Green in the City
New York is a neat city because it has really rather a lot of green space. This is lovely. My own apartment is beautifully nestled between Central Park four blocks to the west and Carl Schurz Park (home of Gracie Mansion) on the river, four blocks to the east. Last weekend, Lrand and buddy M and I went to the Cherry Blossom Festival at the brilliantly-blooming Brooklyn Botanic Garden (which I persist in wanting to call the "Brooklyn Botanical Garden," though why I like the redundant adjectival suffix is beyond me). I routinely play softball in Riverside Park in Manhattan, in the ubiquitous greenspace on Roosevelt Island (technically in Queens, but actually in the middle of the East River between Manhattan and Queens), and in Central Park. I eat lunch on the lawn of Bryant Park, just a couple of blocks from the office.This must be a fantastic cosmopolitan luxury. New York City's Parks Department is per capita very well funded (at least by comparison with other cities of reasonable size). Moreover, there is an enormously strong popular appreciation for public greenery, public playing fields, and public art here. Communities take an active interest in their local parks; downtown, everybody and their brother is taking part in the discussion about how to turn the high line into public green space, while up here on the Upper East Side, people turn out every two weeks to tend to the gardens in Schultz park. This is a social as well as spiritual activity. The green is important.
All of this has very real, and very desirous, consequences. It means that, in the middle of the Manhattan, you can watch hawks from the Boathouse in Central Park and you can jog along the river under shade and through gardens. It means that you can grow things in the middle of this big city. It means that you can play frisbee on open lawns even when you only own a single-bedroom fourth-floor apartment without so much as a front stoop. I don't think non-New Yorkers can appreciate how nice--and how important--our parks truly are, concerned as they are with seeing the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty.
I mention all of this because I was dismayed--and surprisingly, viscerally annoyed--to discover that the softball field I played at last week was carpeted with, horror of horrors, artificial turf. Goddamn it, this whole CITY is artificial turf. And that's okay: the city is an amazing, fuel-efficient, heat-efficient, space-efficient, hip, fun, populous urban hotspot where people use public transit and where we build up and not out, leaving a brilliantly small footprint on the earth. But the softball field was in a PARK; why the heck tear up the turf in order to put in rubber "sod" and sandpapery "grass"?? (I also maintain, for you grammarticians out there, that those question marks really should be outside of the quote marks. It's because I'm feeling ornery.)
I take some solace in the fact that I am not alone in my dismay. New Yorkers everywhere agree: actual grass--and, for that matter, actual dirt--are an important part of this city.
Time to pony up in a little more tax money then, I suppose. I wish there were a "save the grass" foundation to which I could give!
posted by Skay @ 10:46 PM
4 Comments:
Vancouver is also a very green city. It being in B.C., there are half a hundred golf courses (not everyone can afford to play, but you can always walk the perimeter).
But there re also hundreds of parks, the most famous of which is Stanley Park. There are also the Van Dusen Botanical Gardens, Queen Elizabeth Park, ... and playing fields and city parks scattered around as well. I can't name them all.
I thought I'd miss that when I moved to Calgary, and while I'm feeling a little coastal withdrawal, I am impressed by the parks and green space they have. Even right downtown, there is a two-block stretch about half a block wide, which has some grass, a couple sculptures and an abundance of plants. There is also, Prince's Park, which is nothing but grass and trees in the middle of the Bow River, easily accessible from downtown.
The other thing that impresses me about Calgary is its sculpture. There are dozens of sculptures downtown, from little ones sitting in flowerbeds to big ones taking over street corners. You never know what is around the corner here. It does make daily city life a little more interesting.
Small footprint? Sure, NYC takes up little area for a city of such a large population. But what about the massive amounts of resources (water, fuel, food, textiles, etc.) used by the inhabitants?
FYI, Roosevelt Island is in Manhattan but not on Manhattan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roosevelt_Island)
We New Yorkers do consume massive amounts of resources, I'm not denying that. But we are nonetheless amazingly efficient in many ways, largely merely by virtue of living in a relatively dense city. Consider our low gasoline consumption and extraordinarily high use of public transportation; the fact that we use half the energy per capita to light and heat our homes as the average American; the fact that 95% of our water gets from source to consumer powered by gravity instead of powered pumps (which is extraordinary and unlike other cities); the fact that our drinking water is wetland-filtered (that is, it moves through natural wetlands and is naturally cleansed in the process) instead of chemically treated; the small per-capita residential square-footage of New Yorkers (perversely helped by high rents); shared laundromats, greenspace, and (in some apartment buildings) even bathrooms; and the fact that high-density city living clears up lots of space for large-scale agriculture (which, for all its problematic social implications, nonetheless represents a highly efficient way to produce food). We don't use space for parking lots, we don't own cars, and we recycle heat (excess heat that I produce in winter goes to heat the apartments above, below, and next door, instead of simply disappearing into the air comfortably separating my home from the next house over).
There's an essay from the New Yorker that has particularly influenced my thinking on the subject; you can open the pdf by clicking here.
A somewhat annoyingly written but nonetheless informative report commissioned by the government can be opened here/
As you intimate, Skay, per capita resource usage is the measure. Imagine the added burden were all those high-rise dwellers dispersed and commuting 20-50 miles in daily. Does anyone in Manhattan drive to the grocery store? Where I live everybody drives. What a waste.
On an unrelated note... Thanks for leaving the question marks outside the quoted phrase. The "standard" is illogical.
Post a Comment
<< Home