Although it sits at the intersection of multiple neighborhoods, the confluence of several transit lines, and directly across from a vibrant industrial business zone, Broadway Junction lacks the fine-grained social and community infrastructures that work to define a place.  In its current state, the site is physically cut off from its neighbors by roads, rail lines, and a cemetery, and functions as a collection of in-between spaces which amount collectively to a junction without any civic, social, and urban identity.  Our project, operating at both an urban and architectural scale, aims to address several key questions:

What might be the neighborhood of Broadway junction?
What is the community; what is its territory?
To what extent are these things separable, or rather, interwoven among its adjacencies?  

STRATEGY:
Our proposal aims to promote social amenities that work to define "place" on the pedestrian scale, to integrate and clarify the connections between disparate transit systems, to mediate the present bifurcation between the ground plane and the elevated train platforms, and to forge pedestrian connections across Atlantic Avenue to the industrial business zone and points south. A well articulated site strategy for the new HRA facility would allow the agency to more directly address the needs of the community: not only through the administration of benefit programs and counseling, but also by providing subsidized spaces and financial support for local small businesses, career development programs, continuing education, recreational amenities, public green space, healthy food options, and by functioning as a socially equitable and inclusive catalyst for future neighborhood growth.

PROGRAM + CIRCULATION

Street level circulation at Broadway junction is presently disjointed, confusing, and unsafe: particularly for pedestrians. The discordant confluence of elevated rail lines, mis-aligned street grids, and the Atlantic Avenue viaduct create disruptions and impasses in an already hostile and intimidating streetscape. Surrounded by such infrastructural cacophony, and a corresponding lack of street life, the site operates only as a transit connection: insular, and spatially divorced from the community below. To better integrate the station with the surrounding community and the new HRA facility, we argue for a bi-axial site strategy based around three major moves. First, an occupiable landscape containing shared spaces between the community and the HRA which acts as both a neighborhood buffer to the detritus of the train-yard, as well as a strong pedestrian link between surrounding residential areas; second, a series of infill and adaptive re-use interventions dedicated to social, economic, and community amenities (recreation center, public pool, food market and grocery, industrial maker-space, and community educational facility) alongside and underneath the tracks of the L-train; and lastly, three HRA administration office towers which rise multiple stories above the datum of the tracks: simultaneously advertising the new community junction to those arriving by train or passing by on the viaduct, operating as a legible and occupiable public connection between the subway transit hub of Broadway Junction and the Long Island Railroad, and bridging the streetscape impasse generated by the presence of the viaduct.

STRUCTURE
Broadway Junction's streetscape is viscerally dominated by the presence of elevated railway infrastructure. The tangle of overhead steel structure blocks sunlight from reaching the street, the roar of the trains interrupt conversations, and the fields of structural columns render whole swaths of the current site unusable for anything other than loitering, trash accumulation, and informal car parking. In analyzing the as-built conditions, we identified four infrastructural ecologies: first, a regular, Cartesian grid of columns; second, an elevated ground plane left unused by decommissioned rails; third, a cacophonous jungle of columns, girders, and banked curves of track, and four, an unused transit bridge. Recognizing, however, the continuous utility of the infrastructure, and the integral role it plays in defining the visual identity of Broadway Junction, we propose that each of these ecologies could be re-purposed as newly occupiable and critical pieces of social infrastructure.