Before & After: Sara D. Roosevelt Park

 

The Houston Street steps of the Sara D. Roosevelt Park in two seasons: Winter 2009 (top) and Spring 2010 (bottom).

WPA poster for the 1936-7 Parks Exhibition

From the Library of Congress WPA Poster Collection: "Poster for exhibition at the International Building, Rockefeller Center, New York City, showing stylized illustration of tree in front of cage containing a wild cat." (Image source).

New York City hosted the 1939-40 World's Fair* ("Building the World of Tomorrow") but I could not find details about the 1936-7 Parks Exhibition online. Do you have any information?

* New York's first world's fair was held in Bryant Park in 1853-54.

@localecologist asked: What is your favorite street tree?

Littleleaf linden (Tilia cordata). Image by Richard Webb, Self-employed horticulturalist, Bugwood.org

@localecologist asked: What is your favorite street tree? and several of you answered:

• @NYCWW: red maple (Acer rubrum)
• @nativebayarea: In San Francisco I love Ginkgo biloba, Ulmus parvifolia or Phoenix canariensis.  Secretly I wish we could plant more Oaks!
• @xrisfg: pin oak (Quercus palustris)

The fourth response was from @adventureeating who asked, Does this include cities outside of the US? It does! If you missed the original tweet, let us know what your favorite street tree is in the comments section.

Our favorite street trees include the London planetree and the little-leaf linden.  We are also partial to the Ginkgo.

* We were inspired by GOOD magazine's "@GOOD asks" column.
** Responses have been edited for clarity.

Survey says... more parks, open spaces, trees

Several weeks ago we added a poll to the blog asking: What kinds of posts do you prefer? While the response rate was not statistically significant (only 10 readers voted), your feedback is important to us. Based on the votes, readers highly prefer posts about parks & open spaces, trees, "photo du jour," wildlife posts, in that order.

Since the closing of the poll, we've written about blooming Callery pears and Kwanzan cherries, "Tudor" gardens on vacant lots in West Philadelphia, and a street-side garden in Greenwich Village. Today we offer a set of before (Winter '09/'10) & after (Spring '10) photos of the West Village as part of the April 2010 Picture This Photo Contest hosted by Gardening Gone Wild. This month's theme is "green world" and will be judged by Rob Cardillo.

Belated Garden Bloggers Bloom Day

Last week, I photographed the Kwanzan cherries and tulips in the Coles Sports Center, installed by the NYU Garden Shop, but missed the deadline for April's GBBD. Better late than never.

Not Garden variety in Philadelphia

Vacant land parcels, June 1999 (Source: Philadelphia City Planning Commission)

Philadelphia has a knotty problem.  The city has a large inventory of vacant parcels.  Forty-thousand (40,000) in 1990 but "half that" by 2006 according to Maitreyi Roy, a landscape architect with Philadelphia Green.

In 1995, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS) Philadelphia Green program began to clean and green the city's vacant lots.  Under contract with the City of Philadelphia, PHS manages vacant properties in two ways.  One approach is the Vacant Land Stabilization Program whereby some parcels are planted with grass and trees and fenced and another is Community LandCare whereby community groups are paid to clean and mow the remaining vacant lots.

Maitreyi Roy attributes the reduction in Philadelphia's vacant lot inventory to the clean and green strategy: clear the lot, plant grass and trees, and fence it.  (In so doing, by 2006, "one-third of that city's vacant lots have become public property, and some have sprouted as parks and other gathering spaces.")

The grass and trees vocabulary is not what one would call "expressive," at least this is argument forwarded by PEG office of landscape + architecture. PEG has not only designed "a cost-effective way to achieve the same aesthetics of care [as PHS's approach] but provide more expressive diversity with lower maintenance," but has implemented its design in two experimental plots -- "Not Garden" and "Not Again." (I first read about PEG's gardens in the April 2010 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.)

The Not Garden, as the name suggests, is based on the "intricate geometric patterns" of the Tudor knot garden. In Knot Gardens and Parterres: A history of the Knot Garden and How to Make One Today, Anne Jennings echoes PEG's assertion that a (k)not garden offers "expressive diversity." She writes,

the knot garden can be brashly exuberant, romantically nostalgic or quietly simple and chic.

I say that the Not Garden pattern is simple and chic while the Not Again pattern promises to be exuberant. With financial support from PennDesign, PEG staff and PennDesign students "installed two 200 sf prototypes using laser cut geo-textile."

Landscape prior to Not Garden installation (All images courtesy of Keith VanDerSys, PEG office of landscape + architecture.)

One of the two prototypes failed due to the characteristics of pre-existing "creeping and rhizome vegetation." See plot in lower half of the image.

Landscape after Not Garden installation

In the fall of 2009, PEG staff and PennDesign students installed the Not Again prototype on a 1,800 square foot lot, also in West Philadelphia. The vegetation is expected to fill in this spring. Additional partners for the Not Again garden include the Redevelopment Authority of the City of Philadelphia and the Urban Tree Connection.

Not Again "bloom pattern"

Landscape after Not Again installation.

Don't you think PEG's designs would work well on a roof?  I am reminded of Martha Schwartz's "Splice Garden" for the Whitehead Institute and Carnegie Mellon's Posner Center roof garden.

