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Entry #31 of The Journal, based in Brooklyn, NY is a strong continuation of the Michael Nevin and team’s view into all things worth documenting. With the help of numerous contributors, The Journal collects together everything from writings, performance and photography, as well as a very strong zine review and selection – a topic very close to my heart. We offer select looks from inside entry #31 for you to decide. In many respect, the periodical itself follows that classic zine format or bringing together a mash

If you have not picked up The Journal in the past, we strong suggest you take a look at this wonderful publication. They are documents worth viewing and re-viewing as all good books and periodical deserve. Buy your copy online at Thejournalinc.com.

Photography: Jeff Carvalho/Selectism.com

More looks in our gallery including the full semi-NSFW cover…

(...) Read the rest of The Journal Magazine Entry #31 – A Look Inside (1 words)

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Hiroshi Awai’s CREEP line is based up in Canada and designed with Japanese sensibilities. What that means is left to discussion. What we know is that season after season, CREEP offers looks and cuts that pull heavy from the designer’s background and, more importantly, the collection is distributed well throughout North America. The fleece, above, is a great look that pulls from those classic 90’s mountain garbs – modernized of course. CREEP works.

More looks in our gallery…

(...) Read the rest of First Look | CREEP by Hiroshi Awai Autumn/Winter 2012 – Looks (1 words)

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© 2012 Selectism for Titel Media. Author: Jeff Carvalho | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us |

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If you’re in the vicinity of TriBeCa next month, get ready to have fun saying: “Honey, I’m off to the haberdashery.”

That is when J. Crew plans to open The Ludlow Shop, a 2,100-square-foot space boasting an assortment of their Ludlow suits along with Thomas Mason shirts, Italian leather shoes, and ties. Tailors and suit wizards will be at the ready to fit the suit to the man, and then monogram the suit with the man’s initials, should it come to that. The eminently wearable—and adaptable (survey the ad campaign after the jump)—collection tops out at $1,500 for a Ludlow made from Italian cashmere.

As for the slim-fitting two-piece at the center of all the excitement, it debuted three years ago at The Liquor Store, also in the neighborhood, but demand has grown to the point that it now needs its own mailing address. -jt

Image: wwd

This article originally appeared on Selectism.com.

J. Crew Ludlow Suit Shop – Opening in TriBeCa

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© 2012 Selectism for Titel Media. Author: Jeff Carvalho | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us |

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The 2012 Republican primaries commenced this week and already the election has seen political scandals worthy of the books.  From Herman Cain’s sexual harassment charges, to Newt Gingrich’s open marriage proposal to Stephen Colbert’s joke campaign, this political season is one you will not want to miss.     

Here is a list of books that attempt to give you an inside look into what the campaign trail is really like.  Some are fiction and some are non-fiction but they all seek to paint a picture of the truly dramatic, scandalous and stressful lives of America’s politicians. 

Culling inspiration from Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, Le Bazar Des Poilus—a pop-up store at Hotel Jules & Jim in Paris—escaped the grim realities of WWI trench warfare with a few finer style points still strapped to the back. Vintage shoes, boots and sneakers, workwear and army issue fatigues, coats and woolens all held court at this collaboration between French online lifestyle mag Hell’s Kitchen and Leonard Vintage Shop in Lyons. Read all about it here … if you can read French.

We’d like to get our hands on the “Belt On” Levis Casuals pictured after the jump, but something tells us that the $4.98 price tag is as old as the pants. -jt

Photography: Mathieu Vilasco/Selectism.com

Click here to view the embedded video.

This article originally appeared on Selectism.com.

Le Bazar Des Poilus – A Pop-up store at Hotel Jules & Jim in Paris

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Here’s a shout-out to all buyers currently in town for the NYC Gift Fair: Team Tattly unfortunately does not have a booth *but* we would like to invite you to our “Tattly Showroom” in DUMBO if you’re interested in carrying Tattly.

We just started selling wholesale and are looking forward to being in many designy stores. For more info email us.

Welcome to Make It By Monday, GOOD's weekly DIY feature in which we curate, demystify, and add our own tips for craft projects from around the web (and our apartments). This week: DIY your belated thank you cards.

