Lower Manhattan’s Battery Park City has seen several major disasters in recent memory, a fact that was not lost on the presenters at Thursday’s topping-out ceremony of the area’s new SeaGlass carousel. “This community, you cannot bring us down,” said Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer, who spoke at the ceremony. “You can attack us, flood us… but we are about building and creating.”
Borough President Scott Stringer speaks at the SeaGlass topping-out ceremony.
The carousel, designed by New York firm WXY, will be the centerpiece of the newly redesigned Battery Park. Several speakers at the ceremony lauded it not just as a new neighborhood landmark and beautiful work of design, but as a symbol of the resilience and strength of a community that has endured both the 9/11 attacks and hurricane Sandy.
Attendees admired the completed exterior. Inside, banners were placed to indicate the scale of the carousel seats. Read more…
Amidst all the post-Sandy commotion and the excessive media coverage, it was confusing to keep up with all that was going on, be it just a few blocks away or in the far reaches of the wide spread New York City. This was further compounded by media outlets scrambling to report properly on the unprecedented storm; their efforts were patchy, to say the least.
Last week when I sat down with Local Office Architects, Walter Meyer and Jennifer Holstad to discuss their projects, I was taken aback by their description of the degree of destruction on the Rockaway Peninsula. But I was also positively surprised to learn of the relief efforts they described (and were intrinsically involved with, having spearheaded some of them), and some of the initiatives to bring that beleaguered community back to life.
One initiative, PS1’s VW Dome 2, officially opens this Friday, March 29th. The temporary dome (a slightly smaller scale version of the one installed at PS1’s courtyard, gifted by VolksWagen) aims to give the Rockaway community a place to gather and be inspired, whether they’re hosting talks, watching movie screenings, or taking in exhibits.
If something between $467 million to $504 million were about to be spent in your back yard, wouldn’t you want to know what those dollars would buy and add your voice to the discussion?
Map of the Gowanus Canal Superfund Study Area, courtesy EPA
Those dollar amounts reflect the estimated cost for cleaning up the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, NY. The canal, an EPA (US Environmental Protection Agency) Superfund site, is an extremely polluted body of water with hazardous materials like coal tar, oil, metals, and other toxins. These contaminants are resting in the sediments at the bottom of the canal. The EPA’s job is to study the area, determine who is responsible for the contamination, create a plan for clean up, and oversee the clean up, which is paid for by the responsible parties. The EPA does this with the objective of removing risk to human and ecological (plant and animal) life in and around the canal.
January 23rd Carroll Gardens EPA Public Meeting, photo by Ryan A Cunningham
To help them achieve that objective, the EPA has defined a series of 9 criteria for evaluating the alternatives for clean up. Many of these criteria focus on common sense things like smart, efficient, and safe actions; but there is one very key criteria that you should care about, “Community Acceptance”.
January 23rd Carroll Gardens EPA Public Meeting, photo by Ryan A Cunningham
Community acceptance is what makes this a great time to speak up. Right now the EPA is in the Proposed Plan Comment Period, which is the time when the agency is required by law to take comments on its proposal for how to clean the canal; and they must respond to these comments in documented form.
Why comment? Here are a couple of reasons.
Everyone is listening – Politicians, businesses, and the media are all watching very closelyhow the various groups involved, including the community, are responding to the plan.
It’s on the record – Community groups, mission driven organizations, and concerned citizens not only can know they are being heard, but will actually see their comments (or similar ones), answered in written form by the EPA.
Now is the time – The public comment period is the primary time that the community has to comment on the proposed plan. It’s open till March 28, and after that, there will be a lot less attention paid to the comments and questions surround the plan.
Across New York City and the tri-state region, neighborhoods glimpsed the climate change forecast—massive flooding, storm surges, and rising seas. With lives lost and billions in damages, it’s safe to say our communities will never be the same.
