One of the things that attracts my attention in cities all over are the leftover spaces where things were once made. The faded grit and glory of a city’s formerly industrial buildings and districts have an aesthetic appeal in their decay—a theme that has attracted many an artistic and entrepreneurial eye. Perhaps because of this appeal (along with their general undesirability and low rents), the buildings that once housed large-scale manufacturing, warehousing, markets, and other functions of a city’s industrial past have over time frequently become homes for new types of creative and productive activity. Spaces and places that appear to be neglected and disused are often teeming with new life. With little or no renovation, generations of artists, workers, small businesses–producers of all kinds of things–have moved into cities’ industrial lofts, warehouses and factories, either alongside or replacing more traditional industries. In this way, the industrial infrastructure of so many cities has provided ongoing support for growth and innovation, even while larger interests and policies assume these spaces and activities are dead.

Artist ESPO penned a “Love Letter to Brooklyn” on the walls and ramps of a garage in downtown Brooklyn. The garage belongs to Macy’s; the department store commissioned the work. ESPO is Steve Powers, a graffiti writer who is known for making poetry larger than life, in a graphic, block-letter style that plays with language and imagery that offer a kind of nostalgic take on the advertising and signage that once adorned the urban landscape that now forms his canvas. It’s good stuff.

In a strange series of events, I spotted this work for the first time while on my way to a public tour of the Brooklyn Detention Center, newly re-opened just down the block. An entirely different way to see eternity.

All's Fair in Love and Brooklyn, photo by Luna Park via thestreetspot.com

Always a good companion for sleuthing, the internet led me from ESPO’s exteriors to his interiors:

ESPO in his studio, photo by Todd Selby via theselby.com

How incredible is the Stockholm Subway? Why have I never seen images of it before? The Coolist has a little post about great metro stations around the world, and while I’m pleased of course to see the dramatic shots of the Washington, DC system, MAN. I would like to pay Stockholm a visit just for the exposed bedrock experience of the blue line.

From Superfund to sludge parks, I’ve missed many opportunities to chronicle my life in Gowanus these last few months. Why start now? Here are pictures instead of words, and a link to an article on the Whole Foods site and another to the future home of the Pratt studio’s framework plan.

Photos from this time last year on the Gowanus Canal.

Every building footprint in New York City. Data source: New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunicatons.

The arrival of spring in New York has me thinking about bicycles, obviously, and I was reminded of the photographs on Downtown From Behind, a photographic project that captures cyclists in portraits taken from behind on streets throughout downtown Manhattan. The .com version of the project lets you browse by neighborhood. The concept, they say on the blog, is ”an environmental portrait for each street and its subject.” Giving precedent to the streetscape and the city, the photographer (photographers?) transform their subjects into just another part of the city they say they are shaping; many of the portraits are of artists, designers, entrepreneurs, academics, etc., all people making some kind of creative impact on downtown.

The sort of pseudo-anonymity (in the images themselves, at least–the captions give it all away) achieved in the photos is an interesting choice, and captures quite a bit of what I think many people find appealing about zipping through the city on a bike. One minute you’re here, the next you’re gone; you could be hollering the lyrics to R&B classics as you ride by New York’s teeming throngs and not have to give it a second thought, like Times Opinionator writer Melissa Febos, in a piece this week called, “Look at Me, I’m Crying”:

Although I see plenty of stony-faced striders on the sidewalks of New York, the faster people are moving, the more they tend to reveal. When riding my bike through the city, I frequently sing aloud — mostly old soul tunes, but everything from country to rap music — and I hear other bikers doing it as well. Because who cares? If anyone stares, they’re staring at your back and you’re not around long enough to notice. I don’t do it for attention; it just feels good to belt out “Tenderness” with impunity.

A moment of privacy in the middle of the street.

[Images: http://downtownfrombehind.tumblr.com/]

With repeated exposure to a place, there is a difficulty in collecting fresh impressions of the buildings, spaces, storefronts, even the people you see every day. There is an immunity to detail that is in some ways intrinsic to the urban living experience; the ability to tune out extraneous information can be like a coping mechanism. I live just off of Myrtle Avenue in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, so when asked to record my experiences as a user—in my case, a pedestrian—of this area, I wanted to find an approach that would hopefully counter my detail-immune state while providing insight in the process of gathering information, or at least demonstrate some new connections after the fact.

I set out to gather found objects, advertisements or flyers, textures through rubbings, and so on in order to create a literal collage of my sensory experiences of the street. Partly because it seemed like an interesting more focused study, and partly because Myrtle Avenue is kept remarkably clean by the local Business Improvement District sanitation service (thanks, guys), I abandoned the concept of collecting objects, and focused instead on collecting impressions of color.

Walking block to block, I noted dominant color schemes, highlighting colors, pops of paint and graffiti, reflective glass, as well as the textures and points of light that gave what I was seeing depth or focus. Without particular regard as to whether or not the dominant color impression was related to buildings or other structures, signage, storefronts, individual design elements and sometimes even interior spaces, I built the color map by recording what I saw as I walked. The finished map begins on the lower left-hand corner with Classon Avenue. Myrtle Avenue itself runs between two columns, all the way to Vanderbilt Avenue at the top right.

I was able to make a few observations from this mapping exercise, maybe most significantly that the most exciting and interesting uses of color come from the more informal land uses or expressions. The trends in building materials result in a major monotony of hues, with brick red and brown dominating the strip, punctuated by sea green glass, dark greens and royal blues. The map implied a social-spatial element to color usage, too; more unusual variations seemed to occur in the blocks furthest east, a gradual departure in from the more subdued tones (and higher rents) of the Fort Greene end of the strip.

Color, its ability to inform and influence mood, is a critical element of design that may be taken for granted in most exterior spaces. Yet many urban places, neighborhoods, commercial districts, and so on, can be defined by their dominant hues, whether they’re the result of intentional design, building materials, the type of trees planted on the street. Similarly, the influence of small pops of color, seen, for example, on a mural on the fence of a vacant lot, define the feeling of a place or space more dramatically than the neutral tones of an area’s typical building materials or vegetation.

A color analysis is naturally subjective, but can maybe highlight–literally–elements relevant to aesthetic appeal, harmony, and mood response of a user in a particular space.

Musician and designer Alexander Chen’s Conductor, at www.mta.me, is an interactive sonic map of the New York City subway system, based on Massimo Vignelli’s 1974 diagram. The subway runs in an accelerated 24-hour cycle, with the temporal element of travel determined by the estimated travel time for each train. Trains depart on schedule.

The city symphony plays as a train crosses the path of another, the “string” formed by each separate path of the traveling train plays a tone, with the pitch determined by the length of each string. Users can help the music along, plucking the subway strings with their cursors. The result of Conductor is a simple, almost meditative piece that makes a functional play on Vignelli’s map design, the angular and geographically distorted lines of his system plan lending themselves well to the visual and tonal impact of Chen’s revision.

Chen describes his project here, and Massimo Vignelli discusses his map in the documentary Helvetica.

[Image: Massimo Vignelli, 1974 MTA system map]

[Image: Carsten Peter, National Geographic]

In the Naica mines of northern Mexico, near the city of Chihuahua, an underground city of giant crystals form a truly unreal landscape. Hundreds of thousands of years old, the giant selenite crystals existed for millennia in a completely closed environment; a true geode, the Naica Cuevo de los Cristales is completely covered in the transparent “macrocrystals,” some of which have grown up to 12 meters in length. Discovered in 2000 by two brothers working in the Naica silver and gold mine 1,000 feet below the surface of the earth, the crystals in this cave are some of the largest ever to be found.

A few years ago National Geographic reported on the cave, with a description of a kind of intra-terrestrial voyage that few will ever have:

It takes 20 minutes to get to the cave entrance by van through a winding mine shaft. A screen drops from the van’s ceiling and Michael Jackson videos play, a feature designed to entertain visitors as they descend into darkness and heat. In many caves and mines the temperature remains constant and cool, but the Naica mine gets hotter with depth because it lies above an intrusion of magma about a mile below the surface. Within the cave itself, the temperature leaps to 112 degrees Fahrenheit with 90 to 100 percent humidity—hot enough that each visit carries the risk of heatstroke. By the time we reach the entrance, everyone glistens with sweat.

It makes sense that an extreme of geological formation would happen under extreme conditions–I think not just about the brief but physically exhausting and possibly fatal trips of the researches and reporters, but also of the daily experience of the miners working this deep in the mine.

The crystal cave must be an unbelievable visual experience, but those most interested in this find are looking deep into the crystals themselves, hoping to uncover information about geological history from materials trapped inside.

