Neighborhoods Now
Dear friend,
for small businesses on how to apply for relief loans. They drafted legal templates for short-term leases to occupy vacant storefronts. They collaborated with senior staff at City agencies to help neighborhoods access programs like Open Streets and Open Restaurants.
As the pandemic took root in our city in March, its uneven impact on the lives of New Yorkers quickly became painfully clear. While our city’s well-resourced communities and businesses benefit from the ability to purchase expertise, the The work is far from over. Many of these firms are committed neighborhoods where many of our essential workers live do to continuing these partnerships in service of long-term not have the same access and resources. efforts to address systemic inequities and greater community In response, the Urban Design Forum and Van Alen Institute ambitions. The need for this work is profound, and we hope this effort inspires the design community to come together in tapped into our collective network of architects, designers, continued service of New York’s neighborhoods. Ultimately, and engineers. In a matter of weeks, more than 65 firms the long term value of this approach will be the alliances mobilized to support the recovery of four neighborhoods forged across demographic and professional boundaries. hit particularly hard by the pandemic: Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn; Jackson Heights, Queens; Kingsbridge, Bronx; and We are humbled by this outstanding display of teamwork, Washington Heights, Manhattan. To date, these firms — including architects, planners, engineers, graphic designers, creative problem solving, and immense generosity. We thank the 200+ community experts and practitioners who and attorneys — have contributed thousands of hours of pro have given their time and passion, and we look forward to bono expertise to support fellow New Yorkers. continuing the work. In partnership with community leaders, they piloted open-air With gratitude, extensions for restaurants, created neighborhood signage with COVID-19 health protocols, and developed proposals Deborah Marton for relocating community events and educational programs Executive Director, Van Alen Institute into open space. Our partner neighborhoods’ needs also went far deeper than design, so our working groups expanded their support beyond physical interventions. They organized a seminar
Daniel McPhee Executive Director, Urban Design Forum
Neighborhoods Now
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June 30, 2020 SHoP Architects project summary
Neighborhoods Now
Neighborhoods Now SHoP Collaborations Through the Neighborhoods Now initiative, from January through June 2021, SHoP Architects was assigned two clients within the Fourth Arts Block (FABnyc) network: 1. KGB Bar and the Red Room 2. Performance Space New York
KGB Bar and the Red Room The client had a modest and immediate ask—to extend their limited indoor seating, 25 tables at the time, to any degree, even just two to three tables, outside, a place for more people to buy more drinks, that did not need to be serviced by the restaurant. They would essentially function as picnic tables for to-go drinks. But in the continually changing city policy landscape, KGB was caught between qualifying for Open Streets, Open Restaurants and Open Culture status. As a bar that makes ice, for example, that designated KGB a restaurant not a culture space, which meant they were also required to serve food. (And met this by serving snack packs from Target at greater expense to a greatly compromised business.) But their second-floor location did not ensure street-level access. And so on. There was no precedent and crucial lost-revenue weeks of disappointment. SHoP attended at least one DOT meeting where KGB was denied table space on the street. We started exploring other ways to try to claim that space if KGB couldn’t get that permit, including via a speaker’s corner/free speech concept based on the history of KGB as the former headquarters of Emma Goldman’s Secret Society of Anarchists. SHoP completed multiple client interviews and site visits and measuring, scoping so we’d be ready to go. Then KGB got lucky or the right person turning the lack of precedent to an advantage and received the sidewalk permit—and because the owner of KGB also owned the comedy club next door, we could extend the sidewalk space. The SHoP team put a model together, designed in Rhino without plans and using the constraints. Because of existing conditions, the space could only contain so many freestanding chairs and tables, so the solution was to create a long bench of continual seating with a roof, then KGB can adapt and place tables. We chose the paint colors of red and black that are so emblematic of their brand—in many ways the ultimate indoor, upstairs bar now opened up outside. The client brought on the contractor Mr. Yu, who had done a lot of the millwork and had a long relationship with KGB. (He somehow also managed to obtain plywood not subject to the skyrocketing costs of the material through the pandemic.) Collaboration was so agile that the construction process started and finished within 24 hours, a record timeline for a SHoP project which are sometimes the same in years.
KGB | Site Visit
KGB | Outdoor Constraints
sidewalk width
~12’
- 13’
~
6’
7’
KGB | Outdoor Constraints
8’ clear zone required
KGB | Installation
2 x 4 Stud Partition
Seating
KGB
KGB | Installation
Performance Space New York Where our work for KGB was all hands-on and immediate action, start and finish, Performance Space had an entirely opposite ask of SHoP expertise: for future and ongoing consultation. From the first SHoP site tour and meeting the PSNY team, it was clear that their timeline had been more urgent in 2020 and they had already successfully completed a lot of the design interventions in-house (though both parties wished they’d been engaged to collaborate earlier). They had already started to open up inside, allowing controlled crowds to come in—so they didn’t need an architectural intervention per se, and nothing on the street level. What was most interesting and definitive for SHoP was the recognition that each exhibition they mount calls for distinct architectural solutions on a mini-scale, from changing live load situations to lighting and air circulation to raising live insects in the green room for an installation composed largely of earth. It was fascinating to see their process and established precedent for SHoP to consult on future exhibitions and their ever-changing spatial needs.
Performance Space NY | Site Visit
Performance Space NY | Site Visit