Sustainability Guidelines for NYC Parks

Posted on 2011-01-09 by admin

Panorama, Frozen Lullwater at Prospect Park at Sunset

The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation (Parks) recently released new sustainability guidelines for the design and maintenance of NYC’s green spaces, High Performance Landscape Guidelines: 21st Century Parks for NYC:

High Performance Landscape Guidelines is the first document of its kind in the nation: a comprehensive, municipal design primer for sustainable parks and open space. The product of a unique partnership between the Parks Department and the Design Trust, a nonprofit organization that helped create sustainable guidelines for NYC buildings, High Performance Landscape Guidelines covers every aspect of creating sustainable parks, from design to construction to maintenance, and feature many best practices for managing soil, water, and vegetation resources.
– Press Release, January 6, 2011

The Guidelines, running over 270 pages, cover site assessment; design, construction and maintenance; and soils, water and vegetation. the final section of the manual includes several case studies, including two of Brooklyn’s Parks: Calvert Vaux and Canarsie Parks.

Climate change is identified as a major factor, if not the single most important consideration, for the guidelines:

Climate change threatens the stability and longevity of New York City’s infrastructure, buildings, and parks; it also compromises the health and safety of the city’s population. Unless the growth of greenhouse gas emissions is curbed and reversed, experts predict that climate change will result in significant sea level rise, increased storm intensity and frequency, and increased temperatures.

Two factors will exacerbate the impacts of climate change in New York City: the urban heat island effect and the city’s overburdened stormwater infrastructure.

– Climate Change and 21st Century Parks, Part 1, Guidelines

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Links

High Performance Landscape Guidelines: 21st Century Parks for NYC, available as PDF (273 pages)
Parks Press Release: A New Year Launches A New Era In Great Park Design, 2011-01-06

Dad’s Dogwood

Posted on 2010-11-10 by admin

The Dogwood which my family sponsored, and I helped to plant, outside the 3rd Street Playground in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.

My father’s birthday was November 2. He would have been 79. He died almost two years ago, early in the morning of December 1, 2008. I’ve been going back over what I wrote about his death. But the best thing to read, to get a sense of who he was, is in his own words: How Old Will I Be?

This morning, Blog Widow and I helped plant a tree in his memory in Prospect Park. The Prospect Park Alliance Commemorative Giving program provides opportunities to sponsor an existing tree or plant a new tree. There are no plaques or signs on the trees themselves or in the park; their Web site provides an online register, indexed by commemoration name, of the sponsored trees, their locations, and the season they were planted, going back to 1983. My father was born and raised in Brooklyn, so this seemed an appropriate way for the family to remember him.

My Dad’s favorite tree was the native Dogwood, Cornus florida, so that’s what the family selected to commemorate him. Luis Lemus, the Prospect Park arborist who coordinated this morning’s planting, told me he purchased it from a nursery in Pennsylvania. Just three days ago it was in the ground. And now it is again. Luis was joined by his Parks colleagues, Eric and Jose. The three-man crew made quick work of planting. It was all over in a little more than a half-hour.

The location is lovely, just outside the 3rd Street Playground, behind Litchfield Villa. Prospect Park lost hundreds of trees over the past year, in a winter storm, and this summer’s tornado-macroburst storm. A few large trees were taken down in this location, opening up the canopy. Countless thousands of park visitors, a few of whom we met and spoke with during the planting, will enjoy this tree for decades to come.

Slideshow

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Links

Prospect Park Alliance: Commemorative Trees

Grief & Gardening: Nine Years

Posted on 2010-09-11 by admin

Let’s get the usual question out of the way. This is where I was the morning of September 11, 2001.

This is Skytop Tower at Mohonk Mountain House at sunset the previous night. Blog Widow and I had planned a week-long vacation upstate, starting at Mohonk. The morning of September 11, we hiked up to Skytop. A rustic retreat, Mohonk had no televisions or radios in the rooms. As we left the massive wooden structure to go out hiking, I noticed people huddled around the few televisions in some of the common rooms. I thought nothing of it at the time. I later realized we left just after the first attack.
We hiked around the lake, then up to Skytop, and climbed up into the tower. We had the trails almost to ourselves. As we came down the tower, I sang loudly, my voice echoing through the stone structure: “I love to go a-wandering …” Part of the way, we encountered another hiker coming up the stairs. I stopped singing and said, “excuse me.” Only then did he lift his head to us, tears streaming down his face. “Did you hear what happened?” “No.” “They flew a plane into the World Trade Center.”

