Central Park

Kunstler’s back and forth banter about the creation of unnatural landscapes such as carefully designed parks in urban and suburban “communities” was quite humorous.  His commentary on Central Park in particular caught my attention.  The design of Central Park and the functional/recreational purposes it serves Manhattan residents has always interested me.  I find the park to have an air of mystery around it and an appearance of a misplaced fantasyland. 

When I first moved to New York City three years ago, Central Park stood out like a soar thumb right away.  I found that its appearance did not match the style and facades of the other structures.  Every time I enter Central Park, I feel as if I am crossing a threshold into a location outside Manhattan, because it is unlike anything else around.  For many residents, myself included, Central Park serves as an escape from the everyday hustle and bustle of the city.  The suggestion of green space becomes an almost refuge for “tired eyes and nerves.”  Roaming through the park, removed from commercialized streets filled with heavy pedestrian and automobile traffic permits residents to peacefully relax and spend some time with nature.

Central Park 1

However, you have to wonder far into the park if you want to escape the crowds of tourists and street vendors that horde around the entrances.  They tend to like to overpower the entranceways, which is both frustrating and annoying when all you want to do is get away from everything.  Nevertheless, once you start to wonder around and take some of the side paths further into the park, you can usually find some peace.  While strolling through the heart of the park, you will most likely pass other people, but it will not be to overbearing.  When exploring the park aimlessly you can not help but feel like you left Manhattan because the sudden site of trees and grass throws you off because you are not accustomed to seeing it.  It reminds NYC lover’s how refreshing nature can be when they immerse themselves in it.

Although the park is large and it is easy to disconnect from society by getting completely lost in it for a bit, the park does serve as a city square/meeting spot where neighbors can meet up and chat.  This is especially apparent when the weather is warm outside.  During the warm weather months, the park host as assortment of events for the general public. Additionally, it is not uncommon to find people having a picnic or playing a game of frisbee in the parks open green spaces. 

Ultimately, Central Park has many good and bad aspects about it.  There are times when its mere size prevents it from acting like a true city square for its residents.  People enter the park and wonder around by themselves until they are tired of being lost or become bored so they leave.  Yet, there are also times when the park brings neighbors together and gives Manhattan residents a place to enjoy nature in a relaxing environment.  Although the park in a preplanned and carefully designed fake natural landscape, it still manages to offer people the escape they sometimes need.  For the good and the bad, Central Park is what it is, and no matters what others may think, I always enjoy the time I spend there.

Chapters 1-6 of Kunstler's Geography of Nowhere give a historic recount of America's physical (architectural, geographic) growth from the time of the first European settlers through the Reagan era.  In addition to providing the facts about how the country developed, Kunstler also gives the reader his take on how certain types of physical development played a role in the creation of the nation's attitudes and morals.

One of the most fascinating relationships that I have encountered in my studies is the relationship between people and their physical surroundings.  I am fascinated by the process by which things we experience with our senses affect our internal state.  In this vein but on a larger scale, Kunstler provides a history of how the material properties of of an entire new land influenced the philosophy and morality of an entire society, and vice versa.  His recount, albeit heavily opinionated, shows the reader how a certain way of dividing land reflects on human intention, how a way of treating nature reflects on the values of a society, how religious beliefs can mold expectations of place, and a how style of architecture can be closely linked to the attitude of its creators.

While I appreciate Kunstler's tact in condensing hundreds of years of history into a hundred or so pages (doing so by only focusing on what he deems to be "key" geographic and architectural developments), I am somewhat unsettled by the sense of authority in his writing.  I understand that he is trying to support an argument, which, may I add, I largely agree with, but I don't understand why he doesn't offer any points of view other than his own.  His super-critical writing automatically dismisses anything he may disagree with -- all Americans are hung up on not letting anyone tell them what to do with their land, individualism destroys public life, "Modernism did its immense damage in these ways...", no questions asked.  He leaves a lot of history out, and he doesn't entertain any counter-arguments (at least not in these chapters).  This attitude, coupled with Kunstler's haughty air of authority ("[other people] lack the vocabulary to understand what is wrong with the places they ought to know best.  That is why I wrote this book") turns what could have been an interesting and informative read into an exercise in smugness.  I wish he would try to shed light on the intricacy of the issues, and instead of briefly stating what he thinks is right and wrong as fact.