Presidential candidate Rick Santorum has really gone after higher education lately. Earlier this month, he called President Obama's suggestion that everyone should go to college "elitist snobbery." Now, he's speaking out in response to Obama's State of the Union education plans:

It’s no wonder President Obama wants every kid go to go college... The indoctrination that occurs in American universities is one of the keys to the left holding and maintaining power in America. And it is indoctrination. If it was the other way around, the ACLU would be out there making sure there wasn’t one penny of government dollars going to colleges and universities, right?

Let's get one thing straight: Rick Santorum is about as educated as you can possibly get, and not from insular religious institutions, either. He got himself a bachelor's degree from Penn State. Then a M.B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh. Then he went back to Penn State to get his law degree. Would he be a millionaire running for president if he hadn't gotten those degrees?

Even Santorum must know that college isn't just a place the left goes in order to maintain power; it's a necessary stepping-stone to get a good job, now more than ever. And, of course, educated people make more money. In 2009, the median the median annual income of a young college-educated adult was $45,000, while a young person with just a high school diploma made $21,000.

Santorum is correct in pointing out that most academics are lefty—professors identify themselves as liberals more often than people in any other type of job. That isn't a coincidence; many conservatives—the faith-based kind embodied by Santorum—embrace being anti-intellectual. But when Obama stresses the importance of every kid going to college, he's not plotting for a liberal takeover. He's acknowledging the key to building a competitive economy.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user Gage Skidmore.

If you are a photo buff then you most probably know about the mothership of all photo stores, B&H, here in NYC. The most fascinating part of B&H has always been their conveyor system. Let’s say you decided to buy a new lens, you’re on the third floor, they’ll put that lens into a basket that then is being transported down to the register at the exit, silently ‘floating’ through the store.

The Lense folks secretly put a camera into one of the baskets to see how it works from the inside. Again, this might be only fascinating if you have actually been to B&H.

(via Coudal)

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East Haven, Connecticut, Mayor Joseph Maturo, Jr. ruffled a lot of feathers this week when he told a reporter that he would address Latinos' concerns over police discrimination and abuse by "eating tacos." Maturo has since apologized numerous times, but activists around the country continue to take him to task. Some, like Connecticut's Latino and Puerto Rican Affairs Commission, have asked for his resignation. Others have gotten a bit more creative with their protest.

Immigrant rights group Reform Immigration for America started a "text-the-mayor-a-taco" campaign, in which they agreed to buy Maturo a taco for every text message they received from irate citizens. The group ended up getting more than 3,000 texts, but they decided to send only 500 tacos, all of which were delivered to Maturo's office Thursday night. The gesture was mostly symbolic, of course, and 499 of the tacos were donated to a community food bank for East Haven's needy. One taco was left for the mayor.

Since its inception, SoundExchange, the organization that collects royalty payments from digital music services like Pandora, has brought in more than $900 million--$292 million of which it collected last year alone. But how much of a cut does SoundExchange take for itself? Nothing, other than for operating and administrative costs.

SoundExchange is a non-profit that's rapidly growing to become one of the most important organizations in the music industry. For many labels, it's the No. 2 source of digital revenue only behind iTunes. And for president Michael Huppe, it's now more important than ever that organizations at the center of collecting and distributing so much artist revenue--from satellite and Internet streaming services--are non-profits, especially as Google enters the field with its acquisition of RightsFlow last month. "Believe me, there's many a day that it would be great to just have our staff vested in options," Huppe says. "But that's not we do. We're a non-profit because we want to do the right thing, and because we're not solely driven by whatever maximizes our bottom line. You don't come to a non-profit to get rich."

Huppe's main mission is to track down rights holders and distribute royalty payments--a surprisingly difficult mission. Though registering with SoundExchange is a simple and free process, many artists have not claimed their royalties--one very famous R&B artist, says Huppe, had unclaimed royalties in the six figures just waiting to be collected. But after reaching out through myriad channels, the artist repeatedly avoided collecting his or her earnings. "You wouldn't believe what we do to find artists, and there are a lot of folks we have found, and for whatever reason, they haven't registered. I can't tell you why you wouldn't register to get free money," Huppe says. "We see people, call them up, and say, 'Hey! We have money for you!' Maybe we sound like a Nigerian bank scam?"

