Evan's blog

Sunflower SeedsI am having a tough time coming inside to write this post after the weekend’s streak of good weather; as such, I thought it would be appropriate as a theme. We have talked about places in many ways and under many circumstances. Often, the most compelling discussions have been ones that acknowledge a place’s multi-faceted character and shape-shifting identity as a result of changes in experiences, perception, mobility, architecture, etc. What we haven’t talked much about, however, is a change that happens to a place that is not controlled or driven by humans, something that (almost) completely alters a place’s fundamental qualities—that is, the weather.

I don’t mean to sound overly dramatic here, so excuse the tone if need be. Looking back over my blog posts from the semester, I have written about New York and my experience of the city. As I have said before, being a newcomer to New York has been a key qualifier to my story. In fact, it is so much so that in this case, I can say that this weekend was the first time this sort of weather had come around since I have been here.

New weather prompted the finding of new places and new activities. I went to parks—some incredibly popular and others apparently overlooked by most but wonderful nonetheless—and played catch, chewed (and spat) endless amounts of sunflower seeds, and listened to baseball games. Familiar places were transformed, too. Windows had to be opened and beds rearranged to avoid the morning sunlight and its stale heat. Anyway, you get the picture. Actually, you probably did something similar.

Nothing about these shifts is particularly extraordinary. To the contrary, these slow days marked by uncontrolled changes are the regularity that slows you down, that allows you to feel at home and comfortable in a place. Doing nothing—that still part of experience—lets a place, in this case defined by the weather, experience you.

“A Sense of Place” has provided a language with which to understand these mundane, strange, and common inversions of perception. Even if it sounds like “I really like this place,” I know what you mean.

How does this project relate to the class?

Reading the New York stories that were the subject of the second half of the semester, I could not help but turn the lens inward and wonder what my New York story was. While discussing Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York during class, we inquired as to the “colossal” nature of the city. One of the most convincing—or most thought-provoking—explanations was that New York exists as a grouping of individuals en masse, so much so that individual identities and thoughts are shared in some collective way.

I wanted to explore this a bit further. New York is simultaneously a city of natives, newcomers, and tourists—it caters to all at once, each part (Times Square and my unassuming apartment) just as “real” as the other. How did my, albeit brief, New York experience compare to that of a tourist? Where does the tourist go, and how do those patterns correspond with my own everyday tendencies? These questions led me to the bus tour. Though the photo essay does not explicitly relate to a particular reading, I think it touches on the class’ most recent and most project—to think closely about how you are situated within the city, and how your experience relates to others’.

Do you think your project successfully comments on the difference between your own experience and the tourist experience?

I deliberately left this a bit ambiguous. I found it surprisingly easy to “act” like a tourist—here is more confirmation that you can buy a new identity quite easily. I originally intended to offer a harsher criticism of the tourist culture, but because I shifted so easily into that role I thought another sort of implicit commentary was more appropriate: the line between the tourist and the resident is not always clearly defined. That, in fact, is a “colossal” aspect of New York. Anyone can be anyone at any time, whether by choice or by accident.

CitySights NYThe “real” New York is difficult to find, if it exists at all. Even so, and perhaps as a result, New York has a draw, a magnetism that brings you there and once you get there, makes it hard to leave. Before I came here for school, I had never really experienced New York as a tourist. Now, settled in to my own pattern, I am comfortable here. I feel like I know New York. I know the monuments—some better than others—though my New York is not the one sold in Times Square, or advertised in brochures. I have learned to love New York, but I don’t necessarily “♥NY.”

I thought it was time, then, for me to better understand the popular New York, the one that is bought by the average tourist. What places are you supposed to go—or are you brought to—when you come to New York? In order to find out, I decided to go on a double-decker bus tour.

Being “the recognized leader in NYC’s sightseeing” (though it is unclear who is doing the recognizing), I chose CitySights NY. CitySights NY offers a variety of bus, boat, and helicopter tours throughout the city, with multiple routes and themes. In a sense, the tourist is first acclimated to New York’s daunting range of choices through the barrage of tour options. How do you choose between the “Downtown Tour” and the “Uptown Treasures & Harlem Tour,” and the “Brooklyn Tour”? If you can’t decide between those, the “All Around Town Tour” or the “Super New York Tour” might be for you. These tours package multiple tours in one ticket, with museum tickets thrown in as an added bonus. Or you can go on one of the “On Locations Tours,” where you can take your bachelorette party on a “Sex and the City Hotspots” tour or go on a “Sopranos Guys Getaway.” And once you get tired of New York, you can take a day trip to Boston, Philadelphia, or Washington D.C.

Faces in the CrowdColson Whitehead’s preface, “City Limits,” qualifies not only the form of the narrative to follow, but also the form of the city itself. His is a democratic depiction, a city open for ownership to all those who come. Beginning to his story—“what follows is my city”—this is an invitation into his world, and an invitation to tell our own (10).

The warmth of this offer hides its unusual character. New York’s reputation as being harsh and impolite seems relatively accepted. Where I’m from, at least, this is the perception: that New Yorkers revel in their brazen individuality, not caring for others—what they think or their general welfare. And while Whitehead acknowledges this—“ There are eight million naked cities in this naked city—they dispute and disagree”—it is from the perspective of possible diversity rather than with disdain (6). “You start building your private New York the first time you lay eyes on it,” he says, allowing the reader to dream for their piece of New York (4). In this way, Whitehead takes a tiresome New York truism—its anonymity—and spins it so that it can be discussed with excitement.

That being said, this would be the place for my New York story, which turns out to be a more difficult thing to define than one might think. So I’ll leave it at this: I like it here, with all its harsh and comforting anonymity. And with that room for possibility and change, that there is much more New York ahead.

The Yale Type LibraryI spent part of the weekend with a friend at Yale. The architecture at Yale is overwhelming to say the least, though my favorite parts of the campus were the many informal spaces tucked away in corners of quads or basements of buildings. One of these places, forgotten due to its absence of typical monumentality and out-of-date technology, was the type library. Apparently, Yale has one of the largest (or most prestigious?) collegiate type libraries in the country; a type library, for those of you who don’t know—like I didn’t—is a giant inventory of individual letters and symbols in many fonts and sizes that can be arranged and used on a printing press. To my eyes, they looked like the metal letters used on a typewriter.

As it were, you can imagine my surprise when on the train back to New York, I read Ian Frazier’s “Typewriter Man.” I have no previous experience with either typewriters or type libraries, so I thought a single day double-occurrence pretty extreme. As a friend says—who was taking a printing class, hence the knowledge and access to the type library—one of the exciting things about this form of design, besides the mind-boggling monotony of the work (like a precise science or “doctor-patient” quality), is the freedom of formatting that is absent from most computer word processing software (134). I am not a designer, but have come across this problem recently in putting together a presentation—scrambling to learn InDesign is not my favorite thing to do, though its advantages over Word are incredible. An unexpected part of Frazier’s piece was the connection between literacy and communication during war; or more generally, language and power. Just as in City of Glass, the ability to wield language is a central theme. In abstraction, the ability to “format” text with freedom has large implications on social control.

Lots of LettersIt is ironic then—or perhaps merely a sign of technological advances—that the printing press, the most powerful weapon of old, is delegated to a locked, anonymous room in the basement of a dormitory. It is forgotten or overlooked in a way similar to Martin Tytell’s typewriter shop; it shared interior features as well, where “we sidled through right angles into a dark and cramped part of the shop,” complete with drawers upon drawers of metal letters. These possibly inherent features of type libraries—dark, cramped, tucked away—seem to correspond with the human temperament necessary to deal with such conditions.

My friend says that she finds the solitude, routine work relaxing, a break from the intellectual world of the rest of her schedule. It is the engagement in process—or in Tytell’s terms, the “soul” as opposed to being concerned solely with the product—that makes these outdated word processors appealing (140). I feel the same way when working with ceramics or cooking. As far as I’m concerned, there is little downside to making these process-driven techniques a more accessible and encouraged part of our everyday lives. If done right, the type library could make its way out of the basement.

New YorkThe novel’s title, City of Glass, seems to suggest that both the transparency and fragility of Quinn’s identity is determined, at least in part, by his physical context. If we are to understand physical space as representative of identity in this manner—where Quinn’s being is constantly in flux like see-through but solid glass—then Peter Stillman (the younger), after “an entire childhood spent in darkness,” sits at the other end of the spectrum (45). Though polar opposites in that sense, neither has a clear sense of his identity. Much of this can be attributed to their relation to space: Quinn’s abundance of anonymity and Peter’s isolated darkness. This holds true in terms of walking as well, where Quinn’s persistent freedom of motion is in stark contrast to the locked door’s of Peter’s existence, though both contribute to a fluid sense of identity.

The following passage lends further insight into the complexity of the space/identity relationship: “By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal, and it no longer mattered where [Quinn] was,” and that “New York was the nowhere he had built around himself” (9). With subtlety, Auster presents a problem. Is there something unique about New York that fosters Quinn’s perception of the shapelessness of external space and internal character? Or is it the process of walking itself, “the act of putting one foot in front of the other and allowing himself to follow the drift of his own body,” that transforms any environment into a place where one can be “lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well” (8)? More generally, how is a person’s “sense of place” in relation to their “sense of self”?

Vermont: same clothes, different place; different person?As I spent some time alone, walking in the woods over break, these abstract foundational questions have been concretized—well, to some degree. Since I moved to New York, I have not had the chance to explore its rural counterpart. So I was a bit anxious to return to a place that I hold in great importance after I had gotten comfortable in a busy environment. How has the city changed my sense of self?

With relief, I quickly fell back into the Vermont woods—by that I mean that I felt comfortable in the openness. The question of identity is harder to address, both because it is a complicated one and the brevity of my stay. Regardless, our “sense of place” language is helpful in drawing some preliminary conclusions. In short, both New York and these particular rural woods have a distinct sense of place, meaning that I know where I am when I am there. My spatial memory was intuitive and not rational, characterized by a feeling rather than a certain mental map. For me, it is possible to walk in both locations, getting lost in myself as Quinn does in the city. That is, I am literally a different person in both places, and as such, walking serves a different function as it relates to my location-specific identity. Like Quinn, I can build New York as a nowhere, but this possibility is not exclusive to the city. Walking, it seems, is a means by which to transform a space in this manner, transforming the self as a consequence.

Our earlier discussions on suburban space are an interesting wrinkle into this topic. I have tried to point out that these transformative qualities of space and identity apply to extremes (Quinn and Peter, New York City and rural Vermont), but do they also apply to the middle, the in between spaces? I’ll avoid answering that question by saying that the places that appeal to me are of the extreme type—I think because they have the qualities explored above. Whether or not this means that places in the middle cannot share is not for me to say.

Building a BarnOver break, I traveled to the Mountain School (TMS), a semester program in Vermont that I attended in high school. There is a lot (a lot) to say about TMS, but I am going to limit it to the chapter “Architectural Space and Awareness.” Key to the TMS experience is the relationship between the students and the physical surroundings, including the built environment. Written in to the everyday schedule is a work period where students not only clean and perform maintenance tasks, but also build the buildings themselves. Tuan’s commentary on nonliterate and peasant societies can help illustrate the TMS dynamic: “there may be greater awareness of built forms and space in a traditional than in a modern community. One cause of such greater awareness is active participation. Since nonliterate and peasant societies do not have architects, everyone makes his own house and helps to build public places” (104). Though TMS is not a “traditional” community in Tuan’s sense, it fills a similar niche in the contemporary (or dare I say postmodern?) world. Students are confronted with the relative traditonalism of TMS compared to their homes. Experiencing these conflicting practices side-by-side gives more meaning to each, as relative difference exists in a real sense. Tuan’s discussion of the religions connections between building participation—or building as a religious activity in its own right—has relevance for a secular institution such as TMS. In a secular setting, a strong sense of community acts in a similar way, at least in the level of commitment to both an abstract ideal or greater good and the concrete personal connections to other community members. A loose analogy: Raising the obelisk in front of St. Peter’s Cathedral : raising the new cow barn. And for an explicitly educational institution, this is certainly a relevant quotation: “The designed environment serves an educational purpose. In some societies the building is the primary text for handing down a tradition, for presenting a view of reality” (112). I am running out of steam. I love to talk about this, so please don’t let my poor post send the wrong message…

