I have now moved this blog to www.christopherdgray.co.uk

See you there!

On home as the sedimentation of experience

"Sitting around the breakfast table this morning, Nurri and I got to discussing our (divergent) feelings about the importance of having a home, and what even constituted one. She said something that initially struck me as obvious - that Home was the place where one laid down one's memories - but the more I thought about it, the more the idea's supposed obviousness began to dissolve.
That schema does account for the most traditional situation: you're born in a place, you have all your early and significant life events there, and even if you later have intense experiences elsewhere - a few years at college, a tropical honeymoon - you eventually return. Over the course of a life in one place, you lay down a rich sediment of associations and cross-referenced memories, in such a way that if you could rotate the whole thing on its vertical axis your life would be revealed as a tapestry of harmonics."

From v-2 Organisation | interface usability |

Apologies for the absence...

Walker in the Wireless City November 24, 2002
By TOM VANDERBILT

IT is a late autumn day in Bryant Park. Red and yellow leaves swirl around clusters of green folding chairs. People sit in the thin afternoon light, talking on cellphones, to others, to themselves. The scent of a piquant cigar mixes with the crisp tang of fall.

As I sit in this verdantly genteel place, a whole other flurry of movement and social interaction is going on around me, one invisible to the eye. I watch it on my laptop, the modern equivalent of Jimmy Stewart in a wheelchair, binoculars in hand, in "Rear Window." In the small browser window of my iBook's Airport card, an antenna of sorts, I find myself at the nexus of any number of the wireless networks that have come to blanket the city.

There is one called "theorywireless1," another that says "Wlan," another labeled "www.nycwireless.net" and one called simply "X." I select the penultimate choice and within seconds have a free broadband connection to the Internet, something, it is estimated, found in less than 10 percent of American homes.

While most people were not watching, New York has become host to yet another layer of infrastructure, a random, interlinking constellation of what are called "wireless access points." A survey last summer found more than 12,000 access points bristling throughout Manhattan alone, many open to anyone with a wireless card, many others closed and private, and still others available for a fee.

None of these were laid down by city workers. No streets were torn up. No laws were passed. Rather, this network has been made possible by the proliferation of ever more affordable wireless routers and networking devices, which in turn transmit the low-range, unlicensed spectrum (a wild frontier, home also to baby monitors and cordless phones) known as 802.11b, or, more genially, Wi-Fi.

Walking the streets of New York today means walking amid an unseen tangle of Wi-Fi. The hum of Internet traffic mingles with the jostle of pedestrians. Data "packets" whiz by like bike messengers. In no place are the emerging social and urban aspects of this fact made clearer than Bryant Park, which last spring became what its operations director, Jerome Barth, calls "the first park to have installed a dedicated system that provides coverage throughout its entire footprint."

Not that you would notice. A thin antenna rising from the park's office serves as access point, while two similar antennas, on top of the bathrooms and the pizzeria near the Avenue of the Americas, function as what are called repeaters. These minor appurtenances drape the eight-acre park in high-speed Internet access.

The people who run the park now report that daily users of its high-speed access number in the high two figures. Come spring, they expect the daily figure to swell to several hundred. Internet sessions often last more than an hour.

"We are intent on loading the park with users and increasing what we call their `dwell time,' or how long they stay in the park," said Daniel A. Biederman, president of the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation.

The idea of Internet access surfaced at one of the corporation's regular meetings more than a year ago, Mr. Biederman recalled: "What can we do to make people stay in the park? Why do they have to go back to their offices at 2? They have to go back to get on the Web. Why don't we give them the Web?"

The idea of fixed connections seemed discordant with the park's philosophy. "They were in portions of the park that didn't seem amenable enough, too noisy," Mr. Biederman said. "We wanted to have the same thing as we have with our seating: a random distribution of the function."

Enter NYC Wireless, an ad hoc group committed to the creation of free wireless access in public spaces throughout the city. Bryant Park would be the perfect showcase for their vision.

With some clever engineering and hardware from Cisco Systems and Intel, the wireless park was born. Just as park users could sit wherever they liked, so too could they gain access where they liked. The eight-megabytes-per-second connection was as free as the sunshine and the green grass.

"When we first started the group, we were concerned about the proliferation of paid hot spots in coffee shops, hotels and airports," said Anthony Townsend, a co-founder of NYC Wireless, using the popular term for a wireless access point. "We realized that if we could deploy a free hot spot at a given location, there would be no incentive for a commercial provider to ever set up a network there. People are always going to choose the lowest-cost option."

The group began small. The other co-founder, Terry Schmidt, set up a free network in the New World coffee shop downstairs from his Upper West Side apartment. But with Bryant Park as its flagship effort, and Madison Square and Tompkins Square Parks among its other areas of coverage, the group is building a loose network of free Wi-Fi throughout the city. Apart from its centralized efforts, the group's Web site is filled with announcements from those who have set up their own access points, a do-it-yourself response to the paid Wi-Fi found at Starbucks.

Rather than a paid telecommunications service, its founders regard wireless as an urban amenity with untold implications for a city's vibrancy. "Cities wouldn't work if we didn't have networks," Mr. Townsend said, "for moving people, goods, information."

"This technology flies in the face of all the `death of distance' and `end of geography' rhetoric of the 90's fiber optic boom," added Mr. Townsend, a doctoral student in urban planning at M.I.T. and a researcher at the Taub Urban Research Center of New York University. For regulatory reasons, the ranges of Wi-Fi transmitters tend to be within several hundred feet.

"It's a very intimate technology, very local," he said. And perfect for New York: the denser the city, the greater the number of people who can gain access to a network. "It's easier to achieve a critical mass. When we got to 50 hot spots, that looked like a lot more than Los Angeles or Atlanta. You could actually walk between them."

Rather than the death of place, it serves to reinforce place. "Places that have it will become special," he said. This in effect causes a kind of reimagining of the city's geography — i.e., where can I go to find a hot spot? — although interestingly, places with access already tend to be vital urban places.

BRYANT Park is an example of what the geographer Kevin Lynch, in his classic 1960 book "The Image of the City," called a node. Nodes, as he defined them, "may be primary junctions, places of a break in transportation, a crossing or convergence of paths, moments of shift from one structure to another." They help give "legibility" to the city, help us to orient ourselves. Node is also a word synonymous with hot spot — a junction of Wi-Fi signals — and the electronic nodes are turning up in the same parks, airports and public gathering places that Mr. Lynch considered physical nodes.

For Mr. Townsend, there is much possibility, and still much to be learned, in the relationship between the physical Bryant Park and its virtual twin. For example, should there be some physical manifestation of the Internet activity in the park, like a light that grows brighter with more users? Should information about park events, dining options and other local information be posted on the Bryant Park portal?

Conversely, should the virtual park reflect the real one? "When the park closes, do we close the network down?" he asked.

Plans are in the works for a Bryant Park chat system, where users could meet online. This location-based service, as with other virtual meet-and-greet applications, represents a striking effort to overcome the social distancing augured by wireless itself: Why talk to the person next to you when you've got the world at your fingertips?

For Mr. Biederman, the wireless program is part of the evolving mission of Bryant Park, one of the world's most heavily trafficked (900 people per acre) and intensely managed public spaces. The park has kept track of its Internet users with the same vigor with which it sends two employees with clickers (one for men, one for women; a close male-female ratio is vital to its vision of a vibrant public place) to measure park attendance each day at the peak hour of 1:15 p.m. On daily walkthroughs, the park managers approach laptop users.

