colleen's blog

This is my final course at Gallatin, a place that, for over the past couple of months, I have grown to think about often. During these past four years at NYU and in New York, I have visited the same buildings, parks, streets, and shops so often that these places have become the backdrop for my experience at college and significant landmarks in my life. Thinking in the future, I cannot imagine a life where there is no subway or tourists or constant movement, lights and noise. Of course, once I am gone, the city will continue. People will continue to visit and travel to the same streets and cafes that I once frequented. Everyone's experience in New York City is as unique and personal as the sections of the city itself.

There are aspects to the city that make it uniquely its own, aspects that made it a perfect setting to learn about the physical and personal construction of a place. I have learned that love of a place is much like the love of a person. What I may find attractive and appealing in a place may not be everyone's cup of tea but love has always been a very personal experience. Places can affect one's entire being - each of the senses. When I think of New York City, I hear the sounds of a playground with car horns humming in the distance. I smell coffee brewing and sizzling chicken kabobs being prepared by a hard-working street vendor. I taste the vast variety of foods and cultures. I feel the changing seasons, people and time. When I think about my anonymous time spent in the city, I wonder what mark my presence may leave once I am gone. I realize, however, that the mark New York has left on me will be far greater and more permanent in the way that it has profoundly impacted and influenced my life.

What made you want to make a video of New York?
I wanted to make a video of New York because I thought it would be a cool way to document my familiar surroundings in New York City. A video form I thought would be best to vividly represent that the sounds of taxi cars going by, the colors of buildings, the movements of people, and all the complexities that make up New York. The city is constantly in motion. The places, the people, the weather are uniquely defined by the moment and time in which I filmed. A day later or even ten minutes later would have created a different moment with different people.

How long did you work on the project?
I spent an afternoon walking around the city filming different buildings, streets, and people. It then took a while to edit it and somehow interconnect the different footage to create a certain theme.

What were you trying to say?
I wanted to capture what a day in New York is like in a variety of places for a variety of people. There is such diversity in the places within the city. There are areas that are noisy and crowded but there are also places within the city that are isolated and tranquil. The people within the city are as diverse as the place itself and I hoped to convey the interaction between place and people.

How does the project relate to specifics in any of the readings?
The video reflects some of the topics expressed in our readings. Ian Frazier’s Gone To New York essay I felt depicts his very personal attachment to and relationship with New York City and his sense of place. In his essay Rental he describes the city - its patterns and the weather- through the view of his apartment. The video hopefully also shows attachments to the city and a sense of place– basketball court, park, a corner eatery. Things that may seem everyday or commonplace to others, like bags in trees, become significant and important for Frazier to recognize and address.

How did the project change or evolve?

Friday was a beautiful day. For my final project, I took my  camcorder on a walk with me around the streets of the city to capture some of the buildings, activities, and inhabitants that make it up. At the outset, I was unsure of what my objective was. What was going to be the theme that brought together any footage I would film? How can I portray New York with a video camera?

Throughout the early morning and afternoon, I compiled seconds long footage of lower Manhattan and Midtown. I walked to well-known city landmarks and parks and down side streets and alleys to try to find moments and places that were significant to me. The walk began at Port Authority, a place filled with traffic, noise and hassled commuters on their march to work. The place is marked with a constant movement of cars, buses, subway trains, and hundreds of thousands of people. I then took a crowded A Train downtown to West 4th street where I strolled passed cafes, dry cleaners, convenience stores and brownstones. Many of the side streets were charming and tranquil. Residents were reading newspapers or bringing their children to school. Shopkeepers were washing down their front walks.

It’s hard to imagine that in the same city there are places of sanctuary and leisure, like a Washington Square Park, only minutes away from the traffic and congestion of a place like the Port Authority. These locations, however, are all intrinsically New York. It’s amazing how much a video camera catches peoples’ attention. I have spent many days over the years walking through the city but never have I received so many looks or quizzical expressions as I did on Friday. Pedestrians would look, as they were passing by, to see what street or building I was filming. Some people waited for me to finish my shot before they continued walking by me, which I found quite surprising. I think a majority of people, however, questioned why I was taping old buildings or mundane settings similarly to how I question why tourists take pictures of park squirrels.

The whole experience reminded me of when Daniel Quinn is first following Peter Stillman on his walks in City of Glass. Quinn observes Stillman picking up junk along the curb of the street. To Quinn, the junk means nothing but to Stillman, these things have an essential meaning. Although to others what I was filming was ordinary and unexciting, to me each building, storefront, and street had a significant importance. The video camera not only affected the way people viewed me but also the way I viewed New York. By looking through the lens as I was filming, all the shots seemed significant. Even if a truck pulled up in front of me and blocked the view, all the footage I took became important in the way I think of New York as a place. The most noteworthy part of recording aspects of New York on video was how much the places that I filmed were significant because of the people in them. The movement of individuals in their daily life, their experiences working and living all help to define the place that is New York. Construction workers, mothers, artists, children, bus drivers, police officers and musicians each help define to a place, to give it meaning, movement and purpose. A place isn’t a place without its people.

