Phantom Buildings and Dream Apps

November 03, 2009

By WNYC Culture

This weekend, WNYC and Urban Omnibus got together to check out how iPhone apps could overlap with urban exploration. Architects Irene Cheng and Brett Synder demonstrated their Phantom of the City iPhone App, which we featured last week on Morning Edition and on Urban Omnibus.

About 20 of people gathered to learn about buildings that were never built; strange proposals like the Bryant Park Airport and the Times Square Hotel Sphinx, proposed by Elia Zenghelis and Zoe Zenghelis. The iPhone app that Cheng and Snyder created takes advantage of GPS technology to provide users with details of proposals for buildings that never made it off the drawing board.

After the demonstration, we had an informal discussion in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel about other possible uses for the application, and everyone seemed to have a dream app. One favorite was the rat detector, an app that would alert users to nearby rat infestations (perhaps ideally combines with the Mosquito “Repel” app perhaps. Another suggestion: an app that uses the same technology as the “Bump” app. When an iPhone ‘bumps’ up against one of the city’s cultural institutions (or gets close) it could download information relating to the area, or even time sensitive information related to the institution itself.

Many participants wanted to see this technology used in a non-commercial context. And many non-iPhone users began to think of the mobile app not a gadget or widget but rather as a new platform itself. Also, check out the recap on the Urban Omnibus site.

Tell us what your dream iPhone App is. Leave a comment, below.

By WNYC Culture | Comment

Street Shot of the Week: “Trucks”

October 26, 2009

By WNYC Culture

Street Shots photographer Oliver 62 took this photograph while his wife’s “huge Italian family” was visiting him in New York City from Rochester, N.Y.

“We made a stop at my wife’s cousin’s loft in Williamsburg for some lunch… There was a party in the loft next to us and I took this shot from above.”

Street Shot of the Week: “Swimming in Dreams”
Street Shot of the Week: “Lèche Vitrines”
Street Shot of the Week: Eighth Avenue Freeze Frame
Street Shot of the Week: 7th Ave Q
Street Shot of the Week: Dimly Lit
Street Shot of the Week: Hands on the Subway
Street Shot of the Week: Pink
Street Shot of the Week: Water
Street Shot of the Week: Chairs
Street Shot of the Week: Pass
Street Shot of the Week: Go Humans Go

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Museum of the Phantom City

October 26, 2009

By Benjamen Walker

iPhones and mobile devices have changed the way we navigate the city. Apps like Google Maps and Yelp put an unprecedented amount of information about the city at one’s fingertips. But mostly, these mobile apps are used to locate nearby restaurants and bathrooms. Two architectural designers have built a new app that uses GPS technology to explore “how mobile media can deepen and intensify urban experience, perhaps even introducing new pleasures and mysteries of the metropolitan condition.”

The app is called “Museum of the Phantom City,” and it turns the iPhone into an “architectural dousing rod.” As you wander the streets of New York, it shows a city that could have been — 50 architecture sites that never got built.

WNYC’s Soterios Johnson took the iPhone tour with Irene Cheng, one of the co-creators of the app. They started off at Bryant Park, the site of a proposed airport. Take a listen to the tour.

Cheng and her partner Brett Snyder developed the App with the help of the Van Allen Institute — the beta version of the app is available for free on iTunes, and you can see the whole tour on their website. Also our partner Urban Omnibus has a feature up right now on the project.

On Saturday afternoon, WNYC’s culture department is hosting another meet-up with Urban Omnibus. Cheng and Snyder will take us on a mid-town tour of some of the sites. If you don’t have an iPhone, we’ll pair you with someone who does. RSVP to culture@wnyc.org.

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The Leonard Lopate Show Transit Stories

October 23, 2009

By WNYC Culture

It’s time to unveil the winner of The Leonard Lopate Show transit stories contest. For those not aware of the project, the Lopate Show asked listeners to contribute essays about their commute in 300 words or less. They received almost 100 tales, but alas, there can only be one winner.

And the wittiest commuter of the bunch was …

Bob Krumm

Here’s his contest-winning essay … and three very entertaining entries from our runners-up.

