For years, 1,200 people an hour have been seeing this six-block stretch of street in secret. But finally, New York City is bringing these back-alley relationships into the light, and giving them the official municipal seal of approval. Now the street can announce to the world: “I’m here. I’m part of the city. I’m not an unnamed pedestrian walkway you’d be ashamed to walk your mother down. I’m 6 ½ Avenue.”

The newly named avenue runs from 51st to 57th Street. It’s primarily a pedestrian walkway, and as Transportation Nation says, that makes the city’s official approval more significant:

In giving this stretch of walkways a name, the New York City Department of Transportation is encouraging more walking. Even more than the cute name, they do so by painting crosswalks and stopping traffic mid-block where people already jaywalked with more than the usual amount of New York pavement entitlement (if that’s possible).

This walkway exists in part because of provisions the city made for creating density in the city: The stretches in between buildings are Privately Owned Public Spaces created in exchange for the right to build higher up into the sky. Now the public can feel just as legitimate walking through these red-headed stepchildren of city planning as down any other avenue.

On a rooftop a few dozen blocks south of my apartment, there’s a beehive. The hive’s owner, a woman named Susan, keeps what she described as an Italian species of bee, Carniolans. (In reality, the species is from Slovenia.) Pedigree aside (we are talking about the tony Upper West Side, after all), Carniolans have other traits to recommend them. They’re more docile, for example, and more resistant to certain diseases. They are also more prone to swarming.

This week, The New York Times reported that bee swarms are increasingly appearing around the city.

This spring in New York City, clumps of homeless bees have turned up, often in inconvenient public places, at nearly double the rate of past years. A warm winter followed by an early spring, experts say, has created optimal breeding conditions. That may have caught some beekeepers off guard, especially those who have taken up the practice in recent years.

There’s a link between hive overcrowding and swarming. When a hive becomes too crowded, bees can be displaced. New beekeepers, the Times suggests, can be unprepared to deal with a number of bees suddenly looking for a place to stay. The New York City real estate market is tough for everyone.

Bee swarms are frightening. Several weeks ago, my wife and I encountered one on a light pole in Central Park. An audible hum; a teeming mass orbited by a few stragglers. We did what anyone would do: took pictures, Instagrammed them, quickly moved on. (See above!)

James Fischer, director of education for NYC Beekeeping (the organization with which Susan also volunteers), suggests that such a reaction is unwarranted. “A swarm is as harmless as a cat up a tree,” he told me, “and just as newsworthy.”

Fischer isn’t convinced that the number of swarms has actually increased. Those mentioned by the Times have been reported elsewhere. My spotting notwithstanding, Fischer notes that those who participate in NYC Beekeeping’s free training sessions “haven’t seen any more swarms this year than last.” He notes that swarms only happen on sunny days, possibly meaning that sightings have been clustered together during a generally rainy spring.

If there are more swarms, though, it could be a good sign.

“This year, all the rules were broken,” said Dennis vanEngelsdorp, a researcher at the University of Maryland who helped to lead a national survey of managed honey bee colonies released this month. It showed that about 21.9 percent of bee colonies nationwide died over the winter, a substantial drop from the 30 percent average losses reported in the previous five years.

When asked if this meant a rebound in the population, Mr. vanEngelsdorp said on Skype from Pretoria, South Africa, “It’s too early to tell.”

A rebound would be welcome. Bee populations worldwide are collapsing. In North America and Europe, it’s partly due to an as-yet-unexplainable affliction known as colony collapse disorder. Here and elsewhere, there are other causes as-yet-unknown. The event* where I met Susan the beekeeper was the one I wrote about on Monday, the kick-off of Pollinator Week. Pollinator Week, a project of the Pollinator Partnership, is an effort to raise awareness about the issues impacting pollinators — bees, birds, bats — and what that means for our food supply. The week wraps up today.

In 2010, New York City lifted its ban on apiaries. The rules now are surprisingly lax, meaning that it’s up to organizations like NYC Beekeeping to continue to educate keepers and try to police behavior. From the Times:

“It’s up to beekeepers to practice swarm prevention techniques and regular hive maintenance,” said Andrew Coté, the president and founder of the New York City Beekeepers Association, adding that many beekeepers were “poor stewards” for not regularly inspecting their hives. “If they treated their dog or cat in the same way, they would be taken up on charges,” he said. …

Mr. Coté advocates stricter regulations. “But you can’t regulate common sense,” he added.

