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We?re crawling over hot highways and beneath dark underpasses in this month?s LAM, looking at a push from many quarters to recolonize the spaces wasted by modern highways and railroads. We have projects in Toronto, Houston, New York, and Washington, D.C., where wasted space is coming alive again. Nate Berg kicks us off with an essay about the moves to put parks and public spaces over and under freeways. It had been a huge priority of President Obama?s Transportation Secretary, Anthony Foxx, who revived the sleeping debate about the scars left behind in urban neighborhoods about the freeway system.
In New York, Alex Ulam surveys the massive construction of a new mini-city, Hudson Yards, atop the West Side rail yards, where a complex landscape is under the charge of Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects. Jane Margolies travels to Toronto, where PFS Studio has created the exuberant Underpass Park in the bowel of a highway viaduct. Washington, D.C., is deleting a huge highway trench with several new blocks of city above it, as Braulio Agnese reports. Margie Ruddick, ASLA, and a team of designers and artists pushed the renovation of Queens Plaza in New York to its bureaucratic limits, and Julie Lasky finds it makes the soaring, clattering infrastructure around it much easier to take. And Jonathan Lerner visits the much-loved Klyde Warren Park in Dallas, where OJB Landscape Architecture has given the whole deck-park movement its favorite touchstone. In ...