Urban Placemaking Lab: Hillel Place

Article by Jackson Chabot & Daniel Eizo Miyagusko [UPM]

Afternoon Rush Hour Traffic at Flatbush Junction.

Jackson Chabot

STUDIO MEMBERS: Kristin Brown; Claudia Castillo de la Cruz; Jackson Chabot; Jaiyi (Grace) Cheng; Alex Dewitt- Connelly; Daniel Eizo Miyagusko; Lindsay Fischer; Molly Greenburg; Daniela Hurtarte; Saba Jaberolansar; Harsh Prajapati; Jane Kandampulli; Dhanya Rajagopal; Koichiro Tamura; Nasha Virata.

FACULTY: David Burney; Meg Walker

THE LAB

Each Fall, the incoming cohort of the Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment (GCPE) Urban Placemaking and Management (UPM) students take an introductory Lab course to gain invaluable fundamental Placemaking skills. For the Fall of 2017, the course was based around researching and supporting the case for converting an existing street, Hillel Place, into a pedestrian only plaza under the New York City Department of Transportation (NYC DOT) Plaza Program. This interactive collaborative project incorporated elements of research, community engagement, and street level evaluation. These elements and others built on a collective package of the courses Placemaking learning and contribution. The client for the Fall 2017 Lab was The Junction Business Improvement District (BID), led by Kenneth Mbonu. Additionally, the course was taught by Professors David Burney and Meg Walker whose professional and academic experience were instrumental to the learning process. The immediate study area for this Lab was Hillel Place, a small street just off of the busy Flatbush Junction in South East Brooklyn. Flatbush Junction is defined by the intersection of Flatbush Avenue and Nostrand Avenue. While this was the immediate site, to best understand the context of the project, the whole study area included the surrounding neighborhoods up to a ten minute walk away. The full extent of the site is shown in the attached image with several neighborhood points highlighted on the map.

Afternoon Rush Hour Traffic at Flatbush Junction.

Jackson Chabot

CHALLENGE

The Flatbush Junction is uniquely located at the intersection of Midwood, Flatbush, East Flatbush, and Flatlands neighborhoods, where a host of diverse communities and activities meet. Within this intersection is The Junction BID, on a street currently blooming as a shopping district. The core challenge for this project was to understand the varied range of languages, ethnicities, and user groups from the surrounding neighborhoods and subsequently provide recommendations for how to program and design the existing streetscape’s possible conversion into a NYC DOT-sponsored plaza. This plaza project presented a great economic development opportunity for the BID, through potential increases in foot traffic and sitting places adjacent to the eateries along the site, as well as a great social connector space for an area with scarce public space infrastructure.

An underlying challenge to this project was to establish whether potential users of the site were interested in closing Hillel Place to vehicular traffic. Throughout the project, Hillel Place was seen as an opportunity site to create a small place that is welcoming for the many different groups. These user groups range from high school students that need a place to hangout after school, commuters from the subway lines that would like to rest for a moment before they catch a bus, patrons of the local businesses who would like to eat their lunch outside and the many Caribbean immigrant communities that live in the surrounding area. In order to create this type of representative space the project focused on the history of the area, the people residing within a half mile of the site, and the potential for partnerships among community organizations and public agencies.

Looking Up Hillel Place Towards the Flatbush Junction

Jackson Chabot

PROCESS

The placemaking process of this project centered around gathering community input about how the community felt about closing the street to vehicular traffic and, if that happened, what they might want to be included in the design and programming of the site. The Junction BID director, Kenneth Mbonu, was instrumental in the initial phases of this process as he led the class on a site visit of the neighborhood and invited the class to participate in the “Taste the Junction” food festival. The “Taste the Junction” event was a tremendous opportunity to gather public opinion with in-person surveys and user feedback place activities that asked, “How would you change the Junction?” and “Show us what you want and where!” Class reflection after the event stimulated further inspiration for additional community interviews and workshops with elected officials, the Clarendon Library branch, and Midwood High School students, among other stakeholders. Also, the in-depth study of the area brought more inputs, beyond the plaza project, revealing the will and potential of change for the whole neighborhood.

OUTCOMES

The information collected over the course of the semester guided a dual approach of short-term and long-term recommendations. The short-term proposals, starting with Hillel Place as the foundation, recommended a seasonally based programming approach that retained a flexibility of uses given the small size of the space. Over the long term, with Hillel Place Plaza growing into its own, The Junction could also evolve to include safer streets for pedestrians and bicyclists, improved storefront design, and options for using Flatbush and Nostrand for large scale street festivals. These two sets of recommendations can be implemented on a parallel basis with the understanding that large changes in and around The Junction will take more time to complete. Following the completion of this project, findings were presented to the BID director Mr. Mbono, as well as to the larger audience of the GCPE on Super Saturday, and published in a physical report that Mr. Mbonu used to show the social and economic value of implementing the proposed plaza.

Community Member responds to how she feels about the Flatbush Junction.

Koichiro Tamura

Following the semester, Mr. Mbonu informed the class that the DOT has decided to build the plaza on a one year test basis with construction anticipated to begin Fall 2018. The plaza will be reviewed by the DOT, Mr. Mbonu and the neighborhood throughout the test phase. The plaza will be evaluated at the end of the test phase to decide on whether it should be implemented permanently.