"We look over their shoulders a lot," Mr. Biederman said. "When I see someone using a laptop and I run up to them and say, `Hi, I'm the guy who runs the park, and I wanted to see what your reaction is to this,' it's almost like parental guidance."

That raises the issue of what is on people's screens at the park.

"We want to give users the greatest privacy possible in the usage of the system," Mr. Barth said. "We believe that just as Bryant Park is a very lawful place where people are extremely civilized, this will link in a manner to their Internet usage; that you won't feel comfortable surfing the Internet for reprehensible Web sites or pornography, because the social pressure around you will make it an unpleasant experience."

Call it "eyes on the net," an updated version of William H. Whyte's classic idea of "eyes on the street," espoused in books like "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces" (1980). Whyte, whose time-lapse studies of pedestrian behavior and treatises on the desirability of movable chairs are the foundation stones of Bryant Park's revival, died in 1999, before the advent of the wireless park. And yet New York's emerging wireless citizens, like the cellphone users before them, would certainly have been germane to his studies of street-corner conversations, plaza footpaths and spatial relations.

Even if the Blackberry-armed New Yorker can check e-mail anywhere, Whyte might have noted that this behavior had its own distinct patterns, that people would feel more comfortable doing so in inviting public places like Bryant Park.

Whether or not Whyte would have envisioned the wireless park, Mr. Biederman thinks it is true to his thinking. "Anything that got people into parks, made them more pleasant — he would have thought this was terrific," he said.

DOWN the street from my house in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, a Linksys wireless router sits in the window of the apartment of Kevin Milani, a 28-year-old engineering school dropout and marketing consultant. As one of the far-flung band of people who have posted listings on the Web site of NYC Wireless, he invites those within range to use the bandwidth streaming into his house through a D.S.L. account provided by Panix, a New York company. It is one of many "stoop networks" to be found in Brooklyn.

"I have a lot of bandwidth I'm not using, so I might as well share," he said.

This is the remarkable idea at the heart of the free wireless movement. It's as if he invited people within 150 feet to watch whatever cable stations he happened not to be watching at the moment.

Nor is he overly concerned with the risks of leaving his electronic front door open. "A person could actually do quite a bit of damage if they wanted," he said. "I have backups. I am at risk just being connected to the Internet." As for his potential redistribution of the bandwidth provided by Panix, he said: "I don't think they really care. They're a bunch of techies."

But Panix does care. For residential accounts, says the company's president, Alexis Rosen, this is "strictly prohibited." For business users, it is "strongly discouraged." Predictably, large providers like Time Warner also take a dim view of bandwidth sharers. "The fact that the technology exists to go a couple of hundred feet is irrelevant in our minds," said Joseph DiGeso, vice president and general manager for high-speed online services at Time Warner Cable of New York. "The ability to tap into a phone line or cable box has existed for years, but it doesn't make it legal."

A larger concern for Mr. Rosen is security. The spread of broadband Internet has resulted in scores of connected computers that are, in effect, servers unto themselves. Mr. Rosen worries that such wireless arrangements are vulnerable to hackers or "script kiddies," less technically pro- ficient users who simply use code-breaking software.

"If you open your network to any fool who's got a wireless card in their machine," Mr. Rosen said, "they can use your machine to execute a bandwidth attack, or they can be the victim of a script kiddie and be used to execute an attack. And we can't even figure out who they are. We can only trace it back to you."

The electronic city is still fairly porous, as was demonstrated by a recent series of expeditions of the World Wide War Drive. War driving means cruising through the city logging unsecured access points. Christopher Blume, the 16-year-old New York coordinator of the war drive, trolls through Manhattan like a Baedeker of the ether.

"You learn to look for the abbreviations as you're driving by," he says. "Take `Bndemo.' You wouldn't think anything of that. But where I drive by, that's Barnes & Noble." (This summer, after the magazine 2600 published a log of the bookseller's network activity, including credit card numbers, the network was closed.)

Mr. Townsend of NYC Wireless concedes the additional security risks of a public wireless network, but adds that any network has its vulnerabilities. "I can sit here in my office and sniff the traffic going over the local network," he said. As for al Qaeda or child pornographers using Bryant Park, he argues that there is nothing anyone can do on a wireless network that couldn't be done at the public library.

With all their promise and peril, the emerging wireless networks raise the perennial questions about the dynamics and very nature of urban space. Can public life ever be made truly safe? How do you balance private and public space? What does the geographic distribution of the wireless networks say about the socioeconomic makeup of a city, especially one as large and complex as New York?

Quite a lot, as Marcos Lara, founder of the Public Internet Project, found out this summer. He and a research team, using a global positioning system, a laptop and an antenna, conducted a four-month survey of all wireless access points in Manhattan (www.publicinternetproject.org). Mr. Lara, 28, formerly of NYC Wireless and part of the Bryant Park initiative, is now working to bring broadband access into underserved communities. He also sells the results of his findings, correlated in a plotted, thematic map that, as he puts it, represents a "one-of-a-kind look into the use of wireless technologies in daily consumer life."

His drive also cast cold digital light on the notion of urban social disparity.

"It's one thing to hear about it," he said. "It's another thing to actually see it occurring on your screen as you drive down the block. You see the economically depressed areas. You think: `Well, maybe they have computers. Maybe they have technology.' Then you look down on the screen, and you have this unique portal into their world, and it's a desert."

Tom Vanderbilt is author of "Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America."

Officials Unveil Plans for Rebuilding Trade Center Site July 16, 2002
Officials Unveil Plans for Rebuilding Trade Center Site
By EDWARD WYATT and CHARLES V. BAGLI


The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey unveiled six preliminary plans today for redeveloping the World Trade Center site, all of which include a memorial park as the centerpiece to commemorate the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Some designs include the footprints of the twin towers in the memorial. Others call for at least one soaring tower that evokes the oversize presence of the trade center in the Lower Manhattan skyline.

"I want to emphasize the plans you see today are not intended to represent the design and the details of memorials or other buildings," said the Port Authority chairman, Joseph J. Seymour. "They show where the various components of the redevelopment plan interrelate and how much space they may occupy. Once the land-use plans are approved, we can move to construction with architectural design criteria that provides unified, dignified and creative designs for the site's components."

The designs — which had been shown in recent days to government officials, architects and leaders of civic organizations involved in the rebuilding process — also restrict development on the site itself largely to commercial offices and retail space. Some proposals also call for a museum as part of the memorial. All of the plans would devote at least a third — some two-thirds — of the 16-acre site for the memorial.

Most designs designate existing buildings to the south for residential towers and for a cultural or a performing arts center. These elements are desired by planners to fulfill their goal of converting Lower Manhattan to a place that will attract visitors long after most office workers will have left at the end of the workday.

In a process of debate and refinement that is expected to last at least through the end of the year, the six designs, developed by planners for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, were described at a news conference this morning at the Federal Hall National Memorial, the landmark building on Wall Street.

What was unveiled today, however, is unlikely to survive through the planning process, officials said.

