If land where the Union and Confederacy fought the Battle of the Wilderness in the Civil War is to remain hallowed ground, now is the time to speak up. Within the boundaries of this historic battlefield in Orange County, Virginia, Wal-Mart proposes to build a 138,000-square-foot supercenter. Its plans for the commercial development received the go-ahead from the Orange County Planning Commission on June 25 by a 5-4 vote, and the proposal now goes to the five-member Orange County Board of Supervisors for the crucial vote.

Not only is the plot within the historic boundaries of where one of the most important battles of the Civil War took place, it’s also just across the road from the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. The phased-proposal calls for ultimately constructing 240,000 square feet of big-box commercial development on a 52-acre parcel owned by JDC Ventures of Vienna, Va., including Wal-Mart’s supercenter and three other sites for stores or restaurants. Wal-Mart is pressing ahead despite an eruption of fierce opposition in the past year. (For background, see “Wal-Mart’s Threat to a Historic Battlefield” on Mindfulwalker.com.)

However, a coalition of local, state, and national groups – plus historians and celebrities such as David McCullough and Robert Duvall and concerned citizens – aren’t letting up in their campaign to persuade Wal-Mart to relocate away from the historic park and battlefield. Duvall is a descendant of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The coalition includes the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Civil War Preservation Trust, the Friends of Wilderness Battlefield, the National Parks Conservation Association, and five other nonprofit groups.

Wal-Mart has one remaining local hurdle in its effort – receiving approval from the Orange County Board of Supervisors for a special-use permit for the project (it is required because the project is larger than 60,000 square feet). The board has set a public hearing on July 27 at 7 p.m., at the Orange County High School auditorium.

“Gravely Concerned”

The National Trust for Historic Preservation and its allies remain “gravely concerned” about the proposed Wal-Mart development on this historic land, says Rob Nieweg, director of the National Trust’s Southern Field Office in Washington D.C. “Our analysis shows that Wal-Mart’s project would irrevocably harm the battlefield, undermine the visitor’s experience of the National Park, and open the door for more incompatible large-scale development at the gateway to Orange County,” Nieweg says in an e-mail to Mindfulwalker.com. [Read more →]

We met through Twitter and had our first real conversation for a podcast. What a world! Eric Miller is passionate about creating great and healthy cities and other communities, and so am I. He is the editor/publisher of The New Colonist, a site where he and Richard Risemberg chronicle the return of many from life in suburbia and the resurgence and sustainability of city living, in the U.S. and globally. Like me, he is a New Yorker with roots near Pittsburgh who is constantly thinking about cities and suburbs.

A series of weekly podcasts at Newcolonist.com has been exploring arts and culture in various cities, bicycling and other transportation choices, what’s next for suburbia, walkable places, and other aspects of sustainable living. This week, Miller interviewed me for a Newcolonist.com podcast. We discussed the Mindful Walker, walking New York and appreciating architecture, what you experience when walking compared with driving, comparisons of New York and Pittsburgh, changes in Hell’s Kitchen, the challenges of “creative destruction” co-existing with historic preservation, Coney Island, and more.

It’s a conversation that touches upon everything from whether people are aware of their surroundings as they walk around the city to the wonderful, new lawn chairs in Times Square. If you’re so inclined, grab a cup of coffee or tea and give a listen:

A Conversation With the Mindful Walker

(Note: I listened to this podcast through Internet Explorer, which opened the Windows Media Player. This seemed to offer a better listening experience for me than through the Firefox browser, which I customarily use. You can listen to the Newcolonist.com podcasts from this page, or if you have iTunes installed on your computer, you may subscribe to this series through the iTunes store. The Newcolonist.com podcasts are free of charge.) [Read more →]

Sometimes, surprising beauty lies behind a nondescript gate. At the end of a long street in Kingston, N.Y., and behind a wrought iron gate, lies a sparkling little park. It’s situated on the Hudson River near where the Rondout Creek flows into the wide river, so that water seems to surround the park. It has a backdrop of wooded trails and an inlet, a gentle place that Frederick Law Olmsted would have approved. Looking out at the Hudson, a dear friend and I watched the river lap quietly, walked the railroad tracks along the shoreline, and listened to the birds flying to and fro above the inlet.

It’s a peaceful scene. Yet a look at the railroad tracks prompted other images, of crowds in Victorian dress arriving by the thousands on a Hudson River steamboat from New York City. They rode the carousel at its amusement park, danced at its big pavilion, stayed at the hotel on the hill, and viewed concerts and fireworks. From the landing, many connected with trains that would take them to the Catskills.

