Tag: nyc

• Manhattan’s sticky street

  Street networks tend to be pretty sticky. Meaning, they tend not to change very much, or at all, over time. We have spoken about this before, over the years.

  A good example of this is Broadway in Manhattan. Broadway is a world-famous street. And it’s perhaps no coincidence that it’s also the only street that runs the full length of Manhattan and breaks across the city’s regular street grid.

  The exact reasons for this are somewhat nuanced. And for a more fulsome backstory, I recommend you watch Daniel Steiner’s recent video on the topic (embedded above).

  It is alleged that Broadway started out as the Wickquasgeck trail. Meaning it pre-dates the arrival of Europeans to the island. But regardless, we know that it came before New York’s famed Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, which is the plan that gave the city its grid.

  So it would appear that, sometimes, even the most rational of plans can be no match for something even stronger: a street that already exists.

  2024.07.04

• First cross-laminated timber apartment building in NYC

  At the end of 2020, I wrote about a cross-laminated timber apartment building that Joanne and Fred Wilson were building in Brooklyn at 383 Greene Street.

  Well, that project is now complete and stabilized, and it turns out that it was the first CLT apartment building ever built in NYC, which is quite an accomplishment.

  On her blog, Joanne describes the project as being a “labor of love”, and that certainly sounds right. But they are now also onto their next CLT apartment building at 122 Waverly Avenue (called Frame 122).

  This would suggest that whatever their development model is, it is working for them. My assumption is that they want to both make our cities more sustainable and own high-quality rental assets for the long-term (possibly forever).

  If you’d like to see how 122 Waverly was assembled, here’s a short video that Joanne recently posted on her blog:

  2023.10.03

• Swiss running brand On opens NYC flagship

  

  Swiss running brand On recently opened up a new flagship store in NYC’s NoHo district. It was designed by the Swedish architect and designer Andreas Bozarth Fornell (whose firm is called Specific Generic), and I think it’s a good example of the whole push toward “experiential retail.” Before Zappos there was a belief that nobody was prepared to buy shoes online. Surely shoes are something that you need to try on to make sure that they fit properly. But then Zappos and Tony Hsieh came along and decided to offer free returns so that you could just order a few different sizes to try on at home and return the ones that don’t fit. And then just like magic, we’re now living in a world where I myself couldn’t tell you the last time I bought a pair of shoes offline.

  What is obvious at this point is that people will buy pretty much anything online — everything from boats and real estate to shoes and tires — and so, in many cases, the physical retail experience needs to be exactly that — an experience. Something special. What On has done with their flagship store in NYC is try and create a space that, among other things, tells their brand story, acts as a hub for the local running community, and offers up a unique technological experience that is likely pretty difficult to replicate online. One of the key features is a “magic wall” that analyses your technique and scans your feet as you run past it (pictured below). The invisible foot scanner is supposed to help you find the perfect shoe size, accurate to within 1.25mm.

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  If you’re a serious runner, I could imagine this being a pretty appealing in-store experience. (And if you’re not a runner, I guess you could just take a selfie in front of the magic wall. People seem to like pink walls). Whatever the case may be, I think On has done a great job trying to rethink the retail experience around its brand story and philosophy. But it leads me to a bunch of questions. Which brands and/or products are suitable for a new retail experience? (Does toilet paper, for example, want a new high-tech warehouse space in NoHo?) Assuming we continue down this path toward experiences, does this ultimately lead to less retail space per capita? Probably. And if we’re destined for less space, what does that ultimately mean for the ground floor experience of our cities? What should these spaces become? How does street life evolve?

  Cities aren’t going anywhere. But change is inevitable.

  Images: On

  2020.12.16

• New York City is testing new “flex gates”

  I spent a good chunk of this morning talking and thinking about underground building details that most people (unless you’re in the industry) would never think to consider. This is not a criticism on most people. I mean, I don’t know how iPhones are made. I just use and enjoy them. But when it comes to buildings, I’m paid to ask questions and understand how things work.