By examining bubbles of liquid trapped inside the crystals, García and his colleagues pieced together the story of the crystals’ growth. For hundreds of thousands of years, groundwater saturated with calcium sulfate filtered through the many caves at Naica, warmed by heat from the magma below. As the magma cooled, water temperature inside the cave eventually stabilized at about 136°F. At this temperature minerals in the water began converting to selenite, molecules of which were laid down like tiny bricks to form crystals. In other caves under the mountain, the temperature fluctuated or the environment was somehow disturbed, resulting in different and smaller crystals. But inside the Cave of Crystals, conditions remained unchanged for millennia. Above ground, volcanoes exploded and ice sheets pulverized the continents. Human generations came and went. Below, enwombed in silence and near complete stasis, the crystals steadily grew. Only around 1985, when miners using massive pumps lowered the water table and unknowingly drained the cave, did the process of accretion stop.

[Image: Carsten Peter, National Geographic via Daily Mail Online]

Fallen obelisks, pillars of light, the crystals are enormous, some several feet thick. On the floor and walls are clumps of smaller crystals, sharp as blades and flawlessly transparent. [We proceed] slowly, careful not to damage the crystals, which are made of selenite, a form of the common mineral gypsum. Selenite is translucent and soft, easily scratched by boot heels, even fingernails. Despite the ice suits, the heat and humidity are oppressive. I remove the mask for a moment and suck in wet, hot air. My lungs want to refuse it. There is a damp, heavy scent of earth and an absolute stillness. Miserable conditions for humans, a perfect nursery for crystals.

There has apparently been some push to establish the Cavo de las Cristales as a UNESCO World Heritage Site–as of the writing of the National Geographic article, the owners of the mine had installed steel doors to try to deter looters and trespassers, but larger preservation efforts were uncertain. The fragility of the crystals is threatened, as the cave is now exposed to foreign elements and the wear and tear caused by both visitors and the blasting operations of the Naica mine. That such a site, possibly unique on Earth, might go unpreserved seems almost as unbelievable as its existence in the first place.

[Quoted text by Neil Shea, Cavern of Crystal Giants, National Geographic, Nov. 2008]

Watching them in the trolleys, or along the inexhaustible reduplications of the streets of their small tradings and their sleep, one comes to notice, even in the most urgently poor, a curious quality in the eyes and at the corners of the mouths, relative to what is seen on Manhattan Island: a kind of drugged softness or narcotic relaxation. The same look may be seen in monasteries and in the lawns of sanitariums, and there must have been some similar look among soldiers convalescent of shell shock in institutionalized British gardens where, in a late summer dusk, a young man could mistake heat lightnings and the crumpling of hidden thunder for what he has left in France, and must return to. If there were not Manhattan, there could not be this Brooklyn look; for truly to appreciate what one escapes, it must be not only distant but near at hand. Only: all escapes are relative, and bestow their own peculiar forms of bondage.

It is the same of the physique and whole tone and metre of the city itself. You have only to cross a bridge to know it: how behind you the whole of living is drawn up straining into verticals, tightened and badgered in nearly every face of man and child and building; and how where you are entering, even among the riverside throes of mechanisms and of tenements in the iron streets, this whole of living is nevertheless relaxed upon horizontalities, a deep taproot of stasis in each action and each building. partly, it suggests the qualities of any small American city, the absorption in home, the casualness of the measuredly undistinguished: only this usual provincialism is powerfully enhanced here by the near existence of Manhattan, which has drawn Brooklyn of most of what a city’s vital organs are, and upon which an inestimable swarm of Brooklyn’s population depends for living itself. And again, this small-city quality is confused in the deep underground atomic drone of the intertextured procedures upon blind time of more hundreds on hundreds of thousands of compacted individual human existences than the human imagination can comprehend or bear to comprehend.

It differs from most cities in this: that though it has perhaps a “center,” and hands and eyes, and feet, it is chiefly no whole or recognizable animal but an exorbitant pulsing mass of scarcely discriminable cellular jellies and tissues; a place where people merely “live.” A few American cities, Manhattan chief among them, have some mad magnetic energy which sucks all others into “provincialism”; and Brooklyn of all great cities is nearest the magnet, and is indeed “provincial”: it is provincial as a land of rich earth and of this earth is an enormous farm, whose crop is far less “industrial” or “financial” or “notable” or in any way “distinguished” or “definable” than it is of human flexh and being. And this fact alone, which of itself makes Brooklyn so featureless, so little known, to many so laughable, or so ripe for patronage, this fact, that two million human beings are alive and thriving there, invests the city in an extraordinarily high, piteous and inviolable dignity, well beyond touch of laughter, defense, or need of notice.

James Agee’s Brooklyn Is: Southeast of the Island: Travel Notes first appeared in print in Esquire magazine in 1968; it was written in 1939.

[Image: Red Hook trolley, Jennifer Gardner]