WALKING BY WATER

And so I was walking again in New York City, and if I wasn’t exactly expecting to find ruin, then at least I was hoping for patina and signs of wear, for signs of a city that didn’t look like it had just been “repurposed” and reclad in the trappings of “out of the box” modern architecture.  It was uphill work, let me tell you.

But I thought I might be onto something by going for a walk on Roosevelt Island,  a two-mile long, 150 acre island in the middle of the East River, between Manhattan and Queens.  It’s been through a lot of names: Minnehanonk, Hog Island, Blackwell’s Island, and Welfare Island, before its current designation, named after Franklin (rather than Teddy) Roosevelt.

I’d never been there before, though I had looked down on it from the Queensborough Bridge that crosses high above it.  At the time I didn’t think it looked like the most enticing bit of territory, but now I’d discovered there was something there known as the Renwick Ruin (note the singular), a former smallpox hospital designed by the architect James Renwick, opened in 1856 and abandoned a century or so later.

I asked my New York alumni if any of them had ever been to Roosevelt Island, and only one had, my wife, who’d been to a visit a friend in hospital there, more of an acquaintance really, who’d been horribly injured in a car accident and left paralyzed.  The hospital specialized in treating such injuries, but it had been a long time ago, and she said she knew nothing of any ruins.

Online research brought up some contradictory information about the extent to which the ruins were or weren’t accessible to the urban explorer.  Certainly I didn’t imagine I was going to be able to cavort among the bare ruined choirs but I decided I’d do what I could, see what I could see, walk where I could.

So off I went on a hot, humid, overcast day that threatened rain, in order to see the ruins of a smallpox hospital.  In a perfect word I would have walked there, but there’s currently no sane way to do that from Manhattan.  You’d have to walk all the way into Queens across one bridge then back across another, which would be pretty knackering even on a day that wasn’t hot, humid, overcast, and threatening rain.  And in any case it’s a straight shot to get there on the F train: I was going there for a walk, not to torture myself.

Emerge from the deep subway on Roosevelt Island and you’re right at the waterfront.  The terrain is flat, there are very few vehicles, this is a great place to walk.  There are also great views of Manhattan on one side, and views of Queens on the other, the latter largely grittier than the former.   

But I always think it’s disrespectful to go a place just in order to get a good view of some other place.  I think your attention should be focused on the place you’re in, you should embrace the local topography.

And so I walked down to the ruins, probably less than a mile, and it was much as expected, there was some severe fencing around he old hospital, various metal struts in place to keep the structure standing, and no entry of course, although inevitably a few graffiti “artists” had been in there.

There were volunteers at a stand offering maps and information and “emergency ponchos” if the rain suddenly came on.  They told me that the plan was to make the ruin even more stable but not to rebuild it, then to open it to the public.  Ruins, we know, are always in a state of flux, but one artist’s rendition of how they might end up looks like this (which will be pretty bad, if you ask me):

Two things stood out about the current state of the Renwich Ruins: first, that in making the building stable they’ve also made it far more picturesque.  Nature has got in there and done its work.  That exuberance of ivy growing up over the structure, really does make it look Gothic and magnificent.

And two, round the back (as it were) the powers that be had collected, stacked and I think catalogued, all the broken bits of masonry, and these fragments they had shored (or at least stored) against their ruins, on wooden palates. 

You can see some fine rusted metal pillars there too, and in fact there were quite a few of these scattered elsewhere on the island, folly columns, folly ruins, I suppose you might say.

There is some authentic native flora planted around much of the southern end of the island, perhaps not quite as authentic or rigorously maintained as in the Time Landscape on Houston Street in Manhattan, but it does make it possible to look out through ancient, primitive foliage, and see the towers of Manhattan just a few hundred yards away across the water, but looking as though they come from another civilization, maybe another universe.

But the fact was I’d seen other signs of ruin on the island too, though at first I didn’t know what I was looking at.  To get to the Renwick Ruin I had to walk past a giant, expansive collection of buildings, that looked to me like a gently Brutalist housing development, vaguely Bauhaus, vaguely streamlined moderne, but the structures were derelict and fenced off, and there few workmen around, and signs on the external fences saying the whole lot was due for demolition.