Abingdon Square Park

Take a "Sex and the City" tour and you'll know Abingdon Square as the place you're meant to sit while eating a Magnolia Cupcake. Live in the West Village, and you'll know it as home to the off-kilter cobblestones that snapped your favorite heels, to the rare and inconveniencing college film shoot, and to an inexcusable population of pigeons.

It is evident to me now, after reading Kunstler's “The Geography of Nowhere,” that Abingdon Square and its accompanying park were once meant to be a place of refuge from the "deadening uniformity" (33) of Manhattan's Gridiron structure. Now, the place is one of the rare few where junkies still congregate openly.

Bryant Park, on the other hand, sits surrounded on all sides by beacons of American capitalism—the glassy HBO building, the New York Public Library, fashion showrooms stacked mile-high—glistening amongst the boulevards of Au Bon Pain, Prêt a Manger, and Chipotle. But the park itself is positively lovely, a long stretch of grass encompassed by benches and picnic tables. The park is venue to film screenings every summer Monday, and to Fashion Week—two of New York's proudest artistic ventures. It only makes sense that while a public square in the middle of a calming neighborhood would be a place of squalor, a public square in the middle of a bustling business-centric neighborhood would be a calming place.

New Yorkers are fickle beasts—as Kunstler duly notes, our "yearning to escape industrialism" (37), is inevitably and endlessly counteracted by our efforts to rationalize our choice to live in a metropolitan center. On summer days, when (misfortune of misfortunes) I am usually employed somewhere in Midtown, I bolt to Bryant or Central Park as soon as work lets out. But after a mere hour or two with my book, accompanied by birds, trees, and the occasional jogger, I find I must rush downtown to frolic and chain-smoke on the hot concrete. I am loathe to be such an archetypal city-dweller, but I'll be damned if I'm decisive. Just like every American you've ever known.

Keren sunning in Retiro: by AlyshaIt is hard to picture Manhattan without Central Park. It isn’t something about which I generally give much thought, but Kunstler’s discussion of the initial planning of Central Park made me realize that I take Central Park’s existence for granted. Seen from above, Manhattan is a relatively dark grid with small parks here and there and a wonderful green rectangle right there in the middle. I do not even make it up there frequently, certainly not as often as I would like, but just knowing that I have the option to stroll around amongst the trees and water is somehow comforting. And this is coming from someone who has only ever lived in major metropolitan cities (Los Angeles, New York, Paris). I once got lost in Central Park trying to find friends throwing a Memorial Day BBQ. I believe they were on the Great Lawn, but no one could describe their specific coordinates and I wandered around until it started to get dark, at which point I anxiously worked my way to the edge of what had become an intimidating wilderness. Looking back on what at the time felt like a near-traumatic experience, I actually love the fact that there is a large enough “natural” space in the middle of Manhattan in which I can legitimately get lost. Of course, I do love a good stroll through “grid-locked,” urban Manhattan as well – especially near my house in Chelsea or in the West Village.
I was surprised to read that when Central Park was designed, there was relatively little basis for European comparison – that “the idea of a large park designed as a rambling romantic landscape was quite a novelty” at that time. I suppose Jardin du Luxemburg and Jardin des Plantes (essentially the back yard of my Paris apartment last spring) do not take up the percentage of Paris’ surface area as Central Park does within Manhattan… As Kunstler points out, “nothing like the enormous mechanistic grid of Manhattan existed in European cities either.” Really, the best comparison I noticed while abroad would probably be Madrid’s Parque del Retiro, although I suppose it is relatively small too. In fact, I have already blogged about this lovely park for the Art of Travel tutorial I took with Professor Hutkins last spring (http://www.placeandliterature.com/node/5473). It was a beautiful sunny day (the weather in Madrid was infinitely better than it had been in Paris at the beginning of March 2008), and I walked up the broad, largely commercial Gran Via, which felt like an equivalent to a combination of Broadway and 5th Avenue, to Retiro to meet friends for wine in the park. Retiro was even described to me as the Central Park of Madrid, and perhaps this description defends Central Park the definitive natural space among an urban landscape… or maybe it was because Americans were making the comparison

