sustainableflatbush.org

Last night I attended a lecture at the Museum of Natural History by 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of the Green Belt Movement, Wangari Maathai. What an inspiration! For those not familiar with her organization,

The Green Belt Movement provides income and sustenance to millions of people in Kenya through the planting of trees. It also conducts educational campaigns to raise awareness about women’s rights, civic empowerment, and the environment throughout Kenya and Africa.

Because she is such a charming and charismatic person — not to mention a visionary — I not only didn’t mind that she shamelessly (with great humor) plugged her autobiography “Unbowed”, I’m now planning to read it at the first opportunity.

Park(ing) Day 2007 in New York was a big success, with more than 20 temporary park installations throughout the city!

Streetfilms has a great piece that shows most of the locations; if I hadn’t been hanging out in the grass at Cortelyou Rd. Park my first choice would have been to spend the day at 1st St. B.C. (Before Cars) with the Lower East Side Girls’ Club, sipping on one of their bicycle blender smoothies!

Streetsblog’s recap has a nice mention of our spot:

Seeing pre-schoolers participating in an outdoor music class — in a parking space — on Brooklyn’s busy Cortelyou Rd., you definitely get the feeling that Park(ing) Day has, in just a few short years, transformed from a quirky art activist event into the beginnings of a broad-based grassroots movement with meaningful social and political implications. On Friday, Park(ing) events were set up in about 150 spots across 42 U.S. cities along with events in five or six other countries, according to the Trust for Public Land.

In PlaNYC 2030, the Bloomberg Administration said that it wants to build a park within 10 minutes walking distance of every neighborhood in the city. On Friday, a bunch of New Yorkers went out and began implementing that plan, simply by turning on-street parking spaces into pocket parks and public plazas.

Many Park(ing) Day visitors mentioned to me how much we need more open space and greenery that everyone in the neighborhood can enjoy; hopefully having Cortelyou Rd. Park for one day has inspired people to imagine ways of making that happen.

Cleaning up (photo by Keka)

More photos at our Flickr album here.

Thanks to everyone who visited the park!

Special thanks to: Keka (Co-Instigator); Kathy and Suzana (Setup); Jody (Music); Natalia, Thiago and Garry (Cleanup)

Yesterday was Park(ing) Day, and Sustainable Flatbush celebrated by creating Cortelyou Road Park!

This neighborhood is full of greenery — majestic old-growth trees and beautiful landscaping — but it’s all private property. We are seriously lacking in community gardens, all-age recreational facilities, and public parks closer than the Parade Ground and Prospect Park (more than a mile away for many of us). The Tot Lot on Argyle Road is popular with kids and parents (as one parent mentioned to me yesterday, it’s so full that “the kids are on top of each other”), but there are very few options for older kids or unaccompanied grown-ups. So Park(ing) Day — an international event, co-sponsored in NYC by Transportation Alternatives, The Open Planning Project, and the Trust for Public Land — seemed the perfect opportunity to create a public park for everyone.

We built it, and they came: a public space with real grass, trees, art supplies, games, wi-fi, and live music!

photos by Keka

More photos (and video) to come!

THis FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 21st is PARK(ing) DAY!

Sustainable Flatbush is bringing Park(ing) Day to Cortelyou Road, between Argyle and Rugby (that’s Brooklyn, baby)! Our park will have grass, plants, seating, and games! Hours will be approximately 10am - 6pm.

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“PARK(ing) Day is a one-day, global event where artists, activists, and citizens collaborate to temporarily transform parking spots into “PARK(ing)” spaces: temporary public parks. On Park(ing) Day volunteers reclaim parking spots within their communities and build temporary, public “parks” for neighbors to enjoy. The parks are inspired by the creativity of the many volunteers who develop them and may be dedicated to a bit of lawn space, trees, flowers, art installations, seating areas or a place for kids to play.”

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Come visit the park! Read a book, play a game, drink a coffee, have a snack…

Especially welcome: Musicians (bring instruments!), artists (bring paints!), kids and their parents, pets and their owners, picnickers, bloggers (we’ll try to find a spot with wi-fi), crossword/sudoku/backgammon/yahtzee players … you get the picture. Hang out and keep us company as we create a new neighborhood park for the day.

more info on Park(ing) Day is available from its creators, Rebar Arts Collective in San Francisco, its national co-sponsor Trust for Public Land, and its New York City co-sponsors The Open Planning Project and Transportation Alternatives. Streetfilms also has a video on last year’s Parking Spot Squat in Park Slope. 

For a local (NYC) perspective on Park(ing) Day and its objectives, check out this article in Gotham Gazette, “Replacing Parking with Parks”.

