One of the many issues with POPs is that they very often do not live up to the promises (and renderings) of charming, welcoming, vegetated vest-pocket parks sprinkled throughout the city’s high-rise office districts to offer respite for weary workers from the endless concrete. Instead, they’re often open limited hours, closed entirely, or designed to be utterly inhospitable.

Of course this isn’t true of all such spaces — there are some truly lovely examples from atria to waterfall parklettes that function beautifully as publicly accessible spaces well maintained by owners of office buildings and condo towers. Still, though, with little or no enforcement, too many land owners get away with too much.

The first step toward enforcement is documentation, and WNYC & The New York World have started a crowd-sourced project to document the state of New York’s POPs. I highly recommend New Yorkers adopt a space or two, investigate, and report back. The map interface is a little wonky, but it’s a short, simple survey to fill out for each space.  I’ll be stopping by the unvisited spaces near my work during my lunch break over the next week. Maybe I’ll see you there?

Here’s the map and survey:
http://www.thenewyorkworld.com/2011/10/19/publicspace/

Just the map of POPs:
http://bit.ly/privatePublic

More information about POPs from the City of New York here:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/priv/priv.shtml

The deadline for the project is November 9th.

Greetings from Project Neon headquarters. What you see above is my nifty new neon sign, which is going to hang in the window of the Project Neon show at the City Reliquary. If you are in New York, you should come:

Project Neon
Opening Friday September 23rd
7p – 10p
The City Reliquary
370 Metropolitan Avenue
Brooklyn, NY  11211

Also at that show we’ll be celebrating the launch of the free Project Neon iPhone app. In order for that to happen, we need to submit it to Apple in the next couple of days, so I’ve got quite a bit of work to get done (not to mention getting ready for the show). On account of that there will probably be radio silence around here for the next couple of weeks, but I look forward to catching up with everything after that, and I hope to see you at the opening!

Hello, readers.

I’m working on an iPhone app to map New York’s best neon signs—a pocket digital guide that will show you where to find the best glow. It’s going to be really cool—you’ll be able to search for signs, click on thumbnails, and view a map of the signs closest to your current location, plus get more information about each sign including a photo (turn the photo sideways and you’ll see it big). And the best thing?  It’s gonna be free. But to distribute the app for free, I need to raise some money to get the help I need to put it together, so I’ve launched a Kickstarter project with all kinds of great swag, including Project Neon membership cards, beautiful photo prints, amazing posters, and more—so even if you don’t have an iPhone you can get your just reward for supporting Project Neon in this endeavor.

Regardless of whether you can support Project Neon with some $$, I would be much obliged if you would tell your friends, blog, reblog, tweet, Facebookize, and otherwise help me tell the world that something cool is going on. Thanks!  And super special bonus: there’s a free treat for iPhoners just for reading about the project (hint: look for a link near the end of the Kickstarter page).

Oh, and the deadline’s May 30th (yes, my birthday). If we don’t make the goal by then you don’t get charged, I don’t get any money, you don’t get any rewards, I have a very sad birthday, and the project doesn’t happen. So let’s go!

—Kirsten

PS:  A very big thank you to the wonderful people who have already backed the project.

Hello there. In case you missed it elsewhere, there are two Project Neon updates. First, a story I wrote about chasing neon was published today on Urban Omnibus. Second, the Project Neon blog is now live over on Tumblr. Every week I’ll visit another neon-ified establishment in New York City, and I’ll post a picture and a short story on the blog. Check out the Subscribe page for various means of keeping up to date.

I have approximately a million Catasterist posts waiting in the queue, but I’m also in the process of recovering from the pink eye. Gross, I know, right? So I’m going to bed early tonight, but I’ll be back soon with more architecture & design. Yup.

Man with Russian accent smoking a cigar: Why are you so interested in this sign?

Me:  I love neon signs.

Man with Russian accent smoking a cigar (looking at me like I’m nuts): Oh. OK.

Me:  Also, it’s the 100th anniversary of neon signs.

Man with Russian accent smoking a cigar (breaking into a big grin): Oh! Happy birthday, neon!

It was a cold night and I was wearing work shoes instead of tromping around shoes, so the chill and a blister conspired to cut off my expedition after a couple of hours, but I managed to get a bunch of good photos of signs in the Upper East Side, Midtown, and Times Square. A mere sliver of the signs in NYC, and I haven’t even uploaded all the photos yet, but here are a few for you now. I’ll report back when I’ve had a chance to hit up some of the other fantastic neon in the greater New York metropolitan area (suggestions gratefully accepted!)

Today I trekked up to Yonkers with Paul on another quest: exploring the abandoned Glenwood Power Plant. It was built in 1906 (along with a sister plant in the Bronx) by New York Central to provide power for the electrification of the train tracks (via the a new invention: the third rail) going into the new Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan. It was designed by Minnesota-based architectural office Reed & Stern, who later collaborated with Warren & Wetmore on the design of Grand Central Station.

After only 30 years the railroad no longer needed to run its own power stations due to the increased capacity of regular power stations, and in 1936 the Glenwood Power Plant was sold to ConEd (the Bronx plant was demolished). By the 1960s the Glenwood plant couldn’t keep up with the capacity of newer plants (like the Indian Point nuclear power plant) and was decommissioned. It’s no longer owned by ConEd and is apparently for sale. There was talk recently of the plant being incorporated into fancy-pants condos, but as far as I can tell that plan has been scuttled.