"The importance of this undertaking makes it essential that the Port Authority and its partners at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation build a consensus for development plans," Mr. Seymour said this morning. "First and foremost, we must respect the wishes of families, of community residents, local businesses and other stakeholders, acknowledging the legal obligations of our leaseholders."

The next step will be a public hearing on Saturday at the Javits Convention Center, where 5,000 people are expected to attend.

The designs underwent several stages of revision even as they were reviewed with public officials and others in recent days, people involved in the process say. A draft of the plans dated July 11 that was circulated among government and planning officials had eight versions of the six plans, including at least two that came directly from developers with interests downtown.

But by yesterday, those plans had been significantly altered by architects at Beyer Blinder Belle, the urban planning and architecture firm hired to oversee the design process, making the plans that originated with developers all but unrecognizable to their authors.

Many planners, civic groups and community advocates have already expressed dismay that the Port Authority and state officials have insisted that designers incorporate what was already on the site and more: 11 million square feet of office space, 600,000 square feet of retail and an 800-room hotel. Those requirements, the critics say, allow little else and limit the possibilities for imaginative configurations of the property.

Some members of those groups have also begun to voice reactions to what they have seen that are lukewarm at best. On Saturday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said he viewed the plans as "a starting point" from which to "collect as many different ideas as we can."

Mr. Bloomberg, who has an engineering degree and who helped to design his company's own office complexes, added that he would be giving his own ideas to the planners.

Others who have worked to influence the planning process have been more critical. "It's a plan for the Port Authority," said Susan S. Szenasy, a co-founder of Rebuild Downtown, Our Town, and editor of Metropolis, a design and culture magazine. "It has nothing to do with the call for a 21st-century design or a vibrant 24/7 community, or creating street life in the area. It's very discouraging. But we're living with the reality of everything the Port Authority needs. There's no room for fresh ideas."

Michael Petralia, a spokesman for the Port Authority, said the agency never intended to begin the planning process with a clean slate.

"We had to deal with the legal obligations that are a fact at the 16 acres," including the commercial, retail and hotel space that is under contract, Mr. Petralia said. "Those are part of the discussion, just as a memorial is part of it and transportation is part of it."

The final master plan for the site is likely to incorporate elements of all six initial proposals rather than adhere to any one proposal. But the preliminary designs will crystallize at least some of the issues facing Lower Manhattan and the redevelopment of the site, including the height and mass of commercial towers to be built, the size and location of a memorial park, which streets should be re-established and the location of a transit hub.

The plans include from two to six office towers, some topped by clear or empty shells to evoke the twin towers. Several include a huge tower, perhaps taller than the twin towers had been. One plan calls for a clear "beacon" tower that would be among the world's tallest structures.

The designs also incorporate several proposals that have been circulating among architects and planning and community groups for months, including restoring some of the streets that were eliminated when more than a dozen downtown blocks were combined to form the superblock for the trade center.

All six designs include a restoration of Greenwich Street, whose southward progression formerly ended at Barclay Street, at the site of 7 World Trade Center, and re-emerged south of Liberty Street.

Most of the six plans also call for the reopening of a corridor roughly along the line of Fulton Street, extending from Church Street westward to West Street, either as a pedestrian walkway through the redeveloped site or as a surface street. Two plans restore parts of Cortlandt and Dey Streets, usually as east-west pedestrian byways.

The proposed designs also offer several variations on whether and how to submerge West Street. One calls for the roadway to descend below ground from Vesey Street through Battery Park, creating an 18-acre memorial promenade extending from the trade center site south to the Battery.

One plan calls for an express roadway to be submerged from Chambers Street through Battery Park while allowing local traffic to continue to use a smaller West Street adjacent to the site. Another plan would submerge only the section from Vesey to Liberty Street. Others call for building a platform or a pedestrian walkway over the street.

Think You Own the Sidewalk? July 16, 2002
Think You Own the Sidewalk?
By MARC SANTORA


On the sidewalks of New York there are jaywalkers, baby walkers, dog walkers, night walkers, cellphone talker-walkers, slow walkers, fast walkers, group walkers, drunken walkers, walkers with walkers and, of course, tourist walkers.

Unfortunately, all of these walkers are walking into one another.

"People no longer know how to walk on the sidewalk," said John Kalish, a television producer in Manhattan. "There was a time that any real New Yorker had a built-in sonar in terms of walking down the sidewalk, even a crowded one, and never bumping into someone. Now — forget it."

In a crowded city that is forever rebuilding itself, sometimes it is impossible to be a graceful walker. Still, strollers say that many problems could be avoided if some basic rules were followed.

First, walking rules are like driving rules.

"Stay to the right is the golden, No. 1 rule," said Chris Avila, 29, who has lived in the city for nine years.

Europeans used to driving on the left side of the road have acute problems getting used to New York sidewalks, said Giannandrea Marongiu, 36, who moved to New York from Italy five years ago. "They don't know where to go," he said. "They are all over the place."

Second, don't be a sudden stopper.

"People who stop short really get me," said Carla Melman, 26, a lifelong New Yorker. She said it was the equivalent of a car wreck on the Long Island Expressway on a Hamptons weekend.

Third, when walking with friends, don't crowd every lane of the sidewalk.

Ms. Avila said she reserves a special sidewalk in hell for "mall walkers," which she defined as groups who insist on walking three or four abreast. "They make me so mad," she said. "When you are around a group of mall walkers, you just have to find a way around them."

Fourth, keep it moving.

The average New York City fast walker does not have to get stuck behind a pack of mall walkers to grow sour. A single person moving at a slow clip-clop can be enough. There is even a word for this slowpoke: meanderthal. An Internet dictionary of slang defines him as "an annoying individual moving slowly and aimlessly in front of another individual who is in a bit of a hurry."

Fifth, don't be a heel stepper.

"I hate it when someone gives me a flat tire," Ms. Avila said. That happens when a heel stepper clips the back of her sandal, knocking it off her foot and causing her to become a sudden stopper.

Sixth, get off the phone.

Pedestrians say cellphone talker-walkers are so lost in their own hyperconnected universe that they are almost as likely to break the rules of walking as tourists. "When you are on a cellphone, you are a group of one," said Michelle Nevius, 32, a walking tour guide in Manhattan.

Roger Evans, a musician, agreed. "Typically I think of a cellphone talker as a guided missile," he said.

However, it is the bike messengers who many complain are the true missiles. Mike Nelson, a bike messenger born and raised in New York, says the walkers have gotten worse. "With the cellphones, Palm Pilots and all the other gizmos, people aren't even aware of what's around them any more," he said. "It's not just the bikers that will run them over, but also trucks, cabs, whatever."

Seventh, keep Fido on a tight leash.

Peter A. Perez, 28, a dog walker at the Wagging Tail, a dog care center in TriBeCa, says too many inexperienced dog walkers use long leashes that can become tripwires. And, he said, dog walkers should "never allow dogs to introduce dogs to other dogs," as this can create overactive obstacles.

Unnatural obstacles can also spoil a stroller's stride.

Scaffolding, a major walking hazard, seems to be growing like kudzu in front of buildings in the city. "You do see more scaffolding," said Ilyse Fink, a spokeswoman for the Department of Buildings. In 2000, nearly 4,000 permits were issued for new scaffolding and worker sheds, up from roughly 1,600 in 1995, Ms. Fink said, mostly because of tighter building inspection laws and building owners with more money for upkeep in flush times.

