Open Road of New York has officially started their own web site - please visit them to find updated information! OPEN ROAD LINK
Open Road of New York was founded in 1990 to work with children, teenagers, and adults on outdoor environmental projects. We work long term with individual young people, public schools, non-profit and small business partners, and community volunteers to design, develop, and manage public gardens, playgrounds, parks, and compost systems. Our home site is the Lower East Side Garden in Manhattan, and we work on projects city wide.
Lower East Side Garden:
LES Garden is a public garden/park created and managed by Open
Road in partnership with East Side Community High School. The
NYC Department of Sanitation provided the lead funding, materials,
and technical support to start the garden. The Trust for Public
Land CitySpaces Program is developing a community playground to
complete the site, managed by Open Road. The site was designed
(images) and developed by and for
teenagers and is also open to the public for recreation, environmental
education programs, and community programs. Students, staff, and
volunteers built and maintain the garden's compost heated greenhouse,
fish and turtle ponds, solar powered waterfall, fruit trees beds,
organic lawns, and outdoor classrooms. The project is a model
of community and student design, and is used for city-wide workshops.
Members of the garden designed a playground to complete and preserve
the project; this playground is currently being developed on the
remainder of this nearly one acre site.
Compost Program:
Open Road's Compost Program develops on site composting systems
with public schools and other institutions in NYC. We train schools,
local development corporations, small businesses, community gardens,
and other partners in the development and operation of the systems,
and provide support until local groups can run the systems independently.
In addition to providing commercially available composting systems and training local groups in their use, Open Road has developed and patented a low technology system, the Hot Box, in partnership with East Side Community High School and Project Roots/Intermediate School 318. The Hot Box is appropriate for urban composting, and has been installed in a wide variety of locations city wide. These include LES Garden, the Project Roots/IS 318 Garden, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the Cathedral School at St. John the Divine, Greater Jamaica Development Corporation's Food Court in Queens, and Sahara East Restaurant in Manhattan. A license to construct the Hot Box is available free to non-profit and educational organizations. For more information about our compost program, contact Open Road.
Funding for Open Road's Compost Program includes grants from the NYC Department of Sanitation. Other support provided by the Urban Resources Partnership, Golden Rule, NYC Board of Education, NYC Department of Parks and Recreation, Cornell University, and individual donors.
For more information about Open Road contact OpenRoad of NY (updated 8/05)
Open Road and the Hot Box Compost System has been featured in several publications including, Biocycle and Resource Recycling magazines. To see a sample of a compost bin analysis featuring the Hot Box design, click here.
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