Both scenes above occurred in the same spot, Kingston Point, but a century apart. It’s a place today to explore and feel nature and to envision a prior life as a city escape and playground for thousands in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Today, it’s called Kingston Point Rotary Park (photos). We found it quite accidentally, after walking at the nearby riverfront beach portion of Kingston Point Park. As we were leaving, my friend spotted the wrought iron gate with the words “Kingston Point Park 1897|1992.” Intrigued, we walked through the gate and along a path down to the park, discovering a small pedestrian bridge, cookout area, benches, and trails, much of it with a view of the Hudson River. Heaven! [Read more →]

In the mid-19^th century, runaway slaves found protection in an Underground Railroad “safe house” on West 29^th Street in New York, as they fled northward to freedom. A century and a half later, a group of Bronx high school students plan to take a journey of their own in defense of this house.

The students, from Bronx Lab School, have been training to bike a 250-mile stretch of the Underground Railroad in Ohio this summer. But the cause of the Underground Railroad safe house is prompting them to do a bike trek far closer to home. On Friday, May 29, they plan to cycle from the Bronx to Manhattan, to the Hopper-Gibbons House at 339 West 29^th St. Nearby, they’ll participate in a morning teach-in about the house’s history and join a group of neighbors and preservationists who are seeking to halt and reverse a renovation project they maintain imperils the house’s history and architectural integrity.

Starting at 11 a.m. on Friday, the group - which is maintaining a blog called Save Abigail Hopper-Gibbons House - plans to conduct a teach-in and press briefing, alerting the public to the construction project that is heightening this row house at least a story higher than its neighboring dwellings. All of the houses were built in the late 1840s. Fern Luskin and Julie Finch, the event’s organizers, say that preservationists and political leaders will join them.

“The aim of this event is to alert people to the necessity of preserving this historic treasure from the disfiguring and illegal alterations that have been constructed there,” Luskin and Finch noted in an announcement.

The controversy over the house has been going on for several years. Since 2007, Luskin, Finch, and others have fought to stop the renovation. They maintain it damages the historical integrity of a place where Quaker abolitionists Abigail Hopper Gibbons and her husband, James Sloan Gibbons, provided safe passage to slaves before and during the Civil War and where Abigail Gibbons met with abolitionist John Brown. The home became a target of angry mobs during the Draft Riots of 1863. [Read more →]

Is the architectural and historical integrity of a New York City mid-19^th century row house that served as a “safe house” for the Underground Railroad during the Civil War being imperiled again? Neighbors and local historic preservationists certainly believe so, and they’re again fighting to stop construction at the Hopper-Gibbons House, at 339 W. 29^th St., in Manhattan. The row house was a sanctuary that runaway slaves used while making their escape to freedom along the Underground Railroad.

Work resumed recently on putting a rooftop addition on the building, which would enlarge it a full story higher than its neighboring row houses, according to Fern Luskin and Julie Finch in the Historic Districts Council (HDC) Newsstand blog, which shows construction photos.

Those supporting protection of the row house are trying to get to the bottom of whether construction is proceeding illegally. But a New York City Department of Buildings (DOB) inspection concluded on the morning of May 11 that the owners are proceeding according to DOB-approved plans (see update below). This fight has been ongoing for several years, as neighbors, preservationists, and some public officials have sought and succeeded at times in halting renovation of the historic house.

Ironically, this renewed renovation work is happening at the same time that this row of houses, including the Hopper-Gibbons House, is nearing possible landmark designation. But this may make no difference. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission is considering possible designation of the Hopper-Gibbons House and 11 of its neighboring mid-19^th century row houses as the Lamartine Place Historic District (photo). The Greek Revival-style houses were built in 1847 on the northern side of West 29^th Street, from Eighth to Ninth Avenue. The block was known then as Lamartine Place. [Read more →]

Stand in Bowling Green Park in New York City and look around at the park and the buildings on its perimeter. At one time or another over the centuries here, Native American tribes gathered in council, men and women bought tickets for ocean passage in a couple of the nearby buildings, and John D. Rockefeller oversaw his dominating oil company and his charitable work from an office in another. In the late 19^th century thousands marching in support of workers ended their Labor Day parades in Bowling Green, and many grand ticker tape parades have started here. To get a compact experience of history, great architecture, and a peaceful respite, Bowling Green and the area adjacent to it in Lower Manhattan provide as good as any space in New York.

If you hang out in Bowling Green for even a short while, you’ll notice that scads of tourists pose for photos at the northern tip in front of the famous “Charging Bull,” Arturo Di Modica’s statue placed here in 1989. The artist created the bronze sculpture following the 1987 stock market crash as a symbol of the strength of the American people. Given the market’s dizzying decline this past year, you might want to stop here and call on the bull’s spirit again.