Any more than you can regulate the behavior of bees. Not that we shouldn’t try.

Learn more about how to encourage bee population growth.

* Here’s something I learned at the same event: a male carpenter bee is so docile as to be able to be caught in your hands. Males have yellow faces, so if a giant bee is flying toward you and it has a yellow face, feel free to grab it! You could probably even carry it in your mouth. Go ahead; try that.**

** Our lawyers have advised me to say that you should not do this.

Update: A reader noted that Carniolans are not an Italian species, but are native instead to Slovenia.

Back in 2011, a tragedy of epic proportions struck the East Village: Starbucks moved in. And not only did it move in, it kicked a beloved local coffee shop, The Bean, out of its flagship location. Even non-coffee drinking elementary school students were outraged, as Majorie Ingall discovered:

Here we have a piece of paper recovered from the recesses of the backpack of an East Village, NYC elementary school student.

Translation from first-grader-ese:

Starbucks: The Bean Instead.

These budding activists handed out their hand-drawn flyers to their schoolmates, plus some for the Bean staff. According to other local kids, they also came up with some righteous chants, such as “The Bean rules, Starbucks drools.”

The Bean didn’t let Starbucks’ incursion get it down. In fact, it expanded, opening up a store to replace the flagship and launching plans for additional outposts. But a bond was forged between the coffee shop and kids who valiantly defended it.

Now, this spring, the neighborhood school that these same kids attend (it’s actually named The Neighborhood School) found out that it might need to shut its library. Since then, grown-ups have raised funds to save it from imminent demise. But they’re still worried about its future.

Enter: The Bean.

Today, the coffee shop is graciously hosting a “Save the Library” fundraiser featuring a kid-run lemonade stand, kid-made art sale, and free coffee refills for a week with the purchase of a Neighborhood School mug. Local blogger EV Grieve interviewed the kids about the relationship they’ve forged with this local business. It’s almost impossible to pick the best part of the interview, but here’s a taste:

M: They kicked out The Bean. We all love The Bean. We were all sad.

A: And The Bean is a small company and a monster business kicked them out. They’re like [waves arm], “You’re gettin’ out.”

M: It was a small company taking over a big company.

A: Just because you have more money and are more popular it doesn’t seem fair that money can kick out a place.

M: If The Bean got there first, it’s not fair that someone who got there second can have it just because they are richer. Also The Bean is better. Once at Starbucks I got a sandwich and there was mold on it. I shoved it at my dad and said, “You can have it.”

If there’s a moral to this story, it’s that relationships still matter, even and especially in hip urban neighborhoods. But also that it doesn’t matter if you spell “Bean” b-e-a-n or b-e-e-n, as long as your heart’s in the right place and you’re in the first grade.

In the Netherlands, there are more than 30 “Repair Cafes” — groups that meet once or twice a month to repair (for free!) clothes and gizmos and tools that might otherwise be discarded. The New York Times visited the original Repair Cafe, which began two and a half years ago, and found that people want to keep their stuff — even cheap stuff, like H&M skirts. They just don’t know how to mend it themselves:

“This cost 5 or 10 euros,” about $6.50 to $13, [Sigrid Deters] said, adding that she had not mended it herself because she was too clumsy. “It’s a piece of nothing, you could throw it out and buy a new one. But if it were repaired, I would wear it.”

The group repairs electronics, too — everything from big-ticket items like vacuums and washing machines to the little gadgets that go haywire, like irons, toaster ovens, and coffee pots.

Repair Cafes are mainly driven by the time and efforts of volunteers who pool their skills to fix what needs fixing. But the foundation that oversees these projects has also raised $525,000 from the Dutch government, foundations, and small donors, the Times reports.

This all happening in a country that only puts a teeny portion of its municipal waste (less than 3 percent) in landfills. Who are these dedicated weirdos that are going above and beyond that already insanely good behavior?

Marjanne van der Rhee, a Repair Cafe volunteer who hands out data collection forms and keeps the volunteers fortified with coffee, said: “Different people come in. With some, you think, maybe they come because they’re poor. Others look well-off, but they are aware of environmental concerns. Some seem a little bit crazy.”

Crazy, or crazy like a fox? And can we get something like this going in America? I have a broke-down coffee grinder that’s been sitting on top of my kitchen cabinet for like a year.