We hiked back. When we returned to the buildings, the common rooms were packed with people, watching the news on every available television. We went back to our room. Blog Widow went back downstairs to find out what happened. I had brought my laptop with me, so I tried getting online. He returned to tell me the World Trade Center had collapsed. I was incredulous; I couldn’t imagine what that meant. By the time I went downstairs myself, both towers were gone. I sat and watched those horrible images for the first time.

We decided to hold to our vacation plans for the week, somber though it was. There was nothing we could do back home. My workplace downtown, blocks from Ground Zero, would not reopen for two weeks. Reminders met us everywhere we went. And everywhere we went, we were ambassadors for New York City. When we told people where we were from, as often as not, they broke down crying. We were their reminders.

We drove back to my apartment in Brooklyn that Sunday. I was startled when I saw the first airplane flying overhead; with all flights grounded, the skies had been empty since the attacks. I got my first glimpse as we drove along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway: twin trails of heavy smoke, orange and red from a setting sun. I burst into tears. Somehow, I had expected the fires to have burned out by then.

When we were allowed to return to work, I got my first personal glimpse of Ground Zero.

The fires continued to burn for months, through the winter, into 2002. For weeks, until a few heavy rains washed the city, everything was covered in ash and dust. It collected in drifts along sidewalks and gutters. Every day I went to work, for months, I smelled and breathed the smoke. All of Downtown Manhattan was a crematorium.

Thousands of shrines and memorials appeared and grew throughout the city. The most heart-breaking were those around St. Vincent’s Hospital, which prepped for massive casualties, but received very few. Few who didn’t walk, or run, away survived. Even today, remains have yet to be found for over 1,000 people murdered in the attacks.

The ash washed away, the fires died, the smoke cleared. The candles and posters gradually eroded. A year after the attacks, the memorials which covered the fences around St. Paul’s Chapel were carefully removed and preserved. Eventually, even the basin which held the foundations of the towers and other structures on the site was emptied. As the direct evidence of what happened faded, new symbols emerged. For me, these are far more powerful and meaningful than any flag or banner.

Tonight, the Tribute in Light will shine again.

The Sphere, the sculpture by Fritz Koenig that had held place of prominence in the center of the WTC Plaza, was heavily damaged in the towers’ collapse, but survived. It’s been on display at Battery Park for the past few years. It will be returned to the Memorial for its permanent home.

Another sculpture, Steve Tobin’s “Trinity Root,” was placed in the courtyard of Trinity Church, two blocks from Ground Zero. It was cast from the roots of a Sycamore that stood in the cemetery of St. Paul’s Chapel, a few blocks north, and directly across the street from Ground Zero. The tree was destroyed when the towers fell, but it shielded the church itself from even greater damage.

St. Paul’s Chapel has been a moving memorial all these years. It’s filled with an ever-changing display of artifacts and remembrances from all over the world.

And finally, the official, multi-million dollar memorial will occupy the footprints of the towers and the plaza between them. Here’s a model of the National September 11 Memorial at the Preview Site on Vesey Street, across the street from St. Paul’s near the corner of Church Street at Ground Zero in Downtown Manhattan.

The first of 400 trees for the grove were planted just two weeks ago, in time for today’s observations. These are Quercus bicolor, Swamp White Oaks. The other species will be Liquidambar styraciflua, Sweet Gum. A forest and waterfalls will take the place of devastation, natural elements no less powerful and evocative for being constrained to an urban grid. They will also remind me of where I was when I first heard of the attacks. A garden as the ultimate embodiment of reflection and recovery.

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In Observance of Irish Pride (St. Patrick’s) Day

Posted on 2010-03-18 by admin

Updated 2011-03-17: Added links.

Yesterday, with the first good weather of the year, I visited the Irish Hunger Memorial in downtown Manhattan, two blocks from Ground Zero. I’ve been there before. It definitely had a wintery, wind-swept feel to it this visit. This year, I want to visit it a couple times during the seasons.

Some of the surrounding buildings are new, even in the past few years, since my first visit. The juxtaposition of modern, even stark, architecture with rustic elements is striking.

Here are my photos from that visit.

Slideshow

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Links

Wikipedia: Irish Hunger Memorial

Names, World AIDS Day (Off-Topic)

Posted on 2009-12-01 by admin

2021-12-01: See Names, 2021-12-01

In observance of World AIDS Day, I thought I would re-publish this list of names from my old (neglected and needing to be retired) Web site. These are some of the people, all men, I lost, nearly all to AIDS. I stopped actively maintaining this list in 1994. In alphabetical order.