The organization has an outreach team devoted to delivering royalty payments, whether by contacting labels or managers, take advantage of its board members' connections, or working with other royalty payment services. At the annual SXSW festival, for example, SoundExchange gets an advanced list of the artists slated to play, and then matches the lineup against its database of unregistered artists. "We put posters all around saying, 'Hey, do any of you know these bands? Send them to our booth--we got money for them!'" Huppe says.

Still, despite the organization's efforts, tens of millions of dollars are left unclaimed--which is the exact reason why it's important for SoundExchange to operate as a non-profit. Technically, SoundExchange is only required to hold onto unclaimed funds for three years. "If after that they haven't come forward and signed up, we can release the funds to offset our costs," Huppe says. "But we've repeatedly put that ability off to give artists extra time."

Huppe believes a for-profit entity would not act so altruistically. "Imagine if we were a for-profit entity. Do you think we'd be delaying the release of money? Hell no," he says. "Imagine if we're not obligated to do this outreach, and we're a for-profit entity. Do you think we'd be spending all this money on outreach? Hell no."

So with Google's acquisition of RightsFlow, a small company that similarly processes royalty payments, SoundExchange is paying close attention to the search giant's plans. It's assumed Google will use RightsFlow to help manage royalty payments from YouTube. "i don't know what it means for the industry," Huppe says. "I certainly think the scale of Google is probably bigger than anything the RightsFlow platform has dealt with before, but it's not surprising that Google wants to get into the space."

Pandora cofounder Tim Westergren feels similarly about the acquisition. "I don't know yet [what it means]. It doesn't totally surprise me," he told Fast Company recently. "Google has danced around music for a while, and wanted to get involved in transactions in some fashion. They of course are constantly wrestling with rights and payments and ownership and so on."

SoundExchange just wants to make sure artists are getting paid.

"To the extent that we having any influence over it," Huppe says, "when Google is out there profiting off the blood, sweat, and tears of our artists and labels and rights owners, we want to make sure they're getting their fair share."

[Image: Flickr user Jon Tucker]

Jon Rubinstein, the former CEO of Palm and the man behind WebOS, has left HP.

It's hard to imagine that only about 19 months ago, HP acquired Palm for $1.2 billion and brought on Rubinstein to reinvigorate the company. In that short span, HP embarked on an aggressive plan to produce smartphones and tablets running WebOS--before deciding to kill that original strategy due to poor sales, spin off its PC business, change CEOs, and radically pivot toward acquiring enterprise services company Autonomy for $10 billion.

Now Rubinstein joining a slew of recently departed executives--including Phil McKinney and Richard Kerris--though Rubinstein is perhaps the most high-profile of the bunch. The former Apple executive who oversaw the creation of the iPod, Rubinstein was tapped to breathe new life into HP, but has now become a symbol for all the dramatic and bumpy transformations HP has undergone over the past few years.

"We ran out of runway, and we ended up at HP and HP wasn't in good enough shape on its own to be able to support the effort," Rubinstein said an interview with The Verge. In a discussion with AllThingsD about why the TouchPad failed, he added, "Well, it wasn’t exactly given much time."

Rubinstein's comments echo the sentiments of many critics of HP and its handling of WebOS. Just weeks after the technology company axed the TouchPad, Phil McKinney, then-CTO of HP's $40 billion personal systems group, which oversaw the TouchPad, laid down the "7 Immutable Laws of Innovation" on his blog. It seemed that HP had violated every single one of the laws, especially the laws of resources and patience. "The organization must take the long view on innovation and avoid the temptation and resist the pressure for short-term adjustments," McKinney wrote. Offering a prescient warning, McKinney also said of his laws, "If you violate any one of them, the consequences can be disastrous."