You also may sense, as I have, that many come and go from the statue without even looking around them at the park or its surroundings, and they’re missing a lot. In that spirit, here’s a walking tour of Bowling Green and a number of the most noteworthy buildings around it.

International Mercantile Marine Company Building, 1 Broadway

Part of the allure of the corner of Broadway and Battery Place is one of this spot’s prior lives. The first Dutch fort of Manhattan, known as Fort Amsterdam, stood just south of here, at the time that the Dutch founded their settlement in the early 1600s. This is the place where Broadway begins, and as I look northward thinking of this long avenue I have a sense of so much of the city’s aliveness and history.

The name of the building at 1 Broadway is a mouthful, but it comes from the ambitious trust company, formed in 1902, that combined a number of American and British steamship companies in hopes of dominating shipping. J.P. Morgan backed it financially, and it struggled and ultimately failed, by 1932. This company owned the Titanic, since the White Star Line was one of its subsidiaries. [Read more →]

John Lindsay was mayor of New York. It was the spring of 1970, when the United States was bogged down in a far-off land in the Vietnam War and divided at home, labor strikes roiled the country, and the Beatles officially broke up. On April 22, 1970, 39 years ago, a spirit of passion, anger, and celebration came together on the first Earth Day: An estimated 20 million people took part in teach-ins, festivities, and demonstrations across the U.S. By 2009, Earth Day has spread to a global affair, with 180 countries marking it. New York City has plenty to see and do as part of Earth Week.

New York rarely does anything small, and so it was with Earth Day, 1970. The city was the site of one of the largest, most impressive Earth Day celebrations in the nation. On Mayor Lindsay’s orders, the city closed Fifth Avenue between 14^th Street and 59^th Street to vehicles for two hours. One horse-drawn buggy, carrying members of a neighborhood association, was the sole vehicle in the “autoless” space, as one reporter called it.

The New York Times gave front-page coverage to Earth Day, with the headline “Millions Join Earth Day Observances Across the Nation.” Underneath the banner headline, a photograph of Fifth Avenue showed the entire avenue filled with thousands upon thousands of people. On the street, a group of demonstrators carried dead fish in a net to call attention to the fish kills occurring in waters such as the polluted Hudson River. “You’re next, people,” they shouted, according to the Times.

Midtown Manhattan was part of a citywide convergence. Between Third and Seventh avenues, 14^th Street, closed to traffic, became an ecological carnival. Teach-ins, demonstrations, and other events drew huge crowds to Union Square in the largest outpouring there since the socialist rallies of the 1930s. Governor Nelson Rockefeller rode his bicycle to Prospect Park and then gave a speech there. Schoolchildren, supplied with brooms, shovels, and rakes, cleaned up beaches and parks across the region. [Read more →]

New York City may seem like a curious place to go looking to see gorse, the small shrub that thrives in rural fields and along hillsides, its yellow flowers rippling across the countryside in spring. But there’s at least one sure place I’ve enjoyed the sight of it in New York – the Irish Hunger Memorial in Lower Manhattan. Also known as furze, gorse is native to Western Europe. Fields of purple heather and bright yellow gorse flowers in Ireland and Scotland have thrilled and inspired many a painter and photographer.

Reading a verse about gorse inspired me to take a walk to the Irish Hunger Memorial, which is tucked just off the Battery Park City Esplanade at Vesey Street and North End Avenue, within view of the Hudson River. With April’s sunny, warm days beckoning, I was seeking a closer encounter with spring. Often even the smallest patch of green or courtyard offers a place of repose where one can go into the silence and enter another world, even in the midst of New York City.

The Irish famine memorial is such a place. Designed by artist Brian Tolle, it combines two starkly different elements, a small plot of Irish pastureland with stone fences, rocks, and native plants, cantilevered above a modernist base, that together commemorate the famine of the 1840s and early 1850s in which more than a million people died of hunger and disease in Ireland. Hundreds of thousands of Irish left their homeland and emigrated to the United States.

Dedicated in 2002, the memorial is, in a major sense, a place to learn about the famine, how a potato blight and political failure resulted in mass starvation and death, and about hunger in the world today. It’s also a setting to contemplate how much the land in Ireland must have represented both nature’s splendor and its forbidding qualities.