Ms. Fink volunteered her own pet peeve about city walkers. "I can't stand when people are standing at the corner talking to their friends or rubbernecking," she said. "I'm like: `Why don't you move? You don't do that when you are driving a car.' "

And Ms. Fink would not hang up the phone until she had pointed to another danger: baby strollers. As an admitted mother, she knows that mothers think of the stroller as an extension of themselves and, therefore, do not consider the added space they are occupying. "When I would be jaywalking with the stroller, people would be like, `Do you know you have a baby?' " she said.

Even if every walker followed all the unwritten walking rules, it would still be hard to get around because New York is more crowded. In 1991 there were 22,790,000 visitors to the city, according to NYC & Company, the city's convention and visitors' bureau. In 2000 there were 37,380,000 visitors walking the streets, it said. Add that to Manhattan's 1,537,195 residents and some 800,000 daily commuters until millions of people are fighting over the sidewalks.

Fred Kent, president of the Project for Public Spaces, a nonprofit group that advises communities on public planning, sees the walking crisis as part of a much larger problem. "I think it is all part of this trend away from being comfortable as a pedestrian," he said. American cities and American life in general is so focused on the car, he said, that "we are becoming enormously obese, because we have few opportunities to walk and very few opportunities to exercise."

Mr. Kent says walkers should not be mad at one another, for they have a common enemy. "They are in this situation by manipulation," he said. "We have developed rules for pedestrian traffic to enhance car traffic rather than traffic rules that would benefit pedestrians." But short of ripping up the city's roads, Mr. Kent could not offer a walking peace plan.

But Stella Cashman, who organizes racewalking events in Central Park, could. She pointed to the rules of track and field as a model to help ease the congestion. First, "no intentional contact (or pushing)." Second, "no attempts to impede the progress of others." Finally, "Allow sufficient distance (i.e. three steps) before cutting in front of another."

With those rules, a referee in some parts of the city would be awfully busy. At the corner of Canal and Broadway there is a perfect storm of pedestrian obstacles. Merchants sell everything from shoes to diamonds. Food vendors' carts face the storefronts. Nearby scaffolding, a subway entrance, a few homeless people on the ground and tourists looking for a deal make the corner nearly impossible to navigate.

"A lot of time I take to the street," said Kwok Wan, a letter carrier who has walked a route in the Chinatown area for 18 years. "If they are shopping, they are not moving."

Michael McDaniel, visiting from Birmingham, Ala., was shopping there with his family. He said he thought he obeyed the rules for walking in New York. "I follow the no-walk sign," he said. "Sometimes we ad-lib when we see other folks doing the same."

Mr. McDaniel acknowledged that his family often stopped suddenly if the urge struck them. But they were learning fast.

"Single file moves much faster," said Mr. McDaniel, now a reformed mall walker. "If we try and go three across, it slows us down."

Memorial Park Plays Large Part in Preliminary Trade Center Plans July 16, 2002
Memorial Park Plays Large Part in Preliminary Trade Center Plans
By EDWARD WYATT and CHARLES V. BAGLI


All the competing plans for redeveloping the World Trade Center site include a memorial park as the centerpiece, covering as much as a third to two-thirds of the 16-acre site, according to people who have seen the six preliminary designs.

Some designs include the footprints of the twin towers in the memorial. Others call for at least one soaring tower that evokes the oversize presence of the trade center in the Lower Manhattan skyline.

The designs, which have been shown in recent days to government officials, architects and leaders of civic organizations involved in the rebuilding process, also restrict development on the site itself largely to commercial offices and retail space. Some proposals also call for a museum as part of the memorial.

Most designs also designate existing buildings to the south for residential towers and for a cultural or a performing arts center. These elements are desired by planners to fulfill their goal of converting Lower Manhattan to a place that will attract visitors long after most office workers will have left at the end of the workday.

In what will be the beginning of a process of debate and refinement lasting at least through the end of the year, the six designs, developed by planners for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, are scheduled to be released to the public today at a news conference at the Federal Hall National Memorial, the landmark building on Wall Street.

What is unveiled today, however, is unlikely to survive through the planning process, officials said yesterday. "This is the starting point for dialogue," Matthew Higgins, a spokesman for the development corporation, said yesterday. Part of that dialogue will include a large public hearing on Saturday at the Javits Convention Center, where 5,000 people are expected to participate.

The designs have undergone several stages of revision even as they have been reviewed with public officials and others in recent days, people involved in the process say. A draft of the plans dated July 11 that was circulated among government and planning officials had eight versions of the six plans, including at least two that came directly from developers with interests downtown.

But by yesterday, those plans had been significantly altered by architects at Beyer Blinder Belle, the urban planning and architecture firm hired to oversee the design process, making the plans that originated with developers all but unrecognizable to their authors.

Many planners, civic groups and community advocates have already expressed dismay that the Port Authority and state officials have insisted that designers incorporate what was already on the site and more: 11 million square feet of office space, 600,000 square feet of retail and an 800-room hotel. Those requirements, the critics say, allow little else and limit the possibilities for imaginative configurations of the property.

Some members of those groups have also begun to voice reactions to what they have seen that are lukewarm at best. On Saturday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said he viewed the plans as "a starting point" from which to "collect as many different ideas as we can."

Mr. Bloomberg, who has an engineering degree and who helped to design his company's own office complexes, added that he would be giving his own ideas to the planners.

Others who have worked to influence the planning process have been more critical. "It's a plan for the Port Authority," said Susan S. Szenasy, a co-founder of Rebuild Downtown, Our Town, and editor of Metropolis, a design and culture magazine. "It has nothing to do with the call for a 21st-century design or a vibrant 24/7 community, or creating street life in the area. It's very discouraging. But we're living with the reality of everything the Port Authority needs. There's no room for fresh ideas."

Michael Petralia, a spokesman for the Port Authority, said the agency never intended to begin the planning process with a clean slate.

"We had to deal with the legal obligations that are a fact at the 16 acres," including the commercial, retail and hotel space that is under contract, Mr. Petralia said. "Those are part of the discussion, just as a memorial is part of it and transportation is part of it."

Mr. Petralia and Mr. Higgins declined to comment on the specific elements of the six designs.

Some who saw the plans yesterday praised elements that could raise opposition. Fredric Bell, executive director of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects, said some plans offered interesting ideas for memorial space and a museum that would require building where the towers had been, an area that many family members of the victims would like to be preserved.

The final master plan for the site is likely to incorporate elements of all six initial proposals rather than adhere to any one proposal. But the preliminary designs will crystallize at least some of the issues facing Lower Manhattan and the redevelopment of the site, including the height and mass of commercial towers to be built, the size and location of a memorial park, which streets should be re-established and the location of a transit hub.

The plans include from two to six office towers, some topped by glass-clad see-through structures, several hundred feet high, to evoke the twin towers. Several include a huge tower, perhaps taller than the twin towers had been. One plan calls for a clear "beacon" tower that would be among the world's tallest structures.

The designs also incorporate several proposals that have been circulating among architects and planning and community groups for months, including restoring some of the streets that were eliminated when more than a dozen downtown blocks were combined to form the superblock for the trade center.

People who have seen the proposals say that all six designs include a restoration of Greenwich Street, whose southward progression formerly ended at Barclay Street, at the site of 7 World Trade Center, and re-emerged south of Liberty Street.

