Garden Architecture

After 15 years, this greenhouse of redwood and polycarbonate, has finally come out from under tarp and mouse droppings. It was purchased for my project at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens, in 2001, assembled amidst the acrid haze of September 11, and the structure became a refuge during a very dark time. The company, Gardenhouse, generously donated their profit by giving the structure to my project at their cost.

Our site, formerly Rex's dog pen, was excavated last fall and filled with Class 5 gravel (a mixture of 1 inch or less rock, sand and some clay), hand compacted by me this spring, and laid with the cheapest concrete pavers from a preferred regional box store. Redwood is great for this kind of structure because it really doesn't warp and is one of the best rot-resistant woods. The polycarbonate held up well, but I hosed down the panels last fall and the hard water left spots inside the double walls. Oh well, still have a greenhouse! 

Because thunderstorm winds are a concern, Betsy made L-shaped pins from two-foot long, 1/2 inch rebar which holds down anchoring straps at seven points along the perimeter. As they rust, the pins will bind to the soil which provides extra grip. Also around the perimeter, I laid landscape fabric and 2 inch granite gravel dug from nearby "landscaping" in anticipation of high speed rain runoff from the 45-degree pitched roof, weeds, and the little boost of rock's heat retention. The brick edging is an unfortunate compromise.

I am renovating a portion of our front porch deck so that I could use the old, long cedar planks as framing for our raised herb bed. After ensuring the rusty screws and nails were out, I ripped the boards on the table saw to cut out the rotted sides. The heart of these boards are perfect, so if you are looking for free raised bed material I would look for a deck carpenter in your area. Our boards haven't been treated in at least sixteen years, if ever, and each had a nice coating of algae and lichen. Still, I placed the up-side out and the underside toward the planting. You could do the same if you are concerned or unsure about the treated nature of free, old deck boards.

After building the first raised bed I rather liked the structure over the hastily made front yard vegetable beds of last year. I had potatoes to plant and thought a raised bed would be easiest for "soiling up" mid season. I tilled, built the two side walls out of 14 foot old cedar deck boards, added humus from the base of a giant old oak tree that spits out a fine, peaty substance from a portal 5 feet up its trunk, then added the rotting straw that covered the garlic beds, and finally several cubic feet of compost. I left the 40-inch end boards off so I could run the tiller through to mix these ingredients in. 

I dug a trench and planted the potatoes at about 12 inch spacing, covered the potatoes, then dug the center trench and so on. In a raised bed with rich soil I am anticipating that I can tighten my spacing. Don't take my word for it, however, see Rodale's 7 Ways to Grow Potatoes.

The greenhouse, nearly completed (still rocks for the back and side, one vent operator to install and some window cleaning). We moved our New Mexican Opuntia and Agave inside the greenhouse, mostly to avoid the cold rains, but also to get them more sun than the house could provide. The front of the greenhouse will be tilled and seeded for grass, then stepping stones or maybe brick walkway from the garage pad to the door. 

Inside the greenhouse, on a quick-built table made of cedar taken off the house last fall, are starter trays and cold-stratified milkweed seeds of seven varieties. I am generally two weeks behind on most projects, so these got started a little late, but milkweed enjoys warm soil sprouting (you'll notice even well-established plants are some of the latest to come up). The milkweed seedlings are sprouting and now share the table with summer vegetable seedlings and strong-looking starts purchased last week at one of our area's better unique and heirloom variety vegetable nurseries -Shady Acres.

If you are thinking of a free-standing greenhouse like this, I'd like to offer some considerations. Make sure you have a solid base to build on that is level as these greenhouses won't piece together well if they are bent out of form by off-level pads. Make sure you place it in a sunny location! Don't laugh, if you build in fall or early spring it could be quite sunny, but not from May through October. Do consider wind and overhanging branches. Gardenhouse says it can withstand a wind load of 85 mph. Why chance it? Make sure to anchor it in some fashion, put it in an area that provides a windbreak yet doesn't allow a large limb to come down on it (note that home insurance usually doesn't cover structures like these). Finally, if you have lots of paper wasps, they will love to explore your new greenhouse as a fine place for their nests of stinging motherf$#ers. I was stung four times last year, mostly because I put my hands near a nest I could not see. Paper wasps are very observant and will watch you as you get close. They will leave you be if you do not get too close, but if you do, in a flash one or more will drop on you and leave its painful stinger. In short, you may have to spray a long term pesticide on the rafters, as difficult as that decision is. Wear a mask, cover your skin and eyes, because it's hard to avoid getting doused when spraying up into a pitched roof. Don't forget places like under a table. The long term stuff should last all season, meanwhile you can use clear sealant to close up gaps that allow creatures in, and with some luck, the next year you will not have to spray.

