Island recovery

The coverage of hurricane damage to the islands is still slowly leaking out.

While Puerto Rico's crisis is clearly the largest, Rutgers has developed a relationship with St Croix over the last several years, so is has been particularly tough watching the stories from that island.

Local news has been very hit and miss. The St Croix Source is understandably more focused on recovery (the virtue of the week was gentleness). The VI Daily News has included some interesting updates.  A station in Tampa posted a few photos.

The New York Times has a compelling set of images and stories from the American Virgin Islands that are heartbreaking. They go inside the main hospital on St Thomas and report that it will most likely have to be torn down and rebuilt.

"Reinforcing the sense of despair, St. Croix was hit especially hard by Maria after being spared the worst of Irma’s ferocity. And what had been a staging ground there for relief operations for St. Thomas and St. John was suddenly thrown into a state of emergency."

BTW, over the last month there have been so many different NPS parks and parkland impacted, that they keep their news on a separate website: https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/news/severe-weather-response.htm  The news ranges from Kitty Hawk to De Soto to Buck Island. Although for several properties, the current status is little more than "All employees have been accounted for."

Landscape Architecture presentation Thursday

For our readers in St. Croix, there will be a great presentation Thursday evening regarding Rutgers investigation of "conceptual plans for interpreting the maritime and Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade landscape at the Christiansted National Historic Site."

Great presentation in Christiansted

If you are in Christiansted this week, make sure you catch this great talk by Alex Duro at 5 pm Thursday at the Danish Guinea West India Company Warehouse/Slave Market Building. Great talk, great island.

MERC controversy at Salt River Bay

In a front page story, the Daily Targum reports that a proposed Caribbean research center in St. Croix that would include Rutgers as a partner has some local residents protesting.

It has been a while since we wrote about the beautiful Salt River Bay, so here are some of my photos to get you back in the mood.

You can get more complete photos and descriptions using the STX tag on this blog and the studio's website (which includes student work).

It's Crucian that you see this

Sarah Nitchman is blogging her work in St Croix. It looks like an absolutely great experience.

Great project site

The web site is up for Holly Nelson's Senior Studio investigating the Salt River Bay on the island St. Croix, VI.  The representations of the site include creative studies of both the land and people:

But it also includes more spatially explicit studies of the site.

And soon it will include the final design the students presented to the National Park Service and partner institutions.

Haiti

10 months after the earthquake, many have forgotten Haiti.  To help us be more mindful of that The Big Picture has some amazing photographs of what life is like there now.  But as you see the cities of tents, read today's news that they are bracing for what might be Hurricane Tomas by the time it gets to them.  There is lots that designers could be doing to improve situations in places like these and we've been hearing more and more about it this semester from people like Werthmann and Jelacic.  Add in a current hurricane-prone project in St Croix and a recent look at the coastal zones in Cape May, and it is increasingly clear that there is a call to answer.

Columbus Day

I am surprised to realize how many Columbus pieces I've seen in recent years.

The Smithsonian's Museum of the American Indian includes a display on Columbus.  It talks about his second visit, with 17 ships, which included a stop at St Croix.  You can see the Columbus Landing Site at Salt River Bay in this picture.  While it is his only known landing site in what is now US territory, he is not believed to have gotten off his ship.  Still, imagine those ships sitting out there and the natives having no idea, yet, about guns smallpox or NYC Ivy League schools.

In Barcelona, one of the big landmarks is the Columbus statue on a very high pedestal.But they also have a plaza where he supposedly met Ferdinand and Isabella and the Cathedral where he had 4 Carib tribe members baptized. 








A complicated bit of history.

Governor de Jong thanks Rutgers students

The Governor of Virgin Islands has nice things to say on his blog about the work our students are currently pursuing.

Another St Croix

Having looked at the postcard St Croix, I thought we could look briefly at a different St Croix. The weather there can be fairly intense with some spots on the island (and the MREC site) having some pretty high winds, plenty of humidity, add in some salt, and then lots of direct sun and maybe the occasional hurricane, and things might get beat up in spots.

Not many of the signs had been wiped clean like this one, but it shows how the weather treats some places.

The weathered buildings also give the place its unique feel. 

Outside of the the tourist areas, some of the stores weren't as adorned as we are used to in New Jersey.

The other St Croix isn't all rusted, some of it is institutional or just unexpected.

Chain link fencing is used a a visible marker too.  Especially in parts of the island that have a little more rural character.

The St Croix you see on postcards

One of the things I hope our students get to see is how complex the island of St. Croix is. It is naturally beautiful in some spots, artificially aestheticized in others and still outwardly run down in other areas. While it appears tropical to guests (it is really the subtropics), it has both natural and altered areas that would surprise them.  We talked about this some last year with Cape May, but I was struck even more by the extremes on this tiny little island.

On the western end of the island is the small city of Frederiksted, which has an absolutely huge pier for cruise ships to land at.  At the end of the pier is a section of the city that is clearly meant to be seen by tourists.  You can see the early colonial look that has been formalized for these well maintained areas with a strolling promenade, clock tower, lots of palms.

Those are so beautiful that you might not think the town was really a few hundred years old.  So they made some fake old stuff to convince you.

Over in Christiansted the Fort and Government building dominate another charming little city.

And the bars look like some sort of Jimmy Buffet dream landscape.

The churches looked the part too.

While I hope our students enjoy seeing the postcard side of the island, make sure that you understand it as that. What elements give St Croix its own feel? What just signals that an area is for tourists?

Reading about St Croix

For our seniors, I hope you are reading as much as you can before you visit your site...
The St Croix Source has a fun picture of 1000 barrels of rum.
The New York Times looks at St Croix as a place to visit.
The Virgin Islands Daily News talks about how Hovensa dominated a recent environmental hearing.

MERC site in Salt River Bay

Yesterday's post offered a few thoughts about the larger context of the MERC site, but what I really wanted to do when I visited was see the site and its soil and its plants.  Down by the shore, where coastal erosion works its magic, you can see what some of the soils likes like.  Just a random mix of parent materials, perhaps stability would be a concern.

Parts of the coastline are fairly rough and hardened, creating a coastal environment with tidal pools and rock hopping.  And trash.


Inside the site are some old dirt roads,  This one gives a sense of how enclosed you quickly become as the plants are going about 10 or 15 feet high in some of the lower areas.  The vegetation looks impenetrable, and it seems like it too.  There is a reason people carry machetes in places like this.

The new entry to the site will be from the South.  Here, at the base of the central peninsula of the site you can see the entry that has been laid down.  At this point, it is still pretty high on the hill, and the road drops down, creating an instant effect of getting away from the ordinary world of St Croix.

From the bottom, looking up at the large hill on the site, you can see both the taller scrub down low and the grassy areas as you climb the hill.  This was pretty common around the site.

The flatter coastal areas on the site, transitioned pretty quickly from sea grape to other scrub.  Simlarly, the scrub pushed pretty close to the lagoon and salt pond before finally giving way to a thin but dense strip of mangroves.