The video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1V-fAwiPXGU

I particularly enjoyed reading Frazier’s essay entitled Rental in his book Gone to New York. In it, he discusses getting rid of old junk in his New York City apartment. He says “ For a while, I tried just putting rubbish on the street and hoping to forget about it, but the trash men would leave it for days in protest, and people would go through it. I cannot stand when people go through my rubbish. Once, a friend of mine, after many years of owning a red quilt with her initials on it that her mother had made, threw it out, only to see a woman wearing it a few days later at Gramercy Park. This was the kind of thing I fear.” (9) This passage for some reason reminded me of garage sales. Every September, when I was a child, our community would hold a neighborhood garage sale where every house on the block was able get rid of unused clothing, toys, and trinkets to willing buyers. What I vividly remember about our sale is how high I would price some of my toys once it was time to sell them. Toys that had been lying in the attic or under my bed for years, things that I didn’t even know I possessed, all of a sudden became valuable to me again. What should have been sold for 50 cents I would price at $2 in hopes that it would deter other kids from any interest in buying it. Tuan discussed how individual things within a place are actually places themselves too. I feel like the examples of Frazier’s rubbish and my old toys at a garage sale are in a sense places as well. Although not a part of my life for a while, once I realized some of the things I once appreciated were going to be given to somebody else, these objects became much more than just stuffed animals or board games but evoked specific memories of place for me. Frazier, too, is adamant about his old things are disposed of. He describes them as “old doors, cork insulation, busted stepladders, lumber, pieces of pipe”, however, he is willing to rent a trash container in order for his old items to be removed of properly and to prevent others from steal his stuff. There are even specific aspects linked to his apartment that reinforces a sense of place for him. Frazier knows the way that raindrops are going to hit cars below or the effects of a thunderstorm on streetlamps all based on the direction the rain is coming from his window. Although the loft itself is significant as a home, it is also the objects, the weather, the streets below that construct Frazier’s view of and interaction with his dwelling.

Daniel Quinn, in Paul Auster’s City of Glass, begins with the idea that the city is nowhere. He leaves his small apartment daily to go on directionless walks throughout New York’s neighborhoods occasionally visiting a luncheonette or the post office. “Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind...reducing himself to a seeing eye...On his best walks he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things, to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself.” (10) Even when pretending to be Auster following Stillman, Quinn becomes comfortable with the way Stillman moves about the city through constantly recording Stillman’s actions and behaviors. Once Quinn removes himself from the city, its surroundings and people, and begins to reside in the alley across from the Stillman’s apartment, and later, the back room in Stillman Jr.’s he begins to lose grip of his identity.

By the end of the book, Quinn becomes the ideal Peter Stillman had wished for. Stillman, in his book, wrote, “History would be written in reverse. What had fallen would be raised up; what had been broken would be made whole. Once completed, the Tower would be large enough to hold every inhabitant of the New World. There would be a room for each person, and once he had entered that room, he would forget everything he knew. After forty days and forty nights, he would emerge a new man, speaking God's language, prepared to inhabit the second, everlasting paradise.” (78) Quinn is left alone naked in the dark room of Stillman Jr.’s apartment. He no longer writes about the Stillman case but instead begins to write about “the stars, the earth, his hopes for mankind”. “He felt that his words had been severed from himself, that they now were part of the world at large, as real and as specific as a stone, or a lake, or a flower. They no longer had anything to do with him” (197) Quinn disappears at the end of the book; only his red notebook filled with his thoughts are left for Auster and the author The story ends with snow covering the city, which I found particularly interesting. “The city was entirely white now, and the snow kept falling, as though it would never end”. What was once a City of Glass, a city of transparency, was now a city covered in white.

I came across the graphic novel of City of Glass that was published in 2004. Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli adapted Paul Auster’s book into a comic book form that I thought was pretty cool. City of Glass: The Graphic Novel

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?

Today I have the accessibility of technologies and forms of communication that were nonexistent to travelers like Ibn Battuta or Herodotus. I can instantly locate the latitude and longitude of a place on a highly specific map with the click of a button. I can go to a website or visit a travel agency to find information about places, cultures and people half way around the world. Countless more forms of transportation are available at my fingertips. I can drive cross-country to California, sail on a ship to Bermuda, or fly on a plane to Egypt all without questioning the means of transport or my safety aboard. These luxuries I am afforded as a traveler today, wouldn’t be possible without the journeys and experiences of the men we read in Travel Classics.

Along with this idea, the topic that struck me the most throughout the readings was the difficulty of travel for these explorers. Cabeza de Vaca was shipwrecked and survived with only a handful of members from his original crew. Christopher Columbus had valid fears throughout his voyage that he and his crew would not reach land. Even Prospero had to learn from Caliban where to find food and refuge in order to survive on the island he was stuck on. Nothing about their journeys was safe. People today associate travel with leisure, sightseeing, business and visits to family and friends. Traveling can still be exciting, stimulating, and exotic, but for most travelers there is a sense of consistency, safety, and accessibility in transit and once they arrive at their destinations. Until reading the narratives for this course, I didn’t quite fully understand how significant it was for these people to board a ship, say goodbye to their lives and family, and travel to a place that they knew very little about while not knowing if they would ever see their home again, let alone discover the actual place they were looking for. Climate, food, sickness, speed of travel, accuracy of maps, and the response of the native inhabitants of the land they arrived at were all variables that seriously affected the outcome of their voyages. While the reasons for traveling were different, the authors’ realities of their journeys were the same.

