"MARITIME SKY of MANHATTAN"

New York City is in a dramatic relationship with its waterfront. A fundamental shift is a drift.  The lower East Side gardens were a catalyst to thinking of Ebenezer Howard's garden city within urban hardscape.  Liz Chrystie, Adam Purple, Chico Mendez, and the visionary community gardeners of the East Village opened up a new way of inhabiting urban detritus. The extraordinary lower East Side gardens are truly remarkable testaments to how people can harness the most intimidating of urban landscapes to produce sustainable relationships to air, water and the earth. Make beauty where the city forgets people.  Open the sky through greenery where people have forgotten how to live.  When Corbusier visited Manhattan in 1930's, he was impressed by the "maritime sky of manhattan" yet this maritime sky was not a romance that Robert Moses shared with Corbu as an intimate relationship between neighborhoods and water. The energy crisis is forcing a remapping about how people perceive their cities.  Instead of following Gideon's call to "kill the streets" the people of New York City are actively building on what Jane Jacobs and the movements that followed her inspiration came to identify as the walking city. The post-9/11 New York City is a mobile new york- people want to run, jump, catapult, fly through the air on a trapeze, snooze, kayak, swim around manhattan or across the East River to Brooklyn, bike across the five boroughs or just sit and drum by the water on the Upper West Side. It is a new changing conversation between urban citizens and their public spaces.