In This Issue:

– Taking the Long Walk

– Cooling the Baked Apple

– Announcements

– Calendar

Taking the Long Walk
Before the subway, before the commuter train, before the car, before the bicycle, before the pedalcab, bus or Segway, there was the foot. When New York City was young, say during its first two centuries, people must have walked a lot more than they do now, precisely because there were few other options.

I mention this because I believe some New Yorkers are reviving this old trend. While New Yorkers have always walked more than anyone else is this country, what lately seems to be coming into vogue is what I might call “the long walk.” Eschewing the subway, bus or taxis, people are opting to walk long distances and to do so on a regular basis.

I base this trend on a completely unscientific sample of various friends and acquaintances I have bumped into recently that are doing it.

The first person I encountered doing this was Randy Swearer, who until 2004 was Dean of the Parsons School of Design. Swearer surprised me one day by mentioning in passing that he walked each day from his home in Brooklyn Heights, over the Brooklyn Bridge, and up to Parsons near Union Square – an hour’s walk, each way. I was flabbergasted, but Randy by then was quite blasé about it.

“That walk from Brooklyn Heights is probably the thing I miss most about NYC,” said Swearer, who recently moved back to Austin, via email. “It started because I couldn't sleep one night and once the dawn broke I just thought I've got to get out of this apartment.

“So I walked to work, and saw all of this amazing stuff: delivery trucks unloading weird junk, phenomenal light plays on the buildings, fabulous wall postings and graffiti, wonderfully eccentric people, etc. It was like going to the theater, and I had been missing all of it for years. So I started walking to work, and after a few months liked it so much that I walked home too, about 8 miles total.

“The city is an intensely rich accretion of culture,” said Randy, sounding like the professor he is, “but the average resident of NYC experiences it in these abstracted moments, such as popping out of a subway or zoning out in a taxi and forgetting everything you've seen on the way to a destination. They never really have a chance to take it all in. So as you can tell, I liked walking to work! Plus I lost 14 pounds!”

Since hearing Swearer’s tale for the first time, I’ve encountered a string of long walkers, none of whom I would have predicted in advance. My friend Andy, after more than a decade of using the subway to get from his home on East 17th Street to his finance job near Wall Street, began walking the entire distance. It takes 50 minutes each way, he said, just 10 minutes more than using the subway, when you include walking to the subway stations and waiting on the platforms. Recently his office moved to Midtown, and he’s now walking there and back.

Another long walker is Jonathan Waxman, the executive chef of Barbuto at West 12th Street in the meatpacking district. Waxman often walks there from his home at 89th Street on the West Side. A cross-town walker is, or was, Rossana Ivanova, who used to walk every day to her job at the Council on Foreign Relations at 68th and Park Avenue from the Port Authority Bus Terminal at 42nd Street and Eight Avenue.

“When I walked I knew exactly how long it would take me, and I could time myself for the various meetings, events and appointments,” said Ivanova, who is now vice president for development at Regional Plan Association. “I used to wear sneakers and change shoes in the office.”

Ivanova mentions something many long walkers do, which is timing and reliability. Unlike a yellow cab, the Q train or the M1 bus, your feet always are there when you need them, and they usually work pretty much the same. Consequently, walkers quickly learn how long it takes to walk to a regular destination, and can plan their lives accordingly.

Not all long walkers are to-work walkers. One friend of a friend, who mostly works at home, walks almost everywhere, I am told. She will typically walk from her apartment in Greenwich Village to, say, a show at Lincoln Center, rather than take a cab, bus or train.

So is long walking a trend? In this land of ever rising demands on our time, including work itself, it would be surprising if more people were taking extra time simply to walk places. But I suspect they are. There is something about walking, particularly after work, that allows the mind to expand its joints, to decompress, in other words. That doesn’t happen as easily in a train, bus or cab, or even the private car. Walking limbers both the body and mind, and people are taking time for it. If this isn’t a trend, it should be.

The great thing about New York City’s mass transit system is that it makes all this walking possible, whether short, medium or long distance. Generally speaking, almost all urban walking environments are built around mass transit, because it’s natural to build homes and business tight together around transit stops. Significant amounts of parking, which automobile-oriented cities require, break up any continuous walking environments that might emerge. So even the long walkers who consciously avoid the subway are in a sense taking advantage of it.

Suburban long walkers are hard to find, because it is rare the person who will walk several miles through parking lots, highways crowded with cars, and isolated patches of grass and retention ponds in order to walk from home to office park.

As the weather cools, and walking becomes less of an immersion into a bath of perspiration, perhaps more of us will try the long walk. I hear it’s habit forming. I live in Crown Heights in Brooklyn, which is a bit too far away for a long walk to Union Square. But maybe I’ll try the long bicycle ride.

– Alex Marshall, Editor, Spotlight on the Region

Cooling the Baked Apple
During recent heat waves, you may have noticed on weather.com or the nightly television news that the city was much hotter at night than many parts of the surrounding region. On one typical night at 10 p.m., for example, it was a sweltering 87F at LaGuardia, while a mere hour away in Port Jervis, NY it was a cool 72F. For days this pattern persisted with no relief in sight. Why was the city not cooling off at night?

It’s simple: living surrounded by concrete and brick, and the constant hustle and bustle of human activity (such as cars, trains, or air conditioners) means outside temperatures will be considerably higher than if you were surrounded by grass and trees.

