In her book Gentrification of the Mind, historian Sarah Schulman argues that gentrification destroys communities in which people with differing perspectives come together, replacing them with “homogeneous neighborhoods . . . vulnerable to enforcement of conformity.” With the construction of the Hudson River Park, the largest green space built in Manhattan since Central Park, New York City officials and corporate interests have dramatically illustrated Schulman’s argument.
Over the course of the last 25 years, the Hudson River Park project transformed the derelict industrial waterfront into a sanitized public park that now appeals to corporations, the wealthy, and tourists. But, as David Wojnarowicz writes in Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, that abandoned industrial waterfront had been a haven for the city’s queer community who had repurposed the abandoned space during the AIDS crisis for diverse artistic and collaborative purposes.
Last November, I visited the park-in-development to look for remnants of the world of alternative expression that Wojnarowicz wrote about. The derelict waterfront, cut off from the rest of the city after the Miller Highway collapse of 1973, offered a fruitful space for experimenting and imagining different ways of living; I wondered, what kinds of social and artistic possibilities might the current park contain?
On a chilly but sunny afternoon, I took a long, meandering walk from Pier 57 to Chambers Street. In contrast to the thriving ecology of artists and working class people who had once made the waterfront their own, I found on the new waterfront a park that encouraged a pacified, simplified view of history and social life.
In one revealing moment, I stumbled upon a construction site veiled by a green fence on which the Park Trust had installed informational posters celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Hudson River Park Act. The display promoted a narrative of linear progress and “revitalization” (implying previous death and decay) and characterized the old waterfront as “largely a derelict landscape of barbed wire, crumbling piers, parking lots and decaying warehouses.” One poster on the fence did offer a hint of the old waterfront as an alternative space for recreation, displaying photographs taken by Shelley Seccombe in the ‘70s and ‘80s, But the Trust presents her images without commentary or historