East New York and Jamaica Bay

Site analysis

This presentation starts with a mental map of our sites. In this exercise, we have drawn the site by heart without looking at any maps. This way the drawing becomes an abstraction of reality which shows the important big phenomena occurring at the site. And best of all anyone can interpret this simple medieval perspective.

But let’s start at the very beginning, during the last Ice Age of the Pleistocene era, 1.8million years ago. This map shows the large ice cap covering the half of North America. During the Holocene 12.000years ago the ice started to melt.

Rivers and glaciers start scraping the landscape, transforming it more or less in today’s topography. Also the Great Lakes and the Hudson River were formed. This waterconnection to the inland of America was one of the main reasons, why New York became such an important harbor.

On this map you see Manhattan, Brooklyn and Jamaica Bay. These geological sections also show clearly how the Hudson River and Jamaica Bay were scraped out of the landscape.

When we zoom in to Jamaica Bay and East New York we see slow slopes by the bay and one strip of hills more northwest, which must be have been spared by the glaciers. (Water is not drawn on this map because the shoreline is constantly changing, it isn’t a fixed border. But we can say there is a movement of water towards the land since the ice caps from the last ice age were melting, filling the bay with water, and now sea level still continues rising.) Jamaica Bay became a very fertile area with plenty of fish and oysters and a great bird nesting place. At least 55 ecosystems lived there, which is enormous.  Lenape Tribes settled around the bay about 6500years ago, for example the Canarsie and Rockaway Indians. One of the Lenape tribe paths lead through this hill pass.

At this point there was a junction of 2 railroads, part of the Long Island Railroad System. This junction will later become known as Broadway Junction. West-east  there is the Manhattan-Jamaica Railroad. And north-south there is the Manhattan-Beach Railroad.

At this junction the railroadtown New Lots was settled in the 19^th century. Ten families lived there and their principal occupation was farming.

By the 1880s the population has grown immensely due to large immigrations from Europe. The need for housing was high and so they urbanized large parts of Brooklyn. In New Lots this urbanization reached until New Lots Avenue because the small rivers and wetlands didn’t allow large scale buildingactivities.

In the next decades diverse visions were formed for the Bay. Robert Moses , commissioner of parks, wanted to make Jamaica Bay into a great waterpark to protect the wetlands, in contrast to others who wanted an industrial port in Jamaica Bay, like shown in this picture. By 1920 there was a shift to more industrial and commercial activity. Which eventually lead to competitive visions to make the bay into NYC new refuse dumpingsite or to make it into a recreational area.

Anyway, these visions and the growing population lead to hardening of the estuaries and filling of the wetlands to provide more buildingspace, which has a great impact on the biodiversity of the wetlands. These landfills can be made with sand from the bay, from the so-called borrowpits and canals in Jamaica bay, or refuse dumping, like the Fountain Avenue Landfill.

In the 1970s the built environment reached until the Beltparkway and beyond in Howard Beach.

These building activities lead to poor waterquality in the Bay from the 1920s. The impact of the 40 sewage outfalls, the growing population, narrowing of the in- and outlet for fresh water of the bay, and JFK airport, was very harmful for the biodiversity on the wetlands. Even shellfish harvesting had to be stopped, although Jamaica Bay produced between 1/3 and ¼ of the shellfish marketing.

This is when Robert Moses proposed a new concept in the 1930s, the parkways. The Beltparkway was especially designed to protect Jamaica Bay against the impact of urbanization and commercial activities, because people could not get passed this highway. Robert Moses said that if people wanted to visit the wetlands, they could go to the wildlife refuge at Broadchannel next to the Crossbay Boulevard. The Beltparkway also served as a park for the latest form of mobility, the car. Protecting the bay with a highway can be seen as a contradiction in the vision of Moses, since Highways are one of the main airpolluters. But yeah, Moses thought he was doing the best thing for the bay.

 Along the Beltparkway we can define different typologies of borders that show the inaccessibility of the waterfront, like fences, highways, privatized waterfront, and landfills. Especially the landfills are strange phenomena, since they’ve built these artificial hills of dirt and waste, that not only block waterfront access, but also take away any view of the bay.

The landfill is also one of the unbuilt environment typologies that we have determined. Along with community gardens, vacant lots, and the wetlands itself, which is a very diverse landscape from water to mudland, to salt marshes, to reef grass, shrubs and woodland.

The Beltparkway not only divides nature from built environment, but also sustains very different communities on the different lobes along the shoreline. This matrix shows different characteristics per community. For example Howard Beach and Starrlet City show very contrasting results although both communities lay relatively close to each other: Starrlet City is much more dense, the  people earn less money, huge poverty, and most of them are foreign born. And Howard Beach and Mill Basin, which is a very rich community, show very little differences.

The differences in these communities are also visible in the landuse. For this map we made sections every 18degrees and colored them according to the landuse, water and different wetlands.

To better compare these sections we have put them under each other. We see the landuse is very diverse and only howard Beach lays next to the water as a residential area.

When we go back to the Beltparkway we can see that it connects the shore and and moves around Brooklyn.

When we add the other roads like Atlantic Avenue and Linden Blvd, we see a clear east-west direction, so from Jamaica towards Manhattan. There are some north-south connections, but these are not as important.

Most subwaylines follow the same east-west direction, except for theL-lineover here  and the A-line that goes to Far Rockaway. We can conclude that there is clearly a division in east-west strips.

Around Atlantic Avenue we can determine a commercial strip, the grid, and at junctions of subwaylines and Atlantic or Linden Blvd we see industry, and around the Beltparkway big infrastructures accessible by car, like the Gateway Mall, parkinglots at Starrlet City and Canarsie.

When we  zoom in, we clearly see the morphology of the different east-west strips. The commercial strip around Atlantic Avenue, with  different and bigger grains. The grid that continues until Linden Blvd with mostly residential housing. At Linden Blvd the grid stops. And then there are areas with bigger grain, like industrie and public housing, and as biggest grain the shoppingmall and the parking lot at Starrlet city. So basically this map shows how the progression of the build environment happened towards the bay. And remember how the water moved towards the land because of sea level rises, resulting in an interesting zone where water and land meet.

The area between New Lots Ave and Broadway junction has a very rich diversity of typologies, since this is the oldest part of East New York. East New York is also referred to as the museum of failed public housing typologies. However the 1 - 4 family unit is the most common typology. We started a specific research on these houses. We were surprised by the diversity of solutions for this collective housing problem. Some typologies have one communal entrance, others have one door for each family. Some older typologies has been modified to serve multiple families. Each solution also implies a different solution for car parking, which has a big influence on the streetscape. This is still an ongoing research but we believe that the rich diversity of typologies in east new york's fabric is a quality that certainly should be preserved.

So over all we can conclude that the site East NY-Jamaica Bay is very diverse. The different strips, the wetlands, the borders and the different identities around the bay. All on the mental map again as a synthesis of our research, which is probably even more understandable right now.