Community gardens, art walks, block parties, block walks.
Rendering of the proposed garden by block resident Brady Noé Arellano.
So, similar to progress, city driving, and your own fraught conception of how you look, my work tends to follow an ebb and flow, rise and fall, peaks and valleys-type pattern. I am well aware that this aspect of my being makes me virtually indistinguishable from roughly 8 million other New Yorkers, but if you go back and read the terms of service that should have been sent to your spam folder upon signing up for our emailing list, you will find that I made no representations or warranties about being interesting and at bottom I am just some random guy sitting in an apartment near you tooling around on a website.
The immediate effect of my work situation is that my customary introductory rambling is going to be limited this week to the above and I will get straight to the updates:
The owner of the lot on 29th Street & 10th Avenue has now given us permission to post signs on the fence saying words to the effect of “What if we built a community garden in here?” Find out more at highline28.com.” Very cool.
The owner has also asked for a memo detailing dry but important issues like the proposed timeline for development, the potential lease arrangement, and possible tax exemptions. Fortunately the latter two issues overlap to some extent with what I do in real life, so we have a way forward, but let me know if you are knowledgeable about any of these issues.
I’m going to be talking next week to an individual who works at the nonprofit Friends of the High Line, which is the organization responsible for building the actual High Line (yes, that High Line, the one with the railroad tracks running down the west side of Chelsea and which was named after this block association). To say I am excited about this opportunity would be be like parenthetically describing the High Line as just some park with railroad tracks running down the west side of Chelsea and which was named after this block association. Leslie Boghosian Murphy, who is running for City Council in our area and who I’ve referenced in the last two posts, was instrumental in setting up the meeting. Thank you Leslie.
Cyndie Bellen-Berthézène is helping to plan the Chelsea art gallery walk that I floated a few weeks ago. She is probably going to kill it because this woman is crazy smart and dynamic. We are targeting the weekend of May 29. If you were planning on coming but can’t make it that weekend, let me know.
I got coffee last week with an individual who is doing some consulting work for higher-ups at Nextdoor.com, which is a networking site for neighborhoods (and on which I’ve been posting our updates rather frequently). She floated the idea of partnering with us on throwing a block party. This appeals to me. For those of our readers who go to bed at 8pm, before you hit send on your strongly worded fax or telegram back to me, rest assured that this idea is only in its very nascent stages, and to the extent it makes it out of those stages, I will not under any circumstances blow all of our dues on hiring a mariachi band to serenade you with La Cucaracha until 2 in the morning. You guys have been paying dues right?
I think it would be kind of cool to occasionally do a 20-minute block walk with neighbors in the mornings. If this is something you’d be interested in, reply to this email.
If you have any affirmative ways in which you can move any of these items forward (e.g., “I’m going to make a sign and post it on the lot”), let me know—that is most helpful. I do think our ball is rolling here.
Posts you missed this week:
