MLA Program, City College of New York

BRONX RIVER SCIENCE FAIR Our Bronx River advanced studio hosted its annual Science Fair on May 1. Students presented their not-quite-complete work to our roving guests as a way to kick-start more targeted feedback. There’s still time to incorporate these perspectives during the weeks preceding our final reviews! Thanks to all the great alumni and guests who showed up to provide feedback and wise counsel. Grandaisy and Saba’s kosher pizzas in the house, always appreciated. We’re recruiting along the MLA pipeline as well, with a few incoming MLA students in the mix, as well as baby Ursula! You can never be too young or too beautiful to love City College!

BROOKLYN BOTANIC GARDEN Happy 201st Birthday, Frederick Law Olmsted!! Our MLA students celebrated in style yesterday with big skies at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, with a special guided visit led by the garden’s amazing president (and our former NYC Parks Commissioner!) Adrian Benepe. Adrian brought us to his office in the garden’s quirky McKim Mead & White headquarters building, where he shared an original, little-known 1910 drawing by the Olmsted Brothers, “Preliminary Plan for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.” The preliminary plan makes sense of the garden’s cherry tree “esplanade,” which was intended to connect a grand staircase from the Brooklyn Museum (never built) to a garden gate at Flatbush Avenue (never built). The 100-year-old problem of the missing staircase, which would have resolved the 24-foot sectional drop from the high vista of the terminal moraine down to the esplanade of cherry trees, was finally solved by the elegant, switchback paths (fully accessible!) and sculptural retaining walls with gorgeous plantings that comprise the Robert W. Wilson Overlook. Designed by Weiss/Manfredi, the Overlook was completed in late 2019. Thanks Adrian for your boundless energy and enthusiasm for the wonders of scented tulips, ancient apple trees, Frankenstein maples, de-potted monkey puzzle trees, and BBG’s finest, the yellow magnolia! @brooklynbotanic #yellowmagnolia #monkeypuzzletree #scentedtulips #olmstedbrothers

FEEDING THE FUTURE Our ASLA NY Student Chapter hosted its sixth annual RISING URBANISTS symposium at City College on Friday April 21, the eve of Earth Day! Themed “FEEDING THE FUTURE,” the event was a brilliant success, thanks to the leadership of our City College team, club president Casey Breen MLA’23 and vice president Mary Daly MLA’24. Assistant Professor Zihao Zhang kicked things off with a critical look at ChatGPT’s thoughts, while musing on wild wheat and tech-savvy farming. Session 1 URBAN FARMING, moderated by Courtney Behrens MLA’24, took no prisoners thanks to the strong voices and mission-driven efforts of DK Kinard and Chantel Kemp of GrowNYC as they described their work and challenges at the NYCHA Gardens. They were joined by Onika Abraham Lee of Farm School NYC, an urban farming school that equips its students with the tools needed to be grassroots leaders in the food justice movement. Session 2 REFRAMING THE COMMONS, moderated by Will Thomson MLA’24, hosted Nathan Hunter and Journei Bimwala, the powerhouse advocates behind the Bronx River Foodway, a unique urban foraging site at Concrete Plant Park. Great conversations about the power of “weeds” and medicinal plants! They were joined by Candace Thompson of Solar One, who shared updates on their razed and rebuilt Stuy Cove Park and their educational program centering food, climate, and justice. Candace took the opportunity to school this audience of budding landscape architects and designers—get in the field, and think about the place, its history, its advocates, and its maintenance team! A LOCAL LUNCH was followed by a Spitzer Meadow tour with the Meadow Matts (Mathew Brown MLA’23 and Matt Garczynski MLA’23) and engaging breakout sessions with Adam DeMartino of Smallhold, Sigrid Jacob of the NY Mycological Society, and Zihao Zhang and his FarmBot. KEYNOTE SPEAKER was our brilliant alum Charles Cross BSLA’05 of the Detroit Collaborative Design Center, who shared urban farming, harvesting, and provisioning success stories from Motown! Our director Catherine Seavitt Nordenson wrapped things off with thoughts on seeds and systems for a New Green Revolution focused not on yield, but nutrition.