William “Wolf” Agress, a lover, died in 1990
Andre, a bartender at the Tunnel Bar in the East Village, now defunct
Vincent Barnes
Jerry Bihm
Bobby
Colin Curran
Erez Dror, co-owner and -founder of the Black Hound Bakery in the East Village, New York City, now defunct
Jeff Glidden, a lover
Paul “Griff” Griffin
Martin Noel Jorda
David Kirschenbaum, community organizer with the New York City Gay & Lesbian Anti-Violence Project
Art Kohn, founder of the BackRoom BBS in New York City, now defunct
Jim Lewis
Luis
John Mangano
Jeffrey Martin
Morris Matthews
Karl Michalak
Mark Melvin
Norm
Tony Panico, my first lover in New York City
Charles Pope, barfly extraordinaire
Gordon Provencher, 1955-1992
Tom Raleigh
Craig Rodwell, founder of the Oscar Wilde Bookstore in Greenwich Village, NYC
Tony Rostron
Jurgen Schmitt
Giulio Sorrentino
Buddy Volani
Jeremy Wells
David Joseph Wilcox, 1957-1996

These are only 31 names of people I knew who died before I was 35 years old. There are countless scores, hundreds, more whose names I did not know, whose fates I never learned, or who have died since I stopped maintaining this list in 1994.

Links

World AIDS Day

Trees for the Future, Blog Action Day 2009

Posted on 2009-10-16 by admin

Like Garden Rant, global warming and climate change is a recurring topic on this blog:

It’s too late, but it’s not too late, is it?, 2008-01-16
Gardening as if our lives depended on it, 2007-11-23
Barbara Corcoran Hates the Earth, 2007-11-18
The IPCC Report: Grief & Gardening #6, 2007-02-04
Buying Indulgences: The Carbon Market, 2006-11-23
The Bemidji Statement On Seventh Generation Guardianship, 2006-07-22
NASA Earth Observatory Maps NYC’s Heat Island, Block by Block, 2006-08-01

The impacts of climate change to urban areas, such as New York City, will be extreme. Today, a typical NYC summer has 15 days with temperatures over 90F, and 2 days over 100F. By the end of this century, even optimistic scenarios, in which we reduce emissions and greenhouse gases starting NOW, NYC will have 39 90F days, and 7 100F days. In a typical summer. Some summers will be worse. People will die. If we do nothing, it will be worse.

I’ve written a lot about more immediate benefits of city trees, such as reduced flooding, summer cooling, and improved air quality. There remain opportunities for nurturing our urban forests. Addressing climate change is one more reason to do so:

Urban trees help offset climate change by capturing atmospheric carbon dioxide in their tissue, reducing energy used by buildings, and reducing carbon dioxide emissions from fossil-fuel based power plants. Our City’s trees store about 1.35 million tons of carbon valued at $24.9 million. In addition, our trees remove over 42,000 tons of carbon each year.
– Benefits of NYC’s Urban Forest, MillionTreesNYC

Planting trees is one thing a gardener can do that will outlive them. But what world will my tree grow into? And what are its chances for survival in that world? I must avoid trees that are already at the southern limit of their range in NYC; by the end of the century, the climate will have escaped them. Trees can’t move fast enough to keep pace with the changes that are coming, that are already happening. They will need our help to survive.

I feel compelled to act as a guardian of my little area of the world, for as long as it, and I, last. Though I have always had, and expect I always will have, a troubled relationship with “community,” perhaps there is one I can be part of which will “watch over a much larger area.” It is my belief, my hope, that collectively we will create, and find in each other, that community.
– July 26, 2006: The Bemidji Statement On Seventh Generation Guardianship

The whole world is now our Ark, and we are its Noah. It’s going to be a long ride.

Links

Benefits of NYC’s Urban Forest, MillionTreesNYC

Ancient Forest to Modern City: Mapping Landscape Change in the United States, NASA Earth Observatory, 2008-02-01

Climate Choices: The Northeast

Blog Action Day 2009: Climate Change

A Tree’s Response to Environmental Changes: What Can We Expect Over the Next 100 Years?, NASA Earth Observatory, 2009-10-06

Daffodil Project 2009

Posted on 2009-10-15 by admin

Update 2009.10.18: Kensington date of 10/18 was rained out. Rain date is 10/25.

