Today, Professor Cheng and our Macaulay Seminar Two class took a small walking tour of different spots on the Brooklyn College campus. The goal of this tour was to determine the best spots to implement some form of green infrastructure (some way to either improve current rainwater saturation conditions or to develop a new form of rainwater collection and storage). Each group has now decided which spot will be best for what they want to achieve/implement.
Professor Cheng and the Macaulay Seminar Three class on a tour through the BC campus.
Before the tour began however, Professor Cheng announced that some groups should merge so that there would only be three main groups working on this project (this will help ease the workload placed on each student and provide a greater selection of ideas). Our group (Group One–Anna, Daniel and Trevor) has merged with Group Two (Danielle, William and Michael), so we intend to work on this single eportfolio together from now on.
The tour began at the BC parking lot located on the corner of Campus Road and Avenue H. Our class noticed that the parking lot is very sloped, so rainwater tends to flow down towards Campus Road. Unfortunately, this put a damper on one group’s idea to place planter boxes at certain spots inside the parking lot (no pun intended).
Since this parking lot is sloped, the rain water will always flow down towards Campus Road.
Another issue with this parking lot is that it’s very crowded. Many of the cars parked there were on sections of pavement which had painted diagonal lines on them, which most groups thought would mean free space to construct planter boxes or bioswales. Since the cars seem to be taking up almost 100% of the free space inside the parking lot, it doesn’t look like there’s much that can be done there.
There were multiple cars parked on spaces of the pavement that were actually marked so cars wouldn’t park on them.
As we exited the parking lot, Professor Cheng noticed that there is a section of unused sidewalk that is about 15 feet wide by 40 feet long. Not only was this sidewalk cracked, but it led to a small gate that clearly hadn’t been opened/accessed in years and it had two ugly, empty planter spaces in the middle of it. These spaces did have trees in them at one point in time, but now they’re void of all plant life. Our class figured that this would be an optimal place for a large planter box to take on water from the parking lot, if one of the groups chose to plan its construction.
As our tour group moved down Campus Road, we re-entered the BC campus near the entrance outside of Whitehead Hall. This brought us to a small patch of concrete outside of Whitehead Hall. This is the location that our group mentioned in our first post (which can be read HERE). At this spot, there’s a medium-sized raised section of grass that’s overgrown and filled with stray cats. There are five rainwater drains in the ground, and there’s a very large section of grass on the eastern-most side of Whitehead Hall that’s empty and unused.
The secluded area located outside of Whitehead Hall–home to only weeds and feral, stray cats!
The section of grass that’s overgrown and is occupied by stray grass would be the perfect to store rain barrels. These barrels could collect some of the water which falls on the 13,000+ square foot roof of Whitehead Hall, and the drains in the concrete could take up any excess water that might overflow from the barrels. This stored water could possibly be used by a miniature hydro-electric charger to supply power to the golf carts used by staff on the BC campus, and it could also be used to supply water to surrounding plant life.
This small, raised grassy patch would be perfect for rain barrel storage.
The eastern-most patch of grass gives our group even more room to implement forms of green infrastructure. The water stored in the rain barrels at the other grass patch could be used to water newly-planted flowers and/or trees here. This eastern-most spot could also be the home to a possible hydro-electric mill that would take divert rain water off the roof of Whitehead Hall and have it flow through the mill down to the ground. Our group intends to choose two or three of these small ideas and lay out a single plan for their creation.
The eastern-most part of the campus–this would be perfect for creating a small hydro-electric mill to charge the batteries of the golf carts on campus/planting a new flower bed with rain water-friendly soil.
Out tour group moved across to the other side of campus and through the West Quad while noting some patches of pavement that had unused planter spaces with dead tree stumps in them.
Two examples of dead planter spaces outside of James Hall at Brooklyn College.
The final location we visited was outside of the West End Building near the rear parking lot on the western-most side of the BC campus. We discovered that a lot of the grass patches are greatly sloped here, and that these patches send much more water to the tennis courts and the parking lots nearby. We considered that there may be some sort of dam we can construct on these sloped patches of land to slow the flow of rainwater from the WEB and the West Quad Building to the parking lots.
The sloped grassy hills outside of the West Quad and West End Buildings.
After today’s class/tour, our group has chosen a single spot to work with on campus. The six of us intend to further research the space and determine what green infrastructure forms will best serve the campus.
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Before our groups merged, we drew up plans for green infrastructure implementation over two hard copies of the BC campus map. They’re both displayed below for the sake of showing how our groups have progressed and what changes have been made to our ideas.
The original map/plans for Group One (Anna, Daniel, Trevor).
The original map/plans for Group Two (Danielle, William, Michael).
