Local Ecologist

To access Pinehurst Avenue from 181st Street, one must climb a three-tiered stairway.  The stairs were built in 1924 .  I found the staircase accidentally and was pleased to see it.  One of the most interesting sections of The Greatest Grid deals with modifications to the 1811 Grid due to above 155th Street.  In Andrew H. Green's 1868 plan for Northern Manhattan, large swaths of "hills, valleys, and cliffs" were preserved, though implementation of Green's plan was incomplete.  (Read more about the grid here .) One of the ways that developers accommodated to the area's topography was to construct stairways.  In the book, the West 215th Street Steps, built in 1911 by the city, are featured.  Other street stairways in Manhattan can be found at 187th Street and Fort Washington Avenue, at 215th Street and Broadway heading, and an abandoned stairway at Haven Avenue between 172nd and 173rd Streets, according to the Henry Hudson Owners Coalition. Another Manhatta

Image: Athens, Greece from Acropolis via Stefanos Kofopoulos, Wikimedia Commons ( source ) Yesterday, Jan. 22, 2013, NPR correspondent Joanna Kakissis reported about the impacts of Greece's economic austerity policies the country's urban forests . In her interviews of Athenians about the "fog of woodsmoke" hanging over the city, Kakissis learned that residents are burning cheap firewood, discarded Christmas trees, doors and windowsills, olive trees from country homes, and protected forests. Local environmentalist Grigoris Gourdomichalis observed that the city's urban forest was decimated during World War II: residents substituted wood for cooking and heating after the "Germans and Italians took the heating oil and coal during the war."  The forest recovered and Gourdomichalis would like it survive this crisis.  (The Greek Reporter ran a story about the austerity-induced deforestation in December 2011.) Athens, Greece is not the only city whose

Image: cover of The Greatest Grid , edited by Hilary Ballon via Museum of the City of New York ( source ) Manhattan's grid may be "the greatest" one but there are many precedents.  The Law of the Indies, Philadelphia, Savannah, Albany, the Public Land Survey of the U.S., Christopher Wren's post-fire plan of London, Edinburgh, and Washington, D.C. are described in  The Greatest Grid , a book (and exhibition of the same name) about the city's master plan of 1811 edited (and co-curated) by Hilary Ballon. Image: Public Land Survey System via National Atlas ( source ) Charles V developed the Law of the Indies which was used to design Spanish colonial cities.  The grid of square blocks "400 feet per side arranged thirteen blocks by nine blocks with 40-foot wide street" was centered on an undeveloped square (p. 49).  Similar to the Law of the Indies, the Public Land Survey System of the U.S., proposed by Thomas Jefferson , developed in divided the

Image: View of 2nd Ave. Looking up from 42nd St., 1861, in The Greatest Grid, edited by Hilary Ballon, p. 81 ( Source : New York History blog) I came across a review of books about Boston's environmental history written by Andrew W. Kahrl in a recent issue of the Journal of Planning History.  (Note: the title of this post is taken from the review's title: "Locating Boston's Place in Environmental History".)  Kahrl reviewed five books: Bay Cities and Water Politics: The Battle for Resources in Boston and Oakland, by Sarah S. Elkind (1998) Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston, by Michael Rawson (2010) Remaking Boston: An Environmental History,  edited by Anthony N. Penna and Conrad Edick Wright (2009) Mastering Boston Harbor: Courts, Dolphins, and Imperial Waters, by Charles M. Harr (2005) Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston, by Nancy S. Seasholes (2003) From these books, Kahrl argued two main points about Boston's environmental h

Spring 2010 Winter (January) 2013

Results of soil liquefaction after earthquake in Christchurch, February 23, 2011 (source: www.nzraw.co.nz ) The neighborhoods that now sit in the liquefaction zone of the 2010-2011 earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand will not be rebuilt.  Glenn Stewart, PhD., writing for The Nature of Cities blog , write that the Avon-Otakaro ecological and recreational park has been proposed to replace this "residential 'red zone'." I don't know if the properties in Christchurch's "red zone" are part of a buy out program but the Nashville, Tennessee properties that were flooded in May 2010 were covered by the  Metro Water Services Floodplain Buy-Out Program .  Tim Netsch, assistant director of the Nashville Metropolitan Board of Parks and Recreation, was a participant in the Storms and Climate Change session of the  2012 International Urban Parks Conference  held in NYC.  According to Mr. Netsch, 15 inches of rain fell in 36 hours (or 420 billion g