Today it would be called profiling, but in the 1980s I thought of visitors from Japan as always well-dressed and well-behaved. So one day when I spotted a disheveled Japanese man drunk on a subway car, I thought it very odd. He was rocking back and forth and looked about to throw up. He wore a “Hello, my name is” sticker and an ostentatious gold chain.

To add to the incongruity of the scene, a few seats away, a large man was pretending to be blind. I say “pretending” because I could clearly see him stealing glances through his dark glasses. The two men had entered the car along with a third man who had taken a seat beside me. The Japanese man baffled me, but the fake blind man scared me. Was he feigning blindness so he could jump someone? Perhaps the Japanese man with the gold chain was the intended victim.

It was a mystery that occupied my thoughts for a few stops. But as I watched the pair closely, I came to realize that the Japanese man was feigning, too. He was not drunk; his rocking movements were contrived and cartoon-like. And though supposedly in a drunken haze, he too was stealing glances around the car.

I suddenly realized what I was seeing. This was a police operation. The Japanese man was a decoy to lure a chain snatcher. The blind man was a cop ready to apprehend. I felt so clever in decoding this little charade that I leaned over to the stranger next to me to let him in on my discovery. He listened carefully then said, “Thanks for the critique; we do need more practice.” At the next stop the three men got off together. The blind man glowered at me as he passed.

Runner Up: Dan Moran

The “L” Train

I elbowed my way through the wall of human flesh and descended into the bowels of the subway system. It was Monday morning rush hour and only the strong survive. From the turnstile, I could see the “L” train still standing in the station, its doors wide open, beckoning to me, taunting me. I quickly swiped my transit card and hurried down a second set of stairs. As I reached the subway platform, I began to run. “Maybe my luck is changing,” I thought as I launched myself through the open doors and onto the train with a victorious THUD! “I made it! We can go now!”

I was met with stony silence and disapproving stares from my fellow commuters, so I grinned idiotically and plopped myself down in the nearest available seat. An audible gasp came from the rest of the train. I turned to ask the man next to me, “What is up?” when it hit me. This man is dead. I knew it instantly. The fully relaxed facial muscles, eyes shuttered, jaw clenched, sitting upright, arms tightly clamped across a chest that would never rise or fall again. He had quietly died on his way to work on the “L” train.

I carefully slid out of my seat so as not to disturb the man and once more glanced at the others who now nodded sympathetically in my direction as if we were suddenly all related. And I had to agree.

I backed away and leaned against a pole waiting, as the others were, for the next grinning idiot to jump, both feet first, into the death car. New Yorkers love a good floor show.

Runner Up: Gene Bradford

This is the story of how at age 13, some 62 years ago, I happened to operate an impromptu fish market in the 14th Street subway station.

I set out early one morning from my Bronx home to fish from a party boat out of Sheepshead Bay. This trip required changing trains at 14th Street. After a days fishing, I had two burlap bags of mackerel, well over 100 fish.With a tackle box and burlap bag in one hand and a fishing rod and burlap bag in the other, I set out to change trains. Not being able to lift the burlap bags, I had to drag them behind. After a short distance holes opened in both bags and fish began spilling out onto the walkway. I spied a trash bin nearby with lots of discarded newspapers. Spreading the papers on the walkway I unloaded the fish and called out “Mackerel – 5 cents, Mackerel – 5 cents, get your fresh mackerel – 5 cents.” Being rush hour, a large crowd of eager buyers soon appeared. In short order, all the fish were sold, each wrapped in newspaper. With a nice profit after deducting my $2 boat fare, I was the happiest 13 year old in New York. At least until arriving home when my mother asked, “Where’s the fish you promised for dinner.”

If any listener happens to be one of my customers that day, let me hear your side of the story.

Runner Up: Katherine Pantazis Schroeder

Out of Transit

Filth. I remember the filth. I noticed it just before I heard the woman screaming, “She’s in the tracks!” and thinking, thank god that’s not me — I always stand in the middle of the platform.

