Michelle's Blog #1

Hey, my name’s Michelle, and I’m part of the Citizen Design Internship this summer at Hester Street Collaborative. I was born in the city, and currently live in Brooklyn. I go to Stuyvesant High School in Tribeca, and am going to be a senior (!) once the school year starts. It’s only been a week or two, but so far we’ve done (what feels like) a lot. Today we worked on the mock of one of the maps we’re making on the Allen/Pike Street “Mall-terations”. It was pretty messy working with paint and all, but we managed. The colors were a bit off from what we had on paper, though. I’m sure it’ll be fine. It’s coming along really well but there’s still a lot of work for us to do before we actually start working on concrete. We still have to paint the other half of the map (it’s a circle) and maybe (?) do some more mock-ups for the other circles. Dylan, unfortunately, is sick today but left a very nice, instructive e-mail with Jess so the other interns and I are pretty much supervising ourselves. We went on our lunch break after painting and made our way to the garden when we came back. I feel like those of us who aren’t familiar with Chinatown will eventually know our way around before the summer ends. We’ve been wandering around a lot. We didn’t have to water much at the garden because it’s been pretty rainy the past few days. The plants are growing really quickly; it’ll be exciting once the garden opens up to the public – I’m worried, though, because I don’t want anyone to be careless with or around the plants after all our hard work sprucing it up. Here is a picture of what the garden currently looks like.

At least maybe it’ll give workers/volunteers during the school year something to do. I also still feel like we should eventually fix the plant signs once we have some time off from the Mall-terations because quite frankly, I don’t even know what I’m watering more than half the time. There are so many improvements I think we can make to the garden; it’s just too bad (or good) we’re focusing mainly on the bigger projects right now.

Edit: We've finally finished our mock-up for the Allen Street map! The colors still look sort of awkward to us, but that'll change. Here's a picture of the finished product: