Keeper of this park

We've never seen a sign of this type before. Have you? It's located on the gate to the Downing Street Playground in Greenwich Village, NYC.

Information about the playground can be found here.

Vassar's Shakespeare Garden

Approaching the Shakespeare Garden, "the crown jewel of the Vassar grounds"

...the true meaning of a Shakespeare garden is to house plants that were mentioned by Shakespeare in his plays and sonnets - but, since we’re not in England and we can’t maintain a lot of the plants mentioned that were used in English gardens, what we do is we combine plants that were mentioned by Shakespeare with plants that were grown in English gardens during Shakespeare’s time, to also give more of a display purpose to the garden, a lot more flowers... we kind of blend the two worlds together and everyone’s happy, and it keeps the garden looking nice, and it still has a lot of meaning to it. (Jennifer Dawson's interview with Vassar College Head Gardener Martin Pinnavaia)

Tree Walk: Vassar's dawn redwood grove

The Vassar College campus is known for its collection of trees including this grove of dawn redwoods. Walking the college grounds is like walking through an arboretum.

Tree art in Poughkeepsie

Sculpture by Freda Coffing Tschumy, 1961, Vassar College campus

From afar, this sculpture resembles a real tree, at least when you don't look at its "feet."

Tschumy's attention to details, such as leaf buds, contributes to the sculpture's realism. On a nicer day, we'd sit beneath this tree.

Little Italy's baroque police station

The building at 240 Centre Street in NYC was a police headquarters from 1909-1973. In the 1908s, the building was renovated into luxury condos. Source. (Photo by localecology.org.)

Ideal Glass Gallery mural

22 East 2nd Street - the Ideal Glass Gallery: "An interdisciplinary space for the development and presentation of unusual works."

Valentine's street art

As seen on the streets of Soho during the Valentine weekend:

Houston Street

Broadway

Designer sidewalk sheds

Bamboo sidewalk shed, Hong Kong

A sidewalk shed is the scaffolding erected above the sidewalk during a construction project. Several NYC institutions - the NYC Department of Buildings, American Institute of Architects New York Chapter, the Alliance for Downtown New York, the New York Building Congress, the Illuminating Engineering Society of New York, the Association for a Better New York Foundation, the Structural Engineers Association of New York, the NYC Department of City Planning, and the NYC Department of Transportation - hosted the urbanSHED International Design Competition to generate alternatives to standard sidewalk sheds which "hide the beauty of New York City’s architecture." Three finalists were selected and their proposals can be viewed at the AIA NYC gallery on Laguardia Place in Greenwich Village.

The three winning proposals are Tripod MOD(ule) (XChange Architects with Ex Nihilo Studio, Rider Levett Bucknall, and Weidlinger Associates)

urbanCLOUD (KNEstudio with Arup)

and Urban Umbrella (Young Hwan Choi, University of Pennsylvania student, with Agencie Group).

Two of the entries - not among the finalists - incorporated vegetation as an element of their sheds. (All the entries account for existing street trees.) These vegetated entries - New Urban Ecosystem and urbantreeshed - remind me of sidewalk sheds I observed in Hong Kong last year (photographs below). The sidewalks sheds in Hong Kong were constructed from vegetation; bamboo stems were used as framing material(see photograph at the start of the post).

urbantreeshed

New Urban Ecosystem

Broome Street brick house

Brick town house at 514 Broome Street at Thompson, Soho, NYC

Sara D. Roosevelt Park: Stand of sycamores

This 7.85 acre New York City park is lined and filled with large sycamores. The views from the sidewalk (above) and from the Whole Foods cafe on Chrystie Street are refreshing. From the NYC Parks Department website:

A shimmering stretch of green amidst the sea of concrete, asphalt, and tightly-packed buildings, Sara D. Roosevelt Park provides a refreshing respite for residents and visitors of Manhattan’s Lower East Side.