RISING URBANISTS: FEEDING THE FUTURE Don’t forget to register for this amazing conference happening on Friday, April 21. FREE FOR STUDENTS!! See the link in our bio to register. Opening Remarks | 9:45 Zihao Zhang, PhD, Assistant Professor, CCNY Session 1: Urban Farming | 10:00–11:15 DK Kinard & Chantel Kemp, GrowNYC Domingo Morales, Compost Power Session 2: Foodways | 11:30–12:45 Nathan Hunter & Journei Bimwala, Bronx River Alliance Candace Thompson, Solar One Lunch & Spitzer Meadow Tour | 1:00 Session 3: Breakouts | 2:30–3:45 - Cultivating Community through Fungi Club Membership - Sigrid Jakob, NY Mycological Society - The Future Is Fungi - Adam DeMartino, Smallhold - Robots in the Garden: Innovations and Obstacles in Urban Agriculture -Zihao Zhang, Spitzer School of Architecture Dean’s Remarks | 4:00 Marta Gutman, PhD, AIA, Dean Keynote | 4:15–5:45 Charles Cross, ASLA, Detroit Collaborative Design & The University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture Closing Remarks | 5:45 Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, FASLA, AIA, Director of Landscape Architecture Program, CCNY Register here: /event/ccny-2023-rising-urbanist-conference/ We look forward to seeing you there! - City College ASLA-NY Student Chapter ___ Art by George McCracken MLA ’25 @georgemccracken

POSTCARD PINUP It’s Postcard Pin-Up time in the Bronx River studio, with the smallest footprint on the wall of the year! Each student created three novel postcards, riffing off some of Detroit artist Ray Johnson’s Mail Art genre. It’s a quick way of projecting Deleuzian time-image visions of their design propositions while developing critical design-thinking skills. Looking forward to some of these arriving in various mailboxes around the city soon! #postcardpinup #mailart #rayjohnson #ccny #landscapearchitecture

RISING URBANISTS: FEEDING THE FUTURE The City College ASLA-NY Student Chapter is hosting its 6th annual Rising Urbanist conference on Friday, April 21st. This year’s theme will be Feeding the Future. We will open conversation with experts to understand urban food systems in New York City and beyond. We will emphasize the multiple ways in which we can engage with urban food systems through panel discussions, technology demonstrations, and opportunities to sample dishes from a variety of local restaurants. See link in bio for registration!

DETROIT ART PARKS Reclaiming vacant lands by local residents and artists deeply engaged with their communities is something we’ve seen in both the Bronx (Drew Gardens at East Tremont, Hunts Point Riverside Park, Rocking the Boat) and throughout Detroit. The mural initiative in Detroit is huge, with BLKOUT Walls, Detroit Mural Project, and others intentionally engaging Black street artists who are representing the vibrant communities and cultures of the city. Public art environments in public spaces have a long history here, most famously through the ongoing work of Detroit artist Tyree Guyton at the Heidelberg Project. Guyton has been confronting so-called blight in Detroit by transforming his own east side neighborhood and its houses into an outdoor art gallery since 1986. On the west side at Grand River and West Grand Boulevard, Olayami Dabls has recast his neighborhood’s vacant lots along a highway verge into the extraordinarily sculptural installations and mosaics of the Dabls Mbad African Bead Museum and the N’kisi House, celebrating African heritage. And art and community are a part of our studio’s own wheels, provided by the Detroit Bus Company, which provides free field trip transportation for underfunded public schools and youth programs in its fabulously painted fleet of buses, painted by local artists. That’s it for our Detroit posts!! Our huge thanks go out to our wonderful City College alum and advisory board member Charles Cross BSLA’04, the boots-on the-ground Director of Landscape and Urban Design at the Detroit Collaborative Design Center, University of Detroit Mercy. Your help with coordinating our itinerary was invaluable! @olayamidabls @heidelbergproj #detroitarts #publicspaces #artparks

DETROIT’S EASTERN MARKET DISTRICT Detroit’s historic Eastern Market is the city’s traditional food hub, operating since the late 19th century as both a wholesale and resale public market. Unlike the Hunts Point Co-op Market in the Bronx, a massive truck-serviced industrial food distribution network set behind walls, Eastern Markets vendors and the open-air farmer’s market sheds are integrated into the urban fabric. Nearby, we visited Tepfirah (Tee) Rushdan, co-director of education at the Keep Growing Detroit farm on Orleans Street, a 1.38-acre stie along the recently transformed Dequindre Cut Greenway. Keep Growing Detroit’s mission is to cultivate a food sovereign Detroit, in which the majority of the fruits and vegetables consumed by Detroiters are grown by residents within the city’s limits. The organization views the practice of urban agriculture as a mode of food justice, particularly for those who do not have access to healthy foods. It’s more than a small urban farm: the organization provides its vast network of members with garden resources, transplants and seeds, and agricultural education, giving them agency over their access to food. Together with the Oakland Avenue Urban Farm and the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, Keep Growing Detroit created the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund in 2020, which provides financial support for local Black farmers throughout the city to access and purchase vacant lands and create new farms. 📸 @lite.brown #detroiturbanfarming #dequindrecut #detroiteasternmarket