But Rubinstein had more on his mind than just improving HP's bottom line. When he left Apple and later ended up at Palm, Rubinstein joined a direct Apple competitor--an act of treason in Cupertino. "I'm definitely off the Christmas list," Rubinstein once said of Steve Jobs's reaction to his decision. Not only did Rubinstein alienate his former boss, but he set out to prove that he could produce just as innovative products as Apple. Rubinstein had frequently clashed with Jobs and designer Jony Ive over manufacturing costs and hardware issues; leaving Apple and later joining Palm to build WebOS became an opportunity for Rubinstein to prove his former colleagues .

Unsurprisingly, Jobs's had very harsh words for Rubinstein, arguing in Walter Isaacson's biography that HP's efforts had failed. "Hewlett and Packard built a great company, and they thought they had left it in good hands...but now it’s being dismembered and destroyed," Jobs told Isaacson.

"In the end, Ruby’s from HP,” Jobs added, a one-two punch that both insulted Rubinstein for lacking Apple's innovative DNA, and insinuated that HP has declined into a second-rate technology company.

Still, seems ready to let bygones be bygones. When The Verge reached him in Mexico, Rubinstein was about ready to head off for a job or a swim or maybe to grab a margarita. When asked about what happened at HP, Rubinstein had a Zen-like response.

"I don't think it really matters at this point," he said. "It's old history at this point."

[Image: Flickr user Zach Stem]

We just relaunched the Mixel blog yesterday along with a refresh of our main Web site. The main goal was to bring the look and feel of both in line with one another and, specifically for the blog, to create a more editorial-friendly presentation. As I explained in this post, the Mixel blog turned out to be a more text-intensive product than we anticipated, and so we needed a design that would accommodate that. We also needed to switch to a publishing tool that was more suitable for that kind of content. Tumblr wasn’t doing it for us.

I wrote about Tumblr a while ago with great admiration in this blog post, and I still think it’s an amazing company and one of the best social content products out there. As a ‘traditional’ blogging tool though, I’m more ambivalent about it.

The Writing Kind of Blogging

It’s true that many folks, like my friend Cameron Moll, use Tumblr to publish their text-heavy blogs and are very happy with it, and so I don’t argue that it can work great for this purpose. But we found it to be less reliable than we’d like; the editing interface is unpredictable, to put it politely.

To be fair, we were also using it in a way that wasn’t a truly good fit for what Tumblr is good at; the first rule of digital content is that it must be true to the native characteristics of its delivery channel, and we weren’t doing that. We’re not giving up on Tumblr though; its network effects are truly amazing, and we have some ideas for a different editorial product that will hopefully be a much better fit for that network.

In place of Tumblr, we’re now using a WordPress blog hosted over at Page.ly. The theme was developed by my friend and amazing WordPress guru Allan Cole. In spite of having developed a premium WordPress theme of my own (Basic Maths, which was designed and developed with Allan), I’ve never been a heavy WordPress user until now. I have to admit, its most recent version is full of the fun, geeky features that I like as a blogger, stuff that allows designer-editors to fully tweak the way content is output. It’s great.

Other Stuff Posted at Other Places

All this fooling around with hosted publishing solutions has reminded me that Subtraction.com is getting long in the tooth, and very much represents an old school way of thinking about blogs. (It’s published with ExpressionEngine, which is quite powerful but has been trying to rejuvenate itself after some recent stumbles.) In fact, I’ve always wanted to fold Tumblr-like features into this site, and have played on and off with both Tumblr and Posterous for several years to see what those modes of blogging feel like.

My Tumblr experiments have largely been for naught, but I took to Posterous pretty well and have kept two blogs there for some time, more or less privately. I’ve been writing a log of really short (and, be prepared, somewhat stuffy) reviews of movies I’ve recently viewed at delayedreaction.posterous.com. And I have an ongoing image blog at Subtraction.posterous.com, where I collect a bunch of somewhat Subtraction-y images that don’t quite fit into this main blog.

The latter blog has been really interesting to curate, because it bleeds over to the stuff I’ve been keeping at Pinterest too. My boards at Pinterest are not a form blogging, necessarily, but they’re very similar to the image collecting and curating that I do at Posterous, yet even further afield from what I would normally post on Subtraction.com. (By the way, we’re collecting lots of really amazing work from Mixel on these Pinterest boards.)