My partner has Irish roots, and the sight of gorse takes her back to the land of beauty and spiritual sustenance that inspired and nurtured her on a trip in the 1990s. It’s almost like she is seeing an old friend. If you can’t get to Ireland this spring, you can experience a touch of it at the Irish memorial, in both its compact tranquil setting and in a landscape of indigenous plants and flowers that increasingly will come alive as spring unfolds. [Read more →]

Its architecture and ornate decoration reflect the City Beautiful movement, in which public buildings were expressions of a city’s beauty, order, and harmony. Yet it had a belly-of-the-beast interior containing massive boilers, conveyors, engines, steam pipes, and seven bunkers capable of holding up to 18,000 tons of coal. The Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) Company Powerhouse was truly a structure of its time, originally built in 1904, a classically inspired place extolling magnificence along with technological innovation and industrial might. This building, which takes up an entire block from West 58^th to West 59^th Street and 11^th to 12^th Avenues in Manhattan, generated and supplied electricity for New York City’s first subway lines.

The Municipal Art Society is calling for the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission to designate the IRT Powerhouse as a landmark. The MAS is hoping that the third time’s a charm since similar efforts failed twice before, in 1979 and 1990. Several other preservation and neighborhood groups, such as Landmark West and the Riverside South Planning Corporation, have joined MAS in urging the commission to designate the IRT Powerhouse as a landmark and in considering ways that the building could be adapted for other uses (e.g., a cogeneration plant, a museum). A not-for-profit organization, the Hudson River Powerhouse Group, has formed and is working to secure landmarking status.

To the MAS and others, it’s a matter of not only recognizing the powerhouse’s architectural significance but also its crucial role during an extraordinarily innovative period in New York City history and its place in the city’s industrial heritage.

In his book on the construction of the subway system, 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York, author Clifton Hood called the IRT powerhouse “a classical temple that paid homage to modern industry.” I’ve walked and biked past this building countless times and always feel struck by just how huge and impressive it is. It has the dignified, richly detailed appearance that one often associates with a library, courthouse, or other similarly grand public building.

For much of this, one can thank Stanford White, whose firm McKim, Mead, and White provided New York with so many of its distinctive buildings from the Brooklyn Museum to the Morgan Library. White was responsible for the exterior design and the selection of its materials. The exterior is of the French Renaissance style with lightly colored buff brick and terra cotta Beaux-Arts decorative elements, such as wreaths and swags, along the pilasters and above large arched windows. [Read more →]

When corporate kingdoms fall, they often lose their castles. That may well be the case with AIG. The bailout-dependent conglomerate that has made “bonus rage” a media catchphrase said Wednesday that it’s considering the sale of its legendary 66-story headquarters at 70 Pine Street in Lower Manhattan, Bloomberg confirmed. Like other assets that the American International Group is divesting itself of, this one would almost surely reap a far lower sales price in this depressed market than a couple of years ago.

Yet any price decline isn’t saying a thing about what an architectural and historical treasure this building is. The American International Building, if you have never checked it out or been inside, is one of the most dazzling Art Deco skyscrapers in New York, with an interesting pedigree. Completed in 1932, when the skyline around it wasn’t packed with towers, it stood out as the tallest building in Lower Manhattan and it was then the third tallest in the world. It’s known as one of the last great skyscrapers of the Jazz Age, the exuberant time after World War I during which Art Deco flourished.

Today, one thinks of Texas, the Gulf Coast, or the Middle East as the center of the oil industry, but not in those days. Henry Doherty, an oilman, founded the Cities Service Company in 1910. It became a highly profitable oil, gas, and electricity producer and supplier. Doherty, also a real estate developer, built the company’s headquarters in the prestigious heart of New York’s Financial District. [Read more →]

The headline at least – “Blazing a Trail With a Smartphone, Visual Signposts Included” – promised a wondrous experience. The New York Times column on Wednesday, March 11 focused on some software that can turn your GPS-enabled cellphone into a dynamo that allows you to navigate a route and post photos, audio clips, and descriptive and helpful points of interest. My mind started leaping: Perhaps it was a way to share the sights and sounds of walking experiences with the Mindful Walker audience.

Mind you, I’m only just planning to soon post photos and images with the Mindfulwalker.com content, so I reminded myself to walk before I fly. And, a confession: I don’t use any Global Positioning System device yet. I love maps, all kinds, from the well-worn, folded ones in my car to Google Maps to raised-relief topographic maps. One of the most interesting “mappings” is how we travel from site to site online, seeking out maps, photos, and videos of places near and far. I’m enchanted that, through photos and an online diary, I can enjoy and study the hikes of a fellow in the Lake District, England, where my partner and I plan to travel later this year.

Also, some family and friends swear by their GPS receivers. But perhaps I was burned by my first GPS experience when a cabbie using one drove me to a dead-end construction site on East 70^th Street and insisted it was the right location of the office I had requested. He pointed to it like I was supposed to find the doctor’s office amid the construction crew and trailers: That’s what the GPS shows!

Loaded on a GPS-capable cellphone or GPS receiver and through accounts with wireless carriers or vendors, the Trimble Outdoors mobile application lets hikers, bikers, and walkers get access to many user-generated route maps and other navigational help, track their activities for fitness, create maps, share their trips, keep personal libraries, and explore online caches of points of interest, photos, and audio clips that others upload. That includes thousands of maps the editorial staff of Backpacker Magazine has uploaded, according to the Times. Wow!

Yet judging by the hiking experience columnist Bob Tedeschi described in the Times, I’d need a very large backpack of patience to use the GPS-enabled smartphone program. Moreover, it makes me question what the use of these devices and software does to the experience of walking.

Foul Weather Fear

Reading Tedeschi’s chronicle of the smartphone with this app was almost painful. He told in much detail how he found a treasure trove of one hiker’s maps of a location he wanted to hike that turned out to be fairly useless, how confusing he found the phone’s prompts to be, how at times overlapping text on the screen made it hard to tell where he was, and other glitches. “I yearned for a signal of some kind – a vibration, say – as I got closer to an important point, so I wouldn’t have to keep glancing at the phone,” Tedeschi wrote. I wasn’t sure if the key issues were with the software, how he used it, or with what he expected. [Read more →]

Scrawled on the cornice of a dilapidated building on Coney Island’s Surf Avenue is “Shore Hotel. Nature’s Paradise By the Sea.” But paradise this isn’t. On Coney Island’s main thoroughfare, it sits in the midst of a mish-mash of garish-colored patches of buildings, “Stores for Lease” signs, boarded-up windows, and neon that heralds “Eldorado Auto Skooter,” “Clam Bar,” and “Nathan’s Famous.”

On an off-season walk in Coney Island, New York City’s legendary beach spot is a mix of the timeless and the left-behind-by-time. The beach and boardwalk along the Atlantic Ocean have a wintry peacefulness unattached to events and man’s whimsies about favorite resorts. On the other hand, empty spaces, vacant storefronts, and graffiti speak of a resort long neglected since its heyday in the early 20^th century and pre-World War II.

Coney Island’s central neighborhood is perched between a glorious past, recent decades when activity and abuse teeter-tottered, and an unknown future. Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Administration wants to rezone this segment of Coney Island and make it into a newly resurgent year-round destination with amusement park rides, new housing, hotels, entertainment, and shops, while the Municipal Art Society and a developer have their own plans, and the public seeks to shape what kind of Coney Island will evolve (see “Whose Dreams Will Revive Coney Island?”). Perhaps curiously, in the midst of experiencing not only the emptiness of this beach neighborhood on a late-winter day but some of its dreariness and decay, I feel optimistic that a resurrected Coney Island will emerge.

When I first got off the Q train, which loops through several neighborhoods of Brooklyn before arriving in Coney Island, I headed right toward the beach. The late-afternoon sun gleamed on the sand. Fewer than a dozen people strolled the long and peaceful beach, easily outnumbered by the seagulls. This is one of the spots where New York City touches the Atlantic Ocean. Those walking had plenty of a partially snow-covered beach to themselves to feel the wind and listen to the waves. [Read more →]

Say the words “Coney Island” to New Yorkers, especially of a certain age, and you may well get a dreamy kind of pause and a vivid memory: feeling the sensation of a drop on the Cyclone roller coaster, seeing the steel top on the gigantic Parachute Jump from the distance, riding the fast Steeplechase horses, eating a corn dog for the first time. At one time, it seemed, everybody went there, if at least once.

Coney Island isn’t just a place of yesteryear, of Astroland and Luna Park. As anyone can attest who goes to the Mermaid Parade, the Fourth of July hot dog eating contest, or a Brooklyn Cyclones baseball game, sees the sideshow, or rides the bumper cars, Coney Island is alive today. It remains not only a legend but a draw for many tourists and local beach lovers. (Also check out “Coney Island’s Off-Season Vibe” on Mindfulwalker.com.)

No one would argue, however, that this is the Coney Island of its heyday in the early 20^th century and before World War II. It has vacant spaces on the waterfront and parking lots where amusement rides used to be. Many New Yorkers never venture out on the subway to it today. The owners of Astroland recently took down and packed up Dante’s Inferno and other rides, with their lease expiring at the end of January. They packed up the stuff but apparently hope they’ll be back, as part of a resurrected Coney Island, according to NY1.

And that’s where the fun and the dreams are taking shape right now, albeit with some tough, hard-to-sort-out battles that are becoming their own Coney Island sideshow: What might arise near the boardwalk and sand along the Atlantic Ocean? This is the question that the Municipal Art Society of New York (MAS) has asked the public and is considering itself as part of its ImagineConey initiative. Hundreds of ideas have poured in to the MAS. If Coney Island’s future were a Nathan’s Famous hot dog, it’d come with everything.

