Metropolis’s senior editor, Kristi Cameron, is contributing semi-regular posts on issues regarding livable streets in a feature we’re calling The Street View. Click here to read previous posts in this series.

As a volunteer at Summer Streets this past Saturday, my responsibilities were little more than to hold up a stop sign while standing in front of a working traffic light. Yes, I felt a bit redundant, but it was a great vantage point from which to witness the event. Last year I strolled along Brooklyn’s Bedford Avenue when it was first closed to cars, marveling at the disproportionate pleasure of a little extra elbow room, but I never made it out to Park Avenue, the spine of New York’s street-closing events. While Bedford takes on the vaguely Parisian flair of a street market, Park Avenue is more like an exercise highway with cyclists, rollerbladers, and runners far outnumbering any casual strollers. (The flaneurs seemed to stick to the sidewalks, save for a few forays into the road just to get a taste of the experience). Read more…

Metropolis’s senior editor, Kristi Cameron, is contributing semi-regular posts on issues regarding livable streets in a feature we’re calling The Street View. Click here to read previous posts in this series.

Before I moved to New York, I told people I wanted to live here so that I could walk to the corner for the newspaper and an aspirin. Twelve years later, my priorities have changed: now I want to be able to walk to the corner to throw out a bag of dog poop. Half of the residents in my eight-unit East Williamsburg building have dogs, and we routinely complain about the lack of trash receptacles in the neighborhood. I went to a community-board meeting to ask for additional bins, and while they seemed to think the request was reasonable, none ever appeared. In fact, a passing comment from a fellow attendee should have alerted me that resources aren’t so easy to come by. “Yassky doesn’t even know that’s a residential area,” she said about my semi-industrial street.

I decided to document the situation by creating a Google map, so I spent several days noting the number of trash cans at every intersection I pass through in my thrice-daily rounds. Much to my surprise, the map makes it look like there is fairly reasonable coverage. That’s when I realized that, to members of the planning and sanitation departments, there probably doesn’t appear to be a problem. The two main arteries, Graham Avenue (pedestrian) and Metropolitan Avenue (vehicular), have bins every block or two. But there is nearly as much foot traffic on the side streets, and we dog walkers tend to choose the scenic routes, comfortably far away from the sonic rattle of trucks on Metropolitan. Read more…

Metropolis’s senior editor, Kristi Cameron, is contributing semi-regular posts on issues regarding livable streets in a feature we’re calling The Street View. Click here to read previous posts in this series.

Perhaps it’s the fact that people in California spend so much time outdoors, but whatever the reason, the streets I strolled on a recent trip to the Golden State were a lot friendlier than the ones I’d left behind in New York. In San Diego, for instance, there were pedestrian crossing buttons at every intersection and all were in working order. (A fair percentage of the ones I find in New York are permanently depressed, and I have to wonder what kind of signals they are submitting to the network.) And each public park I entered, from San Diego to San Luis Obispo, had a bin of emergency poop bags for dog owners left high and dry. It finally occurred to me to take a few pictures of these amenities, so here goes: Read more…

Photos: Eric Laignel/courtesy Tihany Design

“Everybody remembers La Fonda del Sol, but nobody remembers eating there. Believe me, I’ve asked.” Over lunch at the latest iteration of the famous restaurant, opened by Patina Restaurant Group earlier this year, Adam D. Tihany’s bon mots nearly outshine the space he designed. But, he might argue, that’s the point. Read more…

Starting today, Metropolis’s senior editor, Kristi Cameron, will be contributing semi-regular posts on issues regarding livable streets in a feature we’re calling The Street View. For her first post—or maybe it’s her second one?—Kristi checks in with our friends in Copenhagen.

Sundry scenes of Denmark’s superior bicyclists making Americans look bad, as usual. Photos: courtesy the Cycling Embassy of Denmark

Well, it’s official. Copenhagen has long been a model for other cities when it comes to bicycles and transportation planning. Representatives from Chicago and New York, for instance, took pilgrimages there before getting serious about improving their own streets. But in May the Danish capitol launched a Cycling Embassy. When I heard this, I pictured a fleet of ambassadors—fair-haired ladies and gentlemen spreading the word on two wheels, a kind of cross between Angelina Jolie and the Church of the Latter-day Saints. Turns out, the city is simply institutionalizing the leadership role it has already assumed. But the Cycling Embassy is not just a group of Copenhagen city planners. In addition to public space guru Jan Gehl, it comprises manufacturers, infrastructure engineers, and the cities of Aarhus, Frederiksburg, and Odense. It’s a one-stop shop for all things bike-related. I’m not usually one for proselytizing, but in this case, bring it on.

