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New York, New York
Ghosts appear and fade away
I waited until the very, very last day you could see Richard Serra's Wake Blindspot Catwalk Vice-Versa at the Gagosian Gallery on (far) West 24 St. So, unless you've already seen it or have developed a time machine that can hurl you back in time, you may instead just have to appreciate these digital images and Photoshop panorama of sculptures best seen in person.
The actual World Trade Center site now looks so different that it is hard to imagine that which was once there. The Winter Garden and E train station (as I wrote once before) have haunted me more than the site because it is there where you realize what is gone forever, where you see the still bloodied appendages that once connected to such a mythical place. Here in the pit it’s a whole different world.
The new PATH Station is open, but the right of way of the tracks has never changed and the platforms are all in the same place where they were before the attacks. I can think of no more powerful experience for anyone familiar with riding a PATH train to the old World Trade Center than experiencing once gain that same exact deafening, unmistakable screeching as the trains take that last sharp left turn into the station. The only real difference is now you can see daylights out the windows, although you won’t be able to do that forever.
Here the E train connects to the concourse. The floor, ceiling and those stairs and finishes are all part of the old concourse that survived, although now instead of making a sharp left here and walking past stores, you’re going straight into a boring concourse.
The next step in the World Trade Center rebuild is the memorial competition entry, which I entered and (obviously) am not a finalist in (if I was, you would likely never hear the end of it). The models are on display and I’m not sure I really have a favorite.
Most of the photos of the models I took came out pretty bad but this one (the eventual winning entry) came out ok, almost as if my autofocus knew something I didn’t.
I’ll reserve judgement but, as someone who entered the design competition and read the rules, this is a disappointing choice since it intentionally ignores the open air pit memorial concept from Daniel Libeskind’s master plan. It is not cool that the jury decided to ignore their own rules but hey, I guess they’re more important than the master planner. Maybe this will end up ok, but it feels like another step back of ever seeing anything actually cool built on the site. That’s not a knock against this particular design, but rather a knock at a design jury who took matters into their own hands and single handedly destroyed a big piece of the once promising master plan design, just because they could.
Ok, I’ll redirect my anger now from that design jury to Orange County, New York, where the Government Center is in danger of being demolished. It was designed by Paul Rudolph when Brutalism was all the rage, and today Orange County is claiming that the building is kind of useless and difficult to adapt for their current use. Knowing what an all concrete government building designed decades ago might be like, it’s honestly not too hard to understand their position. Still, just in case it’s torn down in the middle of the night, here’s a (hopefully not last) picture of what might be lost.
A (irregularly stitched) digital picture of the Hudson River from the Camp Smith Trail, a six and a half mile hike in extreme northern Westchester with an overall elevation gain of 2,500 feet. There is no single mountain on the trail nearly that high, but the trail ascends, descends, ascends, descends, ascends, well, you get the picture. Luckily it is on an absolutely wonderful section of the river, from the foot of the Bear Mountain Bridge with views south past the ticking time bomb of the Indian Point nuclear plant all the way to the (very) distant Tappan Zee.
If you have any interest in going, all you need are good hiking boots (I still recommend Lowa) and a car- drive east across the Bear Mountain Bridge, make a right and park three miles later at the "toll house" (it's fairly well marked). The hike isn't necessarily easy or easy to follow, still there are enough views to make it somehow feel worth it.