Most of the six plans also call for the reopening of a corridor roughly along the line of Fulton Street, extending from Church Street westward to West Street, either as a pedestrian walkway through the redeveloped site or as a surface street. Two plans restore parts of Cortlandt and Dey Streets, usually as east-west pedestrian byways going through the site.

The proposed designs also offer several variations on whether and how to submerge West Street. One calls for the roadway to descend below ground from Vesey Street through Battery Park, creating an 18-acre memorial promenade extending from the trade center site south to the Battery.

One plan calls for an express roadway to be submerged from Chambers Street through Battery Park, while allowing local traffic to continue to use a smaller West Street adjacent to the site. Another plan would submerge only the section from Vesey to Liberty Street. Others call for building a platform or a pedestrian walkway over the street.

People who viewed the plans in recent days say they leave many questions unanswered. Among them are the location of the underground site of the PATH train tracks; most plans put the mezzanine station between Greenwich and Church Streets. What would be required for the condemnation and acquisition of property to build residential towers near the site remains unanswered.

Nor is it clear when there will be a demand for new commercial space downtown. Many real estate analysts estimate that it will not be necessary to build a new office tower on the site before at least 2006.

A Memorial Remembers the Hungry July 16, 2002
A Memorial Remembers the Hungry
By ROBERTA SMITH


The Irish Hunger Memorial opening today on the edge of the Hudson River near Manhattan's southern tip could be New York City's equivalent of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, an unconventional work of public art that strikes a deep emotional chord, sums up its artistic moment for a broad audience and expands the understanding of what a public memorial can be.

The work commemorates a 150-year-old tragedy, the great Irish famine of 1845-52. Although the subject lacks the national scope and immediacy of the war in Vietnam, the Hunger Memorial, which is in Battery Park City, illuminates Ireland's tragedy in undeniable human, even universal, terms; it can grip the viewer with its combination of information and spatial experience.

The new memorial is a startlingly realistic quarter-acre replication of an Irish hillside, complete with fallow potato furrows, stone walls, indigenous grasses and wildflowers and a real abandoned Irish fieldstone cottage. The 96-by-170-foot field rests on a giant concrete slab that is raised up and tilted on a huge wedge-shape base. It slopes upward from street level to a height of 25 feet. A packed dirt path winds up the slope, culminating in a hilltop with sweeping views of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.

The field is a walk-in relic of a distant time and place tenderly inserted into the modern world almost as if it were an offering. From the riverside, the towering end wall of the plinth is shadowed by the broad overhang of the concrete slab, and cut by a ramped entrance that leads into the back of the cottage. Intended to resemble an Irish burial mound, or tumulus, it also suggests that the landscape has been flown in on a large spaceship — especially at night, when it is lighted from inside, creating an eerie glow. From its inception, the memorial was also intended to be a reminder of world hunger. The plinth is lined with glass-covered bands of text that mingle terse facts about the Irish famine with similarly disturbing statistics about world hunger today, along with quotations from Irish poetry and songs.

But the work's potential for contemporary resonance may be unusually great: today's dedication ceremony occurs in a city that saw history change course a short distance away less than six months after the groundbreaking for the memorial on March 15, 2001.

Located two blocks from ground zero, the Irish Hunger Memorial is likely to be embraced by many as a symbol of the hundreds of firefighters, police officers, rescue personnel and office workers of Irish descent who died in the World Trade Center attack. It was half completed when the attack came, and its earth-moving equipment and raw materials were commandeered during the rescue effort. But local police officers and firefighters familiar with the project protectively guarded the half-finished memorial from inadvertent damage or dismantling.

The Hunger Memorial will almost certainly add to the growing debate about the future use of the land on which the World Trade Center once stood. By coincidence, six proposals for the redevelopment of ground zero, each including plans for a 9/11 memorial, are about to go on view at Federal Hall National Monument.

Perhaps most important, the memorial has arrived at a time when Americans, especially young Americans, have a deeper understanding of tragedy and grief, of fate's capriciousness and of the complexities of power.

The work, which was created by Brian Tolle, a 38-year-old New York sculptor, exemplifies contemporary art's ability to meet the public's need for meaningful monuments with an appropriateness that may surprise both advocates and opponents of the new. While the low-lying black marble wedges of the Vietnam Memorial, designed by Maya Lin, might be called populist Minimal Art, Mr. Tolle's memorial is a form of populist postmodernism, a combination of reality and simulacra, of high and low, a layering of different historical periods and contrasting points of view. It is also a typically postmodern blend of existing art styles — Realism, Conceptual Art and Earth Art — bound together by historical fact and physical accuracy.

The work may cause a rolling of eyes among the original Earthwork artists. Their works tend to be hewn from the vast expanses of Nevada and New Mexico, miles from anywhere or anyone. In contrast, the memorial has a slight theme-park preciousness and detail. It is earthwork as Pop Art, a miniature at full scale.

But it also belongs to the tradition of the war memorial in the form of a deserted battlefield. Like those at Verdun and Gettysburg, it is a figure-less terrain in which the viewer stands in for the heroic statue. It commemorates human failure, human loss and human perseverance in a war fought with land, food and political might at the cost of at least one million lives.

The piece brings to fruition efforts dating back several decades to build a memorial to the famine in New York, where so many Irish immigrated to escape its reach. It began to take shape when Timothy S. Carey, president and chief executive of the Battery Park City Authority accompanied Governor George E. Pataki on a trip to Ireland, and the two men began to discuss Vesey Green, a half-acre square in Battery Park City, as a possible site. Upon their return, after the authority was formally charged with creating a monument, Mr. Carey selected a steering committee and hired Joyce Pomerantz Schwartz, an experienced art consultant, to guide the process of selecting the artist.

Battery Park City's 155 acres already include 13 large-scale public artworks, the Museum of Jewish Heritage (A Living Memorial to the Holocaust) and the New York City Police Memorial. Financed by the Battery Park City Authority, the new piece has only slightly run over its original $5 million budget, Mr. Carey said.

Mr. Tolle was among 13 artists selected from an initial review of 150 portfolios and one of five awarded a $10,000 stipend to create a model and proposal for the site. The selection of his scale model — like the budget projection, it's surprisingly close to the final outcome — was all but unanimous. He chose as collaborators Juergen Riehm and David Piscuskas of 1100 Architects of New York and Gail Wittwer-Laird, a landscape architect.

The only conditions were that the memorial be a contemplative space, retain the harbor view and incorporate text. The third condition reflected Mr. Carey's view that too many memorials and monuments become mute because they contain so little specific information about the events they commemorate.

Both Mr. Carey and Mr. Tolle relish the idea that the memorial can change and grow. Paths that form through the grass will be kept. Mr. Tolle devised an ingeniously flexible method of mounting the texts: they are silk-screened onto strips of clear Plexiglas that are simply leaned against the glass bands from the inside. When lighted, they appear to be etched, but they can be easily changed, injecting new facts about world hunger or additional history about the famine.

Mr. Tolle says that the project is "a synthesis of my interest in history, architecture and trying to make a memorial for a particular event that also lends itself to adaptation." He describes the memorial as "a little fragment of Ireland built on a heap of language," and this is almost literally true. Excluding the tons of earth that blanket the tilted concrete shelf and the irrigation system buried in it, nearly every particle of the monument has an Irish origin and a historical logic.

