This past Saturday was an on-the-ground introduction to the workshop site that will occupy my semester. Every Masters of Regional Planning (MRP) student is required to pursue one workshop over the course of their degree, and the purpose is to provide hands-on practitioner experience.
Four other MRP students (Vicki, Ashton, Jia, and Dan) and I chose to work on a strategic plan for the creation of an innovation district for the neighborhood surrounding the Noguchi Museum and Socrates Sculpture Park. Our client for this project is the Noguchi Museum – an institution that is an important catalyst for the surrounding neighborhood. Other MRP students from AAP NYC will focus on the Queens Greenway project (aka “The Low Line”) and the Hudson River Park Trust’s long term financing strategy.
It is clear that the three groups have workshops that directly interface with real world planning. In the case of the Noguchi site plan, my group is joining an already mature conversation about the future of that institution’s neighborhood. My fellow MRPs and I will be working under the guidance the planning and engineering firm HR & A and the architecture and planning firm WXY Studio.
This past Thursday in the AAP Urban Design Studio, my collaborators and I received a comprehensive briefing of our project. The starting point for creating the district plan is taking a census of business and building types currently existing in the area. Our studio introduction to the project was followed up on Saturday by making a site visit to Queens to learn about the area, and to learn techniques to assess building usages.
Although the bounds of our study are demarcated, we learned that the neighborhood itself is the meeting point of Astoria and Long Island City. As of yet, the area of our focus doesn’t have a unified name– depending on who is asked, parts of the zone are considered Astoria and other parts are called Long Island City. Ultimately, helping to define the attributes of the area and working with the community to find a fitting identity will be an output of our efforts.
Saturday morning I biked to the the site with Bob Balder, the AAP NYC executive director, and a few other MRP students. Traveling north, our ride took us from the Brooklyn Museum down to the Navy Yard, and then through Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Long Island City. Beyond simply delivering us to our site, the preceding bike tour contextualized the site within its broader Brooklyn and Queens context.
For nearly a half century, the low rise district surrounding the Noguchi has attracted artists, craftspeople, and numerous service sector industries benefiting from close proximity to Manhattan. Over the past ten years, through the founding of the Socrates Sculpture Park and the institutionalization of the Noguchi Museum, the locale has become increasingly dynamic. The area’s vibrancy was clear from the moment our group met at the gates of the sculpture park. We were greeted by a weekly farmers market amongst a fun collection of contemporary art installations. It was here that we also met our walking guide from WXY Studios, Jacob Dugopolski. Over the course of the next three hours, we learned an enormous amount about the area and its history from both Jacob and Bob.
Taking to the streets beyond the Socrates Sculpture Park, we first stood at the intersection of 33rd Rd. and Vernon Blvd. Standing on the west side of the street we stood with our backs against a new Costco, which is located directly across the street the Noguchi Museum. This intersection proved to embody the tension in the neighborhood. Historic buildings originally built for warehousing and manufacturing are now being transformed. One such transformation is emerging as big box retail. Former warehouses, it turns out, make ideal candidates for the single story 100,000 sq. foot retail model preferred by major box retailers. The unfortunate drawback in the case of the Costco along Vernon Blvd is that it interrupts and makes inaccessible the shoreline– an feature of increasing importance to New Yorkers.
The next stop on our walking tour was 33rd Road and 10th St. At this intersection we got several lessons by looking at a large warehouse structure with the words Dreier painted on its side. This structure typology is the exact same as the one repurposed by Costco. A telling clue on the exterior of the Dreier building as to the type of business going on inside is steel protrusions that infer a track going down the middle of the building (see photo below, note the metal sticking out of the building just to the left of the “D”). Such tracks are used to move heavy loads such as steel or marble throughout the warehouse space. Two buildings down from the Dreier structure we could see similar features and had a view into the load bay to see an sea of cream colored marble.
At 34th Road and 12th Street our site analysis lesson moved on to the topics of assessing a lot’s development potential, and divining possible business operations occurring within obfuscated sites. Tell tale signs of high value operations within a site are well managed landscaping, numerous exterior building lights, and security cameras. We were told by Jacob and Bob that it is well known that the neighborhood is home to several large warehouses housing art collections for Manhattan-based museums and galleries. It is likely that the building we examined is one such site. Of course there was no sign announcing the vault’s presence.
Kitty-corner from the high value building was another site that served as a good lesson in “soft sites.” These are places that are ripe for redevelopment. In old districts, often a significant barrier to redevelopment is the cost of removing an outdated building structure. Lots with buildings on them are considered “hard sites.” The example of a soft site we looked at was an ice-cream truck distribution hub. The main structure on the lot was a mobile trailer, and the primary function of the lot was fencing in a dozen ice-cream trucks. The cost of removing the infrastructure of such a site is minimal in comparison to the cost of removing a one or two story building. Considerations of high value and soft sites it turns out are important considerations when stitching together a vision for a district plan. The softer sites may inform how quickly the entire area may shift. A big concern for this neighborhood is that dozens of 50 story high rises has occurred in Long Island City. Depending on the vision for the area the number of soft and hard sites may motivate zoning changes either to encourage the continued existence of soft sites, or to encourage the speed of their replacement.
Ultimately, our tour finished up at the intersection of the Roosevelt Island Bridge and Vernon Blvd. This vantage point has special significance for the scope our innovation district study. From here, we were beside a significant commercial artery, a major power plant (referred to as Big Alice), and a bridge representing the only mainland road access to Roosevelt Island. As the island changes in the coming years with the build-out of Cornell’s Tech Campus, there will invariably be impacts on the Noguchi/Socrates neighborhood. As a result, there are many questions about how to plan for those changes, while retaining what is loved about the area.
Our workshop team finished the day with a material understanding of our project, and a collection of new analytic tools for visually understanding the neighborhood. We are now back in the studio drafting a template for our team to use as we go out and collect data on each lot in our study area. We’ll be back out on the streets – clipboard in hand – on Thursday!