I know now this wasn’t some housing development at all, it’s what was the Goldwater Memorial Hospital, the place my wife had gone visiting, a nursing facility for patients who’d suffered spinal or neck injuries and, at best, used wheelchairs.  Now the patients are gone, which seems a terrible shame.  If Roosevelt Island is a good place to walk - flat, great views, very little motor traffic, surely it was even better as a place for wheelchair users.

It’s being demolished to make way for an outpost of Cornell University, which will apparently, look something that like the image below. 

Am I feeling nostalgic for ruins?  Only partly.

WALKING IN TIME

        

 It’s a curious thing, isn’t it, when you’re when traveling in some strange or unknown place, and you look out of the window of your car or the bus or train, and you see some solitary walker, in some bleak environment, often in the middle of nowhere, even in the middle of the desert.  You know that if you were walking out there you’d be feeling lost or scared or threatened, or in any case completely out of your element, but you assume that the solitary walker you’re looking at doesn’t feel the same way.  He or she may not be actually at home in that desolate spot, but they’re at least in their own landscape.

Of course, when you look out through the window of a plane, unless you’re very close to the ground, at take off or landing, you don’t actually see people walking, but even so you look down from a great height and sometimes you see a city below, and you can be absolutely sure there are pedestrians moving around down there.

And if you’re coming into a city you know, and recently I’ve flown into London and New York, you see the city from on high, and you not only know that there are people walking down there, you know they’re walking where you’ve walked in the past, and where you’re going to be walking again, quite soon, just as soon as you land, get off the plane and get into the city.  Here’s a picture of man walking in London, on Fournier Street:

And here’s a picture of a man walking in New York, on West Houston Street, where the pedestrianized La Guardia Place begins, striding across the “Seed Labyrinth” which is a “public art project” by Sara Jones, sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

The Facebook page says, “Everyone is invited to walk the Labyrinth  …

A Labyrinth is an ancient symbol of wholeness. It combines the imagery of the circle and the spiral into a meandering but purposeful path. The Labyrinth represents a journey to our center and back again into the world. It has only one path, it is unicursal. The way in is the way out. It is a right brain task, the choice is to enter or not, the choice is whether or not to walk a spiritual path.”

That strikes me as going a bit far, and although I can’t pretend to know what’s going on in the mind of that New York walker, I’d guess he’s pretty much unaware that he’s cutting right across a unicursal path.

Immediately to the east of the labyrinth is another art project, the Time Landscape, by Alan Sonfist.  It’s a 25' x 40' rectangular of land, set up in 1978, made to resemble what Manhattan would have looked like before the Dutch settlers arrived in the 17^th century.  So it’s filled with native species, beech and birch trees, red cedar, black cherry, mugwort, Virginia creeper, aster, pokeweed, milkweed, catbrier vines, and violets.  I am quoting here, obviously.  I would recognize really very few of these flora, but I’ve nevertheless always thought Time Landscape was a “very good thing.”

I gather that it’s an uphill, not to say Sisyphean, task to keep the Time Landscape free of non-native species, and garden crews have to be in there constantly weeding.  When I was there earlier this month the place did look a bit careworn, and it does seem to have a curious status now as memorial, not so much to 17^th century Manhattan, as to 1960s and 70s land art, and there are those who complain that it’s been “museumified,” but although I see their point, I’m still very glad that it’s there.

A little to the north of Time Landscape there are three tall apartment blocks, two of them designated the Silver Towers, containing student housing, the third a co-op for “real people.” Inevitably most of the apartments don’t have any usable outdoor space, nevertheless around the base in certain areas, avid New York gardeners have been at work creating one version of what a 21^st century Manhattan time landscape might look like.

WALKING ALLEGORICALLY

Sometimes walking sticks are allegorical.

Sometimes they're just a dandyish affectation. (Yes, it IS Nic Cage).

WALKING IN SHRAPNEL

While I was in London I walked to Tate Britain, what used simply to be the Tate.  I think I’d noticed before that the west face, as it were, in Atterbury Street is pocked with shrapnel scars, but since I was on my way to see an exhibition titled Ruin Lust, I saw them with new eyes.

I wish I’d loved the exhibition more.  The curator, Brian Dillon, is clearly a good man, but it seemed he was reduced to rummaging around in the gallery’s basement and digging out what he could find.  Of course the Tate has some pretty decent stuff in its basement, and it’s hard to complain about works by Turner, Graham Sutherland, Paul Nash, John Piper, Eduardo Paolozzi, et al.

