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

Hawk and Awe

City Hall, like so many other houses of government, is set within a park. It's a small park, but the significant tree canopy offers relief from the chaos of the city's civil and financial centers. I'm lucky enough to work in the attic of City Hall, which affords me a great view of the park and its inhabitants, which I thought consisted only of squirrels, office workers and nannies. That is, until today, when an enormous hawk landed on our office's AC window unit, scrambled to keep its grip on the metal, and then stared at me and my officemates as we screamed (from shock and delight) and rummaged frantically for a camera before he took off again (to no avail, sorry). I saw him again a few hours later coasting upward over the clock tower. We've named him Stokes in honor of I.N. Phelps Stokes, the author of The Iconography of Manhattan.

While I wait for Stokes' return, I'm obsessed with the live feed of the hawk's nest at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute. After watching the three nestlings nap, stretch and feed, I am trying to figure out how I can make my life a little bit more like theirs.

Title pun courtesy of Alex Hills.

674,725 Trees To Go!

Thursday was the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, and, in honor of this, my friend Keri and I, along with roughly 150 other volunteers, including a troop of chubby Boy Scouts, ventured to Wolfe's Pond Park in Staten Island to plant trees as a part of the City's MillionTrees initiative.

Here's a video of Keri planting her very first tree. (Just a note: the video is cut a bit short because one of the event leaders came by and suggested that I actually help Keri, rather than film her. I assure you, we did get this tree -- and many others -- planted.)

Keri Plants a Tree from Alicia West on Vimeo.

I Never Knew the Charm of Spring... Til April in Paris

I'm fresh back from a week-long visit to Paris. I still have that great jet-lag that lets you feel rested upon waking up at 7:30 a.m. (of course the flip side is that I fell asleep at 9:00 p.m. with all the lights on). Regardless, I am up and feeling industrious.

I've been to Paris before, but previously had not had the benefit of touring the city with natives. Forgive the anthropological leaning of this post, but this experience allowed me to begin to understand and try to embrace the rhythms and customs of the town. While I'll never get the double-cheek kiss down (awkward!), it was liberating to sit down and enjoy a coffee, rather than taking it to go on my way elsewhere.

This joie de vivre-type atmosphere was refreshing. But I also noticed a strong vein of formalism and tradition that we seem to lack stateside. (We're a little more rough around the edges and, well, rude.) I noticed this everywhere -- in interactions in shops, in fashion, and, quite surprisingly, in tree pruning (you didn't think I'd be able to tie this in, did you?)! Parisians love square trees. I don't get it, and I cannot find any explanation thus far. Parks are a priority in Paris, and as far as I can tell, this specialized pruning is a part of keeping them neat and tidy. It's the french cuff of urban forestry!

Jardin du Luxembourg

Orchard Beach: A Transplanted Oceanfront

I purchased Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York in 2007 with every intention of diving right in. But all 1,246 pages of that tome have sat on a bookshelf for the past three years. I never even cracked it. That was until last week, when I eagerly foraged through its index for information on Orchard Beach in the Bronx.

Before Robert Moses got to it, the beach was a narrow pebbly sand bar that linked Rodman Neck and Hunters Island, two of the easternmost landmasses of the Bronx in Pelham Bay Park. Moses reconceived Orchard Beach by connecting Rodman Neck, Hunters Island and the Twin Islands (east of Hunters Island) using fill and white sand dredged from the Rockaways to create 115 acres of parkland and a mile-long crescent-shaped beach. The result, even seen from satellite photos, seems otherworldly.


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What I'm beginning to understand from Caro's book is that Moses was practically an unstoppable force. He rearranged the city with a confidence fed by brilliance and arrogance. The pebbly sand of the Long Island Sound wasn’t good enough for Moses, so he simply transported tons upon tons of white sand from oceanfront Queens. Ecosystem, shmecosystem.

This type of urban planning would never fly today, but I can’t wait to check out Orchard Beach for myself this summer.

More, I'm sure, to follow on Robert Moses....

Hope Renewed

I was walking along Willoughby Avenue, sidestepping mounds of melting snow, when I saw it: a budding tree.

Spring is on the way!

A Failed Attempt at a Positive Outlook: Legacy Vs. Men in the Cities

In hopes of redeeming myself from my "I Hate Winter" post from mid-January, I had planned to write about Joel Meyerowitz's photo collection Legacy: The Preservation of Wilderness in New York City Parks, which includes some breathtaking wintertime images of nature. Meyerowitz's photos of the furthest reaches of the city's parks provide a glimpse of what so few New Yorkers experience – actually being in nature, completely cut off from the trappings of urbanism, all within our five boroughs. These photos express a calm and beauty that is transcendent.

As I said, my plan was to write an uplifting, positive post about natural beauty. But as I was shuffling through our collection of monographs in search of Meyerowitz's work, I came across Robert Longo's Men in the Cities.

The Men in the Cities series, created by Longo in the late 70s and early 80s, includes large-scale drawings of suited men and women writhing in response to unseen stimuli. Longo saw the figures as representative of Downtown types – both CBGB's and Wall Street, and he described the violent gestures he captured as emblematic of the time: "that jerking into now." What's special about the book I have is that it focuses on the photographs Longo used as the basis of his drawings, and many of these, unlike the drawings, which are closely cropped, are set against the backdrop of New York City as seen from the rooftop of Longo's South Street apartment building.

It's easy to identify with Longo's frenetically contorted figures. In wending my way through early adulthood in New York, I frequently feel pulled in too many directions, not sure which expectations to fulfill, all the while my business casual attire twisting uncomfortably.... But it's nice to know that Meyerowitz's New York City is out there too, and someday I'll get there.


















Left: Pelham Bay Park, Hunter Island, marsh grass and tidal pool, winter, Joel Meyerowitz

Right: Photographic study, Robert Longo