A Young George Washington Surveying the Land: we can only imagine how the map turned outRecently, I’ve been doing some thinking about maps. In doing so I’ve run into some complications. Though nothing here is particularly revolutionary, it has been on my mind…

Maps are part of our everyday discourse. Just as we learn to read words, we learn to read maps; or, more broadly, we learn how to read space. Yet even the most spatially literate confront a problem: Does the way in which one reads space match the way in which one knows space? How does one’s experience of space correlate with a mapped representation of space?

Using Yi-Fu Tuan’s guide to understanding the relationship between space and experience, it is possible to approach these foundational cartographic questions with some useful perspective. Maps, or the mapping process in general, are central to the nature of experience. As Tuan puts it, “to experience in the active sense requires that one venture forth into the unfamiliar and experiment with the elusive and the uncertain” (9). Obviously, maps help these everyday explorers to find their way into and through an experience.

A necessary distinction must be made here between material maps and their mental counterparts. This separation magnifies the role of the mapmaker, and it also exposes his humanity. Moving through space, everyone becomes a mapmaker. Tuan reflects, “man, out of his intimate experience with his body and with other people, organizes space so that it conforms with and caters to his biological needs and social relations” (34). Space is thus simultaneously individualized and humanized. The process of mental mapping (some have called it “cognitive mapping,” and others “wayfinding”) then informs the material maps which seek to guide others through unfamiliar spaces.

This multi-layered development exposes some of the troubles that arise when one person’s mental map does not match another’s. Spatial miscommunication, or getting lost, seems inevitable at least to some degree with this context in mind; it actually is surprising that feeling lost doesn’t happen more often. Tuan illustrates this in a variety of ways. In the abstract (feeling), he describes spaciousness and crowding in a way that proves their individuality and relativity rather than their larger Truth based on square footage or population density. In the more concrete (tangible), the maps on pages 48-9 clearly illustrate the difference between reality, experience, and representation among peoples of different places and cultures.

Though in studying (or making) maps, it is easy to quantify their importance too highly, forgetting that there are other ways of knowing space. Tuan argues that “spatial ability becomes spatial knowledge when movements and changes of location can be envisaged,” though it does not always get translated into a map or other form of representation (67-8). “Visual cues are of primary importance,” he writes, “but people are less dependent on imagery and on consciously held mental maps than they perhaps realize. … They learn a succession of movements rather than a spatial configuration or map” (70). Not that anyone thought they could, we nonetheless need to acknowledge the limitations of maps and mapmaking. This lesson is hardest and most importantly learned by the mapmaker himself. Sometimes he gets carried away with his own assumed power, and tries either to do too much or, more commonly, to claim that his map does too much.

Under the BQEEvery Thursday night at 9pm, regardless of season or weather, a group of bikers meet in the parking lot under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway for the weekly gathering known as the Peel Sessions. On Meeker Ave. (at Jackson St.) in Williamsburg, the Peel spot is a central location for the local freestyle fixed-gear community. Though I sit somewhere on the periphery of this relatively tight-knit group, I have been attending Peel regularly for the past months, and regard the place with some sense of personal ownership. A parking lot underneath a major thoroughfare, the Peel spot is of a kind that is often disregarded. This is a story of how technologies are transformed over time, and how space is appropriated for new uses by new users. It is difficult, if not impossible, to separate the people who use a space from the space itself. As such, this story is one not only of the parking lot, but also of the riders who congregate there.

