June 12, 2006

Full Moon on Dean Street

Amazing full moon tonight...While out walking the dog very late, I was inspired to record a rough little nocturnal cityscape...this is (very) loosely based on my view looking out over Dean Street onto Bergen. I have been wanting to do some paintings of the city at night...this has whet my appetite.

Posted by keegan at 03:13 AM

May 29, 2006

Memorial Day in Prospect Park

Today was a perfect steamy summer day to take a stroll in Prospect Park. The pooch and I went for a nice long walk, with a few stops for some sketching. You first walk out onto the open lawn, and the wave of moist grassy air laced with sweet barbecue washes over you. EVERYONE is out enjoying the best spot in Brooklyn. I am still finding cool little paths to walk through. You can actually get lost in there. Since I am still obsessed with Google Earth ( Click here to download ), here are the placemarks of exactly where these sketches were drawn:

Top Sketch: ProsParkSketch1.kmz - Google Earth Placemark
Bottom Sketch: ProsParkSketch2.kmz - Google Earth Placemark

Posted by keegan at 03:08 PM

February 06, 2006

Atlantic Yards Visualization in Google Earth

Living in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, one of the biggest issues hanging over our community is the specter of Bruce Ratner's planned "Atlantic Yards" development. By dangling the prospect of a glitzy new Frank Gehry-designed stadium (to be occupied by Ratner's own New Jersey Nets), the pro-stadium minions have largely succeeded at convincing Brooklynites that it will be nothing but good for the community, and everyone should rally behind it. However, the stadium is just a small part of the whole plan, and this brings me to why you are seeing a post about this on invisibleman.

As a resident who will directly feel the impact of the development surrounding my home, I haven't felt that I have seen an accurate portrayal of the sheer scale of this project, in the context of the existing neighborhood. Enter Google Earth.

I have been majorly geeking out over this amazing program for a few weeks now (as has my brother) , since they released a beta of the Mac version. One of the things you can do is place image overlays on top of the satellite imagery (like the PDF I used), and then draw polygons to extrude your own 3D buildings, knowing their heights (requires the use of the currently PC-only 'Plus' version).

So I set up a placemark that will allow people to see this proposed development, to approximate scale (using the developers' own figures), in context with the existing buildings. Also, make sure you check the "Buildings" checkbox below the viewer to see the heights of the existing buildings in grey.

So if you haven't downloaded Google Earth yet you can do so here (both PC and Mac): DOWNLOAD GOOGLE EARTH.

Once you have that set up, you can download my Atlantic Yards placemark below...NOTE: if you click on the following link and get a garble of letters, just go back and right-click (control-click on the Mac) on the link, and save the file to your Desktop, then just double-click on the downloaded file.

DOWNLOAD THE ATLANTIC YARDS PLACEMARK

Posted by keegan at 01:19 AM