CNU New York

CNU New York Chapter Meet-Up in Austin
Porch at Threadgills World Headquarters (301 West Riverside Drive)
Thursday, April 3, 2008 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM

Join CNU New York at the archetypical Austin joint for a sampler of Southern Cooking and a very brief meeting on upcoming chapter activities. Well have a buffet — enough for a light dinner — at no charge.

The meet-up will be on the Porch at Threadgills World Headquarters (301 West Riverside Drive). Take a taxi or a 20 minute walk across the South Congress Bridge (thats the one with the bats), bear right for a block on Barton Springs Road and look left on Riverside Drive for Threadgills.

We look forward to seeing all New York New Urbanists there!

Join us for CNU New York’s First Event

CNU New York, the newest chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism, will hold its first public event on Wednesday, April 25th at 6 PM at the Municipal Art Society, 457 Madison Avenue at East 50th. The President of the CNU, John Norquist, will speak with Hilary Ballon, the Curator of the much talked-about museum exhibition ‘Robert Moses and the Modern City: the Road to Recreation.’

While Mayor of Milwaukee, Norquist tore down an inner-city highway that divided the city and replaced it with a boulevard and mixed-use buildings that knit the city’s fabric back together again. As President of the CNU, he has worked with the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development to tear down housing projects built in the 1950s and 1960s and to replace them with mixed-use, mixed income neighborhoods.

‘Robert Moses and the Modern City’ reevaluates the career of the great planner and administrator who built many of New York’s highways, housing projects, parks and infrastructure, particularly examining the large-scale projects for which he was both praised and vilified. Near the end of his career, Jane Jacobs famously defeated Moses, but now one hears in New York architectural circles that “Jane Jacobs was wrong, and Robert Moses was right.” Once again there is a call for urban mega-projects.

Moses’s multiple projects to house the middle class in the city are promoted as models. Even his highways like the Cross Bronx Expressway are praised, because they are part of an automobile infrastructure that’s considered important. But Norquist is a consultant for a group in the Bronx that wants to tear down Moses’s Sheridan Expressway and replace it with traditional streets and buildings. The New York debate on the city’s master builder will be enriched by this perspective from the President of this national urban design movement, “the most important phenomenon to emerge in American architecture in the post-Cold War era,” according to the architecture critic of the New York Times.

Wednesday April 25th, 2007.
Reception at 6 pm; Talks and Q & A from 6:30 – 8:30 pm.

Space is limited. For reservations, please send an e-mail with your name and the number of places desired to RSVP@cnuny.org.