Justice is a Dish Best Served in the Shade

In my experience, Forestry, though staffed with very burly men (I like to think of them as reverse lumberjacks), doesn't usually bare its political teeth. Fees for damaging the urban canopy are often nominal and give property owners little incentive to go the extra mile to care for street trees. I often daydream about one day ruling the division with an iron fist, extracting my pound of flesh for every maimed or murdered tree. (And yes, in this dream I often don green spandex a la Batman's Poison Ivy.) So you can imagine how thrilled I was to read this morning in The New York Times that the City has thrown the book at the arboricidal maniac wreaking havoc in Prospect Heights. Obviously, my heartfelt condolences go out this disturbed man's family, but I'm pleased to see that Forestry has manned up. Way to go, boys.

The Ruins of New York's Industrial Past

Perhaps due to an overreaction to a recent birthday, lately I've been thinking a lot about decay. As I touched upon in an earlier post, Hollywood has given us our fair share of desolate New York City ruins. But we don't really need Hollywood; we have plenty of real-life examples of urban decay, most notably of the city's industrial past. These are, admittedly, in most cases less cataclysmic than zombie-apocalypse or sudden onset of an ice age, but they can be just as visually striking.

A few years ago, the Times ran a photo essay by Nathan Kensinger that included images of Brooklyn's industrial ruins, including an abandoned powerhouse on the Gowanus Canal known as "The Batcave" (you'll see why) and the infamous Admirals' Row in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. I keep coming back to these photos; they expose the tender underbelly of New York's past -- spaces occupied now only by our city's most destitute.

On my recent visit to Staten Island, my friends and I sought out another industrial ruin: the Ship Graveyard, the site of dozens of scuttled vessels left to rust in the wetlands. Not much is known about the Ship Graveyard, I suspect it's because its the result of illegal dumping. Indeed, to reach the spot, you must pass through the neglected 18th-century Seguine family graveyard and down a steep hill overgrown with phragmites and poison ivy. But it's worth the effort.

Staten Island Ship Graveyard from Alicia West on Vimeo

In Defense of Poison Ivy

I have always been a die-hard Batman fan, and one of my favorite characters besides the Bat himself is Poison Ivy. The origin story goes like this: Pamela Isley, a shy but attractive botany grad student, is seduced by her professor, who later poisons her. She survives and finds she has developed an immunity to all natural toxins. A supervillain is born. Yet this supervillain has a cause: Poison Ivy is a environmental preservationist turned fanatical bio-terrorist.

A friend of mine recently gave me a sweetly sinister little book by Amy Stewart titled Wicked Plants: The Weed that Killed Lincoln's Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities, which details some of the "unfathomable evils [that] lurk within the plant kingdom." Stewart posits that plants should be approached with a guarded respect, noting that "we all benefit from spending more time in nature -- but we should also understand its power... [plants] can nourish and heal, but they can also destroy."

In an episode of Batman the Animated Series, Ivy poisons Gotham's DA, Harvey Dent, in revenge for his destruction of nature in the pursuit of civic development. She reasons, "Plowing up a field of beautiful wild flowers for that silly penitentiary of his." "This little rose," she adds, gesturing to the poisonous agent, "would be extinct today if I hadn't saved my precious from those horrible bulldozers. The blood of those flowers is on his hands!"

It's hard not to like to Poison Ivy. She understands the power of nature and defends it, albeit in a twisted way. As the scales of the built and natural environment continue to tip in my Gotham, there's a small part of me that fantasizes about donning a green unitard and kicking some ass in the name of plants everywhere. But I'll settle for more reasonable methods. Persistence is key. As Ivy says when vanquished, "They can bury me in the ground as deep as they like, but I'll grow back. We always grow back!"