Brooklyn Navy Yard’s New Lab. Photo by Rich Gilligan courtesy of New Lab.
From today to Sunday is the 2017 Jane’s Walks, a global festival of citizen’s walking tours that celebrate the ideas of Jane Jacobs, the economist and urban life proponent. New York City’s version is organized by the Municipal Art Society.
In this curation of Jane’s Walks, we’ve selected tours across the five boroughs that are led by certified experts – architects, historians, urban planners and organizations directly involved in developing various spaces. Descriptions adapted from the Jane’s Walk website. There’s also much more to celebrate about Jane this month, with her recent birthday and the release of the documentary, “Citizen Jane.”
Brooklyn Navy Yard with Architect Jonathan Marvel
Take a walk through the Brooklyn Navy Yard with architect Jonathan Marvel, who designed the stunning new New Lab, which preserved a historic 1899 hangar. The building has been transformed into a high-tech design and prototyping center, a place where designers, manufacturers, fabricators, and institutions converge to form a hub for innovation and education. Marvel is also working to envision a new entry point for the Brooklyn Navy Yard through the ground floor of Building 77. The 1 million-square-foot building located on Flushing Avenue will contain co-working office space and a ground floor marketplace and manufacturing center.
On the east end of the Navy Yard, the award-winning Naval Cemetery Memorial Landscape creates an experience of landscape and planted form that offers retreat, remembrance, and engaged observation while honoring the layered, 200 year history. The site is an unmarked burial ground from the late 19th and early 20th centuries at the Brooklyn Navy Yard complex and now the first open space node along the Brooklyn Greenway.
Today, May 5th at 4pm
2. Swimming Across Canal Street
The “Swimming Across Canal Street” tour is led by our very own Robert Brenner, who gives Untapped Cities’ Gritty Old Times Square tour. Today most people think of Canal Street as the shortest distance between the Holland Tunnel and the Manhattan Bridge. But Canal Street is also a living remnant of New York City’s gritty, industrial, vice-ridden past. Brenner started hanging out on Canal Street as a teenager in the 1970s. It was an exciting milieu of artists, punk rockers, hip hoppers, squeegee men, sex workers, Jewish radicals, and Chinese housewives. Though it is gentrifying rapidly, there are still traces of its seedy history—if you know where to look. Along the way, we will make brief side excursions into Soho, Tribeca, Little Italy, Chinatown, and the Lower East Side. The tour will finish up with an (optional) sit-down meal in a Chinese restaurant with a shocking past. And we will answer the timeless question: was Canal Street ever really a canal?
Times: May 5, 6, and 7 at 11 AM
3. A Film Industry Grew in Brooklyn
Vitagraph Smokestack
The Midwood Development Corporation, in collaboration with the Friends of Vitagraph, will lead a Jane’s Walk that explores the history of the film industry in Midwood, Brooklyn. At Avenue M and 14th street, The Vitagraph Company of America built the nation’s first modern film studio in 1906, where it operated until 1925 as one of the most prolific moving picture companies in the world, making Brooklyn the epicenter of film production long before Hollywood. Bought by Warner Brothers in 1926, which later drew NBC to build a neighboring studio complex, Vitagraph established a significant legacy of film and television production in Midwood up until 2014.
Architectural remnants of the old studio buildings still exist; the walk will include a tour of those structures, as well as an overview of Vitagraph’s significant contributions to early film history, including its prolific output of classic silent films, the world’s first movie stars, and the impact of Vitagraph’s success on the social and economic development of Midwood. The walking tour will culminate at MDC on Avenue M and 15th Street. Other information, including a formal display of historical documents and photographs of Vitagraph Studio and early 20th Century Midwood, will be available for review.
Time: Sunday, May 7th at 2:30 PM
4. From the Himalayas to Lighthouse Hill: Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art
On Staten Island, this walk led by Meg Ventrudo, the Executive Director of the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art, will begin at the LaTourette House at the La Tourette golf-course and will end at the Tibetan Museum. We will see cute cottages and grand homes and the oldest example of Himalayan architecture in the United States. Participants will learn about some of the noted personalities who lived on Lighthouse Hill and the history behind some of the street names. At the conclusion of the walk, please stay at the Tibetan Museum for bagels and coffee and a film screening of “Walking in Circles” a film about a group of English housewives who trek to the remote region of Zanskar in the Himalayas.