I’ll admit that I’m often guilty of writing off women’s lives before the 1960s as little more than marriage and childbirth, save for the rare anomaly. How bracing then to learn that anomalies were the norm at Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio, starting in 1895 when he hired Marion Mahony as his first associate (she subsequently became the world’s first officially licensed female architect). Mahoney and five of the 100 women that worked with Wright are the subject of the short film A Girl is a Fellow Here (a phrase Wright is known to have used), which premiered last night at the Guggenheim. The film’s genesis was the moment when the director, Beverly Willis, discovered that Isabella Roberts, who has always been listed as a bookkeeper for the Imperial Hotel, in Tokyo, was actually an architect. It quickly became apparent that Frank Lloyd Wright, whose personal relationships with women were famously rather scandalous, was a progressive employer. Read more…

David Sokol sits on one of the planters that run along Broadway between 35th and 34th Streets, a block recently closed to automobile traffic.

I’ll admit I was dubious when the gravelly painted areas popped up overnight around Broadway and 23rd Street last year. I was happy that the eight lanes of traffic that I frequently had to cross (but could never manage in one traffic light) were now down to five. But I had doubts about anyone wanting to sit in the middle of traffic. I was wrong. All summer long people gathered around the café tables, lounging just a planter away from speeding cars. So when I heard about the DOT closing sections of Broadway around Times Square and Herald Square, I was ready to celebrate. In fact, I asked writer David Sokol if we could meet in Herald Square so I could take it all in for myself. I had, prematurely, visions of Broadway as a grand pedestrian boulevard running the length of the city. But despite the weekend celebration with movies and beach chairs in Times Square, what we found at 35th Street today was just a road blocked off by traffic barrels. Instead we grabbed a spot in the preexisting pocket park, beneath a clock monument to James Gordon Bennett, where we could at least watch the activity, or what there was of it, on Broadway. Here’s the extent of the dialogue that the project inspired in its current incarnation:

David: “It’s anticlimactic, but there’s hope.”

Kristi: “Right now, it’s just about redirecting traffic. There’s no reason for people to be in the street. But first you have to claim the space, then you can convert it. People are at least using it to cross.” Read more…

Walkers and canes may be surprising fare for ICFF, but not for Japan, a country that’s dealing with a rapidly aging population. Thanks to rising birth rates and declining death rates, nearly 32 percent of its citizens are over the age of 65 (Germany and Switzerland are the next closest contenders, with 27 percent seniors). No wonder, then, that Japan by Design, an exhibition intended to give an overview of the nation’s product culture, would include tools for the elderly. Read more…

I gave a nod to a promotional bag a few years back, and now I feel it’s time for some more recognition. Tom Dixon’s copper lamé shoulder bags were impossible to ignore and in high demand. The only longer booth lines occured in the i Salone section when the Italians started serving up gelato, risotto, and Champagne. But there was a dark-horse contender: the Stockholm City Mission bag. If you were fortunate enough to run into Eero Koivisto, he probably handed you one of these two-sided textile versions of the classic plastic shopper. Claesson Koivisto Rune designed them pro bono for the nonprofit organization of that name, which receives 16 tons of textile donations a year. The homeless select two different fabrics, cut them to pattern, and sew them up. It’s a simple, smart, and totally worthwhile endeavor.

Moments after filing her roundup of interesting wood furniture at this year’s fair, our senior editor spotted one last wooden collection that merits special mention.

Peter Mabeo is back at ICFF with more furnishings beautifully made by craftswomen in Gaborone, Botswana—but this year’s pieces were designed by global powerhouses Claesson Koivisto Rune and Patricia Urquiola. Mabeo met Urquiola while attending a conference in Cape Town, South Africa. They quickly decided to work together, and Urquiola accelerated the pace in order to have the pieces ready to show at a Salone del Mobile offsite event, last month, devoted to Africa. She designed a traditional-looking stool and variations on a side table, some of which feature a decorative detail embroidered in the same salvaged telephone wire that she saw local basket makers using during her trip.

Mabeo’s pairing with Mårten Claesson, Eero Koivisto, and Ola Rune came about in an even more unlikely way, at least geographically speaking. The London design store Skandium, which specializes in Scandinavian designs and is run by a Swede, a Finn, and a Dane who now live in England, carries the Maun Windsor Chair because the simple lines of Patty Johnson’s design fit well with their collection. But when Skandium creative director Chrystina Schmidt asked Mabeo for a complementary table, he told her he’d need the name of a Scandinavian designer. CKR delivered the sketches for the Kalahari table just last month, yet Mabeo’s artisans were able to produce the prototype in time for ICFF. With three legs, no frame underneath, and tonal dots on the surface, the design is deceptively complex. Made entirely of iroko, it had to be collapsible so it could be shipped from Botswana to anywhere in the world. Accordingly, the chubby legs screw directly into the tabletop, but don’t come all the way through to the surface: the three dots are simply a pleasing illusion. “It looks almost like a kid could have made it,” Koivisto said happily.