In This Issue:

– Progress on Governors Island

– Urban parenting and the playground

– Book review: Great Society on display in DC

– Calendar

At Last, Something New for Governors Island
Almost four years after accepting title to the Island, and ten years since the Coast Guard quit its base, the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation (GIPEC) reached an agreement this week to give the 172-acre Island its first new active tenant. It was a terrific first choice, a venture that clearly befits the Island’s unique character and location off Lower Manhattan.  Even better, the agreement is just one of several recent steps forward by GIPEC on a new, more deliberate approach to the Island’s redevelopment.    
The Island’s first tenant is The New York Harbor School. A project of the Urban Assembly, it is one of the small, specialty high schools widely promoted as a means of re-engaging young people in their education. The City has opened 149 in the past several years.
 
The Harbor School is, of course, all about the Harbor. Its 400 students grapple with mathematics, English, social studies, and science through the prism of ships and the sea. Some of this learning takes place in the classroom. But much of it, and one might imagine the most exciting part for students, takes place on the water. The students build boats and cooperate in sailing the Lettie G Howard, a rebuilt schooner out of South Street Seaport. Teachers make water quality measurements and fish sampling the basis for math and science lessons.  Many students report interest in pursuing maritime studies and careers after graduation. 
 
The unfortunate irony is that the Harbor School is currently located in central Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood -- a location about as far as one can be from the water in New York City, and a constant drain on the limited time and resources available to students and teachers.
 
Bringing the Harbor School to Governors Island won’t physically happen until 2008 at the earliest. But the decision to move is already helping the school meet its mission. Students will help design the restoration of the historic buildings that will house the school.  And the prospect of an Island home will help the school attract and retain its most vibrant teachers.
 
Landing the school is also a very positive step forward for the Island, and for the public corporation charged with its redevelopment.  The New York Harbor School so clearly fits the mix of educational mission, harbor focus, public spirit, and visitor diversity essential to the civic purpose for which the Mayor and Governor accepted title to the Island. While small in size, the school and its students will be outstanding spokespeople and symbols of the Island’s new life.
 
This new tenant wasn’t the only news from the Island recently. In announcing the agreement, GIPEC Chair Dan Doctoroff declared that the corporation was not ready to reach an agreement with any of the other respondents to their request for proposals at this time.  While that process served to identify some interesting ideas and capable partners, GIPEC recognized that there are no silver bullets, no instant all-Island solutions.  Instead, Mr. Doctoroff announced that GIPEC will move forward on creating the physical framework and amenity that will help define and promote development opportunities on the Island.
 
This new process will be headlined by a design competition to for the Island’s 80 plus acres of parkland – with much of it now clearly proposed for the southwest waterfront of the Island (see www.governorsislandalliance.org for more considerations for the Island’s parkland).  Five teams will be selected in January, and a public display of their proposals is expected by April. The winning team or teams will presumably be awarded the contract to design and plan the parkland starting next summer.  A public forum co-sponsored by the Governors Island Alliance, the American Institute of Architects, American Society of Landscape Architects, and the American Planning Association will help kick things off on January 17th.   
 
After years of uncertainty, there is some real progress to celebrate for the Island at last.

– Robert Pirani, Director of Environmental Programs, RPA, and Executive Director, Governors Island Alliance.

Stepping Stones Through the River of Parenthood
When walking streets while armed with a small child, parks and playgrounds sing out to a parent the way an oasis would to a thirsty man. In the Prospect Heights neighborhood that my family inhabits in Brooklyn, the major and minor parks around us are like a constellation of stars, offering varying intensities of respite and pleasure.

Whether one lives in the farthest reaches of Connecticut or the middle of Manhattan, every parent visits parks with their children, at least once in a while. But for the urban parent, life without parks and playgrounds would almost be unimaginable. Visiting parks is simply what one does.

In our area, the brightest sun is unquestionably Prospect Park, the giant park laid out by Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, about a generation after they designed Central Park. Prospect Park is simply wonderful. With its pastoral meadows, its lakes and attractions, all nicely carved up by what seems like semi-wild forests, it’s an amazing part of the community. It is the center of this part of Brooklyn.

But visiting Prospect Park involves a larger investment of time and energy, partly because you want to stay there once you get there. We visit Prospect Park about once a week. On a daily basis we depend more on the small playgrounds that surround us.

Much like Englishmen and their pubs, we as a family have our “local,” the playground we visit most often and which we know the best – Stroud Playground on Prospect Place between Classon and Grand avenues. After that, we have all the other playgrounds. Within a 20 minute walk, we probably have a dozen playgrounds we can visit. Life in New York can be difficult, for both parents and single people, but the presence of so many playgrounds feels like an amazing luxury.

Visiting all of these different playgrounds is an enriching experience, on several levels. Their racial, ethnic and income mix varies from playground to playground even within my own neighborhood. But besides the cultural variation, the defining features of each playground, for both kids and parents, are the Jungle Gyms, or whatever the proper term is nowadays.

In olden days (like my childhood), jungle gyms were relatively simple affairs of a few bars but together in circular or rectangular fashion. Nowadays they are elaborate creations of ramps, bridges, tunnels, spinners, slides and bars, sometimes encompassing a thematic treatment, like a ship or airplane. Each one is like a wonderful, mini amusement park. For a designer, creating one of these toddler challenges must be a really neat task.

