Outdoor Classroom Site Design
Narrative Tour
Wide, shallow cement steps run down the middle of the street in a recessed channel. The students walk down the street, one student hopping down the recessed steps. On either side of the channel, there are fish and whales painted on the old street surface.
At the end, or "bottom", of the street, there is a large cement basin, about 200 feet by 100 feet and three feet deep, with steps, curved, ramped corners, and a flat, sloping bottom. There is a small drain on the east side (the lowest side) of the basin. The basin is bordered by a simple fence, about two feet tall. On 3 sides, the fence is salvaged metal poles laid horizontally on rows of royal blue cylinders, placed in the ground previously when the streets (Aspen and 47th) that crossed to make this intersection/basin were turned into dead ends. Kids of several ages with skateboards are at work in and around the basin, taking turns making passes on the whoop-dee-doos and jumps. A few other kids sit around on the steps inside the fence, talking and watching.
The students hop the fence and step down into the basin. At the bottom of the basin is a large bright blue wavy stripe. They know that the stripe represents Mill Creek, which used to flow directly below them. As they cross to the other side of the basin, they look down at the stripe as if they were in a glass-bottomed boat and the stripe were 20 feet below the basin. On the other side of the basin, they step up again. They hop over the fence and head diagonally to the right (southeast) and up a small grassy incline.
They reach the north shore of a large kidney-shaped pond, about 30 feet by 20 feet. Large, flat stones line the south edge of the pond. The pond is rimmed along its edges by grasses, flowers, and taller aquatic plants such as cattails at the southern tip of the pond. As the students approach, turtles on the rocks lumber into the water, and orange koi fish ripple the surface as they head for the deeper sections of the pond. One student walks to the south edge of the pond so that the sun is behind him and doesn't reflect into his eyes when he looks at the water. He sits on a flat stone overhanging the water, and drops a white disk on a string into the water until he cannot see the white disk any longer. He records the length of the string under water in a hardbound book that reads "POND LOG BOOK" on its cover. Another student pulls out a plastic container and takes a sample of water from the surface, and then lowers another vial sample deeper in the water. She caps the vials and puts them in a bag. She then takes the temperature of the pond at the same two locations with a thermometer on a string. This information she tells the first student to write down in the hardbound book. The other two students head to the right side of the pond. There, they take notes on the plants growing in the constructed wetland (10 by 20 feet), made from soil and saturated with water from the pond. They record plant height and the number of plant species they can find this week in a hardbound book that reads "WETLAND LOG BOOK". They also scoop up a little bit of soil, and rub it between their fingers to see if the soil disintegrates easily or is spongy and retains its shape. They record texture, shape, color, and smell in the book.
Both pairs of students meet on the other north side of the pond, where there is a small waterfall (with a flowrate of about 10 gallons per minute) emptying into the pond. They wash off their hands in the waterfall. The sound of splashing water is loud here. The stream that feeds the waterfall winds up away from the school. The water runs fast and turbulent down here in the shallow and wide section of the channel, but ten meters upstream, the water runs slowly in a deep channel. Where it runs deep and slow, a waterwheel about eight feet in diameter turns; it is supported by a metal structure that straddles the channel. The waterwheel "runs" some gears that in turn drive a small kinetic sculpture which rotates rapidly. The sculpture in turn "runs" a small engine that charges a battery. Attached to the battery is a tall lamppost. The lamppost turns on automatically at dusk every night and lights the area for a few hours.
The group of students sees another group of four students approaching from the other direction; one student is carrying a half-empty plastic bag and another some some cut roses. The other two have a couple of handfuls of weeds. One student is in charge of watering the garden (five raised plots each 5 by 10 feet) because the gardens have drip systems, watering the garden is as simple as turning on the small pump that sends water from the pond up to the flowerbeds and turning it off again a half hour later, so this student also brings gloves and picks up garbage from around the area while the garden is watered. Another two students share the tasks of weeding and pruning the gardens and turning the compost pile when necessary. The fourth student gets to pick a bouquet of flowers for the week, and the bouquet of flowers goes home with the picker. The students talk about how these jobs rotate every week for a month, and who was in the new group of four students picked from a lottery to do garden patrol next month.
It finally begins to rain. The four students who manage the pond and wetland this month decide to run back to the school because they must analyze the two samples for oxygen and pH before the samples get "old". The other four students run in the other direction, up and away from the school, and follow a cement channel filled with running water up to a open U-shaped structure made of metal roofing perched on metal poles. The roof is seven feet off the ground. They huddle under the roof and can hear the rain pound on the metal roofing. The rain drips off the sides of the roof towards the middle of the "U", where they run along the sides of the roof in metal pipes cut in half. The long half pipes drop water into half pipes below, so that the water falls visibly from pipe to pipe. After passing through a series of ten sloping pipes, the roof water has been carried to the floor of the structure, which is flat concrete surrounded by a rectangular metal ridge three inches tall. The water collects here; the only outlet is a narrow vertical gap in the ridge, where water is released and flows down the channeled stream to the pond. The floor basin already has water in it because water has been piped from the pond through a small pipe at the bottom of the "U", but the extra rainwater is now filling up the basin as well. One of the students shuts off the pump by throwing a large red switch attached to the structure. Now, it is time for fresh rainwater to flow to the pond.
Suspended over the floor of the structure, in the middle of the "U", is a platform 3 1/2 feet high. The platform is made of recovered chain link fencing and recovered metal rebar. Placed on top of the chain link fencing are various materials: a section of sidewalk, a square chunk of street asphalt, a square section of roof tiles, a section of brickwork, a panel of potting soil with grass, a panel with large rocks, a panel with smaller pebbles, a panel with poor soil collected from a nearby vacant plot, a panel with sand. The students can look down on the panels from above, the panels look like a patchwork quilt of different colors and textures. The students can also bend over to see underneath the panels and the chain link fence. They can see that rainwater runs through some of the panels and not through others. They can walk around three sides of the platform while still under the U-shaped roof. The rainwater, relatively clean, seeps down eventually to the small pool underneath and then to the pond. The rainwater replenishes the water used to irrigate the flower ponds seeing the rainwater collect reminds the student in charge of irrigation this month that he must turn off the irrigation pump because it is important to conserve water.
After 15 minutes of hard rain, the four students decide to make a run for it back to school. They run back trying to stay under the cover of the canopies of the row of trees. The trees on this side of the park, headed back towards the basin, are younger and donšt provide much cover. They reach the basin. All the skateboarders have gone home. There is already an inch of water on the bottom of the basin, covering the blue strip of the pretend Mill Creek. Just on the other side of the basin, the students stop under one of the first older London Plain trees, which provides more cover. They are still always surprised to see that the dry steps they had walked down next to the school are now covered with flowing water from the street that the school faces. The gutters of 48th Street empty into the recessed culvert and make a series of small noisy waterfalls down the steps and into the basin. The basin will fill with storm water from the streets. It will retain water for several days; water slowly empties into the Mill Creek sewer through the small drain. The students know that the water quality may not always suitable for the turtles and other life pond that is why they let it go into the sewer and then to the treatment plant to be diluted in larger bodies of water such as the river and the ocean. The pond is safe from street runoff because it is elevated and separate from the storm water detention basin.
The students follow the London Plain trees all the way back up to 48th Street and make one last dash to the front door of Sulzberger Middle School.
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