On Saturday, when perhaps I should have been hiking, I attended an all day but exciting meeting about the future of preservation at the 7th Regiment Armory known today as the Park Ave. Armory . I had often been to the Armory for art and antique shows in recent years but I’ve never really looked at it before. The Armory is actually two buildings: a set of offices fronting on Park Avenue and a huge Drill Hall – in which the art shows are staged. Most of the meeting were in the late 19th Century rooms on the Park Ave. side and some of us got a truncated tour of a few of the rooms.

If you care about NYC’s built environment, if you are interested in the aesthetic movement, if the names Louis Comfort Tiffany, Stanford White and Candace Wheeler – Associated Artists who decorated many of the rooms give you shivers, you simply must see this building. Having deteriorated over years, the building itself is now managed by a conservancy which has been investigating and very carefully restoring a late 19th Century treasure.  read more »

This comes from the Municipal Art Society: (I can't make it...will be doing the final practice run of my talk for the International C. elegans Meeting at UCLA, but sounds good!)

New York’s waterfront is being transformed. From Brooklyn Bridge Park to Throg’s Neck on the East River alone, over 1000 acres of redevelopment is slated to occur over the upcoming years. This scale of development is an enormous opportunity - and a risk. Too much waterfront development in recent years has created sterile, privatized places that don’t do justice to New York.

Now is the time to set an agenda to ensure we create an East River waterfront that reflects the diversity, vibrancy and future sustainability of New York. Responding to the Mayor’s bold plan to reclaim 90% of New York’s waterways for recreational use, the Municipal Art Society and the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance are part of a coalition of over 40 groups that is launching the East River Agenda on next Thursday, June 21st on East River Day.  read more »