1.
Now is a wonderful time for the West Side
of Manhattan between midtown and the Upper
West Side. New York City is often most
beautiful in transition: the sad, elegaic quality that Times
Square took on as it was slowly demolished and
gentrified was a
beauty quite absent in the ten years of seediness
that came before. And the construction of
skyscrapers is, with only a few notable exceptions,
usually much more wonderful than the
skyscrapers themselves.
And now, the Far West Side -- an area of
Manhattan as yet unnamed, except by Donald
Trump. Great things are coming to the area
over the Spring and Summer of 2001, in particular
the near-completion of the ‘Greenway,’ a set
of running and biking trails linking Battery Park City
in the South to the George Washington Bridge
in the North. The Greenway isn’t complete yet;
there are still a number of places where resourceful
bikers and runners have to traverse unmarked
parking lots, leap out onto dangerous roadways,
and negotiate curbs and dirt paths. But recently
one of the largest ‘missing links’ in the chain
opened up: the new stretch of Riverside Park south,
roughly running from 72nd street to 59th.
And it is remarkable.
Parks in New York are always glorious, of
course -- islands of nature and beauty, and
sometimes tranquillity, amidst Metropolis.
But the new section of Riverside Park is remarkably
so, especially right now. Thanks to Donald
Trump’s negotiated deal with the city, the decaying
piers of the West Side are being largely replaced
by new pedestrian piers, and, we’re told, planned
commercial development. I’m not sure I’ve
signed on to how delightful West Street Seaport will
really be. But at the moment, the combination
of the park’s opening and the as-yet-unfinished
work of the developers, New Yorkers now can see
some of the most beautiful and moving public
art in the city: the old commercial piers of
the West Side, in their last few months of existence.
The piers north of the Intrepid aren’t just
decrepit and decaying: they are decomposing
outright. The steel and wood is warped,
the rust better textured than any Richard Serra sculpture.
The piers have twisted into shapes that evoke
New York’s industrial and commercial past, now
visible only in vintage maps like those the Met
put on display last summer: a past when New York
harbor and the Hudson River were the heart and
arteries of commerce, when ships docked at piers
from the Bowery around to the Battery and north
to the 79th street Boat Basin. It was not a
bucolic past, nor a gentle one. People
worked hard, in tough conditions, and not for much
money. But now, its relics are beautiful,
braided ropes of metal and wood, as if Christo had
draped scaffolding around a building by Frank
Gehry. The sagging of the piers' infrastructure is like
drapery, or dance. The crumbling arches
of old hoists and drydocks are like a poetic post-industrial Chartres.
It used to be almost impossible to get a look
at these industrial ruins, and soon they’ll
surely be swept away by the cranes. But
at least for a moment, go -- look -- admire. New York
is changing, and this part of it about to be
turned into a ghost is beautiful in its ruin.
2.
In some ways, the changing of the New York
landscape is not unlike the changing of the
seasons; the new (not always better, but at least
new) blooms amid the decomposition of the old.
And it’s pointless to hold on to the past --
South Street Seaport, particularly once the fish market
closes, could not be more different than the
wrecked piers on the West side. South Street is
kitsch. It’s pleasant enough, but its poetry
is fake; it never changes, it only repeats the patterns of
a distant past, commercialized for our enjoyment.
Real change is like the calendar year:
ineluctable, natural, and beautiful. Neighborhoods
have their seasons too.
It’s a banal point that you can’t authentically
hold back the ‘march of time’ or the ‘flow of
time’ or the movement of time in any metaphor
one might choose. But it’s one thing to recognize
the futility of resistance, another to truly
feel it and to liberated by it. Ah, a disclosure: as I’m less
than a week from my thirtieth birthday, these
sorts of thoughts naturally are toward the front of
my mind. Thirty is hardly old age -- one
might well call this time in my life the spring giving way
to summer. Certainly it’s not autumn or
winter, at least not in any objective sense. But thirty is
enough of an inflection point to make me stop
and wonder whether I’m on a path I respect, what
the opportunities are that lie ahead, and those
behind that I’ve missed. Thirty, I’ve always
thought, is adulthood. Values that are
absolutely essential to being a good twenty year old --
rebelliousness, querulousness, unbridled curiosity
in every direction -- begin to look at little, what,
tired? at thirty. Rebelliousness should
give way to serious opposition, or real work -- or, in the
alternative, a more mature understanding of complexity
and the multiplicity of perspectives in the
world. The same demanding, argumentative
stance that marks an intelligent twenty year old is
probably a sign of an immature thirty year old.
And by thirty, one begins to realize that
inquisitiveness without focus leads to very little
work getting done.
These are just examples. And they are not
to suggest, by any means, that the values of carpe diem are in
any way invalid -- as I'm about to suggest, they
only become more richly understood as the impatience
of youth is frustrated by time. And
obviously, thirty, or forty, or fifty should never be the age when
one stops asking questions or seeking wonder
or writing poetry. Questioning and self-
expression are signs of life, at any age.
Most important, one should never assume that a particular time
is ‘the’ time for a particular change. Growing
up is like falling in love -- when it happens, it happens,
and you are swept up in it. You can’t force
it. You feel it.
The flowers in Riverside Park are beautiful
once again. I guess at some point the ‘garden
people’ must have an off-year, but I haven’t
seen it yet. So, biking up from the decaying piers to the
blooming flowers, I was seized by the desire
to take pictures of both -- both were so beautiful, I
wanted to capture them somehow, to remember and
to preserve them. I may go back to the piers
with my camera, because they are soon to disappear
forever. But trying to preserve flowers on
film, or autumn leaves in a scrapbook -- this
is futility. This is what Ecclesiastes warns us about:
this un-natural linearization of the cyclical
time of Nature. We can try and try and try to somehow
escape the cycle of birth and growth and death
and decay, but we will always fail. Our efforts will
be as fleeting as breath, as hevel. And
our end will be folly and failure. But, Kohelet seems to
say, if we release the desire to harness the
world to our fervent wish for immortality, if we acquiesce and
join in its natural course, we can gain a wonderful
kind of freedom.
Kohelet's freedom is both negative and
positive.
It is both a liberation from tying ourselves to futility and
permanence, to a doomed quest for lasting reality,
and a freedom to enjoy that which is before us and work
as best we can to make the world better.
It is a recognition that all is fleeting, but not a nihilistic one:
the necessary next step is to cherish and 'suck
the marrow' out of the
life that is here, and build one for tomorrow.
New York's old piers will decay, and soon
disappear. But they are
beautiful art, in their changing, today.
And there are new piers going up on the Far West Side -- one
of my favorite spots
in New York
right now is the new pedestrian pier leading
out into the middle of the Hudson. I'm sure, too,
that the flowers' bloom will soon be off, and summer will get hot.
Likewise, with the same inevitability,
all of us will find, sooner or later, that the
tasks we set out will not be completed, and that our labor will not
be remembered forever. Almost all of us
will, relatively soon, be forgotten. But if we extinguish the desire
for things to be otherwise, if we let go of trying
to hold on, permanence will no longer be the yardstick of
success. Our sandcastle is beautiful despite
the oncoming tides, like the piers, the flowers, and what few
moments we have that make life worthwhile.
April 30, 2001
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