CNU New York

All members of CNU New York are invited to a tour of Liberty Harbor, an urban infill TND by Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company. The following description is from their website, DPZ.com:

Voted the State of New Jersey’s best new development of 2001 by the American Planning Association. When complete, the neighborhood of Liberty Harbor North will be the most thorough exemplification to date of the principles of the New Urbanism. Due to its high-density housing, multiple transit connections, and pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use streetscape, this development is likely to serve as a textbook model for healthy urban growth in the future. Located just a half mile west of the Hudson River on the north bank of the Morris Canal, the 80-acre brownfield site in Jersey City boasts dramatic views of Lower Manhattan to the east and the Statue of Liberty to the south. A new light rail will provide two stops in the neighborhood; and the Grove Street PATH Train, with service to both Lower Manhattan and Midtown, is a five-minute walk away. A water taxi offers convenient access to Lower Manhattan, and New York Waterways has expressed interest in providing large-scale ferry service in the near future. The site is bordered by the Van Vorst neighborhood to the east and the Hamilton Park neighborhood to the north– two historic neighborhoods worthy of emulation.

The plan is organized as an open network of small city blocks, designed to take optimal advantage of the beauty and convenience of the site. Its structure most closely resembles that of the Upper West Side, where a few wide avenues lined with tall buildings are connected by many narrow streets lined with townhouses. Most of the smaller streets are oriented southward toward the canal, with the central street directed at the Statue of Liberty. Three larger-scale thoroughfares cross the site on an east-west axis, the southernmost of which connects to a linear park along the canal. Together with Liberty State Park on the other side of the canal, this park provides public access to the waterfront and serves as a permanent greenscape along the neighborhood’s southern border. The plan, as approved by the City, contains: 6,000 housing units, with a gross residential density of over 100 units per acre; 500,000 sq.ft. of retail; 4,000,000 sq.ft. of office space; 8 acres of parks/open space; and a school and other civic spaces.

The tour is Saturday, December 11 from 11 am to 2 pm. For more information, contact info@cnu-ny.org

Join us for CNU New York’s First Event

CNU New York, the newest chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism, will hold its first public event on Wednesday, April 25th at 6 PM at the Municipal Art Society, 457 Madison Avenue at East 50th. The President of the CNU, John Norquist, will speak with Hilary Ballon, the Curator of the much talked-about museum exhibition ‘Robert Moses and the Modern City: the Road to Recreation.’

While Mayor of Milwaukee, Norquist tore down an inner-city highway that divided the city and replaced it with a boulevard and mixed-use buildings that knit the city’s fabric back together again. As President of the CNU, he has worked with the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development to tear down housing projects built in the 1950s and 1960s and to replace them with mixed-use, mixed income neighborhoods.

‘Robert Moses and the Modern City’ reevaluates the career of the great planner and administrator who built many of New York’s highways, housing projects, parks and infrastructure, particularly examining the large-scale projects for which he was both praised and vilified. Near the end of his career, Jane Jacobs famously defeated Moses, but now one hears in New York architectural circles that “Jane Jacobs was wrong, and Robert Moses was right.” Once again there is a call for urban mega-projects.

Moses’s multiple projects to house the middle class in the city are promoted as models. Even his highways like the Cross Bronx Expressway are praised, because they are part of an automobile infrastructure that’s considered important. But Norquist is a consultant for a group in the Bronx that wants to tear down Moses’s Sheridan Expressway and replace it with traditional streets and buildings. The New York debate on the city’s master builder will be enriched by this perspective from the President of this national urban design movement, “the most important phenomenon to emerge in American architecture in the post-Cold War era,” according to the architecture critic of the New York Times.

Wednesday April 25th, 2007.
Reception at 6 pm; Talks and Q & A from 6:30 – 8:30 pm.

Space is limited. For reservations, please send an e-mail with your name and the number of places desired to RSVP@cnuny.org.