Using the playgrounds and parks so much encourages me to wonder almost guiltily about their cost. Most of the parks we visit have “parkies,” full time staff members who look after the place. Then there is the constant wear and tear on the equipment because of the heavy use. New York City parks were once known as generally unpleasant places, but in my experience they now look and feel quite good. An exception is only temporal, such as our Stroud Park after a weekend that includes late-night partiers.

I know not all parts of the city are as blessed as this part of Brooklyn is with playgrounds. Jackson Heights in Queens, for example, seems to be underserved with playgrounds. But overall, the generous quantities of playgrounds and parks in the city are a great boon to urban parenting, and a wonderful asset. The dependence on public playgrounds, as opposed to private backyards, is one of the critical differences between raising children in New York City and more suburban areas. And from my own experience, it’s a welcome one.

– Alex Marshall, Editor, Spotlight on the Region

Book Review
The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (John Hopkins University Press 2006).
By Zachary M. Schrag

The DC Metro: A Time of Doing Things Grandly, on Purpose
Zachary M. Schrag, formerly of Columbia University and now an assistant professor of history at George Mason University, has written an excellent book that recalls a time when building public projects was not an exercise in doing something as cheaply as possible, but was sometimes an attempt to build a better home in all sense of the words for the citizens of a city and nation.

The Washington Metro, the subway and commuter rail system that enters and surrounds the nation’s capital and is now an integral part of the region’s fabric, was one of the nation’s last grand public projects. Opening in 1976 with spacious stations and a sense of architectural style, it was meant not just as a transportation device, but as an embodiment of a way of doing things right.

Schrag’s point is that the Washington Metro was not just a solution to transportation congestion; it was meant as an expression of the Great Society ideal, where government could and did play an active role in making life better, and even grander, for its citizens. His even larger point is that this type of thinking is still an option for us today, if we choose it.

“Understanding Metro’s history may illuminate today’s debates,” Schrag says in his Introduction. “To conservatives who decry Metro’s expense – around $10 billion in nominal dollars – this book serves as a reminder that Metro was never intended to be the cheapest solution to any problem, and that it is the product of an age that did not always regard cheapness as an essential attribute of good government.”

Reading President Lyndon Johnson’s quote about Metro can cause disequilibrium, given how different it is from today’s rhetoric on public construction. Perhaps only with the planned reconstruction of the World Trade Center have such soaring words been heard recently. Johnson said that the DC Metro should create “a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce, but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.”

In what is claimed as the first comprehensive history of the DC subway, Schrag shows how Metro emerged from the politics of its time, which on the national level encompassed the Great Society and Vietnam, and on the local and regional level included vociferous debates about whether rail or more highways were the solution to growing traffic congestion. As with any big project (try studying a history of the New York City Subway), the politics of the moment were intricate and intense.

From this thicket emerged the grand, barrel-vaulted DC Metro, designed by modernist architect Harry Weese, which is probably the prettiest and most expansive-feeling subway in the country. Similar to New York City at the same time period, Washington, DC was bound up by opposition to planned freeways that intended to crisscross and encircle the city. Schrag tells this history in ten discreet chapters that examine aspects of the project and its politics. It is a welcome and readable addition to the literature of how we construct the societies we inhabit.

– Alex Marshall


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

December 3 - 5
IBTTA's Transportation Finance Summit to be held December 3-5, 2006 at the Capital Hilton Hotel in Washington, DC. The purpose of the Summit is to bring together transportation financing experts from around the world to discuss practical and workable solutions to the transportation funding challenges faced by all levels of government and the private sector. To learn more about this Summit or register:
http://www.ibtta.org/Events/eventdetail.cfm?ItemNumber=1992.

December 5
Triborough Today: Gain key insights into how major bridges are maintained and rehabilitated over time, as MTA Bridges and Tunnels VP and chief engineer Tom Bach discusses current improvements to the 70 year old span and other related projects at Randall's Island Park. His 6:00 p.m. lecture is free with admission to the NY Transit Museum, NW corner Boerum Pl/Schermerhorn St, beneath Brooklyn Hgts (M/R/2/3/4/5 – Court St-Borough Hall & A/C/G – Hoyt-Schermerhorn stations). $5/$3 seniors 62 + & children 3-17. While there, see the exhibit, “The Triborough Bridge: Robert Moses & the Automobile Age,” on view thru April. For further details, call 718.694.1600.

December 7 & 8
Movement of Global Talent: The Impact of High Skill Labor Flows from India and China. To better understand the growing role of internationally mobile human capital on local and global politics and economies, this symposium will bring leading scholars, policymakers and business leaders from around the world to examine the circulation of high-skilled ("knowledge") workers from India and China to and from the New Jersey-Pennsylvania-New York region, and its impact on the source countries and the receiving region. The symposium will be held at Princeton University and composed of two sessions, 7 to 10 am, EST on Thursday, December 7, and 9 am to 4 pm, EST on Friday, December 8. To RSVP and for more information, contact Udai Tambar, Assistant Director of the Policy Research Institute for the Region, at 609.258.8909 or utambar@princeton.edu.