High Time For High Line

There has been one major park in all of New York City that has managed to go from waste land (or structure) to park land in 10 years, that is the High Line. Recent money donated has given the completion of the new parkway a boost. In fact, as the New York Times pointed out, "This could be the friendliest public/private venture ever attempted in New York City." With a total cost of about $150 million, the High Line has created a stir at under half the cost of the proposed Brooklyn Bridge Park. Of course, no one can complain about the private capital connected to the High Line, as that it is of its essence. While the city owns most of the High Line trestle and NYC Parks appears to have some role to play, it is not a stretch to view this parkway as a privately funded and maintained park with public access.

As a public/private partnership, it makes the most sense that this new parkway has a dual personality -its public and private function. In this sense it is the most viscerally dual-purpose, built landscape that I can think of. On the one hand it is a high fashion, high design plinth for the the viewing of NYC architecture. On the other, it is a lowly, industrial structure, re-visioned as a metaphor for a car-less NYC. One aspect serves the vanity of private institutions and developers' dreams, the other serves the public imagination of a future NYC.

The High Line is an elevated parkway connecting destinations and residential neighborhoods, not unlike Vaux and Olmsted's original NYC parkways designed for horse, carriage, and pedestrian strolling. Unlike Robert Moses' parkway system (connecting parks throughout the region via the gentler travel of non-commercial road traffic, with screen plantings designed to provide a serene, bucolic driving experience), there is only modest screening provided by the planting design. In fact, this new parkway functions as a platform for taking in the sights of lower and midtown Manhattan, auspiciously relying on the local architecture. Imagine it as a stroll through a sculpture garden, but the sculptures are the size of buildings. If you live or work in one of these new buildings, you can take the step back to appreciate how wonderfully your own starchitect designed sculpture resides in the New York landscape. If you do not, you can stroll the High Line, panoramistic foldout in hand, ready to identify any building seen in the growing architectural landscape. This is the essence of the private High Line.

On another level we have the romanticization of the railway ruin. Functioning and defunct railways have been seen as picturesque components of landscapes for decades, and their minimal infrastructure is easily incorporated into park designs. The ruins have hosted many parkways throughout the country, mainly as part of the rails to trails initiative. In Paris, the Promenade Plantee created a formal garden from an elevated railway. Many cities are now looking at conversion of their dilapidated high rail. In our own city, Gantry Plaza State Park had, less than fifteen years ago, incorporated industrial rail into its park design. The incorporation of rail into park design, then, is nothing new as landscape design needed to make sense of the wasted, post-industrial landscapes -often the only new space open for park development in our urban centers. What is new, however, is the attitude of an elevated railway park in NYC.

The primary public aspect of the High Line is its manifestation of the changing attitude towards street vehicles and traffic. It does this by anticipating the elimination of the vehicular traffic below, rather ironically through the preservation of the conduit for a mode of vehicular traffic previously considered too dangerous to keep at street level. It allows us to walk along what most of us recall as the unsafe terrain of train tracks and in doing so, gives us a glimpse of a future where walking on the street is possible and safe. The High Line removes vehicular traffic from the urban experience in an apolitical, non-threatening fashion high above the streets, out of sight and mind of the political body of racing vehicles below. In fact, the elevation of the High Line mimics the sense of civic idealism to which it speaks while, to the speedster below, perhaps it's the floating spectre of a return to biological speed.

There will be those who lament the loss of an urban "wild" space. They may have disdain for the "high design" approach. I sympathize with the sentiment for the tangled, messy spaces and the sense of discovery they contain. Yet I won't harp on it, that debate is over, it is built. I think the planting design looks good and the hardscape is nicely textured. I have noticed, however, the lack of what every overpass in this city has come to acquire -the protective chain link fence. Will it grow one in the future? I think we can all hope not.

This landscape offers the kind of close-quartered plant and hardscape experience that I expect to require high-maintanence. Time will tell how well-suited the plants are to this environment, but I am willing to give the High Line designers the benefit of the doubt. This park experiment has been well-funded, and that usually means better care for plants and hardscape. In fact, managing the horticulture and park operations will be a horticulturalist formerly of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. How well the High Line is maintained and at what cost, in conjunction with how much use or abuse it gets will be instructive for any future, parkway proposals.

As we watch the collapse of the American auto industry, and entertain the idea of a city free of personal automobiles, what new urban landscapes will we dream up? Look out Broadway, your next.

