Tag: New York City

Preliminary notes to a diagram of Occupy Sandy

If I were you, I’d take some time to read Adam Greenfield’s Preliminary notes to a diagram of Occupy Sandy:

Occupy Sandy’s effectiveness constitutes both powerfully impressive testimony as to what ordinary people can achieve when organized in a horizontal, leaderless, distributed and consciously egalitarian network, and a rebuke to the seeming inability of the centralized, hierarchical and bureaucratic organizations to which our society has hitherto entrusted mission-critical disaster recovery functions to cope with what this responsibility demands of them.

Between last week and this, with the cheerful help of everyone I spoke to (and particular thanks to Easton, Lev and Caitlin), I’ve begun to map the process flow at 520 Clinton: to identify the site’s major discrete functions, chart the flow of people, material, information and other resources between them, and identify any blockages or breakdowns in these flows. The rest of this post consists of preliminary notes toward just such a map.

via Preliminary notes to a diagram of Occupy Sandy « Adam Greenfield's Speedbird.

Into the vault: the operation to rescue Manhattan’s drowned internet

Miles of copper is ruined not only in the cable vault at Broad Street, but also at 20 or so manholes around the area. Even worse, paper insulation in the copper wiring sucks water through the cabling from capillary action, destroying cabling even in dry areas. Levendos says it’s “far too tedious, time consuming, and not effective of a process to try and put this infrastructure back together,” so Verizon’s taking the opportunity to rewire with fiber optics instead. Service has been restored to FiOS customers for over a week — unlike copper, fiber optics aren’t damaged by the water. As part of this process, crews have already pulled fiber up the major corridors — including Water, Broad, and Pearl Streets — to ultimately connect the fiber network to buildings.

Into the vault: the operation to rescue Manhattan's drowned internet | The Verge.

Accessible Transit – NYC Subway Hurricane Sandy Service

With the extensive damage wrought by Hurricane Sandy on the Northeast it is unsurprising that the New York Subway has been especially hard hit. Many of the underground river crossings were fully flooded, but luckily most of the rolling stock has been spared and all of the large capital projects (East Side Access, 7th Line extension, and the Second Avenue Subway) have received little to no damage.

What hasn’t been spared are people’s commute – which has been brutal due to the lack of power below 34th Street. This means that even if all cross river tunnels were dry and open for operation there would be no service due to power loss. Below is the Accessible Transit map for the New York City Subway during partial shutdown. This is the sixth installment of my Accessible Transit Map series – an unofficial map, not sanctioned by the MTA or NYCTA. As in previous maps, I have removed all stations which are not handicapped accessible.

Maps represent corporeal objects, through convenient fictions; a representation which works for a majority of its users. But where are the maps for the disabled or those require additional accessibility? Wouldn’t the mother with newborn in stroller need a different map then those without the need to lug all the accoutrement’s of childhood? Equally, those in a wheelchair require a map different then one which the walking can use. I decided to rectify the situation by editing the maps of major metropolitan transportation systems, in order to create a map for those who are not represented on the official map.

Midtown Detail

Overall Map

You may download the Accessible Transit NYC Subway Hurricane Sandy Service map here:

Other Accessible Transit Maps for your perusal:

Bleecker Street Station finally gets a two-way transfer

For more than half a century, it has stood out as a singularly vexing flaw of the subway system, a glaring inequity that has frustrated generations of riders and has even puzzled transit officials, who have wondered how the situation ever came to be.

But beginning on Tuesday, once the first travelers make their way between a B train and an uptown No. 6 at Bleecker Street, a daily frustration will have given way to a whimsical remembrance: Here stood New York City’s fussiest subway transfer point, the one that went one way but not the other.

via Vexing Flaw in the Subway Is Finally Corrected – NYTimes.com.

In Manufacturing Shift, Made in U.S. but Sold in China

Brooklyn Bridge

After generations of manufacturers in New York and across the United States folded because they were unable to compete with imports, Watermark, with its only factory in the East New York section of Brooklyn, has managed to crack the code. Instead of trying to make Watermark’s products cheaper, Mr. Abel has prospered by first making them more expensive — offering custom-made fixtures unique to each building — and then figuring out how to do that at lower cost. The company has supplied thousands of fixtures to six new luxury hotels and condominiums being built in Shanghai, Macau and Hong Kong.

“The days of mass producing in New York City are gone,” Mr. Abel said. “If you were producing nuts and bolts by the tens of thousands 50 years ago, you’re not going to do it today. But creativity, or uniqueness or design is definitely something that can flourish in New York.”

via In Manufacturing Shift, Made in U.S. but Sold in China.

Tunneling Below Second Avenue

Looking west to a passageway about halfway between 72nd and 71st Streets. Richard Barnes for The New York Times

The New York Times Magazine has an article about the Tunneling Below Second Avenue:

“Geology defines the way you drive the tunnel,” Mukherjee said. The bedrock below Second Avenue and for much of the rest of Manhattan is schist — a hard, gray black rock shot through with sheets of glittery mica. Some 500 million years ago, Manhattan was a continental coastline that collided with a group of volcanic islands known as the Taconic arc. That crash crumpled layers of mud, sand and lava into schist, lending it an inconsistent structure and complicating tunneling: in some places, the schist holds firmly together, creating self-supporting arches; in others, it’s broken and prone to shattering, forcing workers to reinforce the tunnel as they go to keep it from falling.

The first time New York confronted its bedrock to build a subway, in 1900, the method was “cut and cover”: nearly 8,000 laborers given to gambling, fighting and swearing were hired to pickax and dynamite their way through streets and utility lines for two miles. Their efforts were quick — they finished in four years — but their blasts smashed windows and terrorized carriage horses. Tunnels collapsed, killing workers and swallowing storefronts.

Accompanying the article is a short movie directed by Jacob Krupnick of Girl Walk // All Day fame. The video is quite good, and is a step up from the usual NY Times shorts. Go on, and have a view.

In New York Sanitation Dept. Garage, an Art Gallery

In New York Sanitation Dept. Garage, an Art Gallery - NYTimes.com

Mr. Molina, 58, a lifelong New Yorker and a sanitation worker since 1981, began collecting pictures and trinkets along his route about 20 years ago, he said, to brighten up his corner of the garage locker room. Gradually, his colleagues on East 99th Street began to contribute, gathering up discarded gems they thought he might enjoy. As the collection grew, word spread, and workers from other boroughs started to drop off contributions from time to time. Next, building superintendents along Mr. Molina’s route started putting things aside they thought he could use.

In New York Sanitation Dept. Garage, an Art Gallery