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 bush in the same way that you fear the burning bush?’” That, at least, is the power gardeners still wield over the yuppies.
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Regarding the larger question of landscape architecture’s “liberatory” possibilities: If I’m honest, the conclusion I wrote in mid-2024 already feels antiquated, sharing a fragmented stratum of early 2020s low-risk revolutionaryisms with the Green New Deal and other antediluvian speculations. At this point I’m content to ask that our public parks simply give people a break from a deranged world—or, at minimum, not contribute overmuch to that derangement. Little Island obviously fails even this test; whereas Gansevoort Peninsula will probably just fade into the background once the sand washes away in next summer’s superstorm. As for dismantling the empire? I doubt that landscape architects— professional mantlers—are up for the job. I could maybe trust Field Operations’ New York office to dismantle a free Mediterranean lunch platter provided by SKATESTOPPERS® or the Shenzhen Municipal People’s Congress, etc. The American Society of Landscape Architects, which did not endorse in the presidential election, has at least (as of March 2) “been following the situation closely,” offering ASLA.com members legal advice on recovering suspended federal grants, such as to “coordinate with their legal council” and “review contracts and grant awards.” Next stop, the barricades.
None of this will be controversial to Mr. Scott, who represents that rarest genus of Kool-Aid-averse yet still bona fide landscape practitioners. When we meet to wake the corpse of Little Island, the Sixteenth Street Western Beef malt liquor tab is on me. If there is a ray of hope in any of this, it’s that once RFK Jr. bans SSRIs and drug commercials, then landscape architects will have to find a new font of design inspiration. Maybe it’s time to give Sharawaggi another try.