Time & Place

In Tuan’s chapter “Time and Place”, he describes three ways to look at how time and place interact. He introduces them as “time as motion or flow and place as a pause in the temporal current”, “attachment to place as a function of time” and “place as time made visible, place as memorial to times past”. (179) As I was reading I was trying to think of how these approaches to time and place meet in my daily life. Referring to the first interaction between place and time, the example I thought of immediately was a walk in the park. I have always thought of Washington Square Park as a place as a whole, which it is, but I never considered the little sections of the park places as well. As I am walking from one class to another, there are definite spots along my path that are significant markers of how I understand the park itself. Washington Square Arch is probably the most pronounced and well-known place within the park marking the end of Fifth Avenue, along with the center fountain (although now blocked off). There are the two dog parks, the children’s playgrounds, the chess tables at the southwest corner of the park and the area along Washington Square Park East where the man warns me about watching traffic and how much time I have till my next class. These are all important places that are, as Tuan says, “connected by an intricate path, pauses in movement, markers in routine and circular time”. (182)
As I was looking through pictures of Washington Square Park, I came across a website created to defend the preservation of the park. http://home.earthlink.net/~preservewsp/ The website documents the politics, dangers, and current construction of the park’s renovation through articles, pictures, videos, and a blog. In “Time and Place” Tuan talks about how people, depending on their perspectives, think about the past. He says, “Some people try hard to recapture the past. Others, on the contrary, try to efface it, thinking it a burden like material possessions. Attachment to things and veneration for the past often go together. A person who likes leather-bound books and oak beams in the ceiling is ipso facto an acolyte of history. In contrast, one who disdains possessions and the past is probably a rationalist or a mystic. Rationalism is unsympathetic to clutter. It encourages the belief that the good life is simple enough for the mind to design independently of tradition and custom, and that indeed tradition and custom can cloud the prism of rational thought”. (188) I thought this quote highlights the differences of how people supporting the preservation of the park view history and place and how the City of New York and its parks department understand place. While those who defended the preservation of the original park cited the history and culture that will be destroyed through its reconstruction, city employees refer to the benefits of the new park. George Vellonakis, the park’s landscape designer, says to the New York Times that his new plan will “increase the green space in the park by a fifth and include the new one-acre lawn and strips of horticultural plantings — ferns, evergreens, flowering dogwoods — around all four sides of the park”. As the park renovations proceed and are completed how will the new Washington Square Park change the way you and I view place and time?