Category Archives: Recipes for Change

Case Study: The Hampline

The Hampline is one of ioby’s favorite campaigns for a lot of reasons. It’s not only because the Hampline was ioby’s first campaign in Memphis, ioby’s first campaign to raise funds for hard infrastructure, and ioby’s highest grossing campaign to date. The project is to us a brilliant collaboration, blending commercial revitalization, placemaking, cycling infrastructure and the arts in a community suffering from disinvestment. It’s an important and rich story, and we’re proud to play a role in the success of the project.

Like many U.S. cities, Memphis, Tennessee has suffered from residents moving out from the urban core to the suburbs. Between 1970 and 2010, the city population grew by 4% while the geographic area grew by 55%. The city limits doubled in size, but population remained flat, and residents packed up and moved to the outer edges of the city. Dispersion created lower density, leaving the core looking like Swiss cheese, with more than 50,000 vacant lots in the city.

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Population shifts were coupled with the construction of I-40. Although Memphis is home to the notorious Supreme Court case Citizens to Preserve Overton Park v. Volpe (1971) that stopped the construction of 1-40 through an established neighborhood and central park, not all neighborhoods fared so well. Similar to the way that the Cross Bronx Expressway cut off the South Bronx from the rest of NYC and compounded socio-economic barriers with a lack of physical geographic access, I-40 cut right through Binghampton, putting five lanes of high-speed traffic between the residential area and the established commercial district on Broad Avenue.

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Binghampton, lovingly nicknamed “The Hamp,” is today a neighborhood of about two square miles and 9,000 residents. The median income is $26,000, and nearly 50% of residents have average household incomes below $20,000. Of the residents, 35% live below the poverty level. In recent years, the neighborhood has suffered from 30% population decline, with a 10-14% vacancy for homes in the area.

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It’s not surprising that this is the case. It’s not easy to live in the Hamp. There are two active rail lines and an expressway with dangerous cross traffic. Vacant properties have led to an increase in blight.

But the neighborhood is literally surrounded by assets. To the west are the famous Overton Park, Rhodes College, the Vollintine-Evergreen Greenline, Downtown Memphis and its historic Beale Street, and the beautiful Mississippi River. To the east are Shelby Farms Park, the Greenline Extension, the Wolf River Greenway, and thriving neighborhoods. The opportunity was that connecting these assets, through Binghampton, and several other neighborhoods, would strengthen Memphis’ urban core.

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In 2006, the city of Memphis began a charrette process using Broad Avenue as a test case, and the planning galvanized the neighborhood and created a business association. Together, residents and business owners came to believe that Broad Avenue could be a place for economic vitality.

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In 2008, there was just one lonely mile of bike lane in Memphis, and the paths to the 4,500-acre Shelby Farms Park were unsuitable for biking, giving Memphis the unenviable position of “Worst City for Biking” (as ranked by Bicycling Magazine—along with another ioby priority city, Miami—in 2008 and 2010). Inspired by advocates, Mayor A C Wharton set about changing that, by hiring the city’s first bike-ped coordinator and setting a goal of adding 55 miles of bike facilities within city limits. Soon to follow was the Shelby Farms Greenline, a 6.5 mile bike lane connecting Midtown Memphis, just on the other side of Overton Park, to Shelby Farms.

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Livable Memphis, a program of the Community Development Council of Greater Memphis, saw an opportunity to connect these two great assets—grounding a major cycling highway while bringing traffic through an emerging business and arts district. As with many neighborhoods of disinvestment and blight, Binghampton had a reputation for crime to overcome. Although Binghampton’s “actual” crime rate was decreasing, nascent revitalization efforts and connecting assets would further reduce Binghampton’s “perceived” crime.

To jumpstart the pre-vitalization process and overcome perceptions, the Livable Memphis, the Broad Avenue Arts District, and the Binghampton Development Corporation, and the owner of an anchor business, T Clifton Arts, drew on a tactical urbanism tool from Dallas, Texas, called Build a Better Block.

The Better Block method, developed by Jason Roberts, uses a 24-hour intervention to reimagine small public spaces in commercial corridors, as if the corridor were thriving, as it perhaps was in the past. Pop-up businesses, public arts, and temporary installations allow residents to reimagine the use of public space, without the investment and the time to make permanent capital improvements.