Luna Park: Coming Around Again?

A bit of background: New York City, in the face of the Bloomberg Administration, wants to rezone and revitalize Coney Island into a year-round destination with amusement rides, indoor and outdoor entertainment, and new housing. A developer has his own ideas. Plus, the Municipal Art Society is advocating its own bigger plan and gathering the public’s creative ideas and input through ImagineConey. [Read more →]

Gas prices are at an average of $1.96 per gallon, far below the $4-plus they hit last year. The price of oil amid a global recession that has sharply curtailed demand declines to $35 per barrel on Feb. 20. People are fearful as many lose jobs and others go through foreclosures. In such an environment, many don’t have “peak oil” or climate change foremost on their minds. But the concerns about the world having a finite reserve of oil and worries about climate change haven’t gone away.

Peter Newman is one of those thinking and speaking about these topics constantly. In a newly released book, Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change, the author and professor from Australia and co-authors Timothy Beatley and Heather Boyer warn that cities must adapt in the face of these two major challenges or they will collapse. The book discusses four possible outcomes for cities: “collapse,” “ruralized,” “divided,” and “resilient.”

Rather than dwelling on doomsday predictions, the authors choose hope, saying that we as humans can, in Newman’s words, “begin to change our cities towards resilience.” Such cities will innovate so that they become based on renewable energy, not oil; are eco-efficient and carbon-neutral; will produce energy and grow food locally; and will take other measures to reduce consumption and become sustainable. They will be transit-based (especially rail), not car-dependent, and far more in tune with nature, and they’ll create much more viable and pleasant walking and cycling spaces.

Does this sound pie-in-the-sky? No. As the authors show in their book and others are documenting each day with practical examples, many cities are overhauling their urban planning for these 21^st century realities and pursuing actions to become resilient and sustainable. Here are 10 examples, cited by the authors of Resilient Cities and from other places:

1. Some cities in Australia have set up “walking school buses,” in which two volunteer guides act as “drivers” and pick up children from their doorsteps and walk them, along a set route, to school. The programs lessen vehicle congestion around schools, encourage children to get exercise, and help increase kids’ familiarity with their communities.
2. In Vancouver, the city mandates that 5 percent of the value of a new development goes into funding “social infrastructure,” the space in between buildings. The local community decides what to do with the funds, which can be used for landscaping, art, bicycle paths, better or additional pedestrian areas, community meeting spaces, schools, etc.
3. The city of Seoul in South Korea tore down an elevated highway that had covered what was considered a sacred small river, restoring the river and creating public pathways on both sides of it. The city now offers walking tours, led by a cultural heritage guide, of a natural place that has been restored after decades of congestion and pollution. [Read more →]

Seasons come to our bodies much like they do to trees and mountains, lakes and bays. Each individually has its own rhythm and signs of changing, adapting, and flowing from one season to the next, until the momentum of so many heralds the new season en masse.

Beckoned by the brilliant sunshine, predictions of temperatures in the high 40s, and the lengthening daylight, I went walking over the weekend at the Ashokan Reservoir to look for signs of spring, and I ran smack-dab into winter. Each of us has places where we go to seek out the seasons, and the Ashokan Reservoir is one of mine. The reservoir, in Ulster County, is a magnificent place unto itself, 13 square miles ringed by forested shoreline and a backdrop of beautiful Catskill Mountain peaks. (This is not to discount its controversial history, since New York City acquired the area and displaced a large number of communities in the early 20^th century in order to create the reservoir as one of its sources for drinking water.)

The reservoir’s two long walkways, one an actual promenade and the other a closed road the public now uses, provide a panorama of each season, from the appearance of the water to the plants and grasses along the slopes to the palette of the trees and the soft, rounded mountain ridges. Because the walkways are elevated, one feels at times as if you can almost touch the huge open sky or become bedazzled by the cloud show rolling in front of you and above.

Punxsutawney Who?

It’s about this time every year that I start to feel spring will be here soon, no matter what Punxsutawney Phil says. Each person has her or his own sense of the early hints that spring is on its way. “The snowdrops will pop up Feb. 14 or so,” said a friend and colleague recently. I eagerly track the lengthening daylight, for one. On Feb. 8, New York City saw an hour and 15 minutes more daylight than on Dec. 21, the Winter Solstice. I also feel it in any spate of sunny days we get in late January and February. A meteorologist may not agree with this, but as I say, seasons come to our bodies individually. [Read more →]

Sometimes in a sea of numbers, it takes just one stat to astound you into getting the picture: In one of the New Towns of Hong Kong, Tseung Kwan O, some 350,000 people live within four square miles. They live in towers that vary from 57 to 62 stories. Here’s another stat: 80 percent of them live within five minutes of a rail station. How about that for a mass transit success story?