The 62 plants — including wild yellow iris, nettle and blackthorn — are specific to the Connacht boglands in County Mayo, whose rural landscape inspired Mr. Tolle. The fieldstone house and walls were imported stone by stone from a farm in the area belonging to Tom Slack, a cousin of Mr. Tolle's partner, Brian Clyne. (Built in the 1820's, the house had a dirt floor until 1945 and was occupied until 1960; it was donated to the memorial by the Slack family.)

The slope of the memorial is dotted with 32 large stones, one from each of Ireland's counties, and an ancient pilgrim stone, carved with an early Irish Cross of Arcs. The surrounding plaza and the base are clad with Kilkenny limestone, a green-gray stone that is studded with small, white, featherlike coils — fossils from the ancient Irish seabed.

The quarter-acre size of the monument adheres to the infamous Gregory Clause passed by the British Parliament in 1847, which decreed that cottiers whose plots exceeded that size would not be eligible for relief. The cottage is roofless because many farmers tore the thatches off their homes to prove destitution and qualify for relief.

The sentences that gird the limestone base from bottom to top have been gleaned from contemporary reports, newspaper editorials, parliamentary debate and parish priests and show how many people in the midst of the tragedy grasped its awful proportions. And also how many did not. In one line, the recipe for the soup ladled out in British-run soup kitchens (12 1/2 pounds of beef to 100 gallons of water) is compared with the recipe used in the soup kitchens established for victims of the famine by American Quakers (75 pounds of beef to 100 gallons of water).

The question of whether this elaborate artwork will have meaning beyond Irish history, or even beyond world hunger, is largely moot. It shows one instance and one cause of the immigration that has shaped and continues to shape New York City. It shows instances of suffering, prejudice and mismanagement so specific that they can't help but reverberate into our own time.

Mr. Tolle said he considered the tilt of the work crucial in separating the memorial from its setting. Without it, he said recently, "the piece would be a folly." But the slant that isolates the Hunger Memorial from its setting also establishes a crucial similarity. The Irish farmers tilled their land so intently that it became close to man-made, just like Manhattan. The crampedness, oldness and ekedness of the field, so unlike most American terra firma, itself communicates a sense of human determination and toil. It is a fragment from a man-made island placed upon another man-made island, one symbol of endurance atop another.

The Star of Elm Street Stages a Comeback

July 11, 2002
The Star of Elm Street Stages a Comeback
By ANTHONY DePALMA


ATLANTA — ROGER W. HOLLOWAY approaches elm trees with a proselytizer's prose and a planter's gentle hand. His green thumb comes from the five generations of gardeners in his family who have run the Michler Florist and Greenhouse in Lexington, Ky., where he was born. His reverence for trees was instilled in him when his family moved to Ontario in the 1960's to run a tobacco farm. That was when he first saw elms disappear.

Back then, elms were still noble giants that lined streets and stood outside public buildings. One day Mr. Holloway found the elms at his grammar school door butchered into logs, splinters and sawdust. "Even today I can see those piles in my mind," said Mr. Holloway, 47. "I was so shocked. I thought something mean was going on."

Anyone who had ever sat in the shimmering shade of an elm or walked along a sweetly darkened elm-lined street would have agreed. The culprit was Dutch elm disease, a fungus spread by elm bark beetles. It arrived in 1931 in a shipment of French veneer logs. By the 1980's, it all but eliminated elms from North America.

It has been said that Americans loved the elm too much. Planting the trees exclusively along entire streets left them vulnerable to the epidemic. No one knows how many elms were lost; one estimate is 77 million.

Driven by his memories, Mr. Holloway, a commercial landscaper based here, has made it his mission to bring back the elm.

It was in 1995, while leafing through a nursery catalog, that Mr. Holloway discovered an American elm described as disease- tolerant. Like many people, he had assumed that elms were gone forever. The tree in the catalog, he learned, had originally come from Princeton Nurseries (today based in Allentown, N.J.), one of the largest wholesale nurseries in the country.

The elms known as Princeton elms have lined Washington Road, which leads to Princeton University, since about 1930. Mid-90's tests proved their ability to at least tolerate Dutch elm disease, and the variety may represent the best hope of raising the species from the horticultural dead.

While Princeton Nurseries has never stopped producing elms, it does almost nothing to market them. Mr. Holloway ordered a tree from the catalog and took cuttings, hoping to start trees that could fight the disease as effectively as the original.

Mr. Holloway's company, Riveredge Farms, is one of several that have begun to sell elms. With nostalgic ads and a Web site that encourages visitors to "plant a piece of history," Mr. Holloway hopes to tap a vein of longing for a vanishing American heritage.

Although he belongs to a family of horticulturalists, Mr. Holloway has plowed other fields. He was a theater graduate of Windham College in Vermont, a versatile actor. He was performing with a regional theater in Richmond in 1978 when his father, who was ill, asked him to help out in the family business. Mr. Holloway never returned to the stage.

At Riveredge Farms, he has created his own world. There is no river — no farm, either. Mr. Holloway's elms are grown at several nurseries in the South and trucked to a parcel here sandwiched between a car lot and a warehouse. Standing in orderly columns is something many Americans have never seen: healthy American elms.

Mr. Holloway says his potted saplings — their developed roots packed in soil — can be planted almost anywhere in the United States between April and October (and in many states year round). Established, they grow three to six feet a year. Despite wariness about Dutch elm disease among homeowners and landscapers, he said he has sold more than 10,000 in two years.

"We were surprised and delighted to find out we could bring back American elms to this campus," said Molly Shi Boren, whose husband, David L. Boren, is president of the University of Oklahoma. She bought 200 of Mr. Holloway's elms for the campus, in part because she remembers the Elm Street of her youth in Ada, Okla.

In East Hampton, N.Y., Ann Roberts, chairwoman of the tree committee of the Ladies' Village Improvement Society ordered dozens of seedlings to be developed in nurseries and transplanted to the streets. "People would rather have an elm tree than almost any other kind," she said.

In the mid-90's, when Mr. Holloway was refining his business plan, Alden M. Townsend, a research geneticist at the National Arboretum in Washington, Md., announced the results of a seven-year experiment. He had tested various elm varieties by injecting them with megadoses of the fungus that causes Dutch elm disease.

Two varieties, which he called Valley Forge and New Harmony, proved strongest: 86 percent of the New Harmony trees survived, as did a surprising 96 percent of the Valley Forge trees.

Princeton elms matched Valley Forge elms in survival rates, Dr. Townsend found. But the Princeton variety offered other advantages: a better record of longevity and a shape closer to the classic vase than to the spindly shape of the other varieties.

The elms on Washington Road in Princeton form one of the most beautiful allées in the United States. The first time Mr. Holloway saw the Princeton survivors in person, he was stunned. "It was twilight as we went through this extremely long allée," he said. "I thought, this is amazing."

The Princeton elm has no patent, said William Flemer III, the vice president of Princeton Nurseries and the son of the man who developed the tree in the 1920's. Being unpatented, it can be reproduced without permission.

But not everyone believes the Princeton variety is impervious to Dutch elm disease. James W. Consolloy, the grounds manager at Princeton University, said that when a new strain of the disease began attacking the trees about 10 years ago, he started a routine of spraying, pruning and sometimes injecting fungicide.