The Daffodil Project 2009 distribution at the Greenmarket in Grand Army Plaza, outside Prospect Park, Saturday, October 10, 2009

The Daffodil Project was originally created to commemorate September 11. … The Daffodil Project is made possible in part by the generosity of a Dutch bulb supplier, Hans van Waardenburg of B&K Flowerbulbs, who has pledged to donate 500,000 daffodil bulbs to the project each year as long as there are volunteers willing to plant them. More than 20,000 volunteers have responded to his challenge so far. And thanks to their efforts, more than 3 million yellow daffodils [bloomed] in over 2,000 individual sites across the five boroughs in the spring of 2009.
– The Daffodil Project, New Yorkers for Parks

Here are some locations in Brooklyn where you can get your bulb on with the Daffodil Project this season.

Kensington, Sunday, October 25

PICK UP A SHOVEL AND MAKE KENSINGTON GREENER (AND YELLOWER)!
WATCH CHURCH AVENUE BLOOM!

Sunday, October 25th, is Daffodil Day in Kensington. (18th was rained out)

Join your neighbors as we plant daffodil bulbs on Church Avenue and its side streets. In the spring, watch the flowers that we planted bloom!

From 9:00 a.m. to noon, volunteers will:

loosen soil in tree pits
plant daffodil bulbs
go to Connie’s Cafe for free coffee and a muffin!

Wear clothing and shoes that you don’t mind getting some dirt on. If you can, bring:

a hand cultivator
a trowel
a bulb borer
anything else that’s useful for digging and planting
extra gardening tools, if you have them, for your neighbors to use.

We’ll meet at 9:00 a.m. in front of Astoria Federal Savings, at the corner of Church and McDonald avenues.

Connie, the owner of Connie’s Cafe (corner of Church Avenue and E. 5th Street), has graciously agreed to donate coffee and muffins for the volunteers.

This neighborhood event is sponsored by KARMABrooklyn (Kensington Area Resident/Merchant Alliance) and WKAG (West Kensington Action Group).

Flatbush, Saturday and Sunday, November 7&8, and November 14&15

Again this fall, Sustainable Flatbush will sponsor Daffodil bulb plantings at locations throughout Flatbush. As we get closer to the dates, we’ll announce the locations and times and how you can get involved.

Links

Daffodil Day in Kensington, Kensington Area Resident/Merchant Alliance (KARMA)

Sustainable Flatbush

The Daffodil Project, New Yorkers for Parks

Guskind Memorial 4/4: Reminder, and Charitable Donations

Posted on 2009-03-30 by admin

Update 2010.01.03: Corrected all links to the old Gowanus Lounge domain to the new memorial domain.

This is a reminder that the Memorial Gathering for Robert “Bob” Guskind will be held this Saturday, April 4, from 2pm to 5pm at the Brooklyn Lyceum, 227 4th Avenue, between President and Union Streets, in Park Slope, Brooklyn. RSVP via Evite.

In lieu of flowers, Bob’s family and friends invite donations in his memory to four organizations which “were very close to his heart.”

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Links

Donations in Memory of Robert Guskind, Gowanus Lounge, 2009-03-27
Robert Guskind Memorial Gathering: Saturday, April 4, Gowanus Lounge, 2009-03-20
Brooklyn Lyceum

Memorial for Robert “Bob” Guskind, April 4

Posted on 2009-03-20 by admin

Update 2010.01.03: Corrected all links to the old Gowanus Lounge domain to the new memorial domain.

A Memorial Gathering for Robert “Bob” Guskind, founder of Gowanus Lounge, has been scheduled for the afternoon of Saturday, April 4:

A memorial gathering to honor the memory of Robert Guskind will be held from 2 pm to 5 pm Saturday, April 4 at the Brooklyn Lyceum, 4th Avenue between Union and President Streets in Park Slope.

Please RSVP if you can. (There is an opportunity to sign up to speak.)
There will be an opportunity to donate to charities in Bob’s name.

Thanks to Eric Richmond of the Brooklyn Lyceum for generously donating the space.
– Robert Guskind Memorial Gathering: Saturday, April 4, Gowanus Lounge

Space is limited, so RSVP.

Links

Robert Guskind Memorial Gathering: Saturday, April 4, Gowanus Lounge
Brooklyn Lyceum

Remembering Bob

Posted on 2009-03-14 by admin

Update 2010.01.03: Corrected all links to the old Gowanus Lounge domain to the new memorial domain.

