Day 176 - World's Biggest Road Map

For the 1964-1965 World's Fair, modernist marvel Philip Johnson was asked to design a pavilion to celebrate the host state: New York. You all know it, I'm sure, even if you don't realize it. Many of you have probably seen the most notable component--the flying saucer lollipop-looking contraptions--while driving by Flushing Meadows Corona Park on the Grand Central Parkway. The rest of you probably know it from Men in Black.

Less known today, since it's mostly gone, is the adjacent Tent of Tomorrow whose colored panels (think '60s) were suspended over the artistic piece-de-resistance of the pavilion: the world's biggest road map. The map is a terrazzo reproduction of the 1964 Texaco Roadmap for New York State and one of the most fabulous pieces of pop art you are likely to see--whether you're a map geek or not.

Most of the World's Fair structures were constructed just for the fair and did not last much beyond its two seasons. The NYS Pavilion as a whole has been in limbo since then. It was too grand and ostentatious to dismantle. And yet it was too operationally challenging to be used effectively after the fair. It hung on for a bit as a restaurant and viewing platform, as it was during the fair, but it could not hold its own financially. The futuristic heaven-pointing monument that the City--or, more correctly, the World's Fair Corporation--was willing to subsidize during the world-renowned event of the fair itself, was harder to justify for a city slipping into fiscal purgatory.

The towers remain (or, at least, have persisted); their external elevator now frozen in place partway up the side and their internal stairwell rusted out from four decades of rainwater pooling upon their treads. The spectral plexiglass panels of the Tent of Tomorrow fell in many, many yesterdays ago; the criss-crossing guy wires hold nothing in place today. And the gorgeous terrazzo map of the Empire State has been rent apart by mosses and ailanthus, succeeding in creating a rift in the Mohawk River valley in 40 years that the Earth's tectonic movement couldn't do in 40 million years. There have been several attempts--most half-hearted, a few zealous--to create a justification and a funding stream to stabilize and possibly renovate the pavilion. The most recent one I remember involved creating a space museum that would be sited there. Each has been done in by a combination of municipal malaise and the daunting
sums of money needed to make it happen.

Recognizing at least part of this vanishihing landscape, the NYC Parks Department, along with the University of Pennsylvania's historic preservation program, recently began documenting and conserving parts of the Roadmap. With an eye toward telling a new generation of aficionados about the map, the Queens Museum of Art just opened an exhibit this weekend that explains and celebrates some of this work. Dave Jacoby and I attended. I was pleased to see such a variety of folks there and interested in this relic. All hopefully will be motivated to help develop a broader constituency for it.

Day 25 - La Guardia Landing Lights

If you find yourself wending your way through northern Queens on the M60 bus to La Guardia Airport, and you're not lost in a book or frantically trying to balance your suitcase and knapsack on the jerky bus while fumbling for your boarding pass and checking your watch, and you look up and out the window on the right side of the bus at the exact time that it is turning through the intersection of Astoria Blvd and 82nd St, you might catch a glimpse of it: the familiar looking Parks sign with the best logo of any city agency--the Parks Leaf. Except that this sign designates a park with one of the most peculiar, at least one of my favorite names: La Guardia Landing Lights. Look a little closer and you find the eponymous structures--a series of lightpoles spaced a few hundred feet apart that lead landing airplanes to Runway 4 at the airport.

And if you're unencumbered by luggage, not rushing for a flight and happen to get off here, and if the planes are landing on Runway 4 that day, you'll be right in the laning path of big jets floating down to the end of the runway barely a quarter-mile away.



The edges of airports can be strange places to find oneself. They have a Lilliputian feel; by the very nature of where it's located, things are low-slung. Streetlights are half-sized. Buildings don't usually go above a single story. And there is a surprising number of folks who, equally enamored of planes passing barely 50 feet above their heads at better than 100 mph, skulk around the ends of runways just sitting and watching. Several for hours. On a recent visit, at least two families pitched a sheet and were picnicking while planes roared overhead. It seemed quintessentially urban. I loved it. And I'll be back here a lot over the next few weeks.

