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TODAY Thursday 4 December 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Beauty in the Bronx

Let us put aside Kyoto anxieties for the day (everything's happening behind closed doors anyway; they're waiting for Bill McKibben to arrive tomorrow) and turn our attention to horizons more nearby. There is good news from the Bronx.

The south and west of the Bronx is where the mainland of North America comes closest to the New York archipelago, the most famous members of which are Manhattan Island and Long Island. The three areas come within reach of each other near, and are spanned by, the Triborough Bridge. In the shadow of that bridge, on the southernmost tip of the Bronx, is an abandoned rail yard covering 96 acres. It is there that a $400 million paper-recycling and paper-producing plant is scheduled to be built by 2000.

If its proponents are credible, that plant will be important in a number of ways. It will re-use an industrial site and provide local employment; it will harvest the "urban forest" of discarded paper and produce fresh newsprint; it will do so through industrial processes that will be net contributors to the environment; and -- according to an article in this morning's New York Times -- it will be beautiful.

It will be beautiful because it has been designed by a team of architects headed by Maya Lin. Maya Lin designed the Vietnam War Memorial on the Mall in Washington and the Civil Rights Movement Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, and there are many who think she is this era's most gifted shaper of public spaces. Working with industrial engineers and factory designers, she has crafted a scale model attractive and striking enough to be the focus of a new show by New York's venerable Municipal Art Society (457 Madison Avenue, (800) 894-4974).

The plant is the brainchild of Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. For almost a decade now he has preached the economic feasibility and ecological desirability of an urban paper-reprocessing facility. He has won the support and co-sponsorship of a South Bronx community activist group (with the indigenous and wonderful name of Banana Kelly), pledges of financing from government and private investors, and a great design from Ms. Lin.

Hershkowitz says that the plant will be non-polluting. Paper mills are great water drinkers, and the Bronx plant is designed to use (and clean) sewage water from a nearby treatment plant. These assurances have not calmed the worries of a local coalition of neighborhood interests concerned with air pollution and respiratory problems. Ardent good wishes to NRDC and Banana Kelly for taking the throat-gulping step of trying to do something hard and worthwhile in a complicated world. May they soothe the worries of their neighbors, line up all the financing, and harvest the bounteous urban forest. And win friends and thanks for the gig for Maya Lin.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

Tom Turner -- landlord of our "In Other News..." media-watch feature -- can't stand the way that The New York Times Sunday Magazine lapses into chic anti-enviro-orthodoxy. The latest brow smoter comes from the pen of Ben Wattenberg, who mistakes a near-worldwide decline in birthrates for the end of the population problem. Read Tom's "The Population Bum."

 

Recent "Today" columns:

12/3: God from Machine
12/2: Gentlemen's Bet
12/1: Public Opinion
11/26: Sperm
11/25: Sound Sound-Bite Science
11/24: Home Sweet Storage Locker
11/21: Tim Wirth's Inscrutable Adventure
11/20: Better to Receive than to Give
11/19: Wes Jackson's Problem with Agriculture
11/18: "Stay Home and Be Decent"

To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.