The FUture of LIFe, or lack there of

We are all brainwashed aliens in a corporate suburban system and we have gone to far down the well to bring ourselves back out again. Bleak as this may seem, the quality of life in America, is defined by the size and location of your house, the quality of your automobile and how much material crap you can amass in your short and insignificant life span. Yet, how and way did this way of life come to be, and who in their right mind decided this to be “the good life”. Kuntsler does a wonderfully sardonic job of explaining the process by which America has created the culture of no culture, and a land that can only be deemed as the geography of nowhere. The first chapter of the book really does explain just how terribly lost Americans and the rest of the western world have become. Instead of creating places of wondrous beauty, of aesthetic appeal, of peace of mind and body, Americans destroy the natural beauty of the world that existed before them and replace it with an artificial landscape, and then Americans wonder why they need ten different medications just to get in and out of bed everyday. The places we Americans have created for ourselves to live in, have polluted the physical and metaphysical space that we live and breath in. Its as if America does have a soul, it doesn’t have a heart…it is inhuman, it is a fairytale gone wrong, it is a nightmare of destruction. And the process of destruction is only intensifying. Americans need to experience a complete shift in the way we dominate space through the creation of places. Intense rapid development of the natural landscape will not better our own lives nor the lives of our grandchildren, instead it will leave them with more dead land. A wasteland similar to the eerie depictions of earth after life in Wall-E. In others words, shit is serious. The future continuation of existence on this planet can only be kept in motion if we abandon the principles that have created the NOPLACE. Otherwise life may cease to exist on this planet and the last humans on earth will be left with an infinite supply of garbage from wal-mart and 10,000 pick up trucks.

Car Lot: http://centerline.grobbel.org/wes/photos_block.htmKunstler presents us with an interesting analysis on the transformation of the US landscape. Providing us with a timeline, he illustrates its evolution from the early colonies to present day. Kunstler begins with the assertion that the early founders formed a ‘covenanted corporation’ that entitled them to all the land. He suggests how the land was given extreme value and how it was recognized early on as a means for ‘capital investment’ (25). The land was divided up according to each family’s ‘needs and social standings,’ in a way creating an early economic system (20). Kunstler then goes on to discuss the division of the Midwest into geometrically square divisions, suggesting that the square plots promoted various scattered farms rather than villages. Kunstler argues that this promotion of the private over the public was an early foundation for an individualistic society. After illustrating the rise of industry and the development of suburbia, Kunstler discusses how the invention of the automobile altered the US landscape forever. He asserts that suburbia was at one time practically an Arcadian living environment where one could experience both the city and the country within an hour of one another. But with the rise of the assembly line and mass production, as Kunstler argues, the automobile industry destroyed that environment forever. He argues that General Motors and Ford Motors corporations sought to replace ‘public transportation with private transportation,’ seeking to eliminate the train industry for its own benefit (92). He discusses how Fords production of the tractor and farming technology destroyed the landscape of family farms by encouraging them to outsource more produce than was necessary, forcing them into bankruptcy. Kunstler asserts that the assembly line and mass production led the US into the Great Depression through overproduction during a period of low demand. He blames the construction of the interstate that destroyed miles of countryside on the unnecessary rapid expansion of the automobile industry. To Kunstler, the publics crave for having their own car versus taking the train was evidence that the society was growing even more individualistic. Kunstler blames the corporations and the government for the rapid evolution of the US into a ‘nowhere’ space: physically, economically, emotionally. But at no time does he recognize the role the consumer has played in the automobile industry; an industry is only as strong as its consumer base. He doesn’t recognize the role the consumers’ played in the destruction of their own environment. If the US was founded upon individualistic principals, then why aren’t individuals to blame? Where is the consumer’s individual carbon footprint? 