Of all of these third party services, I feel least inclined to bring the activity from Pinterest back under the Subtraction.com umbrella, mostly because it’s the least blog-like. But what I’m doing on my two Posterous blogs, as well as what I would theoretically do at Tumblr, is very much the stuff that I would like to integrate into this site, if I had the time. Ultimately, I think I’m just the kind of user who will always want everything blog-like to be clearly a part of this blog, hosted on my own server, customized just the way I want. It’s not the trend of things in the world at large now, I know, but even bloggers get old.

To follow me on Twitter click here.

Bravo Company, an independent design studio based in Singapore, has recently launched a clever new product called Rememberings™. These stretchable silicon rings, similar to those yellow LIVESTRONG bracelets, have inscriptions on them that remind us of little, yet important things, such as Take pills; Call mum; Pay bills; Return books; Buy gift, etc, that always seem to slip our minds. The bright colors are sure to catch anybody’s eye, which thus fulfills its purpose of reminding! It works well as an accessory or a gift for a forgetful friend.

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© 2012 Design Milk | Posted by Jaime in Style & Fashion | Permalink | No comments

The weekend is here. Don't forget to play. 

Patrick Joust loves Baltimore. He loves the architecture, loves the topography, loves shooting portraits on the street. Though Joust grew up in California and Pennsylvania, he developed his photographic style only after moving to Baltimore. 

Joust's photographs are united by a cinematic sense of style. A librarian by day, Joust traverses the city and surrounding counties at night, playing with long exposures and teasing out rich tones from the landscape. A self-professed lover of street photography, he also conveys a sense of place through his photos. Through their own personal style, the characters he captures testify to the unique style of Charm City. 

See more of Joust's photographs on his website and blog. 

Two federal agencies will steer tax money for social programs through a new for-profit investing tool tested in the United Kingdom and Australia, according to a report co-authored by the White House and the Nonprofit Finance Fund.

Rather than providing social services directly, the bonds will allow the government to task a firm in the private sector to solve a public challenge, paying the company only if it achieves certain success metrics. Using pay-for-success bonds could save taxpayer money, earn a profit for impact investors, and incentivize innovation to solve chronic social challenges. In the United States, this is all theoretical at this point, but 2012 may be the year that changes.

The Department of Labor will make available $20 million for pay-for-success projects that help Americans find work through its Workforce Innovation Fund. The Department of Justice has not released a specific number, but says it will give preference to applicants to the Second Chance Act grants program who incorporate some pay-for-success element. That program, started in 2008, awards grants to governments and nonprofits that help ex-prisoners find work and get back on their feet so they don’t return to crime. That’s the basic idea behind the original pay-for-success bond—more commonly known as social impact bonds—in Peterborough, England. That plan, launched in 2010, was designed to lower young offenders' recidivism rates in one small prison outside London. The closely watched program won’t deliver conclusive results for investors or the juvenile offenders for a few more years. But the idea was attractive enough that other agencies in the U.K. and Australia started copy-cat programs to care for the disabled and fight homelessness.

The early evidence from the United Kingdom suggest social impact bonds are a promising innovation for lean budgetary times because the government doesn’t end up paying for projects that fail. If the company in in the U.K. pilot fails to reduce recidivism by 7 percent, its private investors, not the government, lose the $13 million spent on programs for the young offenders. Shifting risk from government to investors enables new designs for social projects—and in theory, frees up lots more money to spend on them.

“We’re seeing tremendous momentum for developing social impact bonds," in the United States, says Steve Goldberg of Social Finance U.S. His organization designed the first bond in Peterborough, and has since creating an office in Boston to capitalize on U.S. momentum for similar projects. "It's encouraging to see government at both the federal and state levels getting behind social innovation financing." 

It looks like a smart investment to the White House, too. “The hope is that Pay for Success will help us find better ways to get Americans the supports and services they need,” administration officials Cecilia Muñoz and Robert Gordon wrote in a companion post to the report.   President Obama asked for $100 million for social impact bonds in his budget, a hefty federal stamp of approval and financial carrot for states and nonprofits to get moving on how to spend that money. Massachusetts, Minnesota and New York City have all taken the bait and started issuing their own bonds. Connecticut, Michigan, New York State, Rhode Island, Virginia, and the cities of Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Louisville are considering pilots of their own.

