have decided to exploit the petroleum windfall to institute "just in time" inventory--using a constantly moving chain of trucks as warehouses, to reduce the cost of actual warehouse space. Because oil has been artificially cheap for so long, and because the harm it causes falls outside traditional accounting concepts, so they don't have to compensate anyone for it.

In fact, since stress makes one more likely to buy junk food as a palliative, it inadvertently makes them richer.

Even the tiniest civility is beyond this culture of exploitation. The trucks could drive up from the other direction, and park their idling motors between the two commercial buildings at the end of the block, instead of among five residential buildings (that were here decades before the stores in question). Thinking about the health and comfort of the communities that enrichen them is beyond the corporatist's ability to conceptualize, I suppose.

But the true cost of cheap oil, the petroleum subsidy that allows the insult to be formulated, is being made up for by my lungs and nerves, by the shuttered windows and battered dreams of my neighbors.

Well, it looks as though that's all starting to change. Let's hope it is.

Richard Risemberg on 08.11.09 @ 05:51 AM PST [link]  

There's a highway in Pittsburgh (I-279) that divides the Northside neighborhoods of East Deutchtown and West Deutschtown like the Berlin Wall. Three uninviting sidewalks on highway bridges and a walking bridge in a bad location are all that connects them. While on the campus of Harvard University last weekend, I noticed what could be a solution. It's a highway covering what you wouldn't know is a covering unless you saw the entrance for the cars. A large lawn, with a sculpture garden perhaps, would be the perfect solution. This could tie the neighborhoods together and bring development to East Deutschtown. It would seem the distance covered by the Harvard pedestrian overpass and the distance needed to connect East and West Deutschtown are about the same.

Eric Miller on 08.09.09 @ 05:55 PM PST [link]  

It seems current days are seeing a renaissance of bus travel. Megabus competes with Bolt Bus and the Chinatown Buses compete with everyone, but focus on one route. This weekend Fung Wah bus took me to Boston. In fact when I mentioned Megabus to my cousin in Boston, she hadn't heard of it but was very familiar with Fung Wah. With the exception of some uncontrollable traffic, the trip was flawless. The bus departed from a street corner New York's Chinatown and actually arrived at a bus terminal adjacent to South Street Station in Boston. The trip cost was $15.00 each way, slightly less than the $16-$20 for Megabus (of course it's possible to get a $1 ticket on Megabus).

Fung Wah typically runs on the hour, more frequent than Magabus. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday they run every half hour. Apparently there are exceptions, however. We arrived expecting a 7:30 p.m. bus, but were told the demand wasn't great enough and the next bus would be at eight. Finding alternatives was easy in Boston and just meant walking around to the different counters. A line called Lucky Bus also had an 8:00. Lucky Bus had passed our bus on the way into Boston, and seemed to have luck enough getting through the traffic that held us back. I then got in the line for the Peter Pan bus. The woman at the counter said they also had an 8:00 bus, direct to New York. The one-way price was $37.50. "Who would ride that?" I thought. There wasn't a desk for Bolt Bus, but I noticed a 7:30 bus was departing. I was told by a person in the Greyhound booth I could board for $20 at the door. "Not too bad!"

The decision was made to get on the Fung Wah bus anyway, not because of the price, but because the bus made a rest stop on the way up. The bus never stopped on the way back, however; I guess because it wasn't during meal time. Again we hit traffic on the way into Manhattan, but that's the price you pay for traveling the roads instead of the rails.

Eric Miller on 08.09.09 @ 03:59 PM PST [link]  

Eric Miller on 08.05.09 @ 03:44 PM PST [link]  

We took some time out this afternoon to discuss growing food locally, as close as or own balcony, the future of local farming and how you can participate in yard sharing and exchanging locally-grown food. Click and listen to our podcast.

Eric Miller on 08.03.09 @ 11:55 AM PST [link]  

Wesley Marshall and Norman Garrick of the University of Connecticut's Center for Transportation and Urban Planning have published a report on their research into street networks. their analysis indicates that New urbanist type developments, with smaller streets and short blocks arranged in connected grids rather than cluster of cul-de-sacs results not only allow walking and cycling to flourish, but also increase the efficiency of car travel while reducing speeds.

The researchers studied 24 California cities for their data.

Excerpts:

Their conclusion: The most unsafe cities in California, in terms of traffic fatalities, are the newest ones--those developed primarily since 1950. The cities with the fewest fatalities, by contrast, are those with significant portions built before 1950.

The newer cities tend to have more "dendritic" networks--branching, tree-like organizations that include many cul-de-sacs, limiting the movement of traffic through residential areas. They also don't have as many intersections. The pre-1950 cities, on the other hand, tend to be more grid-like, giving motorists many more routes to choose from.

[...]

The ASCE study also concluded that street networks containing many cul-de-sacs increased travel demand on arterial roads by 75 percent and on collector roads by 80 percent, compared to a gridded street design. That, too, may help explain the higher fatality rate associated with the street networks that became prevalent after 1950.

[...]

In the period from 1997 through 2005, the safer cities experienced 3.1 fatal crashes per year per 100,000 population, while the more dangerous cities suffered 10.1 fatal crashes per 100,000 population--a death rate more than three times as high.

A summary of the report is available at New Urban News.

Richard Risemberg on 08.01.09 @ 06:36 AM PST [link]