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For Binghampton, the Better Block method was translated for the locality, and A New Face for An Old Broad was born. For a single weekend, the desolate Broad Avenue was transformed into a thriving commercial district, with protected bike lanes and cultural programming. Watch the videos about New Face for an Old Broad here.

And this was just the beginning. What followed over the next year was $2.5 million in private investment, and in the next 3 years, more than $18 million. By the fourth year, the commercial district had 95% occupancy. As investments in local business boomed, cycling advocates began fundraising for the infrastructure to build the two-mile connection between Overton Park and the Shelby Farms Greenline, at that time called the Overton-Broad connector.

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The $4.5 million bike lane would be the first of its kind in the United States. A two-way, protected, signalized cycle track would run straight through the emerging commercial district. Neighborhood and cycling advocates, businesses and the City raised federal, state, city and private funds, but in August of 2013, was faced with a $70,000 gap.

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They could wait for the next city council cycle to request the remaining funds and delay the project, or compromise the safe and innovative design for the route. Or, they could raise the funds themselves from their friends, neighbors, and folks who would like to use the route.

The groups leading the charge – the Broad Avenue Arts District, Livable Memphis and T. Clifton Arts – and their leaders – Pat Brown, Sarah Newstok and Sara Studdard — approached ioby with their challenge to raise $70,000 by Thanksgiving. Raising the remaining funds would mean groundbreaking would begin in April and the construction would be completed in phases through Spring 2015.

The leaders agreed that their catchy fundraising campaign needed a title that would be easy to remember and authentic to the Hamp neighborhood’s unique character. After some deliberation, the Hampline was born.

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The Hampline team started their campaign by asking their closest networks – friends, family, and colleagues – to donate $50 each. At the same time, a local bicycle club called the Memphis Hightailers came to the table with $2,500 in matching funds for donations made by their members. The team prudently decided to cap the amount of match funds applied to each donation at $50, so that donors with large contributions would not drain the pot too quickly. Using this match fund as an incentive, the team raised $2,530 in citizen philanthropy within the first four days of launching. By the end of the first week of the campaign, the team had raised close to $8,000 and the press was starting to pick up on this exciting new effort. They repeated this successful strategy with the Evergreen Neighborhood Association.

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Recognizing that a $70,000 goal seemed daunting and unattainable for many donors who were only capable of making small contributions, Pat, Sarah, and Sara wisely began to make asks in bite-sized chunks. Rather than focus on the lofty total that they needed to raise, they began to ask many of their donors for $55, which they calculated to be enough to sponsor exactly one foot of the Hampline.

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About two weeks into the campaign, with about half of the money raised, the Hampline’s tremendous progress started to plateau. The team worked with ioby’s team of strategists to reorient and reenergize their campaign. They assigned fundraising roles and responsibilities to the campaign’s most ardent supporters, added some new prospects to their list, and identified new opportunities to make in-person asks.

Working in tandem, the team made a series of phone calls, sent out emails, and appeared at community gatherings to share their work, make asks, and recruit new supporters. The Hampline also benefited from two additional matches over the course of the campaign, thanks to generous support from Alta Planning and Design and the Hyde Family Foundations. Ultimately, the combination of matching funds and the team’s direct and explicit style of making asks were enough to get the team across the finish line on time.

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The result was that more than 700 people, living with just a couple miles of the future bike lane gave to the campaign, the median donation was $50, but many people giving just $9.01 (the city’s area code). Not only did the local giving demonstrate a groundswell of community support, but it also fostered a culture of ownership and local stewardship of the space.

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Donating to the Hampline became the cause célèbre of the city. Groundbreaking took place as planned in April, and the archway went up. Today, Broad Avenue has more than 95% occupancy. Additional private funding has supported cultural amenities in the area, creative bus stops and an archway made of bicycles at the entrance of Overton Park. The ArtPlace America grant has enlivened the avenue to zumba, dancing and performance arts on weekends. All of this transforming the neighborhood nearly unrecognizable to its former self just five years ago.

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ArtPlace Simulation 6.18.13

Getting Good Done Miami

The January 30 Getting Good Done Miami conversation at the Miami Green Lab was an exciting event. More than 60 of you came out on a rainy night to share practical skills and challenges in doing positive community-based work in Miami.

A full podcast from the event will be available soon. Until then, you can read the storify here.