It's blooming inflorescences outside

So what is an inflorescence?  It is the arrangement of flowers into clusters (H.D. Harrington, How to Identify Plants).  The inflorescences of the Callery pear (Pyrus calleryana) and the cherry (Prunus 'Kwanzan') are two of the first arboreal signs of spring in the city. 

Writing in The Urban Tree Book, Arthur Plotnik (yes, this is our go-to urban tree book) describes the Callery pear as "a charming, widely used, [but] controversial street tree."  Why is such a beautiful tree controversial?  In a play on words, the pear is literally and figuratively a blooming tree.  When might the Callery pear be figuratively blooming?  One might hear the Callery pear referred to as a "blooming" tree (where blooming is used as a swear word) when the tree drops its limbs.  The Callery pear is notorious for its weak branching structure.  Here is the University of Florida IFAS Extension description of the branching structure of the Bradford Callery pear (P. calleryana 'Bradford'), an early cultivar:

'Bradford' is the original introduction of Callery Pear and has an inferior branching habit when compared to other cultivars which have since been developed. It has many vertical limbs with embedded bark packed closely on the trunk and grows about 40 feet high by 30 to 45 feet wide but the crown is dense and the branches long and not tapered, making it quite susceptible to wind and ice damage and other breakage.

But right now, the Callery pear and the cherry are literally blooming; gracing our sidewalks with showy and in the case of the pear, strong-smelling flowers.  Plotnik describes the smell as "acrid."  The pear's inflorescences are "corymbs of about 3" in diameter" (UConn Plant Database) while the cherry's are "pendulous clusters of 3-5 blossoms, each blossom 2-1/2" across" (Plotnik).  Enjoy!

The Garden City of Santa Clara, Sevilla

Mystery authors are known for their attention to plot and landscape details and fortunately for urbanists, many mysteries are set in cities. In a previous post, we quoted from the Victoria Thompson mystery Murder on Washington Square which as the title suggests is set in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village.

Today, we offer a quote about a neighborhood in Sevilla, Spain from Robert Wilson's The Vanished Hands. (Original title: The Silent and the Damned.)

 
Intersection of Avenida de Kansas City and Calle Frey Francisco de Pareja

He headed out past the endless high-rise blocks of the Avenida de Kansas City {Kansas City is one of Seville's sister cities} thinking about the exclusive barrio where he was headed. The Garden City of Santa Clara had been planned by the Americans to quarter their officers after the strategic Air Command base was established near Seville, following Franco's signing of the Defense Pact of 1953. Some of the bungalows retained their 1950s aspect, others had been Hispanicized and a few, owned by the wealthy had been torn down and rebuilt from scratch into palatial mansions. As far as Falcon remembered none of these changes had quite managed to rid the area of a pervasive unreality. It was to do with the houses being on their individual plots of land, together but isolated, which was not a Spanish phenomenon but rather like a suburban American estate. It was also, unlike the rest of Seville, almost eerily quiet.... Falcon parked in the shade of some overhanging greenery outside the modern house on Calle Frey Francisco de Pareja.

 
"Individual plots of land" along Calle Frey Francisco de Pareja

 
Across Calle Carmen Laffon - "a Spanish phenomenon"

We started this post by remarking on the acute observatory skills of mystery authors.  Here is how Robert Wilson describes his approach to writing:

My first job (the easy part) is research and, because my books are initially inspired by setting, this usually involves some travel and then a hell of a lot of reading before I'm confident enough to start writing....

Two questions: One, if you are a writer, what is your first step in drafting your work? Two, what are your favorite descriptions of cities in works of fiction?

Dispensing greenaids to the L.A. River and beyond

 
Greenaid "seedbomb dispensary" along the L.A. River, photo courtesy of David Fletcher, Fletcher Studio

David Fletcher, principal at Fletcher Studio, teamed up with Daniel Phillips and Kim Karlsrud of Common Studio to design a "seedbomb dispensary" for L.A. River re-vegetation. The dispensary or Greenaid was designed as an exhibition piece. We first read about Greenaid on the L.A. at Home website.

 
Seedbombs, photo courtesy of David Fletcher, Fletcher Studio

Each dispensary is stocked with three seed recipes. The Coast Live Oak recipe is a mix of Quercus agrifolia (coast live oak), Juglans californica (California walnut), Muhlenbergia rigens (deer grass), and Salvia spathacea (hummingbird sage) seeds while the Cottonwood recipe is composed of Populus fremontii (Fremont cottonwood), Salix exegua (narrowleaf willow), Carex praegracilis (clustered field sedge), and Juncus patens (spreading rush) seeds. The third recipe - Sycamore - contains seeds of Platanus racemosa (California sycamore), Fraxinus velutina (velvet ash), Juncus torreyi (Torrey's rush), and Agrostis exerata (spike bentgrass).

 
Recipes, photo courtesy of David Fletcher, Fletcher Studio

Imagine seed mixes for your local ecology! You can make your own seedbomb with clay, compost, and seeds "in the ratio of 5:1:1 with water to bind" according to the instructions at Guerrilla Gardeners. Or you can contact Common Studio and Daniel and Kim "will develop a seed mix as well as a strategic neighborhood intervention plan in response to the unique ecologies of your area."  What seeds would your seedbombs contain?