MAS announced the winners of its Annual Awards honoring individuals and groups that help define what makes New York City great at the MAS annual meeting on Wednesday, July 9. Held at TheTimesCenter, the 2008 MAS Annual Award-winners are: the City’s 311 Customer Service Center; José the Beaver, the first seen in New York since colonial days and a clear symbol of New York city’s improving urban environment; the Long Island City Cultural Alliance; American Ballroom Theater’s Dancing Classrooms; and Solar One Environmental Center. Continue Reading>>

Jeanne DuPont, Executive Director of the Rockaway Waterfront Alliance (RWA) is the 2008 Yolanda Garcia Community Planning Award recipient. This award, which recognizes the often-unsung leaders of grassroots community-based planning, was awarded to Jeanne for her work promoting public waterfront access in the Rockaways. In 2005, the RWA created the Rockaway Waterfront Park Project, which laid the groundwork for the present PLANYC public park project for Far Rockaway. Like Yolanda Garcia, Jeanne has a strong commitment to community-led planning-working across cultural and generational lines to create a community vision. Continue Reading>>

In mid-June, Municipal Art Society Chairman Philip K. Howard announced that Vin Cipolla, a nationally recognized leader in the preservation, arts and business communities, has been named President of the organization. Mr. Cipolla will assume his position with MAS in early 2009. He is currently President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Park Foundation and was formerly Executive Vice President of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the country’s largest historic preservation organization.

“We are excited to welcome Mr. Cipolla to lead MAS as it enters a new period of growth and influence in New York City,” said Mr. Howard. “His outstanding expertise in both the private and public sectors will be critical to our efforts to promote good development while preserving the city’s character.” Continue Reading>>

In an article for today’s Boston Globe, Derrick Jackson writes that “train travel is finally becoming a third rail of politics,” and “the first one to fry over it might be John McCain.”

For years, McCain, in the comfort of cheap gasoline for autos and airplanes, made Amtrak a personal whipping boy. Despite the fact that governments in Western Europe and Asia zoomed far ahead of the United States by supporting high-speed trains to relieve congestion, promote tourism and now as we are coming to know, save the planet, McCain has spent considerable capital in denying the passenger rail system the capital to modernize.

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Although he spent some of his career as a developer with the New York office of Metropolitan Structures and as Vice-President of Uris Building Corp., Richard Buford always considered himself foremost a planner. And it is as a planner and urbanist that he will be best remembered.

Dick served as the executive director of the Department of City Planning during the Lindsay Administration, and as a director of Lower Manhattan Development. A long-term member of MAS’s professional committees and part of the committee at MAS that established the New York Landmarks Conservancy - on whose board he served for 20 years - he was also President of the South Street Seaport Museum, and director of the Buell Center for the study of American Architecture at Columbia University. Continue Reading>>

This spring, MAS hosted a series of programs under the title “Can New York Build a New Train Station?” Among the themes that the programs addressed were the growing popularity of rail travel in the United States, the capacity of well-designed and functional train stations to revitalize the city, and the belief that Moynihan Station should be the primary focus in efforts to develop a new commercial district on the Far West Side of Manhattan. Continue Reading>>

The New York City Charter is comparable to a constitution - it spells out the roles and obligations of all elected municipal officials and state agencies. In Mayor Bloomberg’s January 2008 “State of the City Address,” he announced the creation of a Charter Review Commission to “conduct a top-to-bottom review of the city government,” and that the city would “consider any proposal that would improve the life of New York and New Yorkers.”

The Daily News recently reported that Bloomberg allocated $2.1 million in his most recent budget proposal to fund this commission, $354,000 of which is earmarked for the fiscal year ending July 1. Continue Reading>>

The Economist has an excellent article on the critical state of our nation’s infrastructure in its current issue. After describing the ills the article prescribes a cure for projects not unlike Moynihan Station:

The federal government should do what it can to ensure that these [metroregions], first of all, have the infrastructure they need to thrive.

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While the federal government has sat on the sidelines, local government has provided true leadership in response to global climate change in the United States. Last year, New York City joined a small but growing list of American municipalities such as Boston, Los Angeles, and Seattle in aligning planning and development goals with ambitions to reduce carbon emissions.

Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC2030 was designed to lay the groundwork for achieving and maintaining affordable housing, open space, comprehensive public transportation, and reliable energy, as well as clean air, water, and land. A year has passed and PlaNYC has seen both successes and failures. MAS set about this past year to address what we perceived to be a critical issue that is nonetheless often overlooked: sustainability planning is too important to be left solely to the experts. Continue Reading>>

After a few quiet weeks in the world of Moynihan, the Farley Post Office emerged unscathed from a two-alarm fire on Tuesday night and Steve Roth, chairman of Vornado, and Steve Ross, chairman of Related – the Moynihan Venture tag team – spoke about the project at a real estate breakfast this morning in New York. The Venture's latest scheme is to get the Port Authority to buy the Garden from the Dolans and liberate the coveted air rights on the arena site. Eliot Brown of the Observer has this report:

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