We were really grateful to have several members of Miami city and Miami-Dade county staff at the event to work with community activists on expediting their great ideas for Miami. Special thanks to Nichole Hefty and Susannah Troner from the Miami-Dade County Office of Sustainability, for initiating this partnership with ioby that is now one year in the making.

We also wanted to recognize Christian Guerrero, the Chief of the Environmental Plan Review at the county, Carlos Hernandez from the County Wastewater Division, and Patrice Gillespie Smith, from the County Community Image Manager for bringing their great ideas to the table. Thanks also to Glen Hadwen from the City of Miami Sustainability for hosting the event at the Miami Green Lab.

Our speakers, Marta Viciedo, Eric Katz, Ileana Collazo and Gayle Zalduondo shared fascinating presentations with us about their projects (all found on ioby.org/miami).

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Notable among the practical skills shared to Get Good Done were a focus on taking small steps initially to build support and work within a limited budget at first. The speakers shared that using a light, tactical intervention at first, like a pop-up park, pop-up parklet, or even a pop-up train station, can be great ways to introduce new ideas to a community. Many speakers talked about building creative partnerships and working in neighborhoods where they don’t live and building community, person to person. Marta mentioned that it’s really important to “be nice” when you’re asking people to help you with your ideas. Ileana noted that creative alliances, like hers between artists and developers, can be long lasting. Eric shared his passion for transit-oriented development and said that it is a useful skill he’s acquired in articulating his vision for bringing ecological commodities to all Miami-Dade residents. He emphasized the importance of bringing other people into his network by connecting to them to a shared vision, similar to how one might do so in a grant proposal. Gayle described her surprise when an informal conversation with a new friend about her idea to install a public chalkboard in Wynwood ended up landing her a partnership with a women and girls organization at Miami Dade College.

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The Office of Sustainability at Miami-Dade County offered to create a resource guide to try to help ioby leaders and community groups figure out how to get different types of permitting. Miami-Dade County will share this resource guide with all ioby project leaders once finalized. The Office of Sustainability also offered to assist in making connections with other County staff members (and municipal staff when possible). Office of Sustainability staff can be reached at 305-375-5593 or green@miamidade.gov. It’s a good idea to contact ioby first so we can help you prepare for your meeting with the county. All ioby staff are notified when you email miami@ioby.org. If you have an idea for an ioby campaign visit ioby.org/idea or email projects@ioby.org.

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Thanks to Luis Munoz for these great photos!

December Fundraising: Effective Last Minute Planning

No joke. A lot of charitable gifts are made during the month of December, like more than a third of all annual charitable gifts from individuals. And, more than 70% of them are made during the last two or three days of December.

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Why? Because people want to squeeze in an additional tax deduction in before December 31. Also, a lot of people start feeling charitable because their religions’ holidays might remind them to think of others. Those two motivations can make a big difference.

A lot of organizations have written a ton of literature and tip sheets on year-end giving. A few of our favorites are from Network for Good, GIFT, and the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

So it’s December 10th (or later! YIKES!) and you haven’t done any planning yet. Click here to visit the ioby Leader Guide to Year End Fundraising, download some of our favorite tip sheets and see instructional videos from successful ioby leaders.

ioby Leader Guide to Getting Business Bucks

Today we are happy to release the first in a series of ioby Leader Guides. This series will provide best practices, tips and tools for overcoming common challenges for citizen and community led neighborhood projects.

The ioby Leader Guide to Getting Business Bucks is a easy 10-step guide for ioby Leaders who want to attract support from local businesses and large corporations alike. ioby is unique among crowdfunding platforms because we can act as a fiscal sponsor for informal groups, allowing businesses to make tax-deductible contributions of cash and in-kind materials or services.

Perhaps most useful to community leaders is ioby’s custom built Match Campaign tool that allows businesses to match citizen donations to projects. This unique tool allows businesses the opportunity to share their support for neighborhood projects in ioby’s high touch, high traffic crowdfunding campaign pages.

Download the guide here.

 

 

How to Build a Rain Barrel

This is the second in our online video series portion of Recipes for Change, our online and hard copy toolkit designed for urban environmental leaders to share their knowledge and expertise with others. ioby’s platform is designed to be a place for community-driven, community-funded environmental projects as well as for knowledge sharing. We hope you enjoy this first video, featuring our friend Devona Sharpe, who has generously shared her knowledge of rain barrel installation for community gardens and home gardens with all of us, in this video.