Thursday night I attended the Flatbush Development Corporation’s (FDC) 34th Anniversary Benefit Dinner. In my remarks, as one of the honorees, I spoke of the connections and communities that had brought me there that night: my partner, my neighborhood, Flatbush at large, and the Brooklyn blogosphere. I also told the 200+ people assembled there that Brooklyn bloggers had lost one of our own last week: Robert Guskind, founder of Gowanus Lounge, a friend and supporter of this blog and of Flatbush preservation efforts.

I only met Bob in person a few times. We launched our blogs within one month of each other in 2006: Gowanus Lounge in April, Flatbush Gardener in May. Gowanus Lounge quickly became Bob’s bully pulpit from which he could speak, as friend and neighbor Brenda Becker phrased so well, as “Fool-Killer and Weasel-Slayer.” I don’t remember when I first discovered Gowanus Lounge, but the first links from there to this blog appeared in November of that year.

Bob liked – or at least thought least unflattering! – this picture I took of him at the 2nd Annual Brooklyn Blogfest in 2007.

When the Second Brooklyn Blogfest came around in May 2007, we knew each other well from our online endeavors. We didn’t get to meet at that time; it was too crowded, and too hectic. Bob, a speaker at the event, was an A-List blogger of the Brooklyn blogosphere, swarmed with fans, colleagues, and reporters.

Dave Kenny, another friend and blogging colleague, and I co-founded the Brooklyn Blogade as a way to continue the energy and relationship-building from the Blogfest, and expand into neighborhoods that were “underserved” by the Brooklyn blogosphere. Dave credits a discussion with Bob after the 2007 Blogfest as inspiring him to start the Blogades. With Anne Pope of Sustainable Flatbush, I co-hosted the first Blogade here in Flatbush in June 2007, and that’s where Bob and I finally got to meet in person. The New York Times covered that first Blogade; a photograph from the event opens their article in this weekend’s The City section on the future of Gowanus Lounge, the first time any of those photos have appeared.

I met Bob again on only two occasions after that. Most of our communication was online, through email, tips, and mutual links. I don’t know how many scores of times Bob linked to this blog. I was especially touched by his last link at the end of January, in which he referred to me as “a friend and fellow blogger.” As I write this, I still can’t believe he’s gone. We were the same age, and I wish there had been more opportunities and time for us to strengthen that friendship.

As many others have reported in their remembrances of him, Bob was generous in linking. He brought attention to many neighborhood issues that, I believe, without his support would have been overlooked not only by the general press, but other bloggers as well. He nurtured community in the Brooklyn blogosphere. When I reached out to him by email during lasts fall’s hiatus on Gowanus Lounge, he said that he had received “hundreds of emails and comments.” In response to his death, nearly 80 people have written their own condolences and memorial posts to Bob. There are many hundreds more comments across all those posts. That stands as a testament to the impact he has had, and will continue to have after his death.

He was generous and passionate, sensitive and courageous, humorous and outspoken, gregarious and private. I have learned only since his death that we shared a journey in recovery, different in the details, similar in struggle and spirit. I did not know Bob well enough or long enough to know the circumstances of his life or death. Whatever the circumstances, I have nothing but empathy for the man; they cannot diminish my opinion of him. Real people are complex, their circumstances, usually complicated. It’s cost me a lot to learn that.

This was Bob’s favorite of my photos. I know this, not only because the subject shows Coney Island – among Bob’s greatest passions – in its glory, but because he chose this from the Flickr-Moo mini-cards I handed out at 2007’s Blogfest and the first Brooklyn Blogade. If there is a heaven, may this be part of Bob’s.

Flatbush Gardener

Urban Habitat Gardening with Native Plants

Tag Archives: Grief

Sustainability Guidelines for NYC Parks

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Dad’s Dogwood

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Grief & Gardening: Nine Years

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Gardeners for Recovery Cobblestone Campaign

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Trinity Root

In Observance of Irish Pride (St. Patrick’s) Day

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Names, World AIDS Day (Off-Topic)

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Trees for the Future, Blog Action Day 2009

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Daffodil Project 2009

Kensington, Sunday, October 25

Flatbush, Saturday and Sunday, November 7&8, and November 14&15

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Guskind Memorial 4/4: Reminder, and Charitable Donations

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Memorial for Robert “Bob” Guskind, April 4

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Remembering Bob