  There’s a lot of risk in the ground.

  You have to think about things like bearing capacity, environmental contamination (usually), hydrostatic pressure and, generally, how you’re going to manage water, particularly if you have a high groundwater table. Usually this last one is about making sure you’re keeping the water out. A pretty important detail both below and above grade.

  So when I came home tonight and saw the below tweet, I felt obligated to write about it.

  MTA explain yourself pic.twitter.com/yT2GXAzG9H

  — Kaye Blegvad (@kayeblegvad) November 20, 2019

  If you read the reply from NYC’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, you’ll see that this is them testing something they call a “flex gate.” It is a flood barrier that allows them to seal off subway entrances in the case of a storm surge and they run these tests (shown above) for 4 hours at a time to make sure they’re installed property. This one was.

  Managing water is a big part of city building. New York City, Miami, Venice, and countless others know this all too well right now.

  2019.11.21

• The densest urban cells in America

  Garrett Dash Nelson recently published a study looking at urban density on a cell-by-cell basis for a number of US cities. Each “cell” is a 30 arc-second grid cell, but you can think of them as being approximately one square kilometer. The goal of the project was to better define urban density and do it in a more granular way. City averages don’t tell you a whole lot about how neighborhoods vary, and they can be skewed by the denominator you use. i.e. Where are you drawing the urban boundary?

  

  You can play around with his interactive study, here. Each city can be explored according to its 200 most dense cells. One interesting takeaway — though it is probably not all that surprising to this audience — is that New York City is really a unique place when it comes to American cities. If you look at the above chart (sourced from CityLab), you’ll see that most other US cities don’t come close to it in terms of urban density. New York’s 200th densest cell is still denser than the most dense cells of Boston, the Twin Cities, and of Dallas.

  The y-axis is the total population in each grid cell.

  2019.07.11

• Minimum fleet

  Here is an interesting study by the MIT Senseable City Lab, which looks at: “the minimum number of vehicles needed to serve all the trips in New York without delaying passengers’ pick up times.” If you can’t see the embedded video below, click here.

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFo64kBGF6o&w=560&h=315]

  This is interesting because it begins to quantify the amount of waste running through the system today and the possible efficiencies brought about by autonomous vehicles. In this model, the current taxi fleet in NYC could be reduced by 40%.

  For more on the study, go here.

  2018.08.01

• The neighborhood of the future

  

  Daniel Doctoroff (chairman and CEO of Sidewalk Labs and former deputy mayor of New York City) and Eric Schmidt (executive chairman of Alphabet and former CEO of Google) recently contributed a piece to the Globe and Mail about “why Toronto is the ideal place to build a neighborhood of the future.” 

  It’s about the partnership they working on with Waterfront Toronto. I wrote about that announcement, here.

  Here is an excerpt from the Globe article:

  “The eastern waterfront will be a place where residents, companies, startups and local organizations can advance new ideas for improving city life. It’s where a self-driving test shuttle will take its first steps toward becoming a next-generation transit system that’s cheaper, safer and more convenient than private car-ownership. It’s where new insights into advanced construction methods will start to reveal a path toward more affordable housing development. It’s where explorations into renewable energy and sustainable building designs will show promise toward becoming a climate-positive blueprint for cities around the world.”

  These are some of the first details that I have heard about their vision for Toronto’s eastern waterfront. 

  Some of you are probably worried – after reading the above excerpt – that by focusing on self-driving vehicles, we are setting ourselves up to repeat our previous mistakes. But if self-driving vehicles are destined to become a reality (and it certainly feels that way), it is critical that we understand their impact and how they might best dovetail with the public transit systems we already have in place.

  I am thrilled that all of this will be happening right here on our doorstep.

  Photo by Brxxto on Unsplash

  2017.10.17

• Rinse and repeat

  

  Venture capitalist Matt Turck has a post up on his blog that is packed full of information about the New York City tech ecosystem. (He has also written similar posts about Berlin and Paris.)