American Pillar-of-the-Community:   Reading Kunstler, I can’t help but think back to a day that still echoes with raised voices and pounding footsteps. I was in elementary school, and my parents had imposed some sort of paternally responsible rule. They had been doing it a lot lately, and I wouldn’t stand for it. This was MY house. These were MY toys. This was MY life. In a plume of rage I left the house with a colorful backpack and no destination. I walked until reaching an intersection that seemed miles away, in reality only a few blocks. Almost able to see the shopping center down the street (Houston-has-no-zoning-laws), I remember feeling a radiating joy at having escaped the archaic rule of my parents. The Blockbuster and McDonalds golden arches seemed to share in my triumph. My individuality, the fact that I was intrepid, made me exactly the kind of kid that could forge a new life. Juice box in hand, I would fashion a new existence.

In Kunstler’s depiction, the New World settlers seem to share in my itch to escape the undesirable. Towns went through an odd mitosis at the inception of every argument and quarrel. Their citizens tore apart the young communities so each newly independent shred could become an increasingly small microcosm of an increasingly inconsequential lifestyle. Living amongst the peace and quiet of one’s own thoughts was apparently seen as the achievement of the Eden these religious mavericks were searching for.

In pop culture, many people’s personal lives, and in the urban landscape, we can see how much this refusal to acclimate and repair has perpetually ravaged American culture. In movies, when people get into a fight, what do they do (especially as teenagers)? They go for a drive. When people feel a pang of stagnation they move. When buildings begin to crumble, they are destroyed. Our culture suffers from a lack of resolution. In the face of confrontation (emotional unrest or architectural deterioration) we discard that which is a nuisance, forgetting how valuable it was only moments before.

If we think that in New York we are immune, that we have matured and learned to acclimate in our crowded city blocks, we are mistaken. With shifting renters (I being one of them) moving around the city both in search of the new and escaping the corpse of the last residential fad, people are constantly looking to replace their surroundings with something better. We aren’t willing to make their own communities better or to use their own creativity to bring different people together. Neighborhoods are characterized (read homogenized) by everything from race and sexuality to age. A friend recently complained of the strollers on East Village sidewalks. “Children didn’t belong” there and nor do parents.

“Deracinated”, a word Kunstler uses frequently, is rightfully placed in referring the maelstrom of renters moving from place to place, refusing to set down roots that may finally ground them, the stability (read consequences) of their lives finally reaching the right mailing address.

In reality, when my parents hadn’t come for me on that street corner I walked, head down and feet dragging back to my house. What would I have become had I stayed out on the street. Would my toys and the wily street smarts of a ten year old have helped me to accomplish anything, or even to survive?

Luckily, I went back to my family where a nurturing environment helped me to deal with the people around me and fully appreciate my love for them. It seems though, that I left America back on that corner, angry and confused.

An older drawing of Montclair: from a few years ago

I spent a good chunk of my youth in a town twelve miles west of Manhattan, a suburban part of the United States' Northeast Megalopolis. Montclair, NJ is a former streetcar town of about thirty thousand residents with no discernable borders—typical of the Northeast Corridor, the towns run right into each other and most are totally indistinguishable to the untrained eye. The best way to tell the towns apart is to look for differences in color in road signage and fire hydrants. As far as suburbs go, Montclair isn't bad, and it certainly is not a cookie-cutter "development" à la Levittown; while Montclairites commonly do commute to "The City" (Manhattan) for work, Montclair has several downtown areas, replete with an arthouse movie theater, an art museum, and a bevy of ethnic restaurants (besides the Italian ones), making Montclair a destination of its own for the surrounding towns.

