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.

On the Waterfront

Earlier this year, I accepted the dubious challenge of writing a historic plaque for the park at Catherine Slip in the Two Bridges neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. While trying to explain how a space that was once a docking place for boats between piers was now terra firma parkland, I was surprised to learn that much of the shoreline was filled in not only with earth, but with refuse. This tidbit didn't make it into my plaque text, but it's fascinating to me to think about how we have physically blurred the edges of our city both purposefully and through neglect and how our relationship with the waterfront has changed over time.

The shores of Manhattan once consisted sandy beaches, intertidal mudflats and salt marshes. With industrialization, the waterfront was put to work, much to the detriment of the ecosystem. Industry flourished with easy access to water transport and few regulations about waste dumping. According to Mark Kurlansky's book The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell, by 1910, 600 million gallons on untreated sewage was being dumped into the waterways daily. Surprisingly, New Yorkers still used the waterways for recreation, though they would often emerge caked in filth.

Today, under the auspices of the Bloomberg Administration, the City is endeavoring to return the waterfront and waterways for safe public use. Vast swaths of the waterfront have been rezoned for public access and new parks and esplanades are under construction. Oyster and mussel beds have been reintroduced to the waterways to naturally filter the water.

Of course, there are still areas where the waterfront is completely closed to the public, notably in Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn. Here, the giant Con-Edison plant bars access to the water. I'd love to post a photo to show you how Con-Ed plant completely blocks views of the water, but a small man stepped out of a guard booth to inform me that photography was not permitted, as though I had not seen the signs.

Finally: Mannahatta, Ho!

It took me three months, but I finally made it up to see the Mannahatta exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York. (Nothing like realizing it's the last weekend of the exhibit to send me scurrying up to the northern-most reaches of Museum Mile!)

Having read most of the book, the information within the exhibit wasn't new to me; but I was impressed by the presentation, particularly the 15 foot long topographical model of Mannahatta, onto which the curator projected the many maps and diagrams included in the book. This display was a brilliant synthesis of information, illustrating not only the island's transformation from Mannahatta to Manhattan, but also the different types of bedrock, levels of beaver population, areas of the Lenape's controlled fires, and more. It was really breathtaking at times. Since the exhibit is closed, I think it's okay to post a video of this central display, but I do encourage you to buy the book!

Mannahatta from Alicia West on Vimeo.

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.

America the Beautiful, Manhattan the Sweet?

Independence Day weekend seems like a good time to write a bit about the ecological history of New York City. The city is situated on an estuary, a semi-enclosed coastal body of water with rivers and streams flowing into it, where saltwater and freshwater meet, creating a diverse ecosystem. Early European visitors to Manhattan describe it as an Eden with fresh air, verdant landscapes and an abundance of wild fruit, fowl, fish and oysters (more on those bivalves in later posts).

I’ve always been amused that many of these early written accounts speak of Manhattan as having a "sweet smell." Anyone who is familiar with the unique putridity left behind after a rainy-day garbage collection in Manhattan, can attest to the seeming absurdity of the idea of this place ever smelling "sweet." Some time ago, I had the extreme misfortune of slipping and landing in a puddle of this muck. After three washes, my jeans still reeked of garbage, and I ended up throwing them out.

I find this dramatic juxtaposition fascinating, and cannot wait to see the exhibition Mannahatta/Manhattan: A Natural History of New York City, currently at the Museum of the City of New York. The show recreates Manhattan as it was when Europeans first arrived and explores the balance of nature and urban development over time.