Event - Reviewing Renewal:

Reviewing Renewal:

02.08.15, 3:00 pm

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596 Acres will present 155+ urban renewal plans that the City has ever adopted in an intervention directly on the Panorama of the City of New York, realizing the online Urban Reviewer map on a 1:1200 scale of the 9,335 square foot Panorama.
New York City began to adopt “€œurban renewal plans”€ in 1949 to get federal funding to acquire land, relocate the people living there, demolish the structures and make way for new public and private development. The legacy of these neighborhood master plans remains active across the city, from sites like Lincoln Center to the many vacant lots cleared in East New York and Bushwick for projects that were never completed. Even after federal funding for the program was cut in 1974, New York City continued to adopt renewal plans for neighborhoods – 82 plan areas, where the city has eminent domain power to take private property for the public purpose of eliminating blight and economic “€œunder-performance,”€ came into being between 1975 and the present.
Urban renewal transforms the city, and changes the lives of many New Yorkers, for better or worse. Over 60 plan for areas of the city remain active today. Some communities are taking advantage of active plan areas to make community aspirations into official plans.
What can we learn from the continuing story of urban renewal in NYC?

Curator: Paula Z. Segal, Esq., 596 Acres, Inc.

Exhibition Design: Mary Bereschka, Greg Mihalko, Stephen von Muehlen

Design: Partner & Partners

Event Production: Amy Fitzgerald, Oksana Mironova

Exhibition made possible thanks to the support of Mapzen and the Queens Museum.

Related programming every Sunday Jan 11-Feb 8, 2015. All events are free. Some RSVPs required.

Sunday, February 8, 2015

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3pm – 4pm, Panorama Reviewing Renewal Curator Walk & Talk in the Panorama: Paula Z. Segal
Paula Z. Segal is the Director of 596 Acres, New York City’s community land access advocacy organization. In addition to supporting 30 successful neighborhood campaigns for official community access to vacant publicly owned lots and transform them into gardens and pocket parks, the organization looks for opportunities for residents to be in the charge of what happens to their neighborhoods. She is the curator for Reviewing Renewal.
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4pm “€“ 6pm, 2nd floor theater

Reviewing Renewal Film Presentation: 

The Tragedy of Urban Renewal: The Destruction and Survival of a New York City Neighborhood 2011, Reason TV, 6 min With closing reception and discussion.

The Tragedy of Urban Renewal: The Destruction and Survival of a New York City Neighborhood depicts New York City’s Manhattantown  (1951) – one of the first projects authorized under urban renewal. The Manhattantown project destroyed six blocks on New York City’s Upper West Side, including an African-American community that dated to the turn of the century. The city sold the land for a token sum to build a middle-class housing development. Then came the often repeated bulldoze-and-abandon phenomenon: with little financial skin in the game, the developers let the demolished land sit vacant for years.