A major difference between Montclair and the "developments" which are the object of Kunstler's ire lies in the existence of a local economy, downtown areas, and an unusually diverse population (the town borders on half black, though the distribution is quite segregated: black families are generally poorer and predominantly live in the parts of town with lower elevations and smaller houses). Still, the town is large enough to warrant public transportation, and, following the trend Kunstler describes, the trolleys have long since been replaced with buses.

But while Montclair handily beats out Levittown in terms of resources, convenience, and quality of life, its sense of community has nothing on a few Spanish villages I recently spent some time in: San Pantaleon das Viñas and Betanzos, both in Galicia. To its credit, Montclair boasts two big community events: a Fourth of July parade, and First Night, in which the town hosts musical acts and other performances as an alternative to drinking 'till you puke to usher in the new year. There used to be a major street fair on the town's main avenue as well, but that stopped years ago because of retailers complaining that it disrupted their business.

The Spaniards of San Pantaleon das Viñas, by contrast, drink constantly and heavily, and they have festivals every chance they get, complete with fireworks and mountains of seafood, for any pretense they can dream up. This might be in large part thanks to the extremely rural qualities of the town, which is little more than a small agglomeration of houses, a Roman bridge, and a church operated by Opus Dei. It's understandable that the very few villagers, in absence of any local night life, opt to create their own whenever they can. The whole town regularly turns out, and everyone really knows everyone.

A drawing of the Church of Santiago: in the center of Betanzos

A nearby town, Betanzos, serves as a better comparison to Montclair and other American suburbs in that it is larger and more comprably sized but is laid out completely differently—Betanzos is a model medieval European village, of the type that Kunstler disparigingly compares suburbia to. Betanzos has a number of different physical attributes that no American town could hope to replicate (and some they wouldn't want to): it features steep and narrow cobbled streets, ancient churches, several Roman gates marking where the town walls used to be, and, most importantly, plazas.

The streets are unfit for driving by American (and, I daresay, reasonable) standards, and indeed many cars can not even fit down these roads. By Spanish standards, they are not only fit for driving, they are fit for speeding, which can make pedestrian life somewhat hazardous in certain areas. The town also features an incredibly ugly apartment building right near the town center that is fully nine stories taller than any other building in the area. (It is known as "El Torre"—"The Tower"—by the locals).

These shortcomings aside, the appeal of a town like Betanzos truly becomes evident upon stepping into one of its plazas. Broad and open, lined with cafés, bars, grocery stores, tobacco shops, pharmacies and all of the other amenities village life requires, the plazas are the social centers of the town. It is here that the townsfolk work, shop, sip coffee and talk excessively by day and eat and carouse by night. They are the sites of the local farmers' markets. They are also where the town hosts its regular festivals, and though the town is modest, its festivals put (say) Montclair's to shame. These include musical events that pack the streets and last long into the night, art festivals, and a several-day-long medieval fair, in which the town's streets are strewn with hay and rickety stalls are set up that offer all manner of medieval trinkets, foods, and drinks.

One gets the impression in Betanzos that everyone knows everyone else and the architecture and layout speak of a long and storied history—though the physical elements of the town are unfortunately deteriorating as few steps are being taken to preserve its old buildings and streets. The growth-at-any-cost mentality Kunstler derides has spread even to Betanzos. Ancient buildings are being torn down for new developments, the driving of cars on the narrow streets endanger pedestrians and drivers alike, and many locals desire the same "progress", whatever the consequenses, as we do in America.

