A mistake, or mis-reading of an article led me to these woods in Staten Island. I’ve been doing some research on Staten Island. Despite its development and highways it contains many remnants of its historical natural landscape. I had read that Olmstead had a working farm in the mid 1800s in Arden Woods. So I …
While in Berlin, I didn’t get to the Stasi museum as planned. Or the Pergemon Museum. My longest bike rides were at night when I couldn’t really see anything. I only had one sausage the entire week I was there! But I did spend several hours at the Gemäldegalerie. I had originally planned to just …
This large topographic map of the NYC watershed areas created by the DEP in 1939 is now on display at the Queens Museum! It was originally commissioned for the 1939 Worlds Fair. But it never was displayed at the fair. Some say the reason was because it was too big for the space allotted for it …
Abandoned villa near Matisse Museum in Nice, France. Roaming around Nice for a weekend with Stephanie, who has a conference.
Today it just so happened that I finished reading WG Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn on the subway as I was riding the subway to the Upper East Side to see Mark Dion’s The Phantoms of the Clark Exhibition at the Explorers Club. Interestingly, both works refer to a trip and in both pieces history, colonialism, and …
I recently visited Bucharest with my family. While I was there I met Anca Benera an artist who lives in Bucharest. We had a coffee in this lovely cafe, Atelier Mecanic, where everything is constructed from salvaged materials and mechanical equipment from communist-era factories. While we chatted my son Huck enjoyed working on and with …
The ladder I made to get over the wall at the beach on Buttermilk Channel, Governors Island. Apart from this ladder there is no access to the shoreline on the entire island.
So Near and Yet So Far is working title for an outdoor, public art installation which draws attention to the fact that New York City is surrounded by water but has few places to directly experience the shoreline.
Tour de Scoot, 2011 As part of Open House New York, kids were invited to scoot in a midtown “Privately Owned Public Space”, to draw attention to a series of little known secret pedestrian shortcuts through midtown. This event was a collaboration with with Friends of Privately Owned Public Space (FPOPS), an organization that successfully …