The itinerary and events for Open House New York’s annual OHNY Weekend were announced this week ahead of reservations opening for select events on Tuesday, October 8.
During the weekend of October 18 – 20, over 300 buildings and sites will be open for public tours. The majority of OHNY Weekend sites are free and reservations are not required, while other sites require reservations, which opens on October 8 at 11 a.m.
According to OHNY, “In 2018, more than 10,000 reservation slots went live on Reservation Day, and 8,000 were booked within the first hour,” so it may be worth your time to check out which sites require a reservation ahead of time.
The tours and open houses around Greenpoint and Williamsburg include:
Newtown Creek Wastewater Resource Recovery Facility:
Located in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint community, Newtown Creek is the largest of New York City’s 14 wastewater treatment plants. DEP teamed up with world-class architects, designers, and engineers, along with the Newtown Creek community, to expand and redesign the plant while keeping it fully operational. Ennead Architects served as lead architect and master planner, working with lighting artist HervÌ© Descottes of L’Observatoire International.
Expansion included the Newtown Creek Waterfront Nature Walk, providing the first public access to the Newtown Creek waterfront in decades, and the Visitor Center at Newtown Creek, an indoor destination where school groups and the public can learn how the city’s sewer system works and about the watershed that provides New York City’s celebrated drinking water. The plant’s most dramatic element is its eight futuristic, stainless steel-clad digester eggs visible by day and night from Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. Visitors will get to tour the top of the Digester Eggs!
Newtown Creek has been honored by the New York City Art Commissioner with two Awards for Excellence in Design for addressing the challenge of locating and expanding a large-scale industrial project within a residential neighborhood.
Greenpoint Library and Environmental Education Center:
Currently under construction and set to open at the end of 2019, the Greenpoint Library and Environmental Education Center will be a 15,000 sf community library and hub for environmental awareness, activism, and education in the Brooklyn Public Library system. Program elements include reading rooms; dry/wet eco-labs; community event space and meeting rooms; staff spaces, and an extensive outdoor space. Landscapes will be integrated into the building on three levels – bioswale and rock outcroppings at the street, a reading garden on the second, and a green roof on the third.
Birthplace of Mobil Oil Walking Tour:
Join Newtown Creek Alliance (NCA) historian Mitch Waxman for a guided walking tour through the birthplace of Mobil Oil and on-going efforts to help restore and revitalize areas around Newtown Creek, which was added to the Federal Superfund list in 2010. The short walk will cover the infamous Greenpoint Oil Spill, a 20-million gallon plume of crude oil mixed in with the local groundwater, and pass by the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant, the largest of 14 treatment plants in New York City. Participants will then visit the recently opened Kingsland Wildflowers green roof, a 24,000sf bird-friendly green roof that offers panoramic views of the New York City skyline, Newtown Creek waterway, and surrounding industrial sites. The green roof project is a collaboration between NYC Audubon, Broadway Stages, Alive Structures, and Newtown Creek Alliance – funded by the Greenpoint Community Environmental Fund. The tour will also bring participants to the shoreline area of the Creek to examine some of the marine wildlife that is returning to this challenged water body and hear from NCA staff about local restoration and water quality monitoring projects that are helping to rejuvenate the Creek.
Kingsland Wildflowers at Broadway Stages:
Kingsland Wildflowers is a Greenpoint Community Environmental Fund (GCEF) project committed to expanding natural habitat and green corridors for bird and wildlife populations. The vision, conceived through partnerships with local businesses, community voices and wildlife experts, is providing Greenpoint with living and growing infrastructure to support native New York City wildlife and educational programming focused on sustainable conservation practices and habitat protection.
Kingsland Wildflowers is a 22,000sf green roof which sits atop an active movie studio owned and operated by Broadway Stages, in the most sci-fi and industrial section of North Brooklyn alongside EPA Superfund site, Newtown Creek. Its non-profit and community partners are NYC Audubon and Newtown Creek Alliance. It is an educational and science-focused green roof fostering ecology, sustainability and community.
The roof is managed by Newtown Creek Alliance in collaboration with NYC Audubon, Broadway Stages, Alive Structures and NOoSPHERE Arts.
Designed by Hollwich Kushner (HWKN) in collaboration with Gensler as Design Development Architect, this newly completed eight-story, 500,000 square-foot commercial office building is the first of its type erected in North Williamsburg in more than 40 years. Blending the area’s industrial past with its creative present along Williamsburg’s revitalized waterfront and surrounded by restaurants, shops, and nightlife, 25 Kent is an innovation hub where the technology, creative, design, and production industries can collaborate and grow together. The building incorporates stacked, modular spaces for entrepreneurs of all kinds to run and evolve from incubation through the full lifecycle of their development, while also providing larger, floor-length spaces to established companies.
Help us kick-off the 2019 OHNY Weekend on October 17, when we host the Launch Party at 25 Kent! For more information, and to purchase tickets, click here.
The City Reliquary is a not-for-profit community museum and civic organization located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Through permanent displays of New York City artifacts, rotating exhibits of community collections, and annual cultural events, The City Reliquary connects visitors to both the past and present of New York.
The former Brooklyn Naval Hospital Cemetery was active from 1831 to 1910 and was the burial site for more than 2,000 people, most of them officers and enlisted men of the US Navy and Marine Corps. In 2014 the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative in partnership with Brooklyn Navy Yard developed this space as a publicly accessible designated natural area, populated by native plant species and pollinators to provide visitors with an escape from urban life. The entrance to the Naval Cemetery Landscape acts as threshold to a wildflower meadow and sacred grove, framed by an undulating boardwalk and lifted above the hallowed ground. This experience evokes the histories of settlement and cultivation, life and death, while slowing the heart rate and connecting visitors with the stories of the site. The wildflower meadow, with more than fifty species of native plants, offers much needed fodder for the pollinators critical to the ecological health of the region. Initially established in a strict geometric arrangement, the plantings will eventually drift across the site, creating new patterns and establishing a self-sustaining, ‘open-ended’ ecology intended to draw people, birds, moths and bees in a rich celebration of life.
Brooklyn Grange is the leading rooftop farming and intensive green roofing business in the US. It operates the world’s largest rooftop soil farms, located on three roofs in New York City, and grows over 80,000 lbs of organically cultivated produce per year. In addition to growing and distributing fresh local vegetables and herbs, Brooklyn Grange hosts events from educational tours and workshops to weddings, and provides urban farming and green roof consulting and installation services to clients worldwide. The business partners with numerous non-profit organizations throughout New York to promote healthy and strong local communities.
Crye Precision LLC designs and manufactures state-of-the-art protective equipment destined for use by the most elite members of the US military. The company’s facilities are housed within nationally-landmarked Building 128 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Originally built in 1902, the 225,000sf steel, glass, and masonry building was home to a Navy ship engine factory for decades.
The adaptive re-use of Building 128 emphasizes its cathedral-like proportions, powerful structure, and massive scale through a design sensibility that quietly extends the details of the original structure in unexpected ways. Upon first glance, where the old building ends and the new structures begin is not clear. The only hint that something radically new has happened is a 10,000sf prehistoric forest that welcomes guests at the building entry.
Visit the headquarters of Crye Precision LLC to see how design studios, testing areas, production spaces, exhibition and conference zones, cafeterias – and even a space for tai chi – merge seamlessly into the historic structure, right along Brooklyn’s developing waterfront. Part of New York City’s manufacturing sector is innovating and shaping the future of the city.