Cross-posted from

Guerilla urbanism can take many forms, as there are myriad ways to reactivate an abandoned public space or vacant building. Art exhibitions, temporary shops, ad hoc concerts — different approaches work for different properties, and it really depends on the space, neighborhood, and city in question.

It’s either fitting or frivolous, then, that one New Orleans resident seems to have turned to Chuck E. Cheese’s for inspiration.

Josh Ente, who works at the New Orleans-based filmmaking company Court 13 (you might know them for this Sundance winner or this music video), recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to help him turn a crumbling house into giant ball pit. Imagine neighborhood kids, their parents, and young-at-heart adults gathering at an outdoor community pool filled with bouncy balls, and you get a close approximation to what Ente envisions. (See it in the video accompanying Ente’s proposal below.)

The house, located on the border of the Marigny and Bywater sections of the city, is mostly a gutted skeleton, with only the walls and roof beams remaining. Though south of St. Claude Avenue — the widely acknowledged dividing line between struggling areas to the street’s north and the relatively prosperous ones closer to the Mississippi River — the house stands out as a typical example of post-Katrina blight.

A quick search on the New Orleans Assessor’s website finds that the building does have owners, though their mailing address places them nearly 100 miles away in Zachary, La. The legal description lists the property as “burned.”

Ente’s plan is to remove the roof, string netting around the wall frames, cover exposed beams with padding, and fill the open 30-by-16-foot space with 10- and 15-inch bouncy balls (preferable, apparently, to the smaller variety found in McDonald’s play areas).

“There’s really important work to do to bring attention to the blight and slow progress in New Orleans, and on an immediate level, to improve a dangerous pockmark in my neighborhood,” Ente writes in his Kickstarter proposal. “Fortunately the only way I know how to fight these serious problems is to facilitate absurd, riotous joy with equal and opposite force.”

The ball pit idea joins a number of other projects looking to bring life to vacant buildings in the area. Nearby, for instance, a group of artists and musicians turned a former Creole cottage into an enormous, interactive music box.

Ente estimates that the project will cost around $4,000, and expects it will open to the public in early May. He plans to keep the ball pit open until the summer gets too hot.

Big Tobacco agreed way back in 1998 to stop marketing [PDF] cigarettes to kids. Turns out cigarette companies are still up to their old tricks — they’re just being slightly more stealth about it.

Researchers from California’s Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program recently examined the advertising of menthol and Newport-brand cigarettes in the state. They found a much greater prevalence of cigarette advertising in areas near high schools with significant populations of African American students.

“There is a systematic targeting (of disadvantaged communities) by the tobacco industry, which is an extraordinary public health problem,” said Lisa Henriksen of the Stanford Prevention Research Center, who presented the research at a legislative briefing in Sacramento last week. “The addition of menthol to cigarettes makes it easier to smoke and more difficult to quit.”

Menthol cigarettes have come under fire because they appeal specifically to youth, who prefer the minty fresh flavor to the burning ash taste of traditional cigarettes. Some evidence also suggests that it’s harder to quit menthol cigarettes than regular cigarettes.

Targeting mint-flavored cancer sticks to low-income, minority youth that already face greater risks of cancer, obesity, and other health problems? That’s low even for you, Big Tobacco.

Everyone knows that “Obamacare” was modeled on Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health-care law. But did you know that a key Obama “smart growth” initiative — the Partnership for Sustainable Communities — was also created in the mold of a Romney program?

Tea Partiers rallied to quash funding for this Obama partnership last fall. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), conservative darling, criticized the idea for the partnership when it first arose and accused the Obama administration of trying to impose “an urban-utopian fantasy through an unprecedented intrusion of the Federal Government into the shaping of local communities.” The Republican National Committee recently warned that smart growth is part of a U.N. conspiracy (green helicopters, anyone?).

This is yet another issue on which the party’s presumptive presidential nominee looks to be seriously out of sync with the GOP base.

Romney’s “get smart” phase

As governor of Massachusetts, Romney actively fought sprawl and promoted density. He ran on a smart-growth platform: “Sprawl is the most important quality-of-life issue facing Massachusetts,” he said in 2002.

After winning, Romney swiftly set about remaking state government to encourage smarter land use. He created a powerful new Office for Commonwealth Development, and appointed an aggressive environmental activist to run it — Douglas Foy, who for 25 years had headed the Conservation Law Foundation, a litigious regional environmental group. The state’s business community was appalled.

