I often mentally subtract someone's age from the current year to get their year of birth. Not calculus. I then apply whatever knowledge I have of what the world, though particularly the United States/NYC was like, at the year I land on. Thus, someone I know who just turned 80 was born in 1936. Depression, five years before Pearl Harbor, nine years-old when the war ended. Someone who can have distinct memories of the War years, even though they were fairly young at the time. They cover a lot of ground.
My own impression of what parts of Manhattan were like starts around the first Eisenhower administration. There was a story on the front page of this past Saturday's NYT that reported there are plans afoot to build an underground park, something dubbed the Lowline, out of what was once a trolley terminal under the Williamsburg Bridge, on the Manhattan side, abandoned since it closed in 1948. This acre of land beneath Delancey Street would be a space lit by solar piped light, fed to the subterranean area through mirrors that will allow enough light to create and maintain an underground park, with a wide variety of plantings.
The idea is an outgrowth of the success the High Line has had on the West Side of Manhattan, a park/walkway fashioned where an elevated freight line once plied up and down the West Side between warehouses.
An architect became interested in the old trolley space, teamed with an former marketing manager for Google, and developed plans for what could be accomplished with $80 million.
Funding is nascent, but preliminary approval hurdles have been cleared. A proof-of-concept prototype has been displayed twice and generated excitement.
If anyone knows anything about what this area did look like before what even now is hardly complete gentrification, they could not imagine an underground terrarium.
Two people are quoted in the story about what the underground park might mean. One person is fairly negative, voicing probably what many would say, that they like their parks above ground. Another person is way more positive, saying, "Sounds like a cool thing to take friends to." I can just imagine the Corona beer and cell phone commercials that might get shot in this space. An episode of 'Younger' would surely shoot there.
The person with the positive spin is Dave Wiskus, 35, a singer and guitar player in a local rock band, Airplane Mode, who was questioned while walking his Italian Greyhound dog toward Delancey Street.
That anyone is living in this area with a Greyhound! of any national strip is all the evidence you need that things have changed in New York City.
And if that's not enough evidence for the jury, consider that the developers have been so successful growing all kinds of plants with piped in solar light that they were even able to grow mint plants, from which lunch break construction workers on the project peeled off leaves to add to their sandwiches.
Talk about a Subway sandwich.
http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com
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