#rorschmap

I love the internet.

Kaleidoscopic New York

More fun with the Stereographic Street View hack. As it turns out, you can do a lot more than just make those cute little mini-planets. Long, low buildings, for example, can be fun to play around with. Here we are at Industry City in Sunset Park, Brooklyn:

And, up at Viñoly's razzle-dazzle-y Hall of Justice in the Bronx:

Skyscrapers are fun for the same reason. Here's Manhattan's GM Building (and Apple's famous Cube store):

And Long Island City's Citi Tower, warped into something of a crooked frame:

In fact, with the right site, these stereographic images can start to look like legit abstract art:

And then, of course, there's the straight-up kaleidoscopic stuff. Here's the old American Banknote Building in Hunts Point:

One of the covered sections of the High Line, near 14th Street:

Under the 1 tracks up in Kingsbridge:

Pier Luigi Nervi's magnificently weird bus terminal in Washington Heights:

Inside the Met (three cheers for Street View inside major museums!)

And last, but certainly not least, on the Brooklyn Bridge:

If anybody plays around with this thing and finds some more worth sharing, please do!

Stereographic New York

Thanks to Brainpicker for alerting me to the presence of what may be the best Google Maps hack I've seen yet, Stereographic Street View. Now I know what I'm going to be doing for pretty much the rest of my life. Some early successes:

Under the Queensboro Bridge in LIC:

Then on down to Soho:

And Flatbush. The uniformity of public housing blocks makes for some really great stereographic images:

And speaking of uniform residential architecture, Fort Greene's Portland Avenue lends itself well to this format:

As does the Greystones block of 80th Street in Jackson Heights, Queens:

Then, on to fun with interestingly-shaped landmarks. The Bronx's Kingsbridge Armory:

The Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Greenpoint:

The New Museum:

The Whit:

And the Gugg:

The patchy quality of much of Google's Street View imagery means that a lot of stuff gets a little blurry around the edges, but the site is still terrifyingly addictive. If you enjoyed this post, stop back tomorrow for some more abstract fare...

A Year in New York

A Year in New York from Andrew Clancy on Vimeo.

Goddamnit, this one's good. Also: clearly made by a Queenser. +1

Splashy Times Square Satellite View

Woke up this morning to discover new Google Earth satellite imagery of Manhattan, complete with the fully-pedestrianized & mural'd Times Square. Great light too, Midtown usually looks so dark on G-Earth. Three cheers for Janette.

UPDATE: Just realized you can also get great views of a few other ped plazas. Click the thumbnails for full-sizers:

Union Square (with Greenmarket in full-swing!):

Madison Square Park:

(Also: whoever gets rid of these #$&#% borders that magically insert themselves around images on this blog when I've tried everything I can think of to turn them off wins a prize.)

Considering Programmed Housing

The old abandoned St. Joseph's School is a sturdy old building; a four-story block of red brick and arched windows -- every smart developer's dream. The surrounding neighborhood, Arbor Hill, is a bit run down, but the quality of the housing stock is high, and prices are still relatively low. The potential for an attractive, walkable community is high. To the southwest is downtown Albany and the stunning New York State Capitol; to the southeast, the Hudson River. Conditions being what they are, gentrification and displacement seem inevitable. And then, of course, comes the news: someone is going to turn the old school building into artists lofts. It's an all-too-familiar story.

But this telling has a twist: the artist housing, to be called Academy Lofts, is not an island unto itself; the plans call for the school's former gymnasium to be converted into a community art center where classes would be taught by the building's residents. These artists, who would qualify for the rental units only if they required affordable housing to make a career of their work, would be moving into a programmed housing development, where their residency required active participation in the cultural and social life of the neighborhood.

At the heart of the gentrification problem is the challenge of getting new residents with different sociocultural backgrounds moving into a neighborhood to engage with their neighbors -- and, on the flip side, convincing often very tightly-knit communities to open themselves up to new residents and see them individually as potential partners instead of a combined, faceless threat. If artists are the stormtroopers of gentrification, the set-up at Academy Lofts is particularly ingenious in that it quickly embeds the artists moving into the neighborhood into the existing community, directly connecting new residents with their new neighbors through free or low-cost community programming.

