Manhattan Memorious from Reiser + Umemoto on Vimeo.
Here is a very brilliant video depicting images of a Manhattan that never came to be. “Manhattan Memorious” features the Lower Manhattan Expressway (LoMax), Buckminster Fuller’s Dome over Midtown, and other vast unrealized projects.
The Jet Age by ~Ranchoth
This is television’s most thorough and comprehensive history of New York City’s mass transit. I’m glad they avoided using personal histories and interviews and just kept it as a narrative to keep it chock full of facts. Love the narrator’s grandfatherly, yarn-spinning voice. This really does make all the other subway documentaries look slow & plodding or just immature. Way better than that Extreme Engineering episode.
[Modern Marvels S05E03 New York Subways (by nick rose)]
An excellent editorial piece from a member of Queen’s CB14’s Transportation Committee on the necessity of reactivating the entire Rockaway Branch row for rail.
WNYC has put up a great piece on some of the unfinished portions of the New York City subway. The map above gives approximations of where some line expansions would have gone.
The Google Map below gives a better scale of where the lines would have run.
A major development project for its waterfront could give Staten Island a much-needed boost, but the tide is taking young people from its shores.
A goal of more walkable communities is being pursued statewide by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.
So the New York Times put out a fascinating piece about an ego-tripping proposal to extend Manhattan southwards to Governors Island.
It may be an impossible project, because there are strict regulations on building with landfill. Governors Island has also become a popular destination for recreation and arts events. But the project is the kind of big thinking that New York needs, said Vishaan Chakrabarti, the director of (the Center for Urban Real Estate at Columbia University) and the Marc Holliday associate professor of real estate development at Columbia.
The easy thing to do is to snicker at the audacity of it or shake your head in cynical disbelief, which no doubt many of our city leaders are doing now. But maybe this kind of audaciousness and hubris is what this city—and country—need to fire it’s imagination.
And here I thought private rail cars went the way of roll-up desks and spats. The Washington Post did a nice piece about the last remaining private rail cars in America. Particularly about Chuck Jensen and his prized “Kitchi Gammi Club” (http://www.virginiarail.com/)
It’s heartening to know that some irreplaceable pieces of Americana are not just preserved and put on display, but actually put to use.
