On Saturday we attended the grand opening of the new and improved Brooklyn Museum. The renovation they've done is really nice -- except for one thing: There's no bike parking in front of the building! Having just come back from a four-week fellowship visiting European cities, I've got to say, it seemed a little bit uncivilized -- barbaric, even. The Brooklyn Museum is a no-brainer for bike parking. It's located next door to Prospect Park, alongside one of the first major urban greenways, in the midst of a neighborhood with a relatively high population of commuter cyclists, nearby to the most heinous, choked-up traffic circle in the entire city, Grand Army Plaza. But nope -- they don't want to encourage people to bike to the Brooklyn Museum. Start supplying bike parking and next thing you know people are going to be biking everywhere.

Eventually, I did spy some bike racks in the back of the museum in the middle of the parking lot. It's a really bad spot for bike parking for a number of reasons, and I clearly wasn't the only one who thought so. There were dozens of bicycles locked up on the stairway bannisters in the front of the museum and many cyclists were wandering around looking for somewhere to stash their bike.

As we checked out the opening day exhibit and listened to the Museum's director of planning discuss the high-fallutin' architectural theories behind the renovation of the building, the lack of bike parking became increasingly ironic and yet understandable. Rather than paying even the smallest amount of attention to something as mundane, sensible, useful and, frankly, revolutionary as bike parking, the director of planning talked about the architects' big, theoretical design concepts. These were ideas that you or I would maybe notice if we were hovering in a helicopter 1,000 feet above the building. It was interesting stuff but totally divorced from the day-to-day realities of the community and planet that the building belongs to.

Inside, the Museum commissioned a huge painting for the opening ceremony. The artist was charged with envisioning the future of Brooklyn. She came back with a 24-foot long diorama depicting a flooded, burned-out, post-global-warming view of the Borough, 3,000 years into the future. The East River is as high as the Brooklyn Bridge roadway and an empty oil barrel is floating on the surface with a freakish radioactive squid swimming around beneath.

So, while the inside of the Museum was clearly showing some awareness of our increasingly insane and dangerous dependence on hydrocarbon energy, the Museum itself is not even doing the bare minimum it could do to show that it actually cares about these issues by providing bike racks. Though bike racks may seem like a small thing. I can think of few better ways for the Brooklyn Museum to show that it is really ready for the 21st century.

7:44 PM | Link |