Nature vs. Pavement: Round 5

I don't know how someone thought a sufficient amount of water could get through those holes in the concrete. Clearly the tree thought this was stupid as well.















Park Place between Classon and Franklin Avenues, Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

I Want to Wake Up In the City that Doesn't Sleep

People seem to like disaster movies, particularly ones that leave New York City completely desolate. In these films, the city's infrastructure is intact, but bereft of human activity, it is defenseless as nature creeps back in. These movies play on the idea that urbanism and nature are mutually exclusive. As Eric Sanderson writes in one of my favorite passages of Mannahatta, "It a conceit of New York City—the concrete city, the steel metropolis, Batman's Gotham—to think it is a place outside of nature, a place where humanity has completely triumphed over the forces of the natural world, where a person can do and be anything without limit or consequence." The people are what make this city great.

This has been a frenetic, but exciting New York week for me. With Halloween, the marathon, the mayoral election and the Yankees' ticker-tape parade, I spent most of the last week overwhelmed by masses of people, their excitement and frustration crushingly palpable. At each of these events, I felt pride and enjoyment (yes, even at the ticker-tape parade, thanks to Jay-Z), but I also found myself searching for a quiet moment, a place to breathe, my own personal empty Times Square with meadow grass sprouting through the asphalt.

And this is why I think we like these disaster movies: because New York is as stressful as it is uplifting. Though we love our skyscrapers, sports events and over-the-top celebrations, there is a part of us that wishes for a quieter and more profound experience, which we see distilled by an idealized natural world.

Image from I Am Legend.

Nature vs. Pavement: Round 4

I'm not even sure how this happened, but the tree roots here look like they took molten form at some point and engulfed the decorative brick tree pit edge treatment. Awesome.

5th Street between 6th Avenue and 7th Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn.

A Weed Grows in Brooklyn

At a backyard barbeque in Gowanus this summer, I complimented my host on his spectacular tree (pictured below), to which he responded, "It's a weed." I didn't understand at first, thinking of dandelions and stammering, "But it's so pretty!" Then I realized he meant the tree was an invasive species, one that (often non-native) is able to outgrow and edge out others by monopolizing resources. While I know that I shouldn't like invasives because they detrimentally impact native ecosystems, I can't help but admire their pluck.

It occurred to me that this tree might, in fact, be the fabled tree from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) by Betty Smith. Used by Smith as a metaphor in the book for the protagonist's perseverance despite every disadvantage, this tree "grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement." This tree knew how to overcome obstacles and would be a sure thing in the Nature vs. Pavement arena. Further Internet research revealed that many people believe Smith's tree is an Ailanthus altissima, which looks a little different, but I have been unable to definitively identify my host's tree. Whatever it is, those pink pom-pom flowers are fabulous!

Mon Oncle: A Lesson in Urban Design

This week, I went to see a screening of Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle (1958) at MoMA. Mon Oncle focuses on the absurdity of the bourgeois' obsession with modern invention, which imprisons them as much as it sets them free. The film's main expression of this condition is the ultra-modern home of Monsieur and Mademoiselle Arpel, Monsieur Hulot's (Tati's cinematic alterego) sister and brother-in-law. The house (Villa Arpel) is strikingly sterile -- outfitted entirely in modernist furniture that no one finds comfortable, cabinets that open and shut with complex mechanical programming and a garden consisting of concrete stepping stones, steel edges and plants so manicured they hardly seem real.

There's a fantastic scene in Mon Oncle, where the Arpels host a garden luncheon. During this scene, Hulot's nephew, stifled by Villa Arpel and bored to tears by the shallow social display, rips down a portion of climbing vines, destroying the sad, manicured symmetry. The party rapidly deteriorates, ending in insult and injury (due in no small part to Hulot's bumbling navigation around the awkward "natural" space) and the nephew running around the garden in a Native American headdress. Later that night, when Hulot sneaks back to the house to finish tearing down the vines, the circular windows of Villa Arpel transform into patrolling eyes (the silhouettes of the Arpels' synchronized heads).

Obviously, I got a kick out of this battle enacted between the attenuated natural world and the anthropomorphized built environment. In reading Eric W. Sanderson’s Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York (as noted in a previous post, this study is also an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York), I learned that the Lenape, the Native American inhabitants of Mannahatta, created the structural beams of their wigwams by transplanting tree saplings in a circular plan and bending them inward. The contrast of the Lenapes literally building shelter from live nature with Villa Arpel's precise, tamed gardens brings me back to Anne Whiston Spirn, who posited in 1984 that to ensure the continued success in the urban environment, "nature in the city must be cultivated… rather than ignored and subdued." I think Tati would have agreed.

Nature vs. Pavement: Round 1

One of my earliest memories is of being pushed in my stroller by my dad on Waverly Street in Philadelphia. As we rolled over the huge, canted flags of pavement that had been lifted by the roots of the hundred-year-old trees, he’d intone, “Uuuuup and dooooown, uuuuup and doooown.”

And so, in honor of my dad, this post and many in the future pays tribute to the sheer awesomeness of street trees in the ultimate battle of Nature vs. Pavement.
















Lafayette Avenue and Carlton Avenue, Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

An Introduction

I’m what you’d call a city girl, but I was lucky enough to attend a progressive grade school when I was a kid that based our education in the classroom on experiences both in the urban environment of Center City Philadelphia and the wilds of a nature preserve in Upper Roxborough. My school’s tenet was and still is City, Country, Classroom.

Until recently, my life experience led me a-stray from this well-rounded educational foundation. Misery in a de facto suburban high school caused me to insist that my roots were set firmly in concrete, certainly not in lawn.

And while it is true that I will never again be persuaded to go camping and will never, ever pee in the woods, I realize now that I find joy and curiosity in the natural environment present and growing in the built environment of New York City, my home for the last eight years.

My hope for these posts is to focus on subjects such as the historic ecosystem, current civic endeavors to green and clean the urban environment, fun things to do and see in the city’s parks, and things you can do to help the environment on an individual level. I hope also to hear from you, as I am by no means an expert and am eager to learn more.