The first section of the High Line has been completed, from Gansevoort Street to 20th Street, and is projected to open in June 2009.

Thoughts on a Stroll Through Prospect Park

Last weekend (the hot one, not the wet one) the weather was for sprawling and strolling. So I strolled. All the way to the Farmer's Market to buy ramps, via the Midwood trails.

Prospect Park is amazing in a city filled with really good parks. We've seen a lot of restoration and it looks great. Yet I've always been let down by what I perceive to be lax maintenance and re-construction in the southern end, around the lake. This area is not only my entrance to the park, but one of my favorite places.

A woman pushing a stroller around a large muddy puddle.

The north side of the lake shows a restoration moving forward, defeating the phragmites and restoring plantings along the shore. The remaining perimeter appears unmanaged as we encounter compacted earth, belgian blocks falling into the lake or overwashed by it, trash littering the phragmites colonies, and muddy disintegrating pathways.

The lake sits in a large basin which extends out to the paved park drive. Rain water collects at the pathways. At the base of Lookout Hill there is erosion carrying soil deposits over the roadway. In both areas there needs to be an investment in rebuilding the pathways above grade and re-configuring drainage patterns.

This decrepit staircase leading to the Concert Grove should be fixed. Why has it been like this for years? The under-privileged staircase leads to a really sweet spot in the park that is rather under-used. Why? Disrepair like this is the visual cue that lingering here won't be pleasant. The grove has park benches, seasonal plantings, as the name indicates -large plane trees, a pavilion, and a statue of Abe Lincoln. Yes, thank you ghost of Robert Moses, the woefully ugly Wollman Rink is there as well, but not too visible from the benches.

Walk through the Concert Grove and you may notice the staircase on the left leading up the slope. Take the staircase up and not 50 feet from it you'll find the desire line on the right leading back down to the Concert Grove. Desire lines are a product of poor design and human will. I'm not sure which came first, the staircase or the foot path. Either way, plant in a way that interferes with the desire to avoid the staircase.

As I strolled up the East Drive, I see a family eyeing the Audubon Center. There is black chain link fencing between them and their destination. The horse trail appears to head in the direction they want to go, but they have strollers and are hesitant to get stuck in the gravelly sand. They ask me how to get down there. I tell them to walk up East Drive and they'll see the ramp that allows them down to the Audubon Center. Yet I know that they may be easily confused; it will feel too far as they overshoot their destination, then backtrack.

When people see their destination, yet the designed pathway to it is perceived to be out of the way, people begin to make their own path. The park management response is to create obstacles to this instinct -the chain link fence.

The photo above shows you the entrance to the ramp which takes you to the boathouse, crossing over the horse path, from East Drive. It is a poor solution to the problem, which is this: the Audubon Center is not meant to be approached from the East Drive. This is because the Boat House was built on top of Olmstead's design along with a number of other classical-styled buildings in the park. The McKim, Mead, and White period created a number of "destinations" in the park out of sync with the Olmstead design.

I finally made it to the area known as Midwood. It's been under restoration, and generally looks good.

It has a lacework of trails that can be disorienting to anyone unfamiliar with its meandering. Not a stone's throw away people by the hundreds are sprawled on the grass in barely any clothes paying little attention to those around them. However, in the woods, somewhat wary are the eyes of the few whose paths you cross. The wood isolates, and few bask there as they do the field.

When you come upon the aging Rick's Place sign you feel as if there is a history here you couldn't possibly know. Was he murdered here, did he just hang out here, or both. Maybe he planted trees or watched birds here. The old sign adds to the feeling of stumbling on a ruin, a ruin of one man's habits and preoccupations.

Midwood and its neighboring Ravine are the closest thing Prospect Park gets to the Ramble of Central Park. Like its Central Park cousin, it's filled with desire lines.

I exit the woods and make my way to the farmer's market at Grand Army Plaza. On my way back, I take to the road.

Adirondack Two-Step

Last weekend I traveled to Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks. Friends invited us to stay for a couple of days in their sister's cabin on the lake. While there, my friend Mark and I were given this puzzle: 15 two by six by eights and a slope -make a staircase that senior citizens can navigate from the driveway to the cabin. Use no additional materials (except nails). Here are the results, however unfinished.

looking up


looking down

angle shot

I did express concern about water flow (amongst other problems) down the hillside. Duly noted by its owner. Update & Note: Last weekend a torrential downpour emptied the soil from the staircase. Way too many plants and topsoil are turned over to build these steep-sloped hillside get-aways. Summer thunderstorms wash that loose soil right into the lake.