John Piper, St Mary le Port, Bristol, 1940

But am I the only one to be less than fascinated by Jane and Louise Wilson’s photographs of the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall?  Especially since (unless I missed it somehow) they fail to acknowledge that Paul Virilio covered this territory rather more fully in his book Bunker Archeology.  But, of course, Virilio isn’t British so he doesn’t get any of his stuff into Tate Britain.

Virilio writes of the bunkers, “Why this analogy between the funeral archetype and military architecture? Why this insane situation looking out over the ocean? This waiting before the infinite oceanic expanse? Until this era, fortifications had always been oriented towards a specific staked-out objective: the defense of a passageway, a pass, steps, valleys or ports. Whereas here, walking daily along kilometer after kilometer of beach, I would happen upon these concrete markers at the summit of dunes, cliffs, across beaches, open, transparent, with the sky playing between the embrasure and the entrance, as if each casemate were an empty ark or a little temple minus the cult.”  Why indeed?  I think this might have been referenced in the Wilsons' work.

Still, who am I to be critical of the Tate when there was a pile of Nicholson’s Walking in Ruins in the bookshop?

I’m sure there’s no end of shrapnel marks on the buildings of London, but the ones I’m most familiar with are on St Paul’s Cathedral, which escaped a direct hit in the Blitz, but was left with some spectacular scarring. (But see the comment below)

I imagine that by no means all the scars on St Paul’s are from from World War Two.  There are some carved “graffiti” (below), and I suppose that date must be 1702 (though it's a very badly written 7) since that was right in the middle of the construction of the cathedral, and W. Fox was presumably one of the stone masons.

Below is one of my not all that old author pics (photograph by Steve Kenny) sitting on the steps of Sheffield City Hall – and yes those are indeed shrapnel scars in the lump of masonry I'm sitting on.  There was a period of at least six years when I walked past the Sheffield City Hall every day on my way to and from school, and yet I never noticed the scars at the time. New eyes were required.

Also, while I was in England, and definitely inspired by Virilio rather than the Wilson sisters, I went walking on the Naze at Walton, in Essex, looking for bunkers.  It’s one of those places I’d vaguely heard of but knew nothing about.  Naze derives from the Old English word “næss” meaning ness or promontory, but there is also something nose-like about the land formation. 

It was a vital bit of territory during World War Two.  There’s now a World War Two Walk to be done there, though I admit I didn’t follow the route very closely, not least because I couldn’t actually find it.  (True, I didn’t look all that hard).  The Naze Tower, which has been there since 1720, was used as a radar tower during hostilities, and there were bunkers or pillboxes with anti-aircraft machine-guns built along the cliff edge, not “looking out over an oceanic expanse” but across the North Sea to Holland.  I found this particularly fine bunker:

And then this one:

Since the bunkers were designed to withstand aerial bombings it’s perhaps not surprising that they're still standing.  There are some signs of decay.  One of the metal supports on the one above is rusted most of the way through, thanks to the salt air no doubt, and yet the structure itself seems completely sturdy.  It feels more like a monument than a genuine ruin.

And in that first bunker there was evidence of human presence, and indeed of exuberant, untutored, over-optimistic (and misspelled) wall art.  It would no doubt all have been different if Hitler had won.

WALKING WITH THE QUEEN

There was an interview (by Billy Heller) with Aretha Franklin in yesterday’s New York Post under the headline “Aretha Franklin’s Secret Life.”  Heller says: I saw you in Newark last year, and I was exhausted watching you perform.  How do you keep in shape?"

Let's leave aside the fact that Aretha’s figure has not always conformed to received notions of “in shape,” not least because of health issues, and let's also assume Heller isn't making some cruel joke, and read her reply. 

She says, “I have a walking regimen – about three times a week, at least a mile or so.  I walk the super Walmarts, the biggest ones.  If people are in the aisle and the store happens to be crowded that day, I got to other aisles.”

Well, as I have often said, there’s no such thing as a “walker's body.”  They/we do come in all shapes and sizes.  I've also long thought there might be a book titled Walking the Great Indoors which would consist of a series of pedestrian expeditions in airports, underground tunnels, railway stations, factories, malls and indeed big box stores.

It’s not easy to find a picture of Aretha walking but here she is at least walking down the aisle in 1978 at her marriage to Glynn Turman.