Great Escalations

I am grateful to Ben Barsotti Scott, who first planted NYRA’s flag on Gansevoort’s sand bluff (“Lonely on the Sand Bar,” #38/39), for pushing this discussion of landscape architecture’s disciplinary delusions a few rungs up the escalatory ladder. I concede almost all of his points regarding Teardrop Park’s perhaps lightly camouflaged coercive structures; and yet since I do earnestly believe that parks can be judged good and bad based on diverse and separate criteria, I maintain that the big rock wall is nice, and that the fear felt by our poor Project for Public Spaces punching bag (catching all these stray shots so many years later) was authentic. Worth noting is that Teardrop’s design provided for the installation of giant mirrors (this is true) atop one of the adjacent condo towers, intended to reflect light down into the park’s gloamier quarters like in Imhotep’s tomb in The Mummy. This whole conversation about fear and loathing in the landscape reminded me of something Kafka once wrote in a snarky letter to Max Brod: “It’s as if you had said: ‘Why not fear every…