Red Hook flooded, photo courtesy The Brownstoner
Into this new reality comes a renewed vigor for finding new ways to cope. In New York City we’re hearing about many different solutions including storm barriers, oyster reefs, and waterfront parks—and as many political opinions. Some of these ideas treat water as something to keep at bay, working like the Dutch to build walls to protect us and keep the water out.
But storm barriers pose a lot of problems. They wreak havoc on the marine environment, are challenging to implement legally and politically, can cost billions, and are a binary system, meaning they work up until they fail, then it’s a disaster. A barrier does help with one thing—preserving what we have.
Brooklyn Bridge and harbor, New York City, New York. 1903
I am a climate refugee, or at least, I was for nearly 2 weeks after Superstorm Sandy hit the NYC metro area. What is a climate refugee? It’s someone who’s been displaced due to the effects of climate change. Millions of people throughout NY, NJ and CT are now official members of this latest category of citizens. Climate change has been called a moral issue because impoverished nations are supposed to be the first impacted. Sandy illustrated that rich localities can easily become the Third World when the web of infrastructure we depend on collapses. It’s a good bet another Sandy will hit the region within five to ten years. It was the second hurricane to ransack the northeast in two years. Let’s hope the next downpour isn’t a category 3 or 4.
Climate Refugees Map by UNEP
The aftermath has brought about two major ways of looking at our future. One is to explore how the region can become more resilient and adaptive to climate change. The other calls for “rebuilding stronger than ever” and implementing sea walls to protect the Big Apple from surging water. Both paths are extremely challenging, because we are facing three-front fight. We have to adapt to how our footprint has already altered weather patterns. We have to muster the willingness to continue eliminating further damage to the climate, and we must unlearn what we think modern society is. Lastly, we have to do this as budgets and debt make it impossible for expensive solutions.
My Experience
At around 7p.m. on the night before Sandy made landfall, the lights in my house flickered and then went black. It would be nearly 14 days before they came back on. My house was built in the 1960’s – it is a beautiful vintage, mid-century style ranch home. When first built, it was a model for the future. Everything in the house is electric from the hot water heater to the space heating to the air conditioning. Three decades ago, electricity was cheap. Now, homes with electric-centric mode of operation are a financial burden.
One December day seven years ago, I was just about the only person driving around Gulfport, Mississippi. Hurricane Katrina had hit three months earlier, and the downtown and neighborhoods nearby still looked like Armageddon—house after house had been crushed or split open by the storm surge. Nobody was fixing anything. People were waiting on the government to draw up new flood maps so they would know what might be insured if they were to rebuild.
By now, a lot of people have rebuilt their houses in Gulfport. Many of them are quite close to the water, just like they were before Katrina. If you look at the street views on Google Maps, you see houses rebuilt, as if no 24-foot storm surge could ever happen again. There was a rule: If less than 50 percent of your house was damaged, you could rebuild at the previous elevation. If more than half was damaged, you had to build above a 17-foot elevation. People who rebuilt low to the ground in the surge zone either squirreled under the 50 percent threshold or they don’t have insurance. Many of these people can’t afford the high cost of insurance, the city’s director of economic development, David Nichols, told me recently. They may have had their house passed down through family, so they have no debt but no money either, and nowhere else to live. Redevelopment in Gulfport generally has been suppressed by unwillingness or inability to rebuild to the mandated elevations, or by a lack of insurance—there are still also plenty of empty sites in town. But for many who have rebuilt, you can see a disaster setting up all over again.
Hurricane Sandy has brought home the responsibility that we share to make our region more resilient in the face of severe weather and more responsive to the threats posed by climate change.
What is certain is that we will need new policies, and new investments, to reduce our susceptibility to environmental disasters. Sandy led to the death of more than 70 people in the region and caused more than $50 billion in damage and economic losses. The storm also disrupted the daily lives and commutes of nearly all of the region’s 23 million residents. Whether or not these events are the result of human-caused global warming, it is clear that we need to do much more to lessen their toll.
Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath have awakened us to an uncomfortable reality: The country’s most populated area and its largest economic engine sits on a vulnerable coastline. Yet there are many measures that would help ease the impact of storm surges.
The recent hurricane-induced blackout, and the loss of light — both in our homes and in our permanent street lighting system — plunged us into a chaotic and unpredictable environment. It was, at an emotional level, frightening, bewildering, and incredibly stressful. Indoors, it created inconvenience (where are my clothes? where are the kids’ toys?), danger (where are my pills?, how do I manage 18 flights of stairs in the dark?), and the disruption of habitual activities that focus our evenings (cooking, reading, playing games). Outdoors, the looming darkness escalated anxiety. We feared stumbling, bumping into walls; falling into manholes; that a car or cyclist might hit us; loss of orientation (what street am I on?). We feared strangers. And then there was the loss of what I call “glow.” It’s the social experience of light: I see you, you see me, look at everyone around us. “Glow” provides comfort and ease as we go about our nighttime routines amid the delights and enchantments a city offers, abuzz and alive after dark.
When a street lighting system goes down, we may not be able to replace each element, but we can look for useful and imaginative responses that might ease some of our very real ‘functional’ fears, and bring back some of the social dimensions of light. We might consider the blackout as a time machine transporting us back to a Dark Age before we were so dependent on technologies that we can’t personally control. We forget that, for all but a recent moment in human history, we have, as a species, lived without a state-supplied artificial light system. Yet at night we maneuvered around our homes, negotiated stairs, went outside and navigated pathways. We traveled across counties, indeed, entire countries, and explored all the continents available to explore, using the technologies we had at hand, harvesting the potential of starlight, the Milky Way, and the moon.
We need to mine this Dark Age technology, not just because another blackout might occur, but because it helps us to imagine other less electric alternatives for a future in which we may well want to use less light. So here are a few simple principles gleaned from a review of pre-industrial cutting edge technology.
When the lights went out in lower Manhattan on that evening in late October, darkness enveloped everything around me. A week later I was grateful to see what two New York photographers and filmmakers saw that night. Their work helped me understand the magnitude of the blackout Superstorm Sandy visited on my beloved city, of which I could see only a small sliver from my windows. Here Ruggero and Valentina Vanni write about what it was like to be out on the streets as they documented this frightening and beautiful short film, which turns out to be a cautionary tale of modern life.—SSS
“Downtown New York, October 29, 10:13 pm.—The lights had gone out. The brunt of the hurricane just passed us. The wind fell and the rain stopped. We had to go out and see.
“We have been living here for over 30 years and photographed all over the city. We are in love with downtown Manhattan and its ever-changing urban environment at day and night. We knew this time it will be different. We could not imagine how different.
Hurricane Sandy has invoked a lot of change. Whether it’s coast lines or politics, we have experienced first-hand what scientists, planners, and architects have been warning about for years, that a storm like Sandy was going to happen.
“Sometime between now and 2100, a storm will dump 18 feet of seawater into lower Manhattan, flooding much of the financial district, Battery Park, and most of the subway stations south of Rector Street. Six hundred oil tanks in Bayonne, New Jersey, will be inundated. And all but a nub of Liberty State Park, the landfill opposite Ellis Island, will disappear into the harbor. That’s the grim forecast for New York.”
The above quote comes from Suzanne LaBarre in her 2010 blog post, Hope Floats, where she describes MoMA’s Rising Currents exhibition “as an optimistic rebuke to the government’s stopgap approach to public infrastructure. Whereas the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers erects concrete dams and levees, these architects favor broad solutions that reconfigure the social, economic, political, and natural landscape.”
An image from the MoMA Rising Currents exhibition, Courtesy of Scape Landscape Architecture
LaBarre rightly calls out how the Rising Currents exhibition took sustainable and creative approaches to dealing with cataclysmic storms like Sandy. The ideas in the exhibition illustrated concepts that would help create resilient communities; communities that are not only physically safe from the water’s wrath, but stronger socially, economically, and environmentally
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