The First Presbyterian Church in the City of New YorkIn “The Nineteenth-Century Rural Landscape,” J.B. Jackson highlights the differences in physical form of rural and urban (or merely semi-urban, really) communities (139-48). The courthouse, the small college, the mineral springs, the country store, and the church—all typified rural attitudes and the conscious rejection of their urban counterpart. Contrasting moral and value systems, Jackson argues, were embedded in the built environment.

Following Jackson’s observational model—to take in the everyday in a new light—I want to present here some thoughts that spin from an everyday activity that happened this weekend. I happen to enjoy—bear with me, please—early music, and as such, I was happy to see a flyer on the First Presbyterian Church advertising a free Handel program this Sunday. On 12th Street and 5th Avenue, First Presbyterian is a monumental structure. I know nothing about religious architecture, though that ignorance cannot cloud First Presbyterian’s obvious polarity to the “small, plain churches, erected by people of the countryside” that Jackson pins to the southern, small town ethos (145). Nonetheless, I believe that it is fair to look at First Presbyterian with inspiration from its country cousin. As it turns out (though it doesn’t always come up in Landscape in Sight), religion is a powerful Jacksonian theme. As Horowitz notes in her introduction, as Jackson grew older, he “became increasingly aware of the power of religion in shaping the landscape” (xxviii). If we are to ourselves look through Jackson’s lens, then religion seems a good place to begin.

The church was, in Jackson’s rural history, an important gathering place and locus for social reproduction. Along with the courthouse, the church served as an arena for both the public and private spheres. As with many social functions, music served a central role, if only by way of controversy. Jackson notes that the rural church “banned the church organ,” as it represented “worldly and un-Christian” values of which they wanted none (145). For their religious services, they preferred a local form known today as bluegrass. If one knows traditional hymns, not to mention the classical organ canon, the thought of bluegrass as a replacement is a powerful illustration to the religious re-appropriation of nineteenth century rural America.

A Small, Plain ChurchControversy over music and religion is also rooted in First Presbyterian. Founded in 1716, First Presbyterian had strict rules on appropriate music for worship. In 1748, “traditionalists in the congregation were outraged” about a movement to liberalize the hymnal, and eventually split to form their own congregation, now Fifth Avenue Presbyterian (for source, click here). This split, however, did not have as drastic results as it may seem. No musical instruments were allowed in the sanctuary through the Church’s move to its present location almost a century later, in 1846. The first organ was not installed in First Presbyterian until 1886. Rereading Jackson’s commentary on organ politics in rural congregations after some education in First Presbyterian’s own musical debates only emphasizes further the dangerous, if not volatile, role that music played in the religious sector.

From a spatial perspective, organs are a surprisingly fitting instrument for this debate to happen over. If we are to understand contrasting moral and value systems as embedded in the built environment, as I (or Jackson) suggested above, then the organ, literally built into the church itself, could not be a better case study. The current organ at First Presbyterian was “completed this year,” according to Sunday’s concert brochure. With over five thousand pipes built into the church itself, the organ is a booming presence that leaves subtlety in the dust. Organist William F. Entriken pulled out all the stops (organ pun), harshly declaring the Church’s resolution of its past musical debacles, and its commitment to a robust program. Today’s liberal music repertoire (though we’re only talking about organs and recorders, I suppose, which would seem to most about as far away from hip as you could get) invites a more secular community—those like myself—than the hard-line Presbyterians of old would have been able to stomach. Unfortunately—and I will spare you all of my ranting about this—the concert was awful. Leaving First Presbyterian, I flipped to the bluegrass on my iPhone, wondering if those small-town country-lovin’ rural-folk might have been on the right track.