These differences in regional temperature are what climate scientists call the urban heat island (UHI) effect. Best seen in the evening, UHI is a result of buildings and streets trapping heat over the course of a day and slowly re-releasing the heat after the sun goes down. Not only does a building passively trap heat, but it actively produces heat, as lights, computers and air conditioners send out immense quantities of additional heat, which in turn raise already high outside temperatures. What we get are hot nights in the big apple!

As city dwellers we all feel this excess heat, and inherently veer away from things like bus or car exhaust and air-conditioner vents, which can warm surrounding air by more than 10 degrees. What’s particularly insidious about the UHI effect is that it becomes more extreme as temperatures become more extreme. As temperatures near 100, people retreat inside and turn air conditioners up, which put out even more heat, thus raising outside temperatures and prompting more people to retreat inside and turn on their air conditioners.

And so on. The end result is often record breaking consumption rates and subsequent power failures. These conditions are not particular to the New York region. They have affected hundreds of millions of people in urban environments all over the world. UHI impacts energy demand. With more energy demand, urban heat islands are also contributing to climate change by increasing the demand for electricity to cool our buildings.

But among the concrete and brick are signs of hope - cool islands, such as Central Park or one of the many tree lined streets. These cool islands are especially evident during the heat wave when afternoon temperatures could be 95F in Central Park, while 99F in Lower Manhattan, and 102F in Newark, NJ. They are reminders that weather and climate over a short distance do not impact us all equally.

So what can be done to reduce the urban heat island effect? One thing to do is simply to be aware of it. Awareness can prompt a fine tuning of remedies to beat the heat. Urging people to conserve energy by turning off building lights and setting air conditioners on higher temperature levels or changing old appliances to ones with the Energy Star label will reduce the UHI effect. These conditions are taken so seriously in Tokyo, they have perpetuated a cultural change allowing businessmen to remove suit jackets in order to lower air conditioning demand.

On a longer term basis, the way to reduce UHI substantially is to “green” the city. This can mean bringing more of the country into the city, such as planting grass and trees on rooftops and shade trees along sidewalks. New Jersey has found a cooler path, with its Cool Cities Initiative run by New Jersey Community Forestry Program and the Green Streets Cool Schools Program. It also can mean adopting “green” building and infrastructure standards, which produce buildings with cool roofs and even sidewalks that keep cooler with less energy. Or it can mean all of the above.

Cool Community programs, such as the Cool Houston Plan, include cool roofing, cool paving, and cool landscaping, and are supported by US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Here in New York, the new Hearst Tower, the new Goldman Sachs building in Lower Manhattan and the new Bank of America building in Midtown are expected to receive certificates from the US Green Buildings Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program. These buildings provide good examples of change, but it will take a lot more such buildings to have an impact on the UHI effect.

If we keep planting trees on roofs and sidewalks, changing building design, and turning down air conditioners, then keeping cool may no longer take so much energy, which in the end will make keeping cool not so difficult.

For more information see www.epa.gov/heatisland/ and www.hotcities.org.

– Jennifer R. Cox, Associate Planner and Manager of GIS

Announcements:

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Notice to Readers: Spotlight is taking an August break and will resume publication after Labor Day. Enjoy the rest of the summer!

Questions Or Comments On What’s In This Issue? Send Them To The Editor Of Spotlight On The Region, Alex Marshall At alex@rpa.org

Thursday, August 31, 6:00PM
“There Goes the Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up” – Columbia U urban planning PhD program acting director Author Lance Freeman set out to answer a seemingly simple question of how gentrification actually affect residents of neighborhoods in transition by interviewing the indigenous residents of 2 predominantly black neighborhoods that are experiencing this phenomenon: Harlem & Clinton Hill. He provides a nuanced picture of the impacts of gentrification on the perceptions, attitudes & behaviors of the people who stay in their neighborhoods & signs copies of his new book from Temple U Press at Hue-Man Book Store & Café, 239 Frederick Douglass Blvd btwn 124th & 125th streets, Harlem (A/B/C/D -125th St station). For details, contact 212.665.7400 or info@hue-manbookstore.com .

September 6
Facing the Threat of a Pandemic Influenza: An executive summit for Tri-State Business and Civic Leaders. It has been reported by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that when – not if – Avian Flu hits, corporate America will experience a 20-30% plummet in revenue and employee readiness – in addition to the enormous loss of life. Reservation required: www.safeamerica.org/regform2.html

Tuesday-Thursday, September 6-8
“After Shock: Rethinking the Future Since September 11, 2001”- The Pace U Center for Downtown NY presents a conference at the Schimmel Center, Spruce St between Park Row & Gold St, just east of City Hall Park. 8 panels explore local, national & global issues. US News & World Report editor-at-large David Gergen, 9/11 Commission vice chair Lee Hamilton & author/presidential historian Doris Kearns Godwin, keynote; The Weekly Standard editor William Kristol offers closing remarks. NY 1’s Roma Torre hosts a town hall meeting. RPA President Bob Yaro will speak as well. For details/to register, email Meghan French at mfrench@pace.edu or visit www.pace.edu/aftershock.

Through October 1
"Changing Streetscapes: New Architecture & Open Space in Harlem". The City College Architectural Center has documented the transformation underway with photos and architectural renderings of recent residential and commercial redevelopment, on view Tu-Su, thru October 1 at the NYPL Schomburg Center, 515 Malcolm X Blvd & 135th St, Central Harlem (#2/3 - 135th St station). (Temporary construction entrance at 103 W 135th St.) For questions, call 212.491.2200.