With any elm, there are no guarantees, Mr. Holloway said. He tells customers he will replace any tree that succumbs to the disease. "We know they've been growing in Princeton now for 70 years," he said. "And since we're growing them from root, we know what they'll look like 70 years from now when our grandchildren see them. And that's what this is all about."

About boys and noble giants.

The Thirty Years' War

July 15, 2002
The Thirty Years' War
By RICK BASS

YAAK, Mont.
Where I live, some people decide whether to wave at each other, or even speak a greeting of the day, based on whether the person across from them supports protection of the last roadless areas here. This despite the fact that the timber in these areas is a nonissue: roadless areas are the farthest, most rugged, least productive areas, which is why roads haven't been built there yet.

It's estimated that the last remaining roadless areas in our national forests — a total of about 58.5 million acres across 39 states — contain less than two-tenths of 1 percent of the nation's timber. Yet the divisiveness over such an insignificant amount of timber casts a poisonous pall over entire communities. Some powerful elements in the timber and mining industries are trying wherever they can to scare local millworkers and businesses into believing we can't afford to protect these lands. Here in western Montana this can mean warnings of mill closings and labeling environmentalists as terrorists.

In my own valley, the Yaak — a gnarly, rank, mosquito-ridden jungle that's been subject to countless clearcuts in the last half-century — there's still not a single acre of roadless land protected as wilderness. Only 15 small roadless areas remain eligible for protection — the largest is only about 35,000 acres, and the smallest, 1,000 acres — little more than gardens, from the perspective of the Western landscape.

To date, it's a 30-year war, ever since the United States Forest Service inventoried these last roadless areas for wilderness designation in 1972. Must it be this way for another 30 years? Rural communities of 50 or 100 people fighting over philosophical scraps of land that really belong to every American?

When I began this fight, I was a young man, and went hiking almost every day in many of these public treasures, though almost always with a dull worry in my heart, knowing that these places were not protected for future generations. I'm middle-aged now, with a middle-aged man's responsibilities. Yet still my heart is heavy with that worry of my younger days: How can we defend the nation's last roadless areas?

We've been arguing for decades that building roads in our national forests, where the Forest Service sells public resources (often at a loss), leaves behind damaged land whose repair the taxpayers are left to finance. At last count, the projected cost for such repairs was $8.4 billion. We've been arguing about the necessity of genetic and ecologic diversity. Grizzlies and other rare and endangered species like bull trout depend on the sanctuary provided by roadless areas. We've been arguing that local economies adjacent to wilderness areas are often thriving.

But political recognition of the merits of these arguments has been long delayed. The Clinton administration began the process of establishing permanent protection for these lands in 1998. The Forest Service held hundreds of public meetings over the course of two years, and received an overwhelming public response in favor of protection. But the Bush administration requested further analysis, complaining that there hadn't been enough local input. Last fall over 80 percent of the residents in Idaho, Wyoming and Montana who responded during a second comment period asked — again — for the land to be protected. Recognizing this public will, Representatives Jay Inslee of Washington and Sherwood Boehler of New York have introduced an amendment to an appropriations bill for the Interior Department to protect roadless areas. Votes on this proposal are expected as early as this week.

I admit I've grown a bit tired of arguing for the beauty and the economic benefits of wilderness, of the need to protect the endangered species that rely on these lands. I am sick of the polls, which show again and again that we want these lands protected. But what I am not sick of is beseeching, on behalf of wilderness, and the future. If these last wildlands had been protected yesterday — or last year, or the year before — little if anything would have changed. That's the point. We choose to live, vacation and work in these lands, hoping they will remain as much the same and secure as possible. Is that so radical?

The Wilderness Act of 1964 passed the House by 373 to 1. I am still naïve enough — and patriotic enough — to believe that a vote for protecting our last roadless areas can still pass beyond the brittle barriers of party lines: that conservatives can still know what it means to conserve, and liberals what it means to liberate. That we can have joy and logging, both; that we can survive, and then flourish, with our wilderness.

Rick Bass is the author, most recently, of ``The Hermit's Story.''

Reclaiming a Lost River, Building a Community

July 10, 2002
Reclaiming a Lost River, Building a Community
By D. J. WALDIE

LOS ANGELES
So much is breaking up Los Angeles — from secession movements in the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood to the growing divide between the city's wealthy and working poor — that it may come as a shock to learn there is something knitting the city together. Angelenos are gathering with a common purpose to bring life to the banks of the neglected Los Angeles River, a 51-mile-long, sunbaked concrete ditch best known as the location for fiery car chases in action movies.

The river descends from foothills capped by million-dollar houses, past movie studios in the San Fernando Valley, through gritty, working-class neighborhoods where converted garages pass for affordable housing, and across the flood plain south of downtown where the river, until now, was ignored by freeway commuters and residents alike.

These crowded neighborhoods are the side of Los Angeles that lies behind the postcard image of a vaguely parklike city. In fact, Los Angeles is park-poor. By one common measure, the city has only 1.2 acres of city parkland for every 1,000 residents. (The average for the 12 densest cities is 8 acres.) Near the river, the ratio is half an acre per 1,000 residents. Los Angeles also has one of the lowest ratios of public open space to land area among big cities. The city of New York sets aside nearly 26 percent of its area as open space; Los Angeles residents have a meager 10 percent, according to a 2001 study by the Trust for Public Land.

Los Angeles never had its own Robert Moses, the master builder of superb public places in New York. Los Angeles almost had a plan as grand as any Moses might have drawn — designed in 1930 by Olmsted Brothers, the landscape architecture firm headed by the sons of Frederick Law Olmsted, who with Calvert Vaux designed Central Park. The Olmsted plan would have framed a still-living river with a wide band of parks and wetlands and set aside 70,000 acres of open space for public use.

Timid city officials shelved the plan, and today the city has just 30,000 acres of parkland spread over 470 square miles. When the river flooded in 1934 and 1938, killing more than 100 people, the city abandoned its unquiet river to the Army Corps of Engineers and the utter placelessness of a slab-sided channel shut behind fences and locked gates.

What the city shunned for 60 years is now the only place left to create open space in the heart of Los Angeles, and everyone knows it. Nearly $90 million in public funding has already been allocated for greening the banks of the river, as much as $60 million more will become available through a bond measure approved by voters in March, and more will come from regional open-space agencies. The city, county agencies, environmental organizations, neighborhood associations and ordinary residents are returning to the riverside to work on parks, landscaping and bike paths.

The largest of the open-space projects, already under way, is a pair of urban parks reclaimed from former rail yards that will give Chinatown a 32-acre park a few hundred feet from the river and, two miles upstream, a small state park that could grow to 100 acres of trails and wetlands. These are to be part of the Los Angeles River Greenway, a name that deliberately recalls the ambitious Olmsted plan, which will eventually extend from the river's headwaters in the San Fernando Valley to the ocean.

Recovering parks from industrial brownfields won't restore a lost Eden. The river will always be a flood-control channel, constrained by concrete to protect more than 150,000 working-class households on the flood plain. The greening of the Los Angeles River is a sobering demonstration of the limits of environmental restoration in an urban landscape.

