*Or, Why I Like BLDG BLOK
Last night I participated in the inaugural public event of BLDG BLOK, a start-up housed at the DUMBO NYU-Poly incubator that's using mapping and other digital tools to rediscover urban history. My task was to respond creatively to a history of Tompkins Square by writer Francis Morrone; I had five minutes, or about 1200 words. Following is what I wrote and read.
When I think
of Tompkins Square, I think of rats. Two summers ago, the square—or park, or
gathering place, or historical site, or whatever you deem the most appropriate
description of the space for your needs—was infested with rats, as local
parents complained to media; their burrows—the rats’ burrows, that is, not
the parents’ burrows, which are a different kind of burrow—ran adjacent to the
playground on the square’s west side. At night you could see the rats
scrambling over the mulch, or venturing across the Avenue A sidewalk to pick
through garbage. Rats are shy animals—they disappear if you get too close. But
they need humans to survive.
*
During the rat infestation—I understand it’s
lessened now—I happened to live, just for a short time, on Seventh Street between
A and B, which is the south side of Tompkins Square. Accordingly, I had many
opportunities to observe the rats. I was interested in photographing them, I
guess to capture them, to hold them in time for longer than a moment—that is,
permanently. In one photograph I took, there were 22 pairs of rat eyes glinting
in the dark. Stopped in the image, they seemed to look at me with the same mix
of curiosity and fear with which I gazed at them.
*
Rats are as
much a part of New York City history—of any city’s history—as they are a part
of my history in New York. Twelve years ago, shortly after I moved to this
metropolis, I hit a rat with my foot as I crossed Broadway on Fourth Street. I
didn’t see the rat—I just felt a soft, semi-squishy thud. Immediately a
high-pitched screech overcame the corner; I looked down and saw a furry oblong
scurry away zig-zag-like. Passersby glared at me as I stood there, stunned, as
if I’d been hit by a car—an unexpectedly traumatic collision. But I might as
well have collided with history itself.
*
Rats, as we
know, are ancient animals—so ancient that the zoological designation “Old World
rats” for the black and brown rodents we live with in cities doesn’t refer to
the pre-modern era but to the pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-modern era:
specifically, the Pleistocene epoch, which began more than two million years
ago and ended eleven-thousand-and-seven-hundred years ago. At some point during
this enormous span of time—scientists aren’t sure when—the rats that now
commingle with us and our refuse in Tompkins Square originated in the forests
and scrublands of Asia. Our rats, of course, aren’t a million years old (obviously)—their
average life span is only a year. But their bodies carry within them a history
of the world, both spatial and temporal. They’re living documents of human
civilization. Don’t believe me? Ask the next rat you see. He’ll tell you if he
could.
*
Like rats, architecture carries within it a
spatial-temporal history of the world, only you can’t stop a building—a design—in
its tracks with your foot. As eminent architectural writer Francis Morrone
reminds us in his chronological history, the area that’s now Tompkins Square
was once a swampy mass filled with birds of the snipe variety; Manhatten men of
a certain stripe hunted them. The snipe hunt later became synonymous with the
wild-goose chase, a madcap search for an ostensibly real but actually fictional
object. Indeed, that meaning is so prevalent today that to use “snipe hunting”
to refer to a kind of bird hunting would be archaic. And yet this seemingly
outmoded definition is embedded in the phrase; it can’t be separated out.
Etymologies are not linear but coextensive—meanings are ever present.
*
When
I think about architecture, I often find myself thinking of Orhan Pamuk’s
incredible novel Snow, in which the provenance and
style of buildings are as important as any other theme. After years of living
in exile in Germany, the novel’s protagonist, a poet, returns to Turkey for his
mother’s funeral. Subsequently, he’s offered a reporting assignment that takes
him to the eastern city of Kars, a remote outpost of have’s and have-not’s—mostly
have-not’s. His first stop in town is the Snow Palace Hotel, an “elegant Baltic
building…two stories high, with long narrow windows that looked out onto a
courtyard and an arch that led out to the street. The arch was 110 years old
and high enough for horse-drawn carriages to pass through with ease.” When the
poet-reporter walks under the arch, he feels “a shiver of excitement.”
*
The novel
takes place in the 1990s. A hundred-and-ten years before then—in the 1880s—Kars
belonged to the Russian empire, and Turkey, as a nation, didn’t yet exist. At
the beginning of that same decade, Tompkins Square had become a public park—“one
of the most attractive spots in the city,” as the New-York Tribune hailed it. Within 60 years, however, the park was
no longer attractive: as the New York
Times noted—and these references are Morrone’s, by the way—neglect was
visible everywhere, the playground vandalized.
*
Kars—you may
have sensed I was going here—suffered a similar degradation: “elegant Baltic
buildings” turn out to be a rarity in the city as rendered by Pamuk in Snow. Instead, as the novel’s
poet-reporter walks through the snow, he finds “decrepit Russian buildings with
stovepipes sticking out of every window,” a “thousand-year-old Armenian church
towering over the wood depots and the electric generators,” and “a five-hundred-year-old
stone bridge,” where a “pack of dogs bark[ed] at every passerby.” The forlorn
scenes force our man to wonder if Kars is “a place that the whole world had
forgotten, as if it were snowing at the end of the world.”
*
I read this
moment, fictional or not, as the end of history—the end of a progressive
chronology of the world that relegates the past to the past—forgotten. In
contrast to a chronological view of history, I propose a kairological
perspective, in which the past is never forgotten but always insistently here.
In this regard, I follow the great Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben, who
declares: “Against the empty, continuous, quantified, infinite time of vulgar
historicism must be set the full, broken, indivisible and perfect time of
concrete human experience; instead of the chronological time of pseudo-history,
the [k]airological time of authentic history; in place of the total social
process of a dialectic lost in time, the interruption and immediacy of
dialectic at a standstill.”
*
Architecture
can interrupt this dialectic of putative progress, as can rats. So can, perhaps
ironically, the digital—or digitality, or technology, or invention, or whatever
you want to call it—which makes visible simultaneous—kairological—historical
experiences. This is what BLDG BLOK does, and this is why I like it.
