Ode on a Vessel in the City of Love

How could it not be the most beautiful thing in the City? I thought to myself, staring in marvel at the enormous entity before me.

A hour before, I had arrived at the bookstore of Chelsea Market, and finding the rest of the group, I had perused the books there a little, to get the feel of what the staff picks are---always very vocal about their politics lately, just like the bookstore in Princeton we had visited.

Then we got lunch at a French bakery there, and waited for our sandwiches at a metal table with metal chairs in the main corridor, people watching and meditating. Then we ate our meal.  They explained to me that they had just been on the High Line, the new above-ground park that had been built on an former decommissioned elevated train line, and which went north from Chelsea Market (which I would realize later was a big reason that Chelsea Market felt like the center of the City now). I had heard about the High Line from years ago, and knew they had planned to do it, but I had long since lost track of the project, and was not even aware that it had been completed and was open to the public.

All of them were enthusiastic about it, and I realize I had missed out on something I should have seen, but as it happened I didn't even have to ask before Red suggested they take another walk on it, since they had liked it so much it.

So after lunch, we walked over to the stairs that led up to it, and at the top I instantly realized what an awesome project it was, and that it was in fact revolutionary, and would change the entire nature of the City, and perhaps many other cities, over time.

I had pictured something wide and airy, and straight. Instead it was sinewy narrow path but above ground, hemmed in closely by the buildings around it.  One saw right into some of them. The path on the walkway was lined with planted trees. There were areas off to the side of the path to sit on benches. In fact it felt like being on an elevated walkway inside a zoo. Even the netting they had placed gave it a feeling of being in a walk-in building where the wildlife was around you.

It was spectacular. I had never experienced anything like it. It was already changing the geography and real estate around it. It would only be the start, I knew.

It took us about twenty minutes to navigate up to the north end. There was enough shade from the building and the installed plants that even Red didn't mind the heat and the sun. It was she in fact who had wanted to walk it a second time.

At the north end was the most spectacular thing the elevated walkway came out onto an elevated plaza, where one could see down one of the streets out to the river and to New Jersey.  Here there was a fancy department store that one could enter right off the plaza. But there in the plaza in the corner  was an enormous sculpture and structure, three stories tall at least. It was called the Vessel. It was in fact a giant outdoor staircase that one could climb to the top One had to buy tickets in order to access the outdoor stairs to climb to the top of the Vessel. I wasn't interested in that at the moment. It was enough just to see it, and be stunned by it.

It was, I realized in that moment, the utter concrete fulfillment of the Burning Man experience inside the City. I had known of this trend, of making Burning Man a living presence inside of cities. I had seen it in Denver a little bit. But this was the apotheosis of that trend. It was pure fun. Something in the air to climb for no reason at all but for amusement and gaiety.

It was everything I would want Beauty to be in that moment. Standing by itself, self-sufficient, autonomous,  It overwhelmed me and to be overwhelmed like that was a pleasure that only happens that way every now and again. Among other things it releases me utterly from the burden of understanding the City in any deep way, beyond the surface way I have experienced it. The City doesn't need to be mine. It can't be mine.

For what is the City in my mind but that imaginary set of spatial axes in a structure called to being in my mind, an imagined simultaneous slice-of-time of the City as it is right now, or at any moment, a snapshot of its real reality,  but a reality which I or anyone else cannot possibly access or know? By reason these structures of the simultaneous City in our minds for which we have to fill in all the gaps between the bits we've seen can't possibly exist in reality. Yet we use them, the structures, to imagine the City as real as the real City, and to love it as the City we think it is, in its fleetingness, in the few moments we have when our imagined City is anything remotely close to the real one.