So while I craft my beautiful, exquisite essay (that's right, essay) on R. Kelly, I'll leave you with this for the night. Extraordinarily off-plan, but, I had two doctors appointments today, a Chili's margarita, and an obstacle course around my rampaging mother. There was no time for R. Kelly musings and grandeur.
I don't want to make it a habit of posting my writing. It's not that I'm not proud, it's just that...I'm actually not proud. I've been in a weird writing funk these past few years, and while that's no excuse I won't beat around the bush that my writing has indubitably suffered. But alas, the fuckage I give is zero, and since I have no current plans to publish....ever...I'll just post them here.
(I do promise that they are not great, riddled with grammar and pacing errors, as well as generally lacking. Also don't think this is a pity party. I know when I write well, and these past few years haven't been my best. But the best part at sucking at something is working on it, and remolding your bad habits to better ones. But seriously if you do steal any of these posts for some undergrad writing class, definitely read some Cheever and take another crack at them.)
I'm a greater fan of writing non-fiction than fiction. There's something so untold about the real world that makes it so much more interesting and challenging for me to try and capture. Better writers can portray that in fiction, but I find it so much more enjoyable researching the facts and molding my writing around them, as opposed to the other way around.
Missing home, so it's the Battery Park one tonight, dudes. My favorite spot for a NYC sunset. Pictures included because I'm sorry I've been neglecting you (sourced by the alt text!)
Amy Dean
Advanced Creative Nonfiction
25 April 2011
Remembering Battery
Park
The oldest part of
this island is often the most forgotten. Tourists of New York will prattle on
about Midtown, transplants won’t shut up about the Village, and the locals just
say Manhattan was passé to begin with. But the best part of this city waits
patiently to be rediscovered at the southern tip. It’s full of four hundred
years of drama, all within a twenty-five acre chunk that’s half landfill. Not
that anyone knows, of course, because when’s the last time you’ve been to
Battery Park? Central Park’s better for the day out, and Washington Square is
closer to restaurants. Battery Park’s more an odd growth, like a mole at the
tip of Manhattan’s nose. Poor unlucky Battery Park, fashioned as a memorial for
the unforgettable, and the world always seems to forget it.
There
are twenty-three memorials in Battery Park, and that’s just counting the statues.
A few act as Battery Park’s yearbook—if you happened to be in New York circa
1635, congrats, a slab of granite forever memorializes you. This yearbook is
both specific—we’re looking at you Peter Caesar Alberti plaque—or alarmingly
general, with a simple statue for all “The Immigrants” of America. This nostalgia
includes objects as well, as a pre-Revolutionary cannon has its own memorial,
with an inscription that starts, “This ancient cannon.” Ancient in America is a
whole lot different than ancient anywhere else. Another recent addition to the
Battery Park monument yearbook is a bronze Underpass Marker showing that, in
fact, there is an underpass beneath you. (Proof that things of no importance are
often remembered, too.)
World
War II overtakes the park, but that shouldn’t surprise you. (WWI gets just one,
for the wireless operators. It does get a snazzy fountain, though.) There’s the
Coast Guard plaque and the semi-random Norwegian Maritime monument. The
American Merchant Marines’ memorial is easily the most jarring of the bunch,
and doesn’t apologize for it. It shows four men in the midst of a U-boat
attack. One is hunched over, yelling for help; another is kneeling, and you
immediately realize if this statue could move, he wouldn’t. Another man is
attempting to help another out of the water, but his fingertips are centimeters
too short. And the man reaching up for them? His arms show he’s alive, but by
his face he’s already dead—it’s hollow, deep set, and sad. At high tide the
water swallows him, and the only view you’ll get is of his desperate hand,
stretching to reach salvation. This is one of the dozen tributes to WWII, but it’s
the only one that emotionally smacks you with a shovel. Not even the thousands
names of the dead on the East Coast Memorial elicit this much emotion.
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| Highly stylized photo, however...I have no doubt the Hudson is sometimes this orange. |
But
the most somber memorials are those that remind of too recent tragedy. A
tragedy with memories that were left burned on New Yorkers’ skins and hearts
and not just on granite. Battery Park is home to the Sphere, an old staple of Austin
Tobin Plaza, the old space between the World Trade Center towers. Like most on
September 11th, it survived intact but littered with dents and
scratches. It sits in the park unfixed, next to an eternal flame commemorating
the lives lost. It’s hard to imagine it was originally built in 1971 to
celebrate world peace, because it now symbolizes the consequences of hate. But
it’s not alone. Here in Battery Park, every glance is filled with thousands of
the dead. No wonder the park is always half-full.
The
dead may haunt the park, but there’s life too. The Battery Park conservatory is
one of the finest of New York, and it maintains the twenty-five acres with just
four gardeners. The head gardener is Sigrid Gray, a passionate and strong woman
of sixty. She’s an Olmstead gardener at heart—avoid the flowery crap and use
some native perennial bushes—but it’s her decisions that make Battery Park more
welcoming than Washington Square (and it’s three times the size!). Sigrid
inherited the upkeep of the Gardens of
Remembrance, another memorial to September 11th by famous Dutch
horticulturist Piet Oudolf. It’s the least obvious memorial of the park, but
the most inspiring. After all, it’s bringing life year after year, exploding
with color every spring.
There’s
a well-kept secret of the park that surges with the same sad optimism of
Oudolf’s gardens. The Labyrinth of Contemplation is set in the section of the
park called “Jerusalem Grove.” Three fourths of the year it’s hidden behind
bushes, and tourists walk by oblivious. You don’t get lost in this labyrinth,
physically there’s only one path. Instead, you become emotionally
discombobulated, in an “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey,” sort of
way. This destination is a regular tree, but the journey takes at least five
minutes of weaving. It’s supposed to inspire contemplation on the deaths of
past loved ones. Mostly, it just makes you frustrated. But hey, emotional
rebirths are harder to inspire nowadays. You can’t blame someone for trying to
bring some sort of comfort into the park of death.
While
the park could be seen as the reminder for the ultimate departure, it’s
historically the gateway to see the symbols of the great American arrivals.
Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty are only accessible through the Liberty
ferry, which docks at Battery Park. Cock your head slightly to the right and
you see South Ferry station, where commuters from Staten Island arrive. It’s a
nice cycle, the back and forth.
Herman
Melville, once a famous dweller of lower Manhattan wrote, “Meditation and water
are wedded forever,” and he’s right, because to go to Battery Park is to go to
the water. It’s one of the few places in the city that makes you remember
you’re on an island. To go to Battery Park is to sit on the benches overlooking
the very symbols of freedom—Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty—and reflect
on your life. At this tip of Manhattan, the world seems larger than it did just
moments before in the zany streets of the Financial District. Some could blame
the forgotten park on the Financial District, where the busy daytime crowds
makes the locals avoid it for convenience. The real reason, you start to
realize, is that Battery Park is an open space constructed for contemplation.
It houses the dead, and refuses to let you forget them. What else is more
terrifying than a twenty-five acre space highlighting your own morality?
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| View of the sunset, Battery Park |
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