Listening to a Smart City interview with author Sean Safford a few months ago, I was struck by the author's explanation of why some Rustbelt cites in the US have fared better than others, and what this might mean for urban neighborhoods like Arbor Hill. In his book, Why the Garden Club Couldn't Save Youngstown, Safford compares the steel towns of Youngstown, Ohio, which he describes as having had a very densely-woven social network during the decline of the steel industry, with Allentown, Pennsylvania, which had a looser, more flexible social network. His argument is that Allentown has fared better in the long run specifically because its loose network of connections was more amenable to creating the kind of broad coalitions that were able to adapt to change rather than resist it, whereas Youngstown's extremely dense network was too closely tied to the status quo.

Neighborhoods that are dealing with gentrification -- often places where ethnic or racial enclave communities exist -- the standard scenario over the past few decades seems to have been that of a very tightly-knit community resisting encroaching development. Safford's research, if it can be applied at the neighborhood level (and I don't see why it can't), suggests that these communities might be much better off accepting that the neighborhood will change, and working to build broad community coalitions to try to help the existing community adapt to these changes rather than fight them.

Urbanists around the country are abuzz with chatter about how the Obama Administration's stimulus plan could revitalize American cities and metropolitan areas. Check back tomorrow for more on why programmed housing developments like Academy Lofts should be a key part of that national conversation.

Harshing Body Art

It's too late now, but I think the question Dan should have asked Kunstler is why he hates artistic expression.




(Photo from Flickr user Dean Terry. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

The Valley Does Watts

Pickle and Cake has this great video of a field trip of suburban LA residents to another suburb that happens to have this famous piece of outsider architecture. Of course, the trip is only noteworthy because of the "whites visiting the ghetto" angle, and the visitors to their credit are very honest about race and their perception of danger.

However, I was struck by something more trivial -- that as recently as 1994, when the video was made, people were still fascinated by light rail lines. So fascinated, that LA's (admittedly new) Blue Line shared top billing with the Watts Towers as the trip's main attractions. Even the ticket machines are an exciting and confusing part of the experience! And ticket machines, I think we can all agree, are really boring.

It's as if the scores of midwestern immigrants who settled in LA actually managed to produce children less urbane than they were. Reluctant metropolis indeed.

(Photo from Flickr user amycqx. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

The Bean

New updates to Chicago on Google Maps' satellite coverage finally show The Bean and a completed Millennium Park. In case you were wondering if every last square inch, including the very tip-top, is polished, here's your proof.

Holy Futuristic Automobiles, Batman

Ok...if they can make cars look like that (and not chow down on the environment to get from A to B), I'll give up my bike and start driving again, and stop complaining about how cars uglify the urban environment. I still want wider sidewalks, though. Walking will never go out of style.

Which reminds me...


Forgive the slightly vapid post, but the future is looking mighty sexy right about now...

(Both found via Core77)

Chicago Prints

Found some spectacular art prints of Chicago landmarks while poking around on Etsy today. If you see one you're interested in purchasing, click on the image and it will take you directly to the seller's page.

Urbanffffinds: The Movie

Well, not really. Actually, not at all. Maybe sort of? Whatever, it's a longer variation on a theme.

Urbanffffinds will not run as a regular feature anymore on Where. But, thanks to Marcus, there will be a constantly-updating feed of architecture and urbanism imagery over at Where's new FFFFOUND! account! Occasionally, there will be Urbanffffinds features to promote the page, which can now be found in the sidebar at left. But I encourage you to add the page to your feed reader for a steady flow of excellent urban imagery.

Enjoy!


UPDATE: the full Urbanffffinds catalog has been added, mostly in order, and with only a few permanent losses (stupid broken links!), to Where's FFFFOUND! page. Peruse away!