The Office for Commonwealth Development served as a “super-secretariat” or umbrella office for state agencies dealing with transportation, housing, energy, and the environment. It made sure the agencies were all pulling in the same direction toward smart-growth goals — concentrating development in town centers, constructing housing near transit stations, fixing existing roads instead of building new ones.

“I think [Romney] views sprawl as inefficient land use, and he’s all about efficiency. From a business perspective, he thinks smart growth makes a lot of sense,” says Anthony Flint, who served as a policy advisor in the Office for Commonwealth Development under Romney, and is now a fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a think tank in Cambridge, Mass.

The Romney administration pursued smart growth not through strict regulation but through incentives. The Office for Commonwealth Development channeled hundreds of millions in state funds to cities and towns that changed zoning rules to allow more high-density housing and adopted other smart-growth policies.

Romney was a vocal advocate for the cause. “I very much believe in the concept known as smart growth or sustainable development, which is the phrase I used in the campaign,” Romney told CommonWealth magazine in 2003. “You do not want to deplete your green space and air and water [in order] to grow, and the only way that’s possible is if your growth is done in a thoughtful, coherent, strategic way.”

As Romney put it in 2005, “By targeting development to areas where there is already infrastructure in place, not only can we revitalize our older communities, but we can also curb sprawl as well.” His administration actively pursued a “sustainable development agenda” and promoted “transit-oriented development,” “multi-modal transportation,” “village-style zoning,” “green building,” “mixed-use” development, “mixed-income housing,” and other approaches that would delight any green-leaning city planner — and rile up any red-blooded Tea Partier.

Environmental activists still found plenty to criticize in Romney’s approach to land use and development, but many greens and smart-growth advocates were pleasantly surprised, at least in the first half of Romney’s term. In 2006, the U.S. EPA gave Massachusetts’ Office for Commonwealth Development its National Award for Smart Growth Achievement.

Obama follows Romney’s lead

Under President Obama, the EPA moved from praising Romney’s smart-growth office to mimicking it.

In June 2009, the Obama team created the Partnership for Sustainable Communities in the silo-busting mold of Romney’s Office for Commonwealth Development. The partnership brings together the EPA, the Department of Transportation, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development to jointly promote smart growth.

“We want to make sure that when we’re building infrastructure, we’re considering how housing, transportation, and the environment all impact each other,” Obama explained in 2010, sounding an awful lot like the Romney of yore.

Just as Romney’s Office for Commonwealth Development incentivized local communities to embrace smart growth by offering grants, so does the Partnership for Sustainable Communities. Since its launch, the partnership has helped to allocate about $3.5 billion in grants and other assistance to more than 700 communities that want to better coordinate housing, transportation, and economic-development projects and make neighborhoods more walkable, transit-accessible, and sustainable.

Tea Partiers go nuts

You might think this all sounds benign or common sense, or even classically conservative — conserving land, conserving gas, and conserving taxpayer dollars by preventing the construction of new roads and sewer systems for sprawling new communities. But that’s not how today’s Republican Party sees it.

Tea Partiers are fighting smart-growth programs tooth and nail, believing them to be part of an insidious U.N. plot. Their fears center around a once-obscure, non-binding U.N. sustainability plan called Agenda 21, which came out of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and called for, among other things, “fulfillment of basic needs, improved living standards for all, better protected and managed ecosystems” and — gasp! — “sustainable land-use planning and management.”  Like most non-binding U.N. documents — in fact, like most binding U.N. documents — Agenda 21 was widely ignored. That is, until American right-wingers latched onto it a few years ago.

Last fall, Tea Partiers erroneously linked Obama’s Partnership for Sustainable Communities to Agenda 21, and groups around the country mobilized to fight its funding in Congress. “This funding has been using YOUR tax dollars to promote the United Nations’ plan to control our government,” warned the Gainsville Tea Party. It’s an “assault on property rights and America’s way of life,” railed the Sandia Tea Party of New Mexico. “STOP THE GRAVY TRAIN!!!” demanded the Southwest Virginia Tea Party. Congress did cut some funding for the partnership’s grant making, but the partnership lives on and continues to help allocate funds to local communities.

