The Garden of Post-Industrial Decay

One new park, and part of another, have just opened on the Hudson River, in the stretch from 55th Street to 72nd. Connect these dots with the two-year-old Hudson River Park in the West Village and you begin to observe that an entirely novel aesthetic is emerging for parks, and that New York’s watery circumference is the cradle of its nativity. A further dot in this continuum is the new plans for a park along the FDR Drive, all the way east in Lower Manhattan.Traditionally, two main aesthetics have dominated park design in the Western world: the naturalism of the English garden and the rigorous artifice of the French garden. Central Park is almost entirely English in conception, although the grandiose transit from the Mall to Bethesda Terrace suggests something of the Gallic esprit geometrique. That is to say, the park expends all its art to appear artless, to seem like a slice of nature that we have entered upon by chance.Other parks in Manhattan – indeed, most of them – make no such claims. With their rigorous geometry, the parks at Washington, Union, and Madison Squares, as well as Bryant Park, exemplify a nature that has been brought aggressively to heel by the will of man. But the new parks emerging along our waterfront partake of both aesthetics without belonging entirely to either.Consider that, as regards urban parks, both the English and the French models were essentially escapist. If the former delivered the illusion of bringing us into the countryside, the latter delivered us from an all too chaotic world into the neo-Platonic solace of pure geometry. The new parks, by contrast, revel in their urban context.This is especially true of the park along Trump Place, from 72nd down to 59th, designed by Thomas Balsley, where the lofty pylons of the Westside Highway beetle over its entire length. Surely there was no avoiding their insistent presence, but even if Mr. Balsley had been able to do so, he would not have wished it. For these parks are no longer an escape from an urban context that was once seen as a necessary evil. Rather, they represent an escape into that urbanism.It has become an almost mythic urbanism that squares very well with the dominant spirit of the Big Apple in the last 10 years, the sense that just being in New York makes you a success in life and, even more important, that people no longer come to the big city for such amenities and opportunities as they cannot find in the country. They come to the city because the city as such – for the first time in history – is seen to be desirable in itself.The most defining elements of mythic Manhattan are exploited in these two parks, from the raised highway to those piers and rotting wooden stakes that have been driven over the centuries into the waters of the Hudson. Indescribable – almost inconceivable – are the shapes that these rotting relics have assumed as they sink ever further into the water.At 66th Street is a four-story tower, whose original function – for surely it had one – is quite beyond my imagining. Its blackened, ravaged hulk having been eaten away by the salt air, it now resembles one of the Martian tripods at the end of Wells’s “War of the Worlds.” Several blocks south, near the northern edge of Hudson River Park, which was designed by Richard Dattner & Partners, is an equally baffling structure whose heaving filigree of chewed-up iron looks like a suspension bridge in the midst of an earthquake.There was a time when such things would have seemed ugly – which they may be. But to the “period eye” of contemporary taste, they are things of beauty, which it would be sacrilege to tear down.Thus you have two dominant elements of the new park: urbanist escapism and the pleasures of entropy. To these we may add two more. In the first of these, it is almost as though the designers have taken to heart a term from decades past, “the asphalt jungle.” There is surely greenery in these parks, but it does not predominate, as it did under the older aesthetic, exemplified by Riverside Park, which adapts the naturalism of the English garden to a riverine context.Instead, such grass as there is appears like a patchy, mannered afterthought in a context of postindustrial severity, as represented by the pervasive gray of the concrete. But here again, this concrete is not, as in the days of Robert Moses, a cheap concession to utilitarianism. Rather, its deftly crafted form is, like the rotting remains of the port, an element of industrial infrastructure, to whose beauty and potential our contemporary taste has finally awakened.As for such greenery as there is in these new parks, it rejects both the naturalism of the English garden and the geometric artifice of the French. In their place is an almost Japanese aesthetic that embraces chance, imbalance, and asymmetry, but only within rigorously compartmentalized zones. To this end, a variety of tall, ornamental grasses and other hardy, if unfamiliar plants, crop up here and there in the park.However indirectly, these plants as well are expressive of the spirit of the age. Because they partake of a somewhat Japanese aesthetic, or at any rate an emphatically non-Western one, they speak to the multicultural longings of the present phase of culture. Also, they are often wild grasses, rather than the cherry blossoms and lilac vines of that most Victorian of sites, Central Park. Thus, like the ostentatious functionalism of the concrete that surrounds them, they illustrate that democratic, indeed proletarian, mood which, strange to say, is an ever more prominent feature of elite taste as currently constituted.

The Garden of Post-Industrial Decay

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