“Our new fiscal reality requires that we change the way government does business," says Jay Gonzalez, the Massachusetts Secretary of Administration of Finance, the agency managing the bonds. He says the bonds provide better service while “stretching every taxpayer dollar as far as possible.” An earlier, less formal request for information from potential bond-issuers by the state yielded more than 30 responses.

According to the White House/NFF report, potential partners are particularly interested in using pay-for-success bonds to address criminal justice, homelessness, early childhood education, and workforce development. They also cited research showing the value of spending on prevention, specifically in education. For every $1 spent on early childhood development, the government saves $7 down the road on other programs, like special ed, teen pregnancy services, and the emerging pay-for-success poster case, juvenile delinquency. "In particular [pay-for-success bonds offer] a financing solution for preventive services, which are often the first services to get cut in hard budget times even though they lead to reduced costs and better outcomes in the long-term,” Muñoz and Gordon write.

If these announcements are any indication, 2012 will be the year of education for nonprofits, social impact investors, and local governments on this new hybrid solution to social challenges. After talking with dozens of public officials, the Nonprofit Finance Fund's Kristin Giantris says there is "tangible momentum" happening across the country. "We think we will see various proof of concept pilots in 2012 that will emerge at the state and local level," she says.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user The White House. 

Architects Foster + Partners have attached a 35-storey tower onto the side of two renovated 1920s buildings in Vancouver’s financial district.

Nestled alongside the restored Ceperley Rounsfell Building and the retained facade of the Royal Financial Building, Jameson House provides 23 floors of apartments above offices and shops on the floors below.

The glazed tower’s northeast elevation is articulated as four vertical tubes, which begin at the cornice height of neighbouring buildings.

Other projects we’ve featured in Canada include an interesting canoe store and a set of plywood skating shelters – see them all here.

Photography is by Nigel Young.

Here’s some more information from Foster + Partners:

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Jameson House, Foster + Partners first mixed-use project in Canada

Jameson House is a new 35-storey mixed-use tower in the heart of Vancouver and includes the first residential development to be completed by the practice in North America – completed at the end of last year, already the building is now almost fully occupied. The project combines the restoration of heritage buildings with new construction: the lower level offices and shops knit with the existing streetscape to reinvigorate the downtown neighbourhood, while the apartments above face dramatic views of the bay and create a new landmark on the skyline.

Fusing old and new, the site connects the city’s financial centre with its emerging creative hub, and the scheme integrates two 1920s Beaux Arts structures: the entire internal double-height volume of the A-listed Ceperley Rounsfell Building has been returned to its original configuration and the facade of the B-listed Royal Financial Building has been retained.

The development comprises eleven storeys of offices and shops, topped by twenty-three storeys of apartments. The tower’s form articulates these different functions: the first two storeys continue the row of shop units at street level, while the uppermost office floor aligns with the cornice line of the adjacent building. Contrasting with the flush facade of the offices, the residential floors curve outwards in four wide bays, which are staggered to allow daylight to reach neighbouring buildings and oriented to provide uninterrupted views of the landscape.

The tower’s flexible plan supports a variety of apartment types, with interiors by Foster + Partners and living spaces in the deep curve of the window bays. At the top of the tower are two-storey penthouse apartments and landscaped roof terraces.

The design was developed in response to the local climate, seasonal sun paths, prevailing winds, humidity levels, air temperatures and precipitation rates specific to Vancouver.

Foster + Partners’ in-house engineering group – formerly PHA Consult – has been involved in the project from the outset, in a fully integrated approach to environmental engineering and architectural design.

Click above for larger image

This has led to innovations such as chilled floors and a mechanised valet parking system, which reduces the number of parking levels and associated excavation, lighting and ventilation requirements.

Click above for larger image

Lord Foster said: “Vancouver has a spectacular location, surrounded by mountains and the sea. The design makes the most of the city’s fantastic natural setting, with balconies and deep bay windows looking out towards the landscape. Jameson House further develops a number of key themes that have been integral to our work for many years. The project combines restoration with new construction; it is high-density and mixed-use, offering a sustainable model for urban living; and it demonstrates innovation, both in its evolution of the high-rise building and its progressive environmental agenda.”

