Walking in the City

When I stepped off the subway unto a busy Manhattan street, searching for some telltale patch of green at  the distant end of the block, I had no idea of what to expect on my visit to the Highline. I had always loved the sprawling oasis of Central Park and what it represented – the idea of taking refuge in nature when the city grew too loud and tumultuous, of escaping from the hectic pace of life into an “alien” world of trees, grasses, and flowers – but I had never visited the Highline and didn’t anticipate how little the park would betray its surroundings.  Amid burnished storefronts and old street signs, one could easily miss the glass elevator that shuttles visitors to and from its second story overpass and the adjacent staircase.  There was no pulsating electric sign, no magisterial grove of trees, no heralding crowd of tourists, rushing by one another to catch a glimpse of another New York landmark.  As we entered the park on a cold, bright November afternoon, only a few people were strolling along the walkway, a converted freight rail track that that runs from Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District to West 34th Street on Manhattan’s Westside.  The scene that opened before us was the same one we had encountered moments earlier, walking casually in the streets, and yet that brief flight of stairs seemed to somehow transport.  The structure itself was a model of simplicity: a metal path, understated shrubbery, benches, a sparse, but striking array of art objects, brief plateaus, unexpected views, and a sense of reorientation of the familiar embodied in the very logic of the construction:

I had expected something more – intricate landscaping, bright fauna, crowds of visitors, perhaps some food and live music.   There was none of that in the Highline.  But there was something that in New York City can be as rare and invaluable as any masterpiece of art and architecture –  a genuine sense of calm and perspective.  It was an impenetrable calm that enclosed the thin stretch of track, unperturbed by the ceaseless, blearing traffic below and the imperious arch of the skyline above. The sounds were still there.  The hectic pace of the city still rumbled below, visible with a slight glance over the railing.  The shadows of skyscrapers were still bent fiercely over the horizon.    And yet, twenty feet above the chaos, one could not help but feel, as much as De Certeau felt gazing down from the 110^th floor of the WTC,   that the agitation [of the city] is momentarily arrested by vision”  Perhaps De Certeau captured this arrested vision of the City better than any other in his essay:

“The gigantic mass is immobilized…It is transformed into a texturology in which extremes coincide..paroxysmal places in monumental relief…one lifted out of the city’s grasp…one’s body no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return according to an anonymous law…its elevation transfigures him into a voyeur…It puts him at a distance…It transforms the bewiching world by which one was possessed into a text…It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye…a God…this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more.”

“Walking in the City” can mean stumbling into an endless procession of sights, sounds, and tastes, wandering the bright, buzzing labyrinth of momentary distraction and eternal enchantment that the streets of Manhattan offer.     In the Highline, however, to walk is to walk, to be with people is to really be with them, to see is to see.   Like all great works of arts, it is useless.  It serves no immediate utilitarian or sensual need, and so serves a most important need for people of New York City: the need for tranquility, for understatement, for intimacy, and for a kind of bare, but essential beauty.  The beauty of the Highline is always a minimalist beauty.  The views are not grandiose or contrived.  The design is not imposed upon the surrounding neighborhoods.    Vegetation is designed to reflect the wild, resilient growth that persisted after the railway was discontinued.

There is, in this simplicity, a rich spectrum of possibilities for the the flaneur, the “voyeur…lusting to be a viewpoint and nothing more.”  One can look ahead and allow oneself to be carried by the logic of the path, submitting to its gentle bends and strange offerings. Odd statues speckle the landscape, offering pleasure in their curiousness and unabashed superfluity.   Zebra stripe buildings peek through the brown, windswept foliage, as if mocking some imagined safari, a fantasy of urban visitors.    Benches invite visitors to rest, and talk, and absorb the scenery more completely:

Or, one can look to the side, and see the alleyways, decrepit and graffitied.  And notice the the river peering through, feel it whispering the city’s secrets in the light autumn breeze.  The people who live there speak in the elaborate paintings that decorate the walls of old, decaying edifices:

Or one can look down at the yellow taxi cabs and the bleak, gray sidewalks, with residents scurrying to destinations nameless and obscene, eyes downcast, shoulders braced against the crowd – and perhaps see oneself in the whirl of  silver hubcaps and winter coats.