This video was produced with love by Good Eye Video.

Recipes for Change: The Trees of Evelyn’s Playground

The Fifth and Final Installment of this Week’s #RecipesForChange Blog Series:
“The Trees of Five Playgrounds, from Union Square to TriBeCa”

Come back each day this week for more from this week’s guest blogger, Georgia Silvera Seamans at Local Ecologist!

About this blog series: E.F. Schumacher, the British economist famous for coining the phrase “Small is Beautiful” told us to plant a tree. But which one should we plant? ioby’s guest blog series this week from Local Ecologist gives you a quick introduction to the arboreal lives of Manhattan’s playgrounds and, in it, a guide to trees tough enough for city life. 

About Recipes for Change: ioby equips leaders across the country with the tools that they need to make changes in their neighborhoods. Recipes for Change is a new series from ioby, aimed at providing the resources and expertise that you need for your environmental project to succeed.

Got ideas for more #RecipesforChange? Give @ioby a shout!

 

Today’s Featured Playground: the Trees of Evelyn’s Playground, Union Square Park

There are a lot of trees in the Union Square Park playground!  And the species palette is diverse, too: dawn redwood, goldenraintree, Japanese cryptomeria (Cryptomeria japonica), Northern catalpa (Catalpa speciosa), and saucer magnolia (Magnolia x soulangia).  We have already discussed the dawn redwood and goldenraintree so we will profile the other species here.

Of his choice of the Japanese cryptomeria (PDF) the landscape architect for Evelyn’s Playground, Matthew Urbanski, said that it would “provide a more complex layout for imaginative play….kids can imagine it’s a forest.”  Depending on the variety, the Japanese cryptomeria can reach 60 feet tall and 30 feet wide at maturity in a non-wild setting.  The species is not notable for fall color or showy flowers and its fruit does not have wildlife value, but its pyramidal shape and reddish-brown bark are regarded as “outstanding ornamental features.”  Matthew Urbanski is a principal at Michael van Valkenburgh Associates.  You can view fabulous photographs of the playground on the firm’s website.  The cryptomeria tree is the national tree of Japan where it is known as Sugi.  The trees line Cryptomeria Avenue, the approach to Hakone Shrine.  According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the trees were planted between 1628 and 1648 and “over 13,500 of its original 200,000 Japanese cedar (Cryptomeria japonica) trees survive” today.

 

 

The exuberant spring flowering of the saucer magnolia has passed.  The magnolias, along with goldenraintrees, provide a deep line of green along the eastern and southeastern edges of the playground.  The tree’s saucer-sized flowers appear on the tree before it leafs out.  The species in the Magnolia genus are pollinated by beetles!  Magnolias produce pollen but not nectar; the former is high in protein and a food source for beetles.  Three other commonly planted magnolias in the city are star magnolia (Magnolia stellata), Loebner magnolia (M. x loebneri), and southern magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora).

 

         

The lower leaves on one of the Northern catalpas in the playground looked bedraggled on a hot early May day, though the species is known for its heat tolerance.  The species’ “abundant showy blossoms” appear in late spring.  The flowers look like orchids, and perhaps the tree should have been named orchidtree just as the tuliptree is named because its flowers resemble tulips.  The catalpa’s fruit is a long seedpod that resembles the string bean but is not a legume.  There are several features that distinguish the northern catalpa from the southern catalpa (C. bignonioides).  First is the leaf; the southern species has “a smaller, thicker leaf with a shorter point” (Plotnik, 2003).  Second is the flower; Plotnik notes that there are “considerably more blossoms on each panicle, with more lavender or purple coloring.”  Third is the seed; southern catalpa seeds are bearded and pointed, while the northern ones are rounded.  The fourth distinguishing characteristic is the smell of the leaf.  Crushing a leaf from a southern catalpa releases a strong odor.

The large heart-shaped leaves of the northern and southern catalpa are the only host plant for the catalpa sphinx moth caterpillar (Ceratomia catalpa). Luckily for the Northern tree, catalpa sphinx moth is most common in the southern portion of the tree’s range.  If you fish, you might want to visit this tree in early to mid-spring; the caterpillars are great fish bait!

Feeling inspired? Check out ioby.org/idea to get your own neighborhood project started today!

Recipes for Change: Trees of the Playground at Pier 25

The Fourth Installment of this Week’s #RecipesForChange Blog Series:
“The Trees of Five Playgrounds, from Union Square to TriBeCa”

Come back each day this week for more from this week’s guest blogger, Georgia Silvera Seamans at Local Ecologist!

About this blog series: E.F. Schumacher, the British economist famous for coining the phrase “Small is Beautiful” told us to plant a tree. But which one should we plant? ioby’s guest blog series this week from Local Ecologist gives you a quick introduction to the arboreal lives of Manhattan’s playgrounds and, in it, a guide to trees tough enough for city life. 

About Recipes for Change: ioby equips leaders across the country with the tools that they need to make changes in their neighborhoods. Recipes for Change is a new series from ioby, aimed at providing the resources and expertise that you need for your environmental project to succeed.

Got ideas for more #RecipesforChange? Give @ioby a shout!

 

Today’s Featured Playground: the Playground at Pier 25

The Tot Playground in Washington Square Park and Playground of the Americas are two examples of older playgrounds that seem only to host up to two species of shade trees. Still, newer playgrounds, such as the Playground at Pier 25, in TriBeca host three or more tree species.  The shade trees in the Pier 25 playground are honeylocust (Gleditsia triacanthos), dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides), and goldenraintree (Koelreuteria paniculata).  All three species are listed on the NYC Parks approved street tree list (PDF).

The dawn redwood is a deciduous conifer meaning that it drops its needles in the fall.  There are only five genera of deciduous conifers Glyptostrobus, Larix, Metasequoia, Pseudolarix, and Taxodium.  Dawn redwood was first described in 1941, based on fossil data.  In 1944 or 1946 live specimens were found in China but, due to World War II, were not classified as a new species until 1948.  In that year, the Arnold Arboretum in Boston brought the first seeds (PDF) to the U.S.  Another deciduous conifer that is commonly planted in New York is the bald cypress (Taxodium distichum).  It “does well on city streets” and its wood is used to construct the water tanks seen on top of many New York apartment buildings (Day, 2011).  Our favorite dawn redwood is the 100-foot one growing in the Liz Christy Community Garden on Houston at Bowery; it also happens to be the tallest Dawn redwood in the borough!  Dawn redwoods can attain heights of 150 feet at maturity.  The species grows quickly – three feet per year after it is established, so the playground’s trees should be 100 feet in a generation.

 

 

Like the dawn redwood, the honeylocust is a fast-growing tree.  Its maximum height at maturity is 100 feet.  The species is one of the first to bloom in the spring, and Leslie Day describes the scent as “extremely fragrant.”  The flowers are also attractive to pollinators.  According to Harold Harrington’s How to Identify Plants, the fruit is a legume or “a dry one-celled, one-carpellate fruit splitting down two sides.” The pulp surrounding the seeds within the legume, or pod, is eaten by wildlife such as squirrels and starlings.  The pulp can be eaten by humans but Plotnik offers the following caution: “Not off city streets, perhaps, especially not after the green pod has gone mahogany brown.”  These unappetizing pods make great musical instruments – shake one and hear!  The pods are considered “litter” and seedless varieties were developed.  Similarly, the species was “declawed for the city” when a natural thornless hybrid was discovered (Plotnik, 2000).  Honeylocust is incredibly tolerant of urban conditions.  Its ability to “shake off heat, drought, air pollution, salt spray, and root drenching” accounts for its popularity as a street tree.  In the city’s 2005-2006 Street Tree Census, it was the fourth most common tree in the city and the most common species in Manhattan and the Bronx.

The goldenraintree is significantly shorter than the dawn redwood and the honeylocust at maturity.  Its maximum height is listed at 40 feet.  The species tolerates a range of growing conditions and thrives as a street tree.  It has showy fall flowers – said to be attractive to bees – and its fruit – a type of capsule – persists into the winter adding further seasonal interest.  Wind is an environmental factor when matching species to planting locations.  Interestingly, we have read conflicting accounts about the wind hardiness of the goldenraintree and are curious about its mortality on the pier.  Finally, in contrast to the honeylocust, the goldenraintree is a relatively “new” street tree, but its arrival in the U.S. can be traced back to 1809 (PDF) when aristocrat and botanist Madame de Tessé sent a shipment of seeds to Thomas Jefferson.
 

Feeling inspired? Check out ioby.org/idea to get your own neighborhood project started today!

Recipes for Change: The Trees of Minetta Playground

The Third Installment of this Week’s #RecipesForChange Blog Series:
“The Trees of Five Playgrounds, from Union Square to TriBeCa”

Come back each day this week for more from this week’s guest blogger, Georgia Silvera Seamans at Local Ecologist!

About this blog series: E.F. Schumacher, the British economist famous for coining the phrase “Small is Beautiful” told us to plant a tree. But which one should we plant? ioby’s guest blog series this week from Local Ecologist gives you a quick introduction to the arboreal lives of Manhattan’s playgrounds and, in it, a guide to trees tough enough for city life. 

About Recipes for Change: ioby equips leaders across the country with the tools that they need to make changes in their neighborhoods. Recipes for Change is a new series from ioby, aimed at providing the resources and expertise that you need for your environmental project to succeed.

Got ideas for more #RecipesforChange? Give @ioby a shout!

Today’s Featured Playground: Minetta Playground

The Minetta Playground is named for Minetta Brook, the same creek that used to flow aboveground through Washington Square Park.  Two nearby Parks Department properties are also named for the brook: Minetta Green and Minetta Triangle.  The .206 acre Minetta Playground is located on Sixth Avenue (aka Avenue of the Americas) between West Third Street and Minetta Lane.  The Parks Department was permitted to develop the parcel as a playground in 1934 and, in 1953, the Board of Estimate transferred ownership rights from the Department of Transportation to the Parks Department.

At the groundbreaking ceremony for the playground’s renovation in July 2010, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn described the playground as “an eyesore for the families in one of Manhattan’s most vibrant neighborhoods.”  The playground was reopened in January 2012.  All the play equipment is new but all the existing trees – nine Northern red oaks (Quercus rubra), one pin oak Q. palustris), and three London planetrees (Platanus × acerifolia) – were preserved.  In order to protect and preserve the mature canopy at Minetta Playground, the design and construction teams had to adhere to a five-step process (PDF): (1) define project goals and objectives; (2) inventory and assess all existing trees within the project scope; (3) design with the trees in mind; (4) formulate tree protection, staging and access plan; and (5) implement and enforce tree protection measures during construction.  Time will tell if the approach was successful.  Symptoms of construction damage are often delayed and can emerge within a few months to several years after construction is completed.

One interesting arboreal factoid about this playground is that the canopy is not dominated by London planetrees, which seem to be the default tree species in many older playgrounds.  A street tree-only survey of NYC (PDF) found that planetrees account for 15.3% of the total number of street trees and 29.1% of the street tree canopy cover across the five boroughs!  The pin oak is the fifth most numerous tree in the city, accounting for 7.5% of the total population and 10.9% of total canopy cover.  In Manhattan, London planetrees are the fourth most numerous tree, accounting for 8% of the total street tree population, while Northern red oaks are only 2.3% of the total population.

A 48-inch diameter Northern red oak is the third largest street tree in the Bronx, while in Queens the largest street tree measured in the city is a 76-inch diameter pin oak.

The Northern red oak is a preferred city tree because of its quick growth rate, symmetrical form, and pollution tolerance though it is sensitive to drought compared to other oak species. The pin oak is the “most popular street oak in America” likely because of its pollution and disease resistance and the ease with which it can be transplanted.  The species name for pin oak is palustris which means “marshes” in Latin.  Interesting, given the derivation of the playground’s name!

Different species of oak hold wildlife value in different regions.  In the East, the pin oak is one of three valuable wildlife species and, in the Northeast, the Northern red oak is one of four species of oak that have “particular importance to wildlife” (Martin et al., 1951).  The red oak is one of “the best shade trees,” (Martin et al., 1951) which can be attributed to its dense foliage and the horizontal growth of its branches.  Children and their caregivers will appreciate the effect of these physiological traits on hot summer afternoons.  Elevated temperatures negatively impact human and environmental health, so the role of shade trees goes beyond human comfort.  The trees and the understory vegetation also serve as a buffer between busy Sixth Avenue and the users of the playground – limiting exposure to vehicular pollution.