Such numbers tell a lot about Hong Kong in 2009. It’s the most densely occupied major city in the world, it’s constantly growing upward, and it possesses key similarities as well some stark differences with New York City.

A skyscraper race to the sky is taking place across parts of the globe right now – epitomized best, perhaps, by the building of Burj Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. It’s not an easy race to grasp. For decades the construction of such a tall tower in this country, like the Empire State Building or the World Trade Center, was very momentous. Now and with the focus shifting to Asia and the Middle East, a huge new “tallest in the world” is popping up every several years, many cities are building supertall structures that tower ever higher, and sometimes even veteran skyscraper aficionados feel like it’s all a jumble.

The current exhibit at The Skyscraper Museum in New York, “Vertical Cities: Hong Kong, New York,” allows one to understand the skyscraper mania by exploring two iconic “vertical metropolises.” It examines the needs, societal forces, designs, and scale of building taller and taller. It wasn’t quite like walking around Hong Kong, but through the exhibit’s photographs, architectural drawings, film, computer animations, maps, brochures, and large-scale models, it was enough to get a real picture – and maybe even to feel blown away by it all.

The exhibit calls Hong Kong and New York the world’s “most similar skyscraper societies.” Both feature island cities with excellent and busy harbors, and both evolved into dominant centers of finance and commerce. New York and Hong Kong have had defining moments of development that propelled the building of many skyscrapers through which entrepreneurs and designers channeled economic growth and became super-competitive: New York in the 1920s and 1960s, and Hong Kong in the mid-1980s through 1990s to today. [Read more →]

On the November night that the United States elected Barack Obama as its new President, NBC News anchorman Brian Williams called it “a seismic shift in American politics.” Yes, it is. Yet seismic shifts are, ultimately, created by many forces and actions that culminate in a particular moment. This seemed particularly poignant while walking along the National Mall in Washington, D.C. on Saturday and Sunday and exploring the nation’s capital.

Washington, D.C. has felt electric in the days leading up to the January 20 inauguration of Obama as President and Joe Biden as Vice-President of the United States. Dozens of major events are happening on Inauguration Day, from the Inaugural Parade to the balls, and many of them are sure to be festive, moving, and full of pageantry.

But during these several days many people looked happy just to come down to the National Mall in Washington and view the flag-draped U.S. Capitol, the grounds, and the stage where our 44^th President will take the oath of office. They were, like me, drinking in the atmosphere and relishing this time of gathering together. Joy was in the air as sure as the tingly cold January weather. If you needed a gauge of it, you could see it in the smiling faces all around.

We saw hundreds of people who walked up as close as they could get to the Capitol area where the swearing-in ceremony is taking place or around the National Mall, gazed toward the stage, and took pictures of the scene. It was as if we each wanted our own freeze-frame of this historic moment. People chatted with each other, asking where the other was from. African-Americans were numerous among the crowd.

We as a people are crossing a threshold. Today we will see the first African-American President in the history of the U.S. take office. Isn’t this at least one signpost of the Promised Land that Martin Luther King, Jr. talked about? Many will also welcome the end of the administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, such a dark, dismal, and infamous chapter in history. Many Americans are savoring this change, like travelers who are tired and beaten up after the long, rough journey of the Bush-Cheney years suddenly seeing a vista from a mountain perch.

Divisions are still there, but on this day a strong sense of a common purpose joins us. Where better could one participate in this moment and reflect on it than the National Mall, where hundreds of thousands will attend the Inauguration? It’s a place where so many have expressed their hopes and desires over the years in protests and other gatherings, and it holds those memories. [Read more →]

Outside, it was a post-Christmas, rush-hour frenzy, throngs crowding near the revolving doors and the holiday windows of Macy’s or walking speedily to Penn Station. Inside St. Francis of Assisi Roman Catholic Church in New York in the midst of all of this, you’d never know it. Two men were slowly and carefully placing flowers and plant stalks into large arrangements on each side of the altar. A couple of dozen people sat or knelt and prayed silently in the pews.

One could listen to the silence and hear nothing of the cranking, honking, shouting, whirring, and loud talking just beyond the doors on the streets of Midtown Manhattan. In so many ways, this church space felt like the essence of peace. Each person seemed to have his or her own space.