Or one can cast his gaze upward at the arresting grandeur of a skyline that speaks for itself:

One moment my eyes descend into a desolate urban canyon, the next they are drawn upward by the gleaming visage of steel and glass.  At once the symbolic relief of a defiant street culture, the hard, steel lines of cororate office building, the sumptuous sllouhette of some temple of culture are all present in my shifting field of vision:

One can understand Quine when he says New York is the “Nowhere he built around himself”.   But one also gets the sense of being everywhere, of being connected to everything.  One is small, marginal to the city, but also inseparable from its diverse life.  One is surrounded by Scruton’s ugliness, but also by beauty – and the boundary between the two is often not clearly demarcated.

The Highline seems to reflect the most ambitious, even starry-eyed vision of what a city, what New York City can be: beauty and degeneration in redemptive coexistence, various neighborhoods, cultures, and styles appreciated as distinct, living entities, but united in the narrative of walking, a celebration of the public that offers private joys,  an anonymity that is also an implicit form of intimacy. What we experience at the Highline, more than the ‘Return to Nature’, is a return to the city, its organic patterning and peopling.  As Decerteau observed, “Beneath the discourses that ideologize the city, the ruses and combinations of power that have no readable identity proliferate , without points where one can take hold of them, without rational transparency, they are impossible to administer”.  At the Highline, we are able to experience the city as a complex totality, which for people who live there, is very much related to the totality of the self.  At the Highline distance is no boundary to intimacy, as one is set apart from the city, while remaining very much a part its enveloping life.

Although I would like to claim that our next destination was selected after careful thought and deliberation, I have to admit that the Empire State Building chose us more than we chose it.      Towering over the skyline, it immediately attracted our gaze and offered us so clear a contrast to the scope, design, and spirit of our present surroundings that all other options seemed to dissolve. “Empire State seemed  to float, like an enchanted fairy tower, over New York”, Rem Koolhaas observed in his “Delirious New York”.  ”A structure so lofty, so serene, so marvelously simple, so luminously beautiful, had never before been imagined.”

The neuropsychologist Julian Jaynes hypothesized that  early language users, without well established relationships between the various regions of the brain needed for speech and comprehension,   hallucinated the voices of the Gods and built monuments in the center of their cities to localize them.   Drawn by the allure of the Empire State Building , traversing block after block in its shadow, it is not difficult to see the traces of such a primal relationship to structures. In a landscape of competing glitter and attraction, the Empire State Building attempts, like the Godheads of old, to seize the attention of its viewers, to inspire compelling interest and even awe in a city where interest is endlessly divided and awe is regarded as the most unforgivable sentimentality.  As Koolhaas observed,  ”The ESB is the last manifestation of Manhattanism as pure and thoughtless process, the climax of the subconcious Manhattan”.  Beyond conversations about aesthetics and cultural context, there is man’s fascination with the tremendous – his universal respect for natural power, elegant  functionality, and sheer height –   and it is this fascination that is animated in the ESB.

While Highline attempts to fuse with a surrounding vision of the city, the ESB seeks to overshadow – it does not strive to elevate, but to surpass.    The ESB stands as self-absorbed monument to its own vision, an aesthetic end-in-existence, a thoughtless charge against the vault of heaven. One cannot help but connect the building to Stillman’s Tower of Babble – “a form of automatic architect, a sensuous surrender by its collective makers – from the accountant to the plumber – to the proccess of building”, as Koolhaas puts it.  There is something undeniably arrogant and extra-human in the building.  But there is also something necessarily superficial:

Pure product of proccess, the empire State can have no content.  The building is sheer envelope…The skin is all or almost all.  Empire State will gleam in all its pristine beauty, for our children’s children to wonder at.”

The lobby of the ESB is a museum of the myth of its own exterior.  Reliefs of the buildings are carved into the walls. The famous image of King Kong scaling the side of the building is parodically recreated with an ape doll in one of the display cases.

The interior has its own beauty, but it is a different grade of beauty. The lobby, with its harsh, bright-dark textures does not welcome.  It does not invite exploration.   It seems to be cognizant of the fact that the utopian premise of the exterior is only a premise, that the interior of business offices and restaurants cannot  justify the collective gesture of Babel-making any more than internal motivation can justify the poetry of sorrow in Ivanov.   There is a sort of embarrassment in design.

The contrast between the  Highline and the ESB is not only a constrast between two visions o f New York City, but between two visions of man and his project of civilization.