The futureMBTA Featured in “The History of Somerville, 2010-2100″

Artist and community activist Tim Devin has put together a collection of ideas about the future of Somerville.
From Tim:
“The history of Somerville, 2010-2100″ is a community art project that is exploring what the future might be like. Both the book and the website present what we’ve found by talking to Somerville community members about the [...]

Sunday Evening Map: Neighborhoods of Brooklyn

I was reading the Wikipedia entry on Stuyvesant Heights, Brooklyn, when I came across the section describing the meandering border. I decided to quickly throw it into Google Maps to see what it would look like…. and then just kept going. Like with all maps of neighborhoods this map generalizes the borders to some extent and excludes some micro-hoods to keep things simple. There is always some overlap and argument but I decided just to use the most widely held definitions of the borders. I really made this because all online mapping services don’t really do a good job of defining neighborhoods (Google, what the hell is “Adelphi”? No one in Brooklyn calls it that.) Download this and use it whenever anyone asks where a particular ‘hood is.

The futureNYCSubway: Post War Expansion

In my last post I outlined the ambitious plan to massively expand the New York City subway system. For various reasons (the Great Depression, World War II, rise of suburbia, etc) the plans were, for the most part, never realized. After World War II many plans were scrapped as limited resources were diverted to building new highways. Some minor expansion took place but the system also lost many miles of track as older elevated lines were removed.

In 1968 the city developed a new, much less ambitious, plan to expand subway service and rebuild aging infrastructure. In an unfortunate case of history repeating itself the city immediately faced a financial crisis causing the plans to be scrapped and subway service to be cut. For the next 20 years the city planned, for the first time ever, to decrease in size and services. It wasn’t until the 1990s, when the population stabilized and the economy of the city began to grow, when serious plans for expansion were brought back. This post covers subway expansion from the end of World War II up to the present.

The futureNYCSubway: The IND Second System

The IND Second System was the last great city-wide subway expansion plan ever mounted. It would have extended many existing lines while building many completely new lines. The Second System was proposed at the crest of the roaring twenties, mere days before the crash of the stock market. Although plans for the expansion lingered on for 20 more years by the time the city was able to afford such an endeavor the car had rested control of the minds of urban planners and the subways were left to rot. In this post I lay out just what was in these ambitious plans you you can get a sense of what New York might have been like where subways ran deep into Queens, covered the entire Bronx, ran up and down Second Avenue in Manhattan, and even jumped the harbor to serve Staten Island.