But there is clearly more filth here, I think. I was lifted from behind and pulled up by a number of onlookers standing on the subway platform. I had fainted and fallen on the tracks; two men had jumped in to get me out. People stayed with me, gave me water and washed my hands. No train came.

I had gone downtown to buy shoes. I broke my left hip and wrist. I had no idea at the time, in the ER, that my condition was so serious. I remember thinking, this has been quite stressful, maybe I will take a personal day on Monday. I spent two and a half weeks recovering at Bellevue. I couldn’t walk for a month. Until that time, I had been able-bodied, somewhat athletic, able to get around. And suddenly, due to the subway, I couldn’t get around at all. It was a mini-adventure in life, learning how to do everything with a wrist cast and wheelchair. Putting on shoes, getting in a chair, getting out of bed.

I fully recovered. One of the men who jumped in to help me checked on me in the hospital. I still think about him occasionally, though the memory of the accident wears with time. Yet, I hope the reminder that I shouldn’t waste my life remains forever with me. And speaking of miracles, the shoes I bought somehow made it through the entire process, from the subway, to the ambulance, through Bellevue. I wore them to a wedding last weekend, but I took a cab.

Comments[4]

Appropriate Buildings

October 12, 2009

By Benjamen Walker

(L-R) 40 Mercer (465 Broadway) by Jean Nouvel, in Soho; 322 Hicks Street by Smith-Miller + Hawkinson, in Brooklyn Heights; Carhart renovation by Zivkovic Connelly, in the Upper East Side; 38-51 Douglaston Parkway by Gary D. Cannella Associates, in Douglaston. All photos by Elizabeth Fellicella.

In 1965, the Brooklyn Heights Association convinced the city that their entire neighborhood was of historic value; not just notable buildings like the Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims. So New York City’s first historic district was born.

Rachel Carley: “The totality of the buildings was equally important to be thinking about as the monumental individual buildings.”

In the exhibit “Context/Contrast: New Architecture in Historic Districts 1967-2009” (on display now at the Center for Architecture) curator Rachel Carley looks at Brooklyn Heights and four of the city’s ninety-six historic districts. She shares the backstory behind structures like the Scholastic Building in SoHo, which made it through the Landmarks Preservation Commission process and received the City’s “certificate of appropriateness.” She also unearths sketches and designs of buildings that didn’t. A certificate of appropriateness is awarded when designs both respect the integrity of a neighborhood’s history, and look to the future as well. To get a sense of how difficult it is to define this term, check out the application forms on the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s website.

Designating a neighborhood an “historic landmark” doesn’t mean freezing it in time. Landmarks Preservation Commission Chairman Robert B. Tierney has said that balancing a neighborhood’s evolution while maintaining its historic and architectural integrity is what makes proposals for new buildings in historic districts so challenging for the commission.

And of course there is the money question as well.

Rachel Carley: “Preservation for better or worse has been linked to economic development related to tourism from the very beginning and its derived a lot of its criticism from that fact.”

The South Street seaport, one of the districts in the exhibit, is an example of where this tension between the past and the future has played out. And the story of the Seaport is not finished. In the 80s when the current version was proposed the Times editorialized that it was “mall chic” and not respectful of the gritty waterfront history. Right now, there are designs before the Commission to redo the entire thing. But Pier 17 aside, Carley still thinks that the Seaport hosts some of the best examples of appropriate building done in the past few decades.

Check out what Carley has to say about the Seaman’s Church Institution headquarters on Water Street.

By Benjamen Walker | Comment

Cityscapes on the Brian Lehrer Show

Every Wednesday this April, the Brian Lehrer Show will be hosting a conversation with the New Yorker's architecture critic Paul Goldberger to highlight the Cityscape project and to get your thoughts on the changing city.

New Landmarks with Hugh Hardy
(video from the segment)

Green Architecture with Stephen Cassell
(video from the segment)

Public Space with Michael Van Valkenburgh
(video from the segment)

Taking a Breath with Paul Goldberger
(video from the segment)

What's Next with Liz Diller