Meanwhile, as the Agenda 21 conspiracy theorizing has grown louder over the past year, big-name Republicans have joined in. Newt Gingrich inveighed against Agenda 21 on the campaign trail last year, and even mentioned it during a debate in November. That same month, Rick Santorum warned about Agenda 21 in a Facebook post.

In January, the Republican National Committee adopted a resolution “exposing” Agenda 21 as a “comprehensive plan of extreme environmentalism, social engineering, and global political control.” In an apparent slam against the Sustainable Communities grant program, the resolution called for “rejection of any grant monies” linked to Agenda 21. The resolution could make it into the official Republican Party platform that will be decided upon at the national convention in August.

Where’s Mitt now?

As you might expect, Romney has not been talking about sprawl or smart growth on the campaign trail, and his campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

With other issues — like health care, abortion, and immigration — Romney has flip-flopped from the centrist views he held as governor to right-wing positions now preferred by the GOP base. Because smart growth hasn’t risen to the level of national discussion, Romney hasn’t had to clarify his position on this topic.

Romney told a small group of donors last week that he might completely eliminate one of the departments involved in the Partnership for Sustainable Communities — HUD, which his father headed during the Nixon administration. A few months ago, Romney said the EPA under Obama was “out of control,” though he’s stopped short of calling for it to be abolished. Considering those views, it seems highly unlikely that Romney would want anything like the partnership operating under his watch.

Perhaps, in the same way he has defended his Massachusetts health-care program, Romney would argue that pursuing smart growth at the state level makes sense while doing so at the federal level would be overreach. But as both Romney’s Office for Commonwealth Development and Obama’s Partnership for Sustainable Communities used taxpayer dollars to influence what local communities do, is there really such a dramatic distinction between them?

People who worked with or closely observed Romney during his governorship aren’t sure what his current, or “real,” views on smart growth are.

Foy, the first head of Romney’s Office for Commonwealth Development, recently told The New Republic, “I’m proud of what we did, and I think he’s proud of what we did.” But Foy quit the administration after three years, shortly following Romney’s surprise move to pull Massachusetts out of a Northeast cap-and-trade program that Foy had helped to develop, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

Jack Clarke, director of public policy at Mass Audubon and a former environmental official under Massachusetts Gov. William Weld (R), credits Romney with appointing good people to work on smart growth, but says “it wasn’t a core value” for the governor. He doesn’t believe Romney would do anything to advance the cause as president.

Flint, who worked under Foy, says, “Romney the governor was very active on the environment and smart growth and, for a time, climate change.” And now? “His positions on those topics have certainly changed, so I’m not sure what to think.”

Why is Gen Y migrating to the cities? Because millennials are craving the things they didn’t get in their suburban upbringings, like connectedness and adventure. Basically, they’re throwing off their cul-de-sac childhoods and seeking out authenticity.

Nathan Norris, urban infrastructure planner, lays it all out at the PlaceShakers blog:

Like those before them, Generation Y currently finds themselves attracted to things they did not have growing up. Four that stand out are: 1. Safety to Adventure; 2. Isolated to Connected; 3. Inconvenient to Convenient; 4. Car Dependent to Car Independent.

There are other, more practical factors at work in the urban migration, of course, including higher energy costs, better urban design, public school reform, and lower crime rates in cities. There’s also the fact that an aging population wants to live in walkable neighborhoods that don’t require them to drive. So millennials’ parents apparently crave authenticity, too.

(via Planetizen.)

Detroit is undergoing a remarkable process of un-building, its residents literally transforming its denser neighborhoods into sparse suburbs. It’s the inevitable consequence of the shrinking of a once-great city.

By estimates of the city and various experts, about 40 square miles of the city’s 139 square miles are vacant today — empty fields from which all structures have been removed.

We’ve seen other suggestions for large-scale solutions to Detroit’s loss of population, including a re-wilding carried out by bulldozers and bison and covering all that open space with solar panels. But the fencing-the-neighbor’s abandoned-lot solution has the advantage of being grassroots. It works in part because residents aren’t waiting for the city to sanction their actions.

In some of the emptier parts of Detroit, homeowners in recent years have fenced in the vacant lots next to their houses to create suburban-size parcels for themselves. Sometimes relatives or friends whose houses are separated by two or three lots will fence in all of them to create their own private compounds.

So far, these efforts at reclaiming lots account for only 5 percent of the city’s vacant land. The rest will have to wait for the only half-man, half-machine who can save the motor city: Robocop. Fortunately, he’s on his way.