DETROIT’S NORTH END URBAN FARMING Our studio has been studying the Hunts Point neighborhood in the Bronx, where the world’s largest food distribution hub lies adjacent to a virtual food desert burdened with poverty and high rates of asthma. In Detroit, food insecurity persists as well, due to systemic racism, disinvestment, extreme poverty, a lack of fresh healthy food, and more recently, the pandemic. These conditions, along with a shrinking population and “blight removal” has led to an abundance of community-based urban farms emerging from abandoned empty lots in the city. We met with Jerry Ann Hebron, executive director of the Oakland Avenue Urban Farm in Detroit’s North End. She’s transformed multiple blocks of the neighborhood into Detroit’s first community land trust, addressing gentrification and displacement by securing nearly six acres of land for the permanent benefit and empowerment of this neighborhood. The farm is a community hub, with a Saturday market, farmer training and support, youth programming, and a Black-owned People’s Food Co-Op. The neighborhood is strengthened with community arts and music initiatives through the efforts of Reshounn (Sun) Foster and the Oakland Avenue Artists Coalition. We viewed the mushroom house on King Street, numerous public art murals supported by BLKOUT Walls, and the American Riad canopy at Euclid Street, all efforts that build community, strengthen place, and thwart gentrification. Nearby, we visited a number of artists’ studios and Michigan Hot Glass at the Albert Kahn-designed Russell Industrial Center. Thanks to Nathan Sellers, Albert Young, Darcel Deneau, and Ralph Plumley for hosting us! @oakland_ave_urban_farm #urbanfarming #detroitnorthend #ccnymla

DETROIT INDUSTRY As part of our explorations of the Bronx River, we took a historical dive into the industries that grew up along the river—gunpowder mills, snuff mills, concrete plants, coal gasification, etc. There was even an automobile factory in Bronxville, home to H. Ward Leonard’s 1901 “Century Tourist” Knickerbocker Car! These cars were hand-assembled…so, seeing the radical transformation that Henry Ford’s moving assembly line brought to the nascent automobile industry in Detroit was striking. Ford’s 600-acre River Rouge Factory, designed by Albert Kahn and opened in 1928, hits another scale entirely. The visible pollution of the River Rouge, a 127-mile long tributary that flows into the Detroit River at Zug Island, is extraordinary. Ford produced every component of his automobiles on site—and everything was floated up along the River Rouge and adjacent railroads, from coal for steel production, to sand for glass manufacturing, to rubber for tire production. Thanks to the permission of the United Auto Workers Union, our studio had the extraordinary privilege of taking a factory floor tour of the newest factory at the Rouge complex, the Ford Dearborn Truck Plant. We viewed the production of the iconic Ford F-150 and Raptor pickup trucks on a moving assembly line with over 6,000 workers on multiple 7-hour shifts. The factory features one of the world’s largest green roofs, an onsite orchard, and 80,000 honeybees. After an incredible lunch at the family-owned Slows BAR-BQ, we continued our journey along the Detroit River in the snow, visiting the newly-opened Riverside Park at the foot of the Ambassador Bridge, the iconic 1975 Hart Plaza and Dodge Fountain by Isamu Noguchi, and the 982-acre Belle Isle, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted in the 1880s. #detroitparks #detroitindustry #riverrouge #isamunoguchi

DETROIT CULTURE(S) Our Bronx River / Hunts Point studio recently returned from a fantastic trip to Detroit, Michigan, an analogous (yet very different) city where we explored some parallel ideas concerning industry, culture(s), food access, and community art. We’ll share a few posts here, beginning with our explorations of CULTURE(S) in Motown. Yes, it’s all about the car! We visited Edsel and Eleanor Ford’s Tudor-style house, designed by famed factory architect Albert Kahn, in Grosse Pointe Shores, with its wide, flat landscape by Jens Jensen. In 1932, Edsel (the son of Henry Ford) and Detroit Institute of Arts’ then-director William Valentiner commissioned Diego Rivera to paint the fresco murals entitled “Detroit Industry” on the walls of the museum’s Garden Court. What a joy to see these gorgeous, luminous frescos!! (Oh, and the artist Tyree Guyton painted our TIME school bus, part of the Detroit Bus Company’s fleet, that expertly drove us around the city!). A few blocks away from the museum, we visited the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant. This former factory was built in 1904, and was birthplace of Henry Ford’s 1908 Model T. It’s now the home of dozens of antique Ford cars! And we got a private tour from Detroit’s Best Docent. After dark, Detroit Wine Bar kept it going with DJ LADYMONIX spinning house music all night long. #detroit #edselford #eleanorford #jensjensen #albertkahn #diegorivera

TIBBETTS BROOK Students in Patty McKee and Anna McKeigue’s FINDING LOST WATER studio shared their Tibbetts Brook design work with students, faculty, alumni, and guests at our “Science Fair” style review! Lots of great ideas across the walls, and great one-on-one conversations. #tibbettsbrook #landscapearchitecture #ccny