Time: Saturday, May 6th at 1:45 PM
5. Visit the Roosevelts at their NYC Home
Explore the lives and legacies of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt at their former New York City home on 65th Street. For a new look at Roosevelt life and how it was shaped by the city, attend a tour at the Roosevelt House at 10:00am or noon or 2:00pm. Designed by Charles A. Platt, the Colonial Revival double townhouse was home to Franklin, Eleanor and Sara Delano Roosevelt from 1908-1941, and was acquired by Hunter College in 1942. Recent renovations by Ennead Architects preserved the building’s interior and added classrooms and an auditorium for public programs. Hear about the Roosevelts’ family lives, civic activities, and governmental positions as they transformed the nation and the world with FDR’s Four Freedoms and Eleanor’s work at the United Nations. While at the house, enjoy the new exhibit on “The New Deal in New York City, 1933-1944.”
Time: Saturday, May 6th at 10 AM, 12 PM and 2 PM
6. Newtown Creek Alliance Walk in Greenpoint
Join Newtown Creek Alliance project manager Will Elkins and the organization’s historian Mitch Waxman for a walk past the birthplace of Mobil Oil; a visit to the new Broadway Stages Green Roof with its panoramic views of the Newtown Creek, the DEP’s Newtown Creek Waste Waster Treatment Plant, and the NYC skyline; and the North Henry Street project to discuss the restoration and revitalization of the Newtown Creek.
The Green Roof, which Newtown Creek Alliance has partnered on with NYC Audubon, Broadway Stages, and Alive Structures, is a 21,000-square-foot bird-friendly installation, funded by by the Office of the New York State Attorney General and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation through the Greenpoint Community Environmental Fund. A tributary of Newtown Creek called “unnamed canal” is located at Greenpoint’s North Henry Street just a couple of blocks away from the Green Roof. The North Henry Street project site has been used as an oil refinery, a Municipal trash incinerator, and as a marine waste transfer station during the era of ocean dumping. Today, it sits hidden behind a sewer plant, contaminated and forgotten. NCA has begun the “North Henry Street Project” to remake and reimagine the roughly 350 feet of shoreline at unnamed canal.
Sunday, May 7th at 12 PM and 1:30 PM
7. Queens International Night Market
Photo by Sharon Medina-Chavez via Queens International Night Market
Join the founder of the the Queens International Night Market (or someone from his team) to walk through the market while it is open this Saturday night. The night market is a celebration of the ethnic and cultural diversity that makes Queens and NYC so great. Through the vendors, the food, the art and merchandise, the free performances, and also through the visitors, our mission is to highlight the rich international tapestry of NYC.
The $5 price cap on food helps ensure that the event is uniquely accessible to as broad a demographic as possible. The 6pm-midnight operating hours make it an affordable, family-friendly alternative to the bar and restaurant scene.
The Night Market has been a popular (and at times too popular) addition to the cultural landscape of Queens and NYC. In its first year, it served as a launching pad for around 75 new entrepreneurs and small business owners.
Time: Saturday, May 6th at 9 PM
8. Ridgewood Reservoir Tour
Walk the Ridgewood Reservoir with Matthew Malina, the founder and Director of NYC H2O. The Ridgewood Reservoir in Highland Park is a 50+ acre natural oasis that straddles the border of Brooklyn and Queens. Built in 1859 to supply the once independent City of Brooklyn with high quality water, it became obsolete with the addition of new reservoirs in the Catskills in the 1950’s and was decommissioned in the 1980’s. Since then, nature took its course in a perfect case study of ecological succession. A lush and dense forest has grown in its two outside basins while a freshwater pond with waterfowl sits in the middle basin.
The tour will walk through several of the courtyards and includes a stop at Lewis Mumford’s house, and ends at the designated Phipps Garden Apartments, model tenements designed by Clarence Stein built in 1931. In addition, the tour will highlight renovation projects completed since designation in 2007. The tour will start in the architect’s storefront office.
Vitagraph Smokestack