But it's also a hopeful demonstration of how a perilously fragmented Los Angeles can pull itself together. The banks of the river are becoming crowded with volunteers planting trees and schoolchildren learning for the first time about the river that runs through their neighborhood. The greenway could be our anti-freeway, binding together some of the gaps in the fabric of this city.

It has been the nature of Angelenos to be heedless about their landscape, to have taken what was an oasis in the semi-desert and made it an empty abstraction. That's changing, because it must, as we finally gather at the river.


D.J. Waldie lives in Lakewood, Calif., where he is a city official. He is author of "Real City: Downtown Los Angeles Inside/Out

Just Off the Expressway, Ancient New York

July 13, 2002
Just Off the Expressway, Ancient New York
By BARBARA STEWART

Once you know what to look for, a very old tree is nearly as easy to spot as a very old human.

Trees show their age in the color and texture of their bark, the circumference of their bases, the height of their lowest branches and the shapes of their trunks, branches and roots. The bark of an old beech, for instance, is dull, dark gray and fragile-looking, in contrast to a mature beech nearby with pale, shiny bark.

Bruce Kershner, a forest ecologist and vice president of the newly created New York Old Growth Forest Association, is good at dating trees at a glance. When he stopped before the Queens Giant, a towering tulip tree with bark worn smooth up to its lowest branch, 75 feet high, he put its age at 425 to 450 years old.

"This is just — sheez," he said. "Born in 1550. As tall as the younger redwoods. The oldest living thing in New York City."

New York City?

Many people believe that over the past 450 years, the colonists, farmers, loggers and developers at some point cleared every woodsy patch and felled every old tree in the city.

But a small group of tree-lovers know better. In Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, wildlife and rare birds and vegetation flourish among trees that have been growing since the 1700's. A hiking trail next to Orchard Beach, which is crowded with people every summer weekend, winds through tulip trees and black birches that were saplings 300 years ago.

In fact, several tree experts say, New York State has more ancient forestland than any other state in the Northeast. Hikers and university researchers are exploring, discovering and mapping more and more spots of old-growth trees on wind-swept mountainsides, in wide swaths of forest, on thin rocky soil and on slivers of woods near malls and housing developments.

A few discoveries have been especially striking: 500-year-old pitch pines near Saratoga Springs and 1,700-year-old northern white cedars near Niagara. The only other equally ancient discovery east of the Mississippi is of the baldcypresses of Black River in North Carolina, which are also thought to be 1,700 years old.

"Those two are duking it out for the oldest living things," said Robert Leverett, a Massachusetts engineer and retired Air Force major who is considered one of the foremost authorities on ancient forests.

These old-growth forests are irreplaceable scientific repositories, Mr. Leverett said. "What were the forests like when the Europeans came over?" he asked. "These are scientific baselines to study, say, global warming, ozone pollution, environmental effects." But these are places, he said, that have not been manipulated by humans.

Tree-ring analysis of pencil-size core samples of old trees can reveal historical droughts, fires and weather patterns, said Neil Peterson, a scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.

Until recently, only a handful of environmentalists and forestry academics knew or cared about the Northeast's ancient trees. University forestry schools, which counted big lumber companies among their major donors, taught that virgin forests and nearly all trees older than 200 years were gone, and that old trees were, if anything, a liability, Mr. Leverett said. The students took those attitudes to the federal and state forest services.

But anger over the destruction of California's thousand-year-old redwoods during the 1980's stirred interest east of the Rockies. Could there be virgin forest left in the long-settled Northeast? Mr. Leverett, who identified some of the first known old-growth forests in the Northeast, said that environmental officials were skeptical, and often still are.

"People at the fringes are just getting the word," he said. "Some are finding it unbelievable, but the ages are there. There is an overwhelming body of data."

Now Northeastern old-growth forestry is taught at universities, Mr. Leverett said.

Peter Duncan of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, said the state manages its oldest trees along with the younger ones as a matter of course.

New York regarded wilderness as a treasure and a resource in the 19th century, long before most other states. Much of the woodland of the Northeast was destroyed by heavy logging during that time, but many of New York's hardwood trees were spared because they were useless as lumber, on inaccessible peaks and hillsides or far from streams used to float lumber to towns.

In 1895, the state created Adirondack Park, six million acres to be protected forever as wilderness and watershed. It now has more than half a million acres of virgin forest, as much as all the rest of the Northeast, said Barbara McMartin, a mathematician who has written 23 Adirondack guidebooks. Michael Kudish, a forestry professor at Paul Smith's College in Brighton, N.Y., in the Adirondacks, said that over the past 30 years, he had mapped 97 square miles of virgin forest in the Catskills.

Though virgin forest is extremely rare outside of state parks, it still exists in odd corners and on mountain peaks. Woods are often preserved on estates that have been passed down intact since the 18th or 19th centuries.

And, yes, there are old trees in the five boroughs.

Last month, Mr. Kershner, the forest ecologist, squeezed through a fence around a construction site and entered the woodsy edge of Alley Pond Park in Douglaston, Queens. "Are you ready for this?" he asked.

Trucks rumbled past on the Long Island Expressway, a few hundred yards away. But the woods were dense with towering trees. He paused at one after another. "Two hundred and eighty years, I think," he said of a broad, rough tulip tree. "And see that beech? Two hundred and fifty, I'd say."

The age of the Queens Giant has not been precisely determined by laboratory analysis. Of the few city tree experts who know of it, one thinks that 350 to 400 years is a fairer guess. But the signs of its great age could not be more obvious: the long expanse of worn, or balding surface, caused by peeling layers of bark; the thick, flaring roots, like buttresses on a medieval cathedral; the weird, gnarly twists of the outer branches; higher up, the unusually craggy texture of the bark. And it is surrounded by tulips and beeches nearly as old, at 250 to 350 years, Mr. Kershner said.

"If we can find it in New York City," he said, "we can find it anywhere."

Two articles on Libeskind's first UK building:

Independent on Sunday:
Movie director or architect? No contest
Janet Street-Porter
30 June 2002

The beauty of brilliant architecture is that it takes us on a journey of discovery. Why I care so much about the work of an architect such as Daniel Libeskind rather than that of Steven Spielberg is because Libeskind never underestimates his public. He creates extraordinary structures that open our eyes to possibilities we never dreamt existed, ways of seeing that change your preconceptions for ever.

Observer:
War and pieces
Deyan Sudjic
Sunday June 30, 2002

Manchester is a big, confident city, but an oddly shapeless one. It has nothing like Glasgow's handsome grid of stone streets or Liverpool's heroic riverfront to define it. As if the whole city were set to default mode, that shapelessness is being faithfully reproduced in its struggles to fill the void left by its vanishing industrial past. Its big urban renewal projects take the form of isolated pieces of more or less distinguished architecture, lost in seas of junk.

RIBA awards the best in UK housing design
“The homes that have been singled out for the Housing Design Awards show that it is possible to build attractive new houses at high density on brownfield sites. However, these examples of excellence are currently few and far between. We need to make sure they become the rule and not the exception. Government can help in this by providing incentives to the market and affordable housing providers to build better.”

Haworth Tompkins Architects, Burrell Foley Fischer, Proctor Matthews Architects and Shed KM each took an award, while Feilden Clegg Bradley Architects scored twice.

How depressing...

New poll reveals ‘English desire for bungalows’