In these spiritual places in the midst of a city of 8 million people, individual souls find moments of serenity and silence. St. Francis of Assisi Church, located on West 31^st Street between the Avenue of the Americas and Seventh Avenue, is one such oasis. New Yorkers love their churches, synagogues, mosques, meetinghouses, temples, and other sacred spaces, and the peace they offer is one major reason.

Stopping in St. Francis of Assisi Church for a visit during an afternoon of post-holiday errands, I contemplated its beauty and the larger messages of its peacefulness. I had always wanted to come to this church but had never done so even while passing nearby dozens of times. After all the holiday jostling on Manhattan’s streets, there was an immediate comfort in simply sitting and watching the two men near the altar lovingly placing evergreens among the calla lilies and other flowers in the two large arrangements.

Built in 1892, the church is Romanesque-style with golden-yellow brick and terra cotta trim. It reminds me of some of the churches European immigrants built in my native Western Pennsylvania. Its interior also feels very Old World with highly decorated capitals on its columns, vaulted ceiling, and many shrines and mosaics. The space for worship feels vast in some ways, with an entire dark wood-paneled Lower Church one level below, one that has a separate altar and a crèche displayed throughout the year. Also, the church has an oasis within the oasis – a small, oblong adjacent courtyard filled with hundreds of candles. [Read more →]

Recently, a bankruptcy expert told a Bloomberg Radio interviewer that the United States is “over-stored” – it has far too much retail space than is needed to serve American consumers. Amidst the holiday shopping blitz, I thought of this observation as I read this week of the plans by Wal-Mart to construct a new 141,000-square foot store in Virginia very close to the site of one of the most important battlefields of the Civil War. The retail and grocery superstore would be just a quarter-mile from the boundary of the National Park area commemorating the Battle of the Wilderness in the Civil War. Is this a good place for a Wal-Mart? Does it need to be built there?

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Civil War Preservation Trust, others in the historic preservation community, and 253 historians don’t think so. In a letter to Wal-Mart, the historians, who include David McCullough, James McPherson, and Edwin Bearss, the historian emeritus of the National Park Service, maintain this new Wal-Mart will do great damage to a landscape that is a tangible piece of America’s history. As they noted in the letter, “The Wilderness is an indelible part of our history, its very ground hallowed by the American blood spilled there, and it cannot be moved. Surely Wal-Mart can identify a site that would meet its needs without changing the very character of the battlefield.”

The coalition is fighting to stop the Wilderness Wal-Mart by urging the giant retailer to move its proposed store farther from the historic site. The proposal is under consideration at the local level now: Wal-Mart recently filed an application for a special-use permit, which governs larger retail uses in the commercial zone, with the Orange County Department of Community Development in Virginia; the Orange County Planning Commission will next review the application. The supercenter proposal is sure to be another pitched battle in the campaign to preserve those now-peaceful and important places that commemorate and teach about the Civil War.

The Wal-Mart superstore would be on 19 acres of a 50-acre parcel on the northern side of Route 3 near Route 20, according to the Culpeper (Va.) Star-Exponent. This is in close proximity to The Wilderness battlefield portion of the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. The park preserves and memorializes portions of the battlefields of four of the most critical battles fought during the Civil War. [Read more →]

In a world where teens hang out for hours in their bedrooms playing video games and a household may have three or four computers and several TVs, consider the parlor of Jacobus Dyckman. In the early 19^th century, Dyckman’s family, servants, and one slave – up to 10 people – would likely have confined many of their activities on a cold winter evening to this parlor, seeking to stay close to the fireplace’s warmth. On a December evening, the only light was candlelight. And with no television blaring, the howl of wintry winds would sound very close indeed.

You can imagine this experience when you see the parlor of the Dyckman house in New York City’s Inwood neighborhood today. Here, near a Rite Aid pharmacy, PJ Wine store, and apartment buildings, the Dyckman home remains, at 4881 Broadway at 204^th Street. It is Manhattan’s last Dutch Colonial-style farmhouse. Open to the public as the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, it offers a rare look at how a farm family lived in then-rural Northern Manhattan in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries.

That any dwellings in the United States from that time period survive is precious. In the case of an early farmhouse remaining in the midst of New York City it’s almost miraculous. It’s also a testament to the pluck and devotion of two Dyckman family descendants who decided the house must be preserved when rapid change came to Inwood in the early 20^th century. Today it’s a place to witness and ponder the nexus of family life, class, and slavery within one household during the nation’s earliest days.

Walking on New York City’s streets in the midst of thousands and thousands of buildings, one can easily forget that anyone ever farmed in Manhattan – much less on a large farm. The Dyckman farm covered some 250 acres stretching from the Harlem River to the Hudson River. On Manhattan’s modern street grid, that’s roughly from the “190s” to 213^th Street. [Read more →]