Twenty Minutes in Manhattan by Michael Sorkin

Author:Michael Sorkin
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

LAGUARDIA PLACE

Reaching Washington Square, I face another decision: which of four parallel streets to take south. A square-skirting right turn takes me down MacDougal Street, the most heavily commercialized and busy option. Over the years, MacDougal has remained raffish and student-oriented. Its predominance of small storefronts has ensured it as a home for small businesses, including a multitude of cafés, pizza and falafel parlors, head shops, newsstands, candy stores, Indian jewelers, bars, and restaurants. Sullivan and Thompson Streets are similar but a bit quieter and less commercially dense. Each has its particular appeal, both in its Village stretches and in its run below Houston Street, where it enters SoHo. Sullivan Street has a couple of chess parlors, and I like to walk it periodically to reassure myself that they are still there. The survival of such economically marginal but culturally vital uses serves as a canary in the mine shaft, on alert against the gas of gentrification.

One route-driving criterion, especially important in the summer months, is the possibility of walking in the shade. Because my morning walk is southerly, the shade cast by buildings on the east side of the street—remembering that the general scale of building is fairly low—disappears by an early hour. This means that until late afternoon, when the west-side buildings take over, shade is provided by street trees that spread their canopies directly overhead. The frustratingly uneven distribution of trees in the city—particularly their absence on most major avenues—demands careful calculation for a bowery stroll.

Because of urban renewal and the anomalous municipal ownership of a wide strip of land along the eastern side of LaGuardia Place, the buildings between West Third Street and Houston are substantially set back from the street. The space between is devoted to landscape, and after being improved in fits and starts over the years, it is now completely green. The eastern edge of the space is occupied by a one-story commercial strip—a continuous building in the first block with small shops and restaurants and a freestanding supermarket in the next, a rarity in the city and now threatened by NYU expansion plans. The east side of LaGuardia is divided into two superblocks that replace what were formerly nine city blocks, bits of Brasília in the midst of nineteenth-century New York.

In the summer, the temperature along this green strip—a model piece of greenfill—is always several degrees lower than that of the surrounding streets. The greenery, which for one block includes a thick ground cover of ivy and for the next is shared by community garden plots and Alan Sonfist’s Time Landscape—a nice art piece that purports to restore its small plot to the landscape native before the arrival of white settlers—covers most of the surface and contributes to the cool atmosphere. It even produces a rare and refreshing smell. This linear landscape provides relief from unremitting hardscape and functions as a fragmentary park. The city has a number of these linear landscapes, most more formalized. One of the most important of these—Sara D.

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