Interactive Crown Street

Urban Research Seminar at the Yale School of Architecture :: 2013

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1970s New Haven Photos

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The Museum of Modern Art in New York currently has a fascinating exhibition on contemporary mapping.

Test from the exhibition: "Over the course of two years, from 2008 to 2010, the artist Mateo López traveled through his native Colombia, from Bogota to Cali to Medellin. Crisscrossing vast expanses of territory via Vespa, López made drawings, rendering the ordinary objects he encountered in precise detail. In a country occupied by government forces and paramilitary rebels, traveling itself—and the diaristic drawing that served as documentation—became an act of resistance. Using López’s Viaje sin movimiento—an installation of his drawings from this journey—as a starting point, A Trip from Here to There explores practices and works generated by walking and wandering. As members of exploratory expeditions and surveys, painters and draftsmen have long played key roles in the plotting and investigation of place. However, in the second half of the 20th century, the journey itself became both medium and subject for many artists. In some works, a walk or sojourn is precisely documented via maps and charts, dates and times, while in others, wandering’s inherent detours and deviations are exploited, resulting in collages of impressions or graphs of explored terrain. For some artists, drawing is both nomadic and solitary, while for others it is a way to engage with one’s environment and its inhabitants."

Inspiration for new means of understanding space and movement through drawing and other means.

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Platform Nine and Three-Quarters on Crown 

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Views of Detroit - This film, captured over two weeks in November 2010 by a group of Danish planning students, is part of a researcyh experiment on how to use film as a method of urban development. 

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Archival drawings of Crown Street from Yale's Manuscripts and Archives collection

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Readers offered their views in answer to City Room's request for assessments of the individual blocks where they live, and the vast majority of the responses were negative.

Very interesting neighborhood reports here -- I can imagine a "State of the Block" survey on Crown Street.  

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Businesses promoting the “organic” and “natural” service have blanketed affluent Manhattan neighborhoods and crept farther afield.

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At the corner of Crown and Howe Streets there is a very interesting abandoned building:  exterior in good shape, interior in disarray.  Underneath the awning is this sign:  "Blessings."  A store-front church at some point?  The interior suggests a bar or restaurant.  This is absolutely an "Opportunity Property" (and I have used that tag)  in a very strategic location, especially considering its proximity to the YMCA building.  - Elihu

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Snowbanks on Crown Street

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Parking lot booth on Crown Street after Nemo

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Kevin Lynch used this composite map to render the frequency of mentions of landscape items from 16 student maps.  From red -- the most intense, the most imageable elements -- to black to dotted line, we get a strong sense of the shared landscape of the city.  - Elihu

[myedol]

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from eauxyl, a pretty amazing piece of street storytelling.  - Elihu

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As long as man is thus attached to the earth and to places on the earth, as long as nostalgia and plain homesickness hold him and draw him inevitably back to the haunts and places he knows best, he will never fully realize that other characteristic ambition of mankind, namely, to move freely and untrammeled over the surface of mundane things, and to live, like pure spirit, in his mind and in his imagination alone.

Robert E. Park, "The Mind of the Hobo"

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A view of the mossy carports - made of a thin, undulating concrete shell - that are part of the Crown Towers superblock, a renewal-era housing development on Crown Street.  Just visible to the right is a surface parking lot, now blocked off in blue, that represents one of the development opportunities on Crown.  - Elihu

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DIAGRAM

City Hall Plaza and the State Service building, designed by Paul Rudolph, Boston.  They are foreground.  Monumental background:  a large parking garage that straddles a rebuilt Congress Street; the Central Artery; the JFK Federal Building designed by Walter Gropius and The Architects Collaborate.   

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The illuminated portal: Crown Street is overwhelmingly frontal and exhibitionistic, a small door lit from within denies voyeurism while stimulating intrigue. There are other things happening on Crown Street— beyond clubs, bistros, and bars. But what are they? For a visitor, their existance is only hinted at: not confirmed, not denied. Also, the door is a scalar surprise, things on Crown Street are large-ish; this door is small.

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New vs. Old. Street vs. City