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Nigel Dancey, a senior partner at Foster + Partners, said: “Jameson House was the result of a team effort: we worked closely with environmental engineers, as well as the city, from the outset. This collaborative approach led to innovations, both in the tower’s design and in our interrogation of the brief – we were able to significantly increase the density of the scheme to create a highly sustainable mixed-use development. And by combining these different functions within a compact footprint, we can further balance energy usage with the mixture of daytime and night-time activity.”

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Colin Bosa, CEO of Bosa Properties: “Foster + Partners has created a unique building for Vancouver, which combines high-quality finishes and a strong design sense with a clear commitment to sustainability. We are most pleased with the architectural legacy that Jameson House offers to our city.”

In New York City, public life is conducted in school auditoriums. They’re the only spaces big enough to hold the crowds that show up to public meetings about contentious neighborhood issues. So on Tuesday night, grown-ups filed into the Carroll School to hear the Environmental Protection Agency’s plan for cleaning up the Gowanus canal. The agency declared the canal a Superfund site in 2010, and in December, it released a draft of the feasibility study for its next actions. Tuesday’s presentation laid out the next steps to the community. It will take another six to eight months for the EPA to come up with a proposed plan. The agency plans to publish its recommendation before the end of the year. The Gowanus canal has been polluted for decades, and it took years for the city, state and federal governments to fight out who might take responsibility for it. Now the clean-up process is starting. But with an environmental issue of such long standing, the clean up can be just as complicated and politically difficult as getting an agency like the EPA to commit to fixing the problem to begin with. Before Tuesday’s meeting started, the EPA’s Walter Mugdan, who directs the agency’s environmental planning and protection in this region, instructed the audience to interrupt the presenters if they needed an acronym explained. Environmental remediation requires many acronyms. In the bottom silt of the Gowanus Canal, the EPA found PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons), PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), and NAPLs (non-aqueous phase liquids). NAPL rhymes with apple and in the case of the Gowanus means, more or less, coal tar. The canal is also contaminated with barium, cadmium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel and silver, but the EPA can shorthand those with an acronym, as “metals.” There’s also CSO — combined sewer overflow — which is what’s dumped into the canal when rainfall is heavy and household waste mixes with storm water. PRG stands for Preliminary Remediation Goals. “Because we need another acronym,” an EPA presenter quipped, RTA stands for Remediation Target Areas. But meetings like this one have been going on for years in this neighborhood, and no one asked for a refresher on acronyms. Instead, community members asked questions like “Who’s going to pay for all of this?” and “What’s the point of cleaning up the canal if the land surrounding it is still polluted?” (One of the canal’s many pollution problems is contaminants flowing in with groundwater or street runoff.) When the EPA took responsibility for cleaning up the canal, it allowed this neighborhood to start moving forward with a long-desired goal. While momentum towards the clean-up grew, the city worked on rezoning the area around the canal, developers imagining large condo projects milled about, and plans began for erecting a Whole Foods in a nearby brownfield. The industrial neighborhood became an increasingly hip zone, with artists’ studios and music venues opening up. Now, finally, there’s a little more clarity about what direction the clean-up is heading, which influences decisions by developers to build, potential home-owners to buy, businesses to open up. People can start to move on with their lives. But it’s also not so simple. Just because the EPA has taken charge of one set of problems doesn’t mean it’s fixing every environmental issue left over from the area’s industrial past. “For our organization, it has liberated us to have a final determination about a clean-up for the canal itself,” says Hans Hesselein, who works for the Gowanus Canal Conservancy, a local environmental group that’s been pushing for years for the canal to be dealt with. Now that the EPA has taken responsibility for the canal itself — or, more specifically, the contaminated silt at its bottom — Hesselein’s organization can focus on issues like storm water management (that’s dealing with CSO) and with watershed improvements. The answer to the question about the pollution on the surrounding land is that the state environmental department is dealing with it. The GCC is still worried about CSO, because that’ll be the city’s responsibility to fix. Although clean-up of the canal is moving forward, in some ways, it has yet to begin.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user listenmissy.