The Red Barn Burger JointDuring the culminating chapter of this week’s reading, Kunstler sets out to identify facets of “The Evil Empire.” His choice of title, which now cannot be disassociated from the popular Bush-era rhetoric of a decade later, should be a warning sign from the beginning. Besides using a particularly modernist mental exercise of separating the good from the bad—strange for such a critic of modernism—this declaration comes from an intellectual simplicity that lacks any sense of subtlety. In a brash attempt to grab attention from the complacent citizen, The Geography of Nowhere reduces complex processes with little hesitation. Kunstler’s criticism of the scholarship of J.B. Jackson in particular, and the university system in general, exposes his larger agenda. (It should be noted here that I hardly know Jackson’s work, and certainly have no attachment it—my goal here is not to pick his work off the ground after Kunstler’s decisive knockdown. I hope merely to complicate the simplistic dichotomy that Kunstler creates. Further, I share much of Kunstler’s personal feelings towards the current phase of the built environment; it is his approach that I want to criticize here.) As Kunstler describes it, Jackson “especially loved the task of trying to understand how it all worked,” to delve deeper into the inner workings of spatial organization and the social functions existent therein (122). This curiosity is troublesome for Kunstler because it lacks the pragmatism necessary for critical observation—he imagines Jackson sitting back, content with a passive interaction with both the built and natural environment. “He was not interested in consequences, only manifestations,” Kunstler proclaims, a statement that I can neither confirm nor dispute through personal knowledge (122). Jackson’s supposed shortcoming plays out most vividly at the Red Barn hamburger joint. As Kunstler claims, “a Jacksonian student of landscape can observe a Red Barn hamburger joint … and never arrive at the conclusion that the Red Barn is an ignoble piece of shit that degrades the community” (123-4). In this passage of frustration with not only Jackson but also the state of the entire world, Kunstler seems to provoke for provoking’s sake. Kunstler’s mistake lies not in his desire for a critical gaze, but that the critical gaze he provides is rather unsatisfactory in and of itself, not to mention accompanied by cheap shots. His criticism balloons quickly from the scale of a single scholar to global proportions in an effort to point out moments of stupidity that symbolize things far greater. In doing so, he paints a colorless image of developmental change that, in turn, only takes away from the power of his claims.

New York, New York, Las Vegas: You can go all the way to the torch in Vegas' Statue of Liberty.
I love Las Vegas.

In the span of an hour, you can go from Paris to Egypt to New York, take photos with Brangelina and Britney Spears, and stand directly underneath lions (complete with a lion-rawring soundtrack because, apparently, they sleep 20 hours a day). I know it’s cliché, but Walt Disney himself couldn’t have designed a better theme park for the 21 and over crowd. But Las Vegas is a gimmick; the city is a one-liner. I get the joke and, for three days, it is hilarious.

I would hate to live in Las Vegas.

Las Vegas is great because it cannot be taken seriously (does the Luxor hotel replace traveling to the pyramids?). However, exporting the self-aware, ironic architecture of the strip to other cities, as Robert Venturi suggests is a legitimate reaction to modernism, undermines the field’s ability to create meaningful solutions. Kunstler shares a similar, though heightened, opinion of Venturi, calling his architectural philosophy “simple parody, which is to say the sophomoric urge to ridicule by means of feeble imitation in the absence of an urge to create something original of real quality” (83).

Moreover, Venturi’s imitations do not solve any of the underlying issues of modernism and car culture. They actually end up embracing modernist principles because they are still based on the same “signs and boxes” architecture. Venturi’s architecture is just as inaccessible as modernist architecture, divided between people who get the joke and those who take it seriously.

On the other hand, Venturi made astute observations about the streetscape of LV (and, by extension, most of the US): the signs are more important than the architecture, and at least putting something on the façade is better than doing nothing, even if it’s painfully ironic decoration. Urban planners and architects have, in my estimation, taken themselves Too Seriously and Venturi calls them out on it. Unfortunately, though highlighting modernist problems, his work does not offer any viable or significant solutions beyond (sometimes) improving a building’s aesthetic characteristics.

Robert Venturi’s Learning From Las Vegas has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. While, 40 years ago, it was boxes with signs, it is now the epitome of the postmodernist architecture movement that he helped create. Unquestionably fun, but the new landscape no more livable than the modernist’s.