The second season of the Prospect Park Food Truck Rally launched this Sunday in balmy spring weather. On the third Sunday of each month from April through October, sixteen gourmet food trucks will greet crowds of eager New Yorkers at Grand Army Plaza, a paved area at the Park’s main entrance. Though the Food Truck Rally was initially designed to [...]
Filed under: green infrastructure, programming | Tagged: food trucks, new york city | 2 Comments »
A thirteenth excerpt from the recently released book published by Island Press called Urban Green: Innovative Parks for Resurgent Cities. In this post, we look at some cities who have added parkland by closing streets and roads to automobile traffic. In every city there are hundreds of acres of streets and roadways potentially available as park and recreational facilities. While parks [...]
Filed under: planning, programming, transportation | Tagged: atlanta, houston, new york city, portland, road closures, washington dc | 1 Comment »
The Brookings Institution recently released a comprehensive report on metropolitan demographic changes over the past thirty years, which highlighted the increasing concentration of the U.S. population in major metropolitan areas. Overall, metropolitan areas have grown consistently since 1980, and now over 80% of Americans live in metropolitan areas, i.e. cities and their suburbs. Though suburban [...]
Filed under: economics, green infrastructure, planning, renewal | Tagged: density, new york city, santa fe | 2 Comments »
Last month, Amazon.com spent more than $600 million to acquire three adjacent parcels in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood for its new headquarters campus. The parcels are within brief walking distance of South Lake Union Park, a new destination park and the focal point of the burgeoning neighborhood. Creative and technology firms respond to their [...]
Filed under: economics, funding, partnerships | Tagged: boston, new york city, seattle | Leave a Comment »
New York and Chicago are often pitted as rivals with regards to parkland acreage (38,060 acres vs. 11,959 acres, equating to 4.5 and 4.2 acres per 1,000 residents, respectively), and this month was no different. Last week both cities released designs to the community for the next latest and greatest thing in the park world [...]
Filed under: green infrastructure, planning, renewal | Tagged: chicago, elevated trails, new york city | 1 Comment »
An eleventh excerpt from the recently released book published by Island Press called Urban Green: Innovative Parks for Resurgent Cities. In this post, we look at some cities who have created parkland from wetlands and stormwater storage ponds. For environmental, financial, and legal reasons, urban stormwater management is getting much more attention – and the result is helping to [...]
Filed under: green infrastructure, planning, renewal | Tagged: new york city, seattle, staten island, stormwater | 1 Comment »
A ninth excerpt from the recently released book published by Island Press called Urban Green: Innovative Parks for Resurgent Cities. In this post, we look at some cities who have created parkland by converting abandoned railroad corridors into rail trails. In 1963 famed Morton Arboretum naturalist May Theilgaard Watts wrote a letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune. [...]
Filed under: green infrastructure, planning, renewal, transportation | Tagged: chicago, minneapolis, new york city, seattle, st. louis, trails, washington dc | 1 Comment »
In early February, the New York City Council (36-12) approved, and Mayor Bloomberg signed, a ban on smoking in the city’s parks, beaches, pedestrian malls and plazas. Effective as of May 23rd, the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation can now impose $50 fines on rule breakers. Given what we know about the health value [...]
Filed under: health | Tagged: health, legal, new york city, research | 4 Comments »
Older private cemeteries, where plots are mostly full and burials are too infrequent to provide adequate income, often wind up as public land managed by city park departments. A recent article, published in Landscape Architecture Magazine and American Cemetery, explores how public cemeteries can offer more to a community than a final resting place – [...]
Filed under: green infrastructure, planning | Tagged: atlanta, cambridge mass, hartford, lincoln, new york city, salt lake city | Leave a Comment »
A seventh excerpt from the recently released book published by Island Press called Urban Green: Innovative Parks for Resurgent Cities. In this post, we look at some cities who have created parkland by removing excess parking spaces. Do you park in your park? Does it seem to be a parking lot more than a park, a lot? Urban park [...]
Filed under: green infrastructure, planning, renewal | Tagged: atlanta, chicago, houston, minneapolis, new york city, parking, portland, research | 1 Comment »
