Audio walking

Since I am currently sans camera, which puts a damper on my excursions (snapping photos is half the fun), here is something to satisfy the other senses. I have recently developed an obsession with audio walks, or sound walks, in NYC. Not  exactly audio tours--though they may act in a tour-like manner-- the walks to which I refer encapsulate the essence and many layers of the city through sounds and narrative. If you're up for a little time travel and reflection in the upcoming fall weather, I would definitely recommend doing one...or several.

I have gone on two so far, the first a work by artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller entitled "Her Long Black Hair" (2004).The experience starts at the southern gates of Central Park and takes the walker within, following the footsteps of a nameless blackhaired woman via several photographs taken at various points in the park. While walking (alongside Cardiff's audible footsteps), it is nearly impossible to distinguish between the sounds occurring in "your" park and that of Cardiff's world. Throughout the meandering is a stream of consciousness flow from Cardiff, the recitation of Baudelaire, music, slave narratives--an artistic represenation of this particular space and the art of walking itself.

You can read more about this walk and Cardiff's and Miller's other walking projects all over of the world, here.

The second walk, purchased off of Soundwalks.com, is slightly less abstract but still an in depth exploration of the walking space, in this case Ground Zero, narrated by  NYC author Paul Auster. The trek starts on Broadway at Saint Paul's Chapel between Fulton and Vesey where upon entering the cemetery you are instructed to sit on a bench, staring straight out to the fenced off construction site which once was the Twin Towers. Auster then takes you down Church Street, through Ground Zero, World Financial Centers 1, 2, 3 and the Winter Garden, and ends on a bench, waterside, looking out onto the Hudson. This is a beautiful, and of course heart-heavy experience due to the history of the space, spanning the time when this area was the hub of broadcasting and electronics, to architectural perspectives on building the Towers, followed by a conglomeration of news castings and personal recordings centered around their collapse on September 11, 2001. Also part of this audio portrait are the sounds and  "soul" of the buildings themselves, with the testament of artists, including the incredible perspectives of  Phillipe Petit (Man on Wire).

I would highly recommend this walk, along with checking out the website and the various others Soundwalks has to offer--Bronx Hip-Hop, Brooklyn's Dumbo district as well as a men and women's Hasidic walk, Chinatown, Little Italy--all seem to be full of character and narrated by quirky, and sometimes well-known, guides.  There are also walks for various cities in China and Paris.

I plan on doing all of them (even, with luck, eventually those in Paris and China), and also finding more audio-art walk sources, and will of course post on each experience.

So far, the effects of these walks have been disorienting; while they in one sense immerse you in the environment, their constant reflection on the history, emotion, and abstract concepts related to that space simutaneously puts you on a different plane. Shall I say, possibly, somewhere in the urban twlight zone, in between those many layers of New York.

Maybe that is the most pure city experience one can have.

Happy audio walking!

Don't you feel the breeze from the subway...

Why must the best photo opps occur when one does not have a camera?

I rarely visit Central Park without bringing back a mental keepsake whether delightful, disturbing or disorienting. Today's find may border on all three categories. Enjoying the luxury of a mid-week day off, I took my first ever jog through Central Park, running from 60th to 90th and then around the Jackie O Reservoir. Finally! Though my endurance has yet to grow, I felt like one of those people. Those people who run through the park,  such fine human machines stretching, flying across the urban savannah, past my leisurely and unthreatening mosie, faces anguished, t-shirts drenched. PAVEMENT FEARS ME.  IN MY MIND I'M A KENYAN.  I RUN THEREFORE I AM. I was one! At least for about 30 minutes.

Resorting to a brisk walk on the way back from the reservoir towards the subway to Astoria, I passed a group of seven girls, no older than 12, dancing on top of a vent attached to the Museum of Natural History. I noticed their long brown and tangled hair blowing around, some with skirts flying up over their leggings, some bending forward puckering up their lips. A couple less shy than others. Odd, I thought. Oddly cute (they were still young enough for this to be benign). I realized they were reenacting that oh-so-famous Seven Year Itch vent scene, when I vaguely heard one them say "Marilyn." Other little girls looked up at them enviously. I can get into a discussion here about the perpetuation of gender roles and the conflicts arising from such...but I won't.  That famous vent scene was shot for the first time, not so far off from where these young girls were posing and dancing to the delight and criticism of others--Lexington Avenue and 52nd Street.