In The Granite Garden, Anne Whiston Spirn recommends at least 33 feet between the road and the sidewalk, the distance at which “the concentration of pollutants falls off sharply.”

 

Feeling inspired? Check out ioby.org/idea to get your own neighborhood project started today!

Recipes for Change: The Trees of the Playground of the Americas

The Second Installment of this Week’s #RecipesForChange Blog Series:
“The Trees of Five Playgrounds, from Union Square to TriBeCa”

Come back each day this week for more from this week’s guest blogger, Georgia Silvera Seamans at Local Ecologist!

About this blog series: E.F. Schumacher, the British economist famous for coining the phrase “Small is Beautiful” told us to plant a tree. But which one should we plant? ioby’s guest blog series this week from Local Ecologist gives you a quick introduction to the arboreal lives of Manhattan’s playgrounds and, in it, a guide to trees tough enough for city life. 

About Recipes for Change: ioby equips leaders across the country with the tools that they need to make changes in their neighborhoods. Recipes for Change is a new series from ioby, aimed at providing the resources and expertise that you need for your environmental project to succeed.

Got ideas for more #RecipesforChange? Give @ioby a shout!

Today’s Featured Playground: Playground of the Americas

 

 

On the border between Greenwich Village and SoHo sits the Avenue of the Americas Playground.  The playground is located on the southeast corner of Avenue of the Americas (aka Sixth Avenue) and Houston Street (the “Ho” in SoHo).  The playground parcel was acquired by the city in 1925 and placed under Parks Department jurisdiction in 1934.  It was formally designated Houston Plaza in 1998 and then given its current name in 2000.  We would like to suggest another name change for this 0.079-acre playground in honor of the lone mulberry (Morus) growing among six London planetrees – Mulberry Tree Playground – but there would always have to be a mulberry tree growing there!


We were surprised to see an edible fruit tree in a playground!  A search for “mulberry recipes” in Google Recipes yielded over 71,000 results.  The Playground of the Americas mulberry appears to be intentionally planted unlike the other ones growing between the playground and the adjacent apartment buildings.  It is likely a white mulberry or Morus alba, which was first introduced to the U.S. from China in 1623 to develop a colonial silk industry.  The initiative failed but the white mulberry thrived especially in urban areas because it can “tolerate drought, salt, compact soil, high winds, and air pollution,” according to Plotnik (2003).  The fruit can also be eaten by wildlife, primarily songbirds.  In New York the list of songbirds might include Cardinal, Catbird, Mockingbird, Robin, Sparrow, Starling, and Thrasher.  The red mulberry (M. rubra) is native to the U.S. It has a limited presence in cities, occurring “mainly as a park-thicket tree or a natural hybrid with the white mulberry” (Plotnik).


The fruit on the mulberry in the Playground of the Americas is green – an indicator that the tree is a white mulberry.  An additional marker is the shiny upper side of the leaf.  Despite the “berry” in its name, the fruit of the mulberry is not a true berry!  In his 1957 book, How to Identify Plants, Harold D. Harrington described the mulberry fruit as an exemplar of the “multiple fruit” type meaning it a fleshy fruit formed from several to many separate flowers.  These flowers have superior ovaries which may become fleshy but other parts of the unit may also be succulent.

Despite the fact that the (white) mulberry provides an ecosystem service to humans and to wildlife in the form of edible fruit, it is not beloved by all people.  The fallen fruit is considered litter, and some cities have banned planting the tree while others recommend fruitless (female) trees.  Female flowers produce fruit while male flowers produce pollen, but a mulberry tree can be monoecious or dioecious.  If the tree is monoecious, it produces both male and female flowers on the same tree, but if it is dioecious,  the male and female flowers are borne on separate plants.  In Washington, D.C. female ginkgos are sprayed to halt fruiting. At least we have not heard of municipalities spraying female mulberry trees.  Better to organize a fruit-harvesting brigade!

Finally, if you cannot visit the Playground of the Americas, you can find mulberries throughout the city. Check out Edward S. Barnard’s New York City Trees for a short list.  The male red mulberry near the Central Park Tennis House is an official Great Tree of the City.  For more information, take a look at the guide to “the Great Trees of New York City” written by Benjamin Swett in 2000.

 Feeling inspired? Check out ioby.org/idea to get your own neighborhood project started today!