[Paul's photos are over here.] What an amazing place. It’s pretty stripped down, of course, and there’s some graffiti and whatnot, but the building is still beautiful. The bones are strong  and enough details and relics remain to evoke its past life:

There are two big buildings, with the turbine hall (shown above) being the more dramatic. Accessing it involved crossing a rusty catwalk of a bridge (and I turned out to be a bit more afraid of heights than I remembered), though the biggest gaps had been helpfully planked over by past visitors. Emerging into the vast expanse of the main hall, well lit even on a cloudy day like today with huge, graceful windows, is impressive. The plant’s location on (and into) the edges of the Hudson River makes for some spectacular vistas, and from the roof you can see all the way to Manhattan. Windows are broken, metal is rusted, piles of junk litter the floors, and the building is silent and frozen in an advanced state of rigor mortis, but there’s still somehow the feeling of life with the play of light on walls, with the river outside, and with the evocation of so much past clamor and motion in that gigantic space.

Can you imagine a power plant today being built with so much lovely detail, with huge windows, or with such graceful proportions? I can’t. There are a few notable infrastructure projects from the recent past, but none in the league of the Glenwood Power Plant, and we are the poorer for it.

Today’s dispatch tells the story of an amazing detail in plain sight. I’m sure I’ve walked over this West Village spot and not registered it many times. I’ve probably even trod upon it, but I never looked down and wondered what it meant. Take a look:

Go over to Scouting New York to read the full post, and I highly suggest adding the blog to your regular rotation.

OK, time for me to get back to Hypothetical Development–my rendering is in the home stretch!

Do you know some good NYC neon I should include? Let me know so I don’t miss it! Comment below, or send me an email.

• A really excellent site called Edible Geography (just added to my RSS feed) explores the rich overlap between food and place, including an entry about Pratt’s You Are Here show (on view in the Manhattan gallery until November 6) about mapping the psychogeography of New York City, including artist Liz Hickok’s awesome gelatin New York (San Francisco is shown below).

• A great interview by Paola Antonelli with Rob Walker in conjunction with an upcoming MoMA exhibit called ‘Talk to Me,’ about his relationship with objects. Below is an object from his Significant Objects project.

• Loft cabins by architect Terri Chiao elegantly and humorously separate out space from a large Bushwick loft. I love this and hope to steal it—I mean be inspired by it—some day.

• Louise Naunton Morgan has a new twist on pointillism—she is The Human Printer, and will draw pictures you send her with halftone dots, in CMYK, B&W, or spot color.  Pretty amazing.

• Did you know there were a half dozen Lustron homes in New Orleans?  I  had no idea. Here is one of them. Found at Regional Modernism, a repository of New Orleans Modernism info.

• New York City had to call in help to deal with all the post-tornado fallen trees. Responders included the Cherokee Hotshots, as documented in The New York Times.

That’s enough for one day. Happy reading!

Maybe some other time I’ll tell you more about that, but for now a few words on the in-and-out coffee bar trend. In the article seatless coffee bars (like the Stumptown digs in the Ace Hotel) are compared to Italian espresso bars. Well, in my limited experience, yes and no. Italian espresso bars have universally fantastic coffee, often have a very working-class feel, and are somehow convey the feeling that it’s fine if you want to gulp and run, but it’s also fine if you want to stand around and chat with the policeman on your left or the professor on your right. Partly they manage this trick by being more ubiquitous and better integrated into the life of their surrounding neighborhoods than most (though happily not all) of their American cousins. I think in the US bars have historically been more in that great-good place role, though coffee houses could certainly catch up in many places. To do that, a look at how the best bars work and a look at coffee bars in many places in Europe, is the way to go.

It’s a tricky balance, keeping enough turnover to maintain profitability while making a place welcoming. And none of that matters if the coffee is crap. Much of that (besides the quality of the coffee) is a question of design: materials, proportion, light all speak to us about the expectations and functions of a place. What does your local coffee bar say to you?

Her words have sometimes been used to justify urban design practices that I strongly disagree with, but I don’t blame her for that. She asked the right questions, it’s up to us to find the right answers.

Jane Jacobs moved from New York to Toronto in 1968 (partly to protect her draft-aged sons), but clearly continued to think about the city where she developed her urban ideas and ideals. She often comes to mind when I see my elderly neighbors on the stoop (‘eyes on the street’ make it safer, she wrote), when I see a good mix of uses in a neighborhood, or whenever I see a lively, healthy place. But she is particularly in my mind as I try to grapple with the changes in my own neighborhood. The other night I was biking down the fantastic new bike lane on Kent and nearly got knocked over by people unloading an immense flat screen TV from an even more immense SUV to take into one of the huuuuuge new condo towers along the water. And with some sadness I realized that the people with the TV probably fit into the new Williamsburg better than I do.

I certainly hope my realization was wrong, and there are definitely still parts of the neighborhood I love, but the character has shifted as the condos (many now converted to apartments) slowly fill up as the economy slowly sputters back to life. Change, I well know, is an integral part of any living city and its neighborhoods, and as an architect I know that my whole profession is predicated on taking something away: trees, an old building, or even empty space. Before the building plans come the demo plans. But it’s important to direct and control change, or things will fall apart. As I look around this neighborhood I wonder how long the infrastructure will last. The L train is more crowded each day, often to the point I worry someone will get hurt. The sewer lines, I can only imagine, must be strained, like the water mains, and let’s not even talk about the electric grid. Yes, there are some fantastic new resources like parks and bike lanes, but the less glamorous stuff and the small but critical details seem to have been largely overlooked.

And so back to the letter. Jane Jacobs could see (as could anyone who looked) that the recent massive re-zoning of Williamsburg  and Greenpoint was not well thought out and was not based on sound principals. And in this letter (reprinted in the Williamsburg Greenpoint News+Arts) she tells Mayor Bloomberg exactly that a year before she died (you can click on the letter to enlarge):