2. New York City
Manhattan is a slim peninsula on the north-eastern seaboard of America, where the Hudson River and East River converge into Lower New York Bay.
With its linear topography and rocky geology it was naturally suited for its overlay of man-made Avenues and Streets on a linear grid across the island.
“The streets are deserted … nothing disturbs the rectilinear grid of Eighth Avenue. Cubes, prisms, parallelograms; the houses are abstract, solids and surfaces; the intersection an abstract of two volumes - its materials have no density or structure; the space itself seems to have been set in molds .…. Slogans run through my head: ‘City of contrasts’. These alleys smelling of spices and packing paper at the foot of facades with thousands of windows: that is one contrast. I encounter another contrast with each step, and they are all different. ‘A vertical city’, ‘passionate geometries’, ‘thrilling geometries’, such phrases are perfect descriptions of these skyscrapers, these facades, these avenues: I see that. And I've often read ‘New York with its cathedrals’… all these cliches seem so hollow. Yet in the freshness of discovery, the words of ‘contrast’ and ‘cathedrals’ also come to my lips.” *
New York City is now characterised by its verticality, the formation and erection of modern sky-scrapers massed around each block, some tall and narrow, others stepped by regulation and ordinance.
Later ones harnessing newer technology are yet taller super-slim with aero-dynamic gimmicks and dampeners reaching to the sky so as to secure higher rents and real estate amortisation. The only unbuilt respite is the area of Central Park preserved as a green lung for residents of the city.
Broadway is the only avenue that cuts through the rectilinear grid with its iconic ‘flat-iron’ building and triangular footprint that interrupts the east-west and north-south traffic flows.
With more cars and trucks, new parking restrictions have been introduced and ‘congestion charging’ introduced for all vehicles entering the city from below 60th Street.
With its sole points of entry for vehicular traffic being either bridges or tunnels under its two bordering rivers, Manhattan is a captive island for controlling movements in and out of the city.
These main infrastructure axes are maintained by the ‘Port Authority of New York & New Jersey’ with its principal George Washington and Manhattan suspension Bridges and Holland and Lincoln Tunnels which are a feature visible from the top of the new One World Trade Center since its reconstruction after 9/11.
Whilst its old subway system affords services for hundreds of thousands of riders every day, enabling commuting in and out from the more distant Bronx and Brooklyn suburbs, its rattling carriages and rusty tunnels need millions of dollars to upgrade the trains into a modernised metro system to reflect its standing as a premier world city that Asian and European visitors really expect.
*Simone de Beauvoir – L’Amérique au jour le jour – Editions Gallimard, 1954.