We interrupt the “What-I-did-on-my-summer-vacation” essay to give a brief report on this week’s activities back in Brooklyn…

The 30th Annual Flatbush Frolic street fair took place last Sunday on Cortelyou Road. Sustainable Flatbush was out promoting recycling and biking, and I acquired my new favorite T-shirt:

photos by Keka

Thanks to Eve Martinez from NYC Department of Sanitation for bringing all the great recycling materials, and to Transportation Alternatives for the magazines and 2007 bike maps — we gave ‘em all away!

More photos from Portland here:

• Views from bridges and mountains
• Bicycle-loving graffiti and architecture
• Stormwater management strategies
• Gorgeous produce at the Farmers’ Market
• Did I mention the bikes?

Have a look!

Next up, a report and photos from the Sustainable Energy in Motion Bike Tour…

While in Portland, I was eager to check out some of the projects spearheaded by a local organization called City Repair (”an organized group action that educates and inspires communities and individuals to creatively transform the places where they live”). One of their traffic calming “intersection repairs” turned out to be a few blocks from where I was staying, so I encountered it by accident on the way to breakfast:

These two women are also not locals, and when they asked me about the origins of this traffic circle I was proud to be able to speak with some knowledge about it (thanks to all the Portland promotion on Streetfilms).

This sheltered bench, located outside the Hawthorne Hostel, is an example of a centuries-old natural building technique called “cob” construction. It is one often used by City Repair because cob is an easy material to work with for those with little or no experience — requiring no forms, bricks, or wooden framework — and is well-suited to sculptural structures like this one. As I would soon learn on my upcoming sustainability-themed bicycle tour, cob is not made from corn cobs! It is made from clay, sand, straw, water, and earth, and formed by hand into bricks or blobs or whatever. After the structure is established the material can be shaped by hand like modeling clay. Portland is filled with cool hangout spots like this, thanks to City Repair’s annual Village Building Convergence (”a 10-day event in which neighborhoods activate to build shared public places that they have envisioned, designed, funded, and will maintain for themselves”).

What can I say? I’m impressed. And trying to envision a what Brooklyn version would look like. And planning a visit to next year’s Convergence.

Having heard (and seen) amazing things about the city of Portland (OR)’s alternative transportation infrastructure from Clarence Eckerson of Streetfilms, I planned my itinerary to spend a little time there prior to the bicycle trip. Portland’s reputation is well-deserved: light rail and buses both allow bikes on board, there is a great system of bike lanes, and automobile drivers really do accomodate walkers and cyclists to an almost startling degree (one driver waited patiently for me to cross an intersection on my bike even though HE had the green light!). They also have a MUCH more generous amount of bicycle parking than we do here, including many examples of curbside automobile spaces being reallocated for bikes:

I saw several of these bike parking areas in the Hawthorne District alone, and they are obviously getting a lot of use. In all of New York City, the ONLY one I know of is in Williamsburg, next to the Bedford Avenue L train station (have a look here). It was installed this summer and is reportedly extremely popular. Hopefully many more to come!

For those who haven’t guessed (or, perhaps, even thought about it), I was out of town for most of August on a series of adventures. Not the least of these involved getting to work on the day I left, which happened to begin with Brooklyn’s first tornado of record (see Brooklyn Eagle article here).

Being awakened by thunder and rain several hours earlier did not prepare me for the chaos created by this storm. I had heard that the morning commute might be difficult, but upon arriving at the Newkirk Plaza subway station I learned that there was no service whatsoever on the B or Q lines, and many others in Brooklyn as well.

photo by Flatbush Gardener

The reason in our case was fallen trees on the tracks, a problem that would not be solved any time soon. After discussing options with my fellow thwarted travelers — should we take the bus to a different subway line? (No guarantees it’s working either.) A car service to Manhattan? (None available.) Skip work and go out for breakfast instead? Followed by the beach? (Not an option for me, though well-utilized by others!) — I determined that the only truly reliable method of getting to lower Manhattan would be by bicycle. Given the weather (already hot and humid at 10am) and the need to lug a significant amount of equipment to my meeting, this was not appealing and I dragged my feet for some time before succumbing to logic. In the end my travel time was less than an hour (I am NOT a fast rider) and provided an opportunity to survey the damage to my neighborhood along the way. This turned out to be quite shocking: along my route alone there were at least a dozen trees down, several cars destroyed, and streets blocked with debris (Flatbush Gardener has more photos and analysis of the damage). But bicycle turned out to be by far the best mode of travel that day, and even gave me a small workout in preparation for one portion of my upcoming travels: a sustainability-themed bike ride/camping trip in Oregon…

(to be continued!)