What is even more eerie is that as I was trying to find an image, I noticed this scene was filmed on September 15, 1954, 55 years ago today! Synchronous or intentional? I'm not sure, but ponder-worthy all the same. 

There are so many layers to the city, it always makes me stop for a moment when some of those layers intersect in such unexpected ways.

Photo courtesy of gabrielleteare.com.

The Hidden World

Supposedly, the Conservatory Garden is the "best kept secret" of Central Park. Gem it is, but secret I am not so sure. It is a continuous hotspot for wedding backdrops and gets a fair amount of traffic during warmer seasons. It is also too well-kempt for that off-the-beaten-track sort of find (as compared to those quirky community gardens of the LES).

Instead, the secrecy of the garden is imbedded in its design. Bushes and shrubs mask more intimate areas that stray from the main walkways inviting repose, while trickling fountains and blossom-scented canopies create a full sensory experience. It is an induced and intentional secrecy, but that does not make it any less enchanting.

The fountains of the Conservatory in particular are displacing--whether they replicate natural phenomena amidst the artifice of design or hide behind trimmed bushes and draping crabapples, they give the stroller the sensation of stumbling upon a "secret" garden.

Sitting un-coincidentally in the English-inspired South Garden of the Conservatory, the Burnett Memorial Fountain and its intimate surroundings is an homage to Frances Hodgson Burnett, the author of The Secret Garden.

The young boy playing the flute and the girl raising a birdbath are meant to depict Mary and Dickon, the two main characters from the novel. The bronze statue is the work of sculptor Bessie Potter Vonnoh and was placed in the park in 1936 (it was fully restored in 1980). The sculpture overlooks a pool strewn with water-lilies, and is hidden by shrubs and flowers, such as these:

Walking north, or if you enter the garden through the Vanderbuilt gate and not via Central Park, you come upon an awe-filled stretch of perfectly trimmed lawn zooming straight back to a not-so-secluded geyser fountain.

This is the Italian-style Central Garden, which to the west harbors a wisteria pergola (translation: elevated gazebo overlooking the fountain, strewn with wisteria vines and other shrubbery), a personal favorite which was unfortunately closed on this last visit. However, when I visited last March I ran into three placid, straw-hatted painters, their easels propping up canvases donning thick brush strokes and bleak color conglomerations. I was convinced it was the ghosts of the early impressionists.

The hidden pergola.

Geyser fountain looking out onto 5th Ave.

Another detail of the garden which airs the affected mystique of hidden worlds? The canopied walkways, reminiscent of a Lewis Carroll setting, as though you have tumbled down the rabbit hole and opened your eyes to what could be the corridor to a prettied-up Hades. Yes...slightly embellished for dramatic effect, but the curved and tangled (crabapples?) are still quite fantastical.

Gold-plated dedications and memorials adorn the benches of these corridors. I would suggest reading them, some are fairly interesting. Last time I was there, I noticed a marriage proposal. (Not mine.)

The French-inspired North Garden holds one of the most gaze-worthy fountains, the Three Dancing Maidens (also known as Untermeyer Fountain) constructed by Walter Schott in 1910.

There is something a little too realistic about the muscles in their maidenly bronze backs, emphasized by the mist and speckles of fountain water, that channels just about every haunted Victorian- house story that I have heard. In the summer, when the sun is pounding on their wet bodies, the dancing and the splashing is pleasant amidst a crowd of people posing for pictures. In the winter, when the fountain is empty and the park desolate, well, I personally do not want to be alone with these women.

The ladies of the fountain.

Info:

For a comprehensive review of the Conservatory Gardens, click here.

The Conservatory Garden is located between East 104th and 106th streets. You can enter at 105th Street on 5th Avenue or at the 106th Street gate inside the park.

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