  His overall thesis is that New York – as a startup/tech hub – is only now starting to catch up to the hype of 4 or 5 years ago. He now refers to NYC as the de facto Number 2 after the Bay Area.

  If you’re interested in all of this, you can go read his full post. But I would like to pull out 2 points. The first is about the “rinse and repeat” cycle that happens over time that allows cities to become substantive startup hubs:

  As any student of emerging tech ecosystems knows, the key dynamic to success is the “rinse and repeat” cycle. You need several waves of successful tech companies to go through the whole cycle of founding, financing, scaling and significant exit.   Post-exit, the hope is that successful founders, employees and investors then contribute back both money and expertise to the next generation of tech startups, a few of which eventually become highly successful themselves and then provide money and expertise to the following generation.

  The trouble is, each successive cycle takes years, because the average successful startup takes 5 to 10 years to get to a large exit.

  One key reason the Silicon Valley has become such a powerful network is that this “rinse and repeat” cycle has been happening there for decades, at least since the 1940s and 1950s (Hewlett Packard), with a real acceleration in the 1970s and 1980s (Apple IPO, founding of Kleiner Perkins, etc).

  I’ve written about this idea before, but didn’t refer to it as “rinse and repeat.” I’m thinking about adopting that terminology going forward.

  The second is a list of New York-based startups. Matt uses it as an example of how entrepreneurial activity in New York is operating across a broad cross-section of different industries. That’s an important characteristic to identify.

  However, I also thought you might find it valuable to see what startups are out there, particularly if you happen to work in one of the below verticals/horizontals. I certainly went right to the real estate line.

  Fintech: Betterment, IEX, Fundera, Bond, Orchard, Bread
  Health: Oscar, Flatiron Health, ZocDoc, Hometeam, Recombine, Celmatix, BioDigital, ZipDrug
  Education: General Assembly, Schoology, Knewton, Skillshare, Flatiron School, Codecademy
  Real estate: WeWork, HighTower, VTS, Compass, Common, Reonomy
  Enterprise SaaS: InVision, NewsCred, Sprinklr, Namely, JustWorks, Greenhouse, Percolate, Mark43, Movable Ink
  Commerce infrastructure: Bluecore, Custora, Welcome Commerce
  Marketplaces: Kickstarter, Vroom, 1stdibs
  On Demand: Handy, Via, Managed by Q, Hello Alfred
  Food: Blue Apron, Plated, Maple
  IoT/Hardware: littleBits, Canary, Peloton, Shapeways, SOLS, Estimote, Dash, GoTenna, Raden, Ringly, Augury, Drone Racing League
  AR/VR/3D: Sketchfab, Floored

  I was happy to see my friends at Floored in the above list. They are under AR/VR/3D, but they service the real estate industry.

  2016.07.16

• Introducing Tech:NYC

  Following the lead of San Francisco, a new non-profit, member-supported organization for New York tech companies has just launched. It’s called Tech:NYC. Here are their goals, taken from this blog post:

  Tech:NYC’s primary goals are to support the growth of the technology sector in New York City, to increase civic engagement by leaders of the New York tech community, and advocate for policies that will attract tech talent, jobs, and opportunity to NYC.

  Tech:NYC will advocate for policies that: 1) underscore a regulatory environment that supports the growth of technology companies and technology talent in NYC; 2) promote inclusivity; and 3) ensure access for all New Yorkers to connectivity, technology tools, and training.

  What makes something like this important is that many public policy issues are now rooted in the tech sector. Think about all the debate regarding ride-sharing, home-sharing, drone regulation, contract employees, and so on.

  But what is also clear is that many cities are struggling to deal with these issues. As I’ve argued before, just saying no to innovation that doesn’t fit neatly into our currently regulatory boxes is often shortsighted. 

  So how do we put in place policies that deliver the right results and that are balanced? How do we grow the tech base while at the same time managing the disruptive fallout? That’s what this group hopes to do.

  And it strikes me that every big city could likely benefit from an organization like this.

  2016.05.03