All posts tagged: Issue 02 Essays

Above Grade: New York City’s High Line

By PHILLIP LOPATE
When, in June 2009, the High Line Park opened to the public, it was declared an almost unqualified success. Some architecture critics nit-picked the design, but basically they endorsed it, and ordinary folk (I include myself in that category), less fastidious, greeted it with enthusiasm. Crowds lined up for hours to have the elevated promenade experience, it became a (free) hot-ticket item in New York City, which typically over-embraces a novelty for six months, then ignores it. Especially in hot weather, the challenge soon became to grab one of the reclining benches on the sundeck and tan yourself for hours, while envious masses stumbled by. The crowded, restless carnival-grounds movement of the park-goers above-ground rhymed the pedestrian conveyer-belt effect of the gridded streets below: Manhattan is a place where loitering in one place is done at your peril. Paris has boulevard cafes for cooling one’s heels, Rome comes to a rest at fountains and piazzas, but in Manhattan you keep moving forward. Well and good: I approve.

Above Grade: New York City’s High Line
Read more...

Gypsy

By J. MALCOLM GARCIA
1.

I imagine it this way. Gypsy awakens from a restless sleep, stretches. Hears his muscles and bones crack, sees how his curtains absorb the light 
of a late San Francisco afternoon, and at that moment decides to start drinking again.

He doesn’t remember having a booze dream, just woke up and decided: Today is the day I’m going to get fucked up. Something clicks into place. Thank God, it’s been decided.
For days he had found it hard to sit still, hard to sleep. His body ached from the weight of his bitterness. He tried to read some of his old text books on alcoholism and its treatment, tried to take pleasure in his term papers and the comments scrawled in red, Nice insight! and Excellent observation! but those evening extension classes at Berkeley had been nothing but a betrayal, an illusion of accomplishment, and he tossed the books and his notepads across the room with a rage that kept him awake at night. He had done everything he should, and still he was denied what he deserved.

Gypsy
Read more...

Realism in Nature’s Garden

By SARAH LURIA and DANIEL JACKSON

Houghton Garden (Fig. 1) was created in 1906, on the grounds of an estate in Newton, Massachusetts, owned by Martha Gilbert Houghton and her husband. Houghton hired Warren Manning, a leading landscape architect and former member of Frederick Law Olmsted’s studio, to work with her on a design for her garden. Manning disliked the kind of formal garden fashionable at the time, which subdued nature with symmetrical, geometric forms. He advocated what he called a “nature garden,” whose design was less invasive, and took advantage of the elements nature already provided. This demanded, as he put it in an essay quoted by Robin Karson in Nature and Ideology (1997):

Realism in Nature’s Garden
Read more...