Day 24 - A Horse of a Certain Color

How many times have you wandered around the City--probably in a park--and seen a statue of some war hero or colonist or constitutionalist? Occasionally, an animal is included. Very rarely, it's something odd that makes most people stop and wonder a bit, like Balto. More often it's merely the stead that one of the above rode in on. But it's not everyday that one wanders past these monuments and finds it mounted not just by its warrior, but by a worker--a civil servant. Specifically, a member of the Citywide Monuments Conservation Program staff of the Department of Parks & Recreation. (Which, I guess, in the context of conserving art in NYC is a warrior of a different sort, too.) Those following the link will learn more but, in short, the program "monitors the condition of, and performs conservation treatments and maintenance on, the extensive and irreplaceable public art collection in New York City's parks."

There are more than 1200 monuments in City parks, 300 or so of which are sculptures. They're listed here.

Day 22 - This Place Used To Be A Dump!

Literally.

The Fresh Kills Landfill operated for more than 50 years, much to the chagrin of every single Staten Islander except, perhaps, for DSNY guys who worked there and also lived on the Island. For much of that time, it received every shred of household garbage disposed by New York's 7 or 8 million residents. It was originally devised in the late 1940s as a place to dump fill from a variety of Moses-era projects on the Island and slated for closure in fewer than 5 years. But over time, our society's disposable approach to the world required more space to stick the increasing residue of a consumer economy--of 7 or 8 million people. Over time Fresh Kills grew to over 2000 acres--more than 3 square miles--of stinking trash piled high on the former tidal mud flats of Staten Island's western shore. Some spots are now more than 10 stories high.

I grew up about 10 blocks away. It didn't always stink, but it did quite often. People in the neighborhood would joke that we were just used to it always smelling. Folks who didn't live nearby asked if the stench was unbearable in the summer. In fact, I remember fall and winter as being the smelliest times. Maybe the heavy, humid air did a better job at tamping down the odors than the crisp, fresh breezes in cooler weather. And it seemed to only ever smell at night. Stories, many apocryphal I'm sure, circulated as to why this was. My favorite, told by the elders on the block with a conviction that recalled their stories about being in wars, was that the tractors turned the garbage over at night when the sea gulls that infested the landfill would be less likely to swoop in and carry away chicken carcasses or apple cores or dirty diapers. I've seen the gulls at the dump. Nightfall would not have stopped them from a meal.

Another story shared, perhaps a bit more plausible since it was relayed (or maybe just repeated) by our teachers at school, was that Fresh Kills was one of only two human-made structures visible from space; the other being the Great Wall. What is undeniable is that by the end of its life, Fresh Kills was receiving 12,000 tons of waste a day. That 24,000,000 pounds of shit in one form or another. Every day of the week.

In 1999 The Dump, as it was uniformly called, was finally closed to the cheers and psychic relief of everyone on Staten Island. In September 2001 a portion was pressed into service again, temporarily, to take in a good deal of the debris from the World Trade Center. Here the solemn, macabre task of sifting through fine dust and debris for a variety of objects of human significance--papers, ID cards, family photos that used to be propped up on desktops, wedding bands which were not pulverized by the pancaking floors, and, yes, bone fragments--was conducted around the clock by a specially trained group of forensic investigators. Much of what was too fine to be identified, but which almost undoubtedly contained traces of mementos of the lives of more than 3000 people, remains in on a hallowed hilltop poking up from this ignoble expanse.

Over the past 5 or 6 years, several City agencies have been working on a plan to transfer this site--three times the size of Central Park--from the Department of Sanitation to the Parks Department, and to develop it over the next 20 years into recreation and and reclaimed natural areas. Now if that's not turning the term "reclamation" on its head (mud flats and the like are typically "reclaimed" from nature by filling them in and building subdivisions or Home Depots on them, praise God), then you've me. The NYC Urban Park Rangers are giving tours of The Dump from time to time. So this weekend, my girlfriend and I hopped on our bikes and joined an intrepid and sometimes quizzical dozen other folks to see how the last few years of inactivity at Fresh Kills have begun to transform the natural landscape. The results follow below. It was a hazy day, but it made the bucolic wetlands feel of the place even more apparent. Nevermind the subdivisions and Home Depots in the distance.

You'll also see a few other pictures from our bike trip which included a trip to the German-style beer hall Kilmeyer's near where Joseph Mitchell wrote about the freed slave community of Sandy Ground in the Charleston section of Staten Island. And then there are the bricks from the Kreischer Brick Works (scroll down about 1/4 of the way) which was about one-quarter mile away from Kilmeyer's and, at one point, responsible for quite a bit of the fireproof brick construction in NYC. The sidewalks are still paved with them out there. Enjoy!