Submitted by Katya Haskins on August 4, 2009 - 8:46am
Last weekend, my husband, our daughter and I took Amtrak down to New York City to visit with our friends currently living in Chelsea. Although there were a lot of seductive outing options in Manhattan, our friends invited us to first check out the newly opened High Line, a linear public park created atop a defunct cargo railroad that runs for almost a mile and a half through Manhattan’s West Side. Built above street level in the early 1930s, the railroad was meant to ease the transportation of raw materials to local factories and plants. It stopped functioning in 1980, after which the road fell into disrepair and was literally taken over by nature—its bed became host to a great variety of native weeds and shrubs. While the structure itself was left to decay by the city for more than 20 years, over time the scenic wilderness of the abandoned railway and its unique placement in the middle of the city attracted a number urban archeologists and revitalization enthusiasts. By the early 2000s these people worked together to convince politicians and developers that the High Line deserved to be saved as a public amenity.
Retrofitted as a promenade in the sky by a group of architects and landscape designers, the new High Line was opened in June, 2009. The first completed stretch that is open to the public runs for nine blocks south to north, from the conjunction of Gansevoort and Washington Streets in the so-called Meatpacking district, to West 20th Street. When we climbed onto the walkway at its northern entry point, the sun was already setting down and dozens of people were out, enjoying the pleasant warmth of the evening. My first impression of the High Line was that it resembled a stylish, “less is more” contemporary roof-top garden—only this one kept going on and on. The path was paved with concrete blocks shaped like wood-plank flooring and punctuated by irregular-shaped plant beds of weeds and flowers. The flora of the new High Line is meant to evoke nostalgia for the times when nature alone was in charge of the railway’s vegetation. However, unlike the experience of strolling the bucolic expanses of Central Park, walking the transformed rails thirty feet above street level does not remove one from the bustle of city life.
So, why is a rhetorician bringing up urban revitalization and landscapes? Actually, some scholars in our field are busily theorizing spatial experiences as integral to our civic life. Scholars like Lawrence Rosenfield, S. Michael Halloran, and Gregory Clark have argued that landscapes—both manmade and natural—function rhetorically as sites of civic identity. In the most recent issue of the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Kenneth S. Zagacki and Victoria J. Gallagher expand on their notion of “spaces of attention” in “Rhetoric and Materiality in the Museum Park at the North Carolina Museum of Art.” They point out how one’s experience of being in a landscape engages several senses and thereby subtly changes our relationship with our environment. Moreover, because we experience the landscape with others around us, we are called upon to reflect on this ephemeral communion and come out with a deeper appreciation of our civic belonging.
I wondered about all this as I pushed my toddler’s stroller along the High Line. The warmth of a summer night made the grasses and flowers release their subtle fragrance, the noises from the street down below seemed muted, and the paving was radiating the heat it absorbed during the day. I felt mellow and thought to myself, “How lucky we are to be able to come here. How lucky our friends are for having this gem in their neighborhood. Why can’t we have something like that in Troy? All we have is the monstrous Empire State plaza in Albany, a space that looks like a cross between a Third Reich relic and the set of a sci-fi movie. Hmm, the people here sure seem to be having a good time—look at all those comfy wooden loungers!”
So, here was this excellently designed natural/urban public space, in a once gritty New York neighborhood. While several generations of our fellow citizens have been encouraged to think of Disney World and Las Vegas as models of urban planning, the High Line project is a remarkable example of what cities can do to save their history and make life just a little more enjoyable.
Where have *you* been this summer?
Wow, Katya, that was a lovely read, and communicated very well the experience of being there. It really reads like a wonderful public rhetoric--particularly in the sense of its "artistic proof-ness."
I have been in the lands of the inartistic, yet nevertheless beautiful, Colorado.
Your post makes me think about how much rhetorical studies have obsessed on argument and word, at the expense of feeling and sensation. I can't articulate it at the moment, but there is a way in which rhetorics of place and space are also part of the "affective turn" in the theoretical humanities. I think rhetoric folks are starting to turn a corner on sensation and feeling . . . .
Thanks for this evocative post!