NEW YORK, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
--Sam Phillips, “Taking Pictures”, Fan Dance (Nonesuch, 2001)
Manhattan, or New York, New York, New York, is the fabled land of the skyscraper. What is less known is that the Statue of Liberty may well be one of the last free-standing structures left in the City within the City (and it stands on an island all its own). Only mail for Manhattan may be addressed New York, New York, and the precious zip codes and telephone area codes are slowly being sliced up into so much pastrami. 212 area codes will one day soon be traded on the New York Stock Exchange.In New York, New York, New York (Manhattan) everything (and everyone) is leaning on, over, under, on top of something (and someone) else. The City is literally "held in tension", propping itself up, through the finer, daily dissection of air rights, substructure, infrastructure, ground rights, subgrade rights, rights of way, rites of passage, rights of citizens, party walls, party politics, and BIDs (Business Improvement Districts), the latter of which, for reasons unknown, have not yet attracted the attention of Federal anti-racketeering laws.
Rem Koolhaas' rather famous image of Delirious New York, with skyscrapers strutting their stuff on uniform podiums across, up and down Manhattan was essentially a juvenile wet dream. The reality is that in Midtown and Downtown all such buildings jostle for visibility and elbow room, not unlike the proto-typical New Yorker. The few freestanding buildings left in town are under scaffold pending "renewal" or wrapped up in strict preservation bylaws and, like so much else in the City, slowly being engulfed by new signage, new superstructure, new mega-wattage, or new (and serial) longterm slicing, dicing and -- in cuisinart fashion -- maceration. Thus, the recent but dignified late arrival of landscape urbanism -- a latterday attempt to slow the onrushing decimation of life in the City as we are about to remember it.
Landscape urbanism is built itself atop modern urbanism and seriously engaged with the suspect terrain of superstructure and infrastructure. It is, please note, not about the ground beneath our feet. The perquisites of landscape urbanism are manifold but ultimately reducible to the hardscape around our ears, to post-industrial brownfields, and leftover strips and bits of the city. Attuned to the dull din of the jackhammer soloist pounding away somewhere in the concrete and asphalt depths of our collective urban soul, landscape urbanists are the pied pipers of leftover, marginalized and benighted public open space.
Adjusting and mediating the fallout from the wholesale commercialization of the public realm, situating elegant apologias for urban gentrification, and mollifying the attendant social anomie of late-capitalist class warfare is the unwritten agenda of late-modern urbanism. Landscape urbanism rides to the rescue of the fair maiden -- public space -- trapped amid highrise towers surrounded by the fratricidal, internecine wars for turf, perks, prestige and profits by real estate barons and political thugs in the city that, famously, never sleeps.
Pace Karel Teige, perhaps, the vision of Utopia has receded -- another red shift -- and it has been supplanted by a vision of Urbanity, but without the space to observe it. Teige's extraordinary late collages -- erotic collisions of human and landscape forms -- were signature gestures against the loss of the metaphysical ground beneath our feet (in the 1940s). It has been further eroded these past 60 years by the same relentless forces that drove Teige back, late in life, to the revolutionary surrealistic codes of his early years in Prague, in the 1920s, when he was part of the Devetsil agitation. (Woe be to those who missed the Teige exhibition this past summer at NYU's Grey Art Gallery.)The loss (and sale) of public open space in New York, New York, New York -- the transfer to anyone with a big enough bucket of cash -- has left the flaneur and the jaywalker the target of the last Quality of Life initiatives of a Mayor fast approaching political senility.
To paraphrase (and update) Edith Wharton: It is opening and closing time in the cities of the West.
Dr. Prof. Ing. I. M. Avenarius (September 2001)
WELCOME TO THE CIRCUS MAXIMUS
FEVERISH NEW YORK / REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PRESENT
“A block or two west of the new City of Man in Turtle Bay there is an old willow tree that presides over an interior garden. It is a battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved by those who know it. In a way it symbolizes the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun. Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: ‘This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree.’ If it were to go, all would go -- this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death.” --E. B. White, “Here is New York” (1948)
“Of course, there is still the question as to why White makes such a point about that tree on the East Side and why that particular tree must be saved beyond its role as a symbol. The original sense of symbol, from the Greek sumbolon, stresses the symbol’s existence as one part of a totality. As Liddell and Scott define it in the Greek-English Lexicon, a symbolon is ‘each of two halves or corresponding pieces of an astragalos [bone piece] or other object, which two … contracting parties, broke between them, each party keeping one piece, in order to have proof of the identity of the presenter of the other.’ The symbol doesn’t just represent the thing it symbolizes, it is a part of it. White takes the tree so seriously as a symbol in this way that the death of the tree would also be the death of New York’s essential fever. Like a symbolon, the tree and the fever are dependent on one another for White.” --Morgan Meiss, “Nothing Lousier Than Nostalgia” (The Old Town Review, 04/08/04)
Stay away from Times Square at all times, bypass Fifth Avenue at all costs from 42nd Street to 61st, skip SoHo on the weekends. Forget about big cultural events -- "free concerts", parades, New Year's, big box office events -- since you are guaranteed to be treated like cattle being led to the slaughterhouse.
When hopping around the City, use buses for short hops and the subway for long hauls (avoiding peak travel times) -- the transfer (within 2 hours is free). Learn the essential details of express and local bus and subway routes.
Never go to the Post Office unless you have a few hours to spare or can use the vending machines to post your item.
If using either of the City's two airports, use the least known form of transportation (water shuttle* and/or one of the local buses), use e-tickets if possible and take carry-on luggage only (Fed-Ex your heavy luggage to your destination like the plutocracy). If you have to check luggage, transfer all essential items to your hand luggage and never, ever use curb-side check in (if it still exists). (As of late 2003 the AirTrain to JFK is in service, but you still have to take the subway to connect to it, and, alas, it does not service LaGuardia. To get to LaGuardia from JFK, take the AirTrain to Jamaica, take the E or F subway line to Roosevelt Avenue, Jackson Heights, and catch the Q33 bus to LaGuardia.)
If you must take a taxi, anywhere, know the fare and route in advance or be penalized accordingly.
If going to any major museums (MoMA, The Guggenheim, The Met, The American Museum of Natural History, i.e., the new Hayden Planetarium) go mid-week only. The Met is still "pay what you want", though many do not know this. Whether MoMA, when it reopens, will maintain "pay what you want" on Friday evenings is an as-yet open question.
If going out at night, and using the subway, expect to arrive home at 3 a.m. after hours waiting on the platform for a train (watching the garbage and utility trains crawl by) and beware the late-night service changes that can require your travelling downtown to go uptown, or uptown to go downtown.
*The water shuttle to Manhattan from LaGuardia was discontinued sometime in 2003 ...
See André Aciman, "Shadow Cities" (The New York Review of Books, 12/18/97)
"Here our bodies are our vehicles. A satchel serves the duty of a trunk; our shoes must be replaced (or resoled) every 2,000 miles. We use ‘pedestrian’ to describe the latest [Lars] von Trier film, never ourselves. There are drivers, sure, but the sidewalks belong to us, and their regulations and protocol are unspoken but understood by its rulers: the walkers." --Andrew Womack, "How to Walk in New York" (The Morning News, 04/07/04)
FURTHER (REQUIRED) READING
See: Milieu(x) and Anti-Milieu(x) (Provisional Notes)
--Oxford Pocket Dictionary (1924)