The notable characters and individuals we read and discussed are not only important because of their experiences, but also because they wrote their travels down in a log. Would I have known about Marco Polo or Ibn Battuta had they not documented their journeys? I don't think so. Travel writing, although not an established genre at the time, was just as important for the people who were reading it when it was first published as it is for us today. The precise annotations of time and distance by Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus allowed other travelers the security of knowing the approximate location of their destinations. The descriptions of the people and cultures visited by Herodotus, Ibn Battuta, and Cabeza de Vaca (although not always entirely accurate) gave others a chance to explore other cultures and read about different people even though they themselves may never travel. These narratives show how influential travel and travel writing is in shaping the way people view the world.

James Howard Kunstler, in his book The Geography of Nowhere, reminisces about spending his summers in the New England town of Lebanon, New Hampshire while away at boys’ camp. He describes it as a true American town with civic buildings like a library and town hall and “narrow shop-lined streets winding downhill to a mill district”. (13) With a post office, train station, schools, and retail stores all within walking distance to each other, the center of Upper Montclair, New Jersey, is a good example of the type of American town that Kunstler revisits in his book. Upper Montclair has two intersecting streets, Valley Road and Bellevue Avenue, that form its primary central business district with the only commercial businesses being a Gap, a Williams-Sonoma, and a Kings supermarket. The rest of the area is lined with small local retail businesses and eateries like Saunder’s Hardware, Montclair Paperie, and Jackie’s Grillette.

"The Irish Tempest"In The Tempest, Prospero enslaves both Ariel and Caliban after arriving on their native island. Shakespeare, through these characters, presents an interesting examination of colonization and enslavement and the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed. The early interaction between Prospero and Caliban is reminiscent of some of the early encounters with native inhabitants in Cabeza de Vaca and Columbus’ travel accounts. Unlike the travel accounts of Columbus or Cabeza de Vaca, however, The Tempest also offers the view of those subjugated. Caliban speaks of his disgust of Prospero in Act I saying, “and then I lov'd thee,
 / And show'd thee all the qualities o' the isle, / 
The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile. / 
Curs'd be I that did so!” Shakespeare’s play gives a view of colonization from those who are colonized.  However, the character Caliban still comes across as a monster in the play. Prospero in Act I describes Caliban as “a freckled whelp hag-born - not honour’d with a human shape.” Stephano also says that he wants to capture Caliban and bring him back home. “If I can recover him / and keep him tame and get to Naples with him, he's a present for / any emperor that ever trod on neat's leather.”

Malhado or The Island of Doom was the name Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca gave to an island off the Texas coast when he and accompanying Spaniards were shipwrecked. The island was not so much an island of doom for Cabeza de Vaca as it was for the native tribes living there. His accounts of cold, stormy weather that inhibited the Indians from pulling up roots to eat or for finding fish were completely focused on the dire threat of starvation of him and his people. Cabeza de Vaca accounts "their cane contraptions for catching fish yielded nothing; and the huts being very open, our men began to die. Five Christians quartered on the coast came to the extremity of eating each other. Only the body of the last one, whom nobody was left to eat, was found unconsumed. Their names were Sierra, Diego Lopez, Corral, Palacios, and Gonzalo Ruiz." While Cabeza de Vaca goes on to describe the 'strange' customs of the Malhado people, he neglects to emphasize the savageness of his own men who were capable of commiting cannibalism. He talks of a custom of the tribe which involved other people in the community providing food to a family who had lost a son or brother. "At a house where a son or brother may die, no one goes out for food for three months, the neighbors and other relatives providing what is eaten. Because of this custom, which the Indians literally would not break to save their lives, great hunger reigned in most houses while we resided there, it being a time of repeated deaths. Those who sought food worked hard, but they could get little in that severe season. That is why the Indians who kept me left the island by canoe for oyster bays on the main." While Sierra, Diego Lopez, Corral, Palacios, and Gonzalo Ruiz were capable of cannibalism to survive, the people of Malhado were willing to sacrifice all the food they had for their belief in the custom. Cabeza de Vaca mentions throughout his account of the uncivility and savageness of different natives he encounters. "The Indians, understanding our full plight, sat down and lamented for half an hour so loudly they could have been heard a long way off. It was amazing to see these wild, untaught savages howling like brutes in compassion for us. It intensified my own grief at our calamity and had the same effect on the other victims." He goes on to say how the indians brought back food for him and the other Spaniards. "In the morning, when they brought us fish and roots and acted in every way hospitably, we felt reassured and somewhat lost our anxiety of the sacrificial knife." It was the native people he describes who brought his people food and drink upon their arrival who were much more civil and hospitable than his own men. I was curious to see if the island of doom for Malhado had a specific location in today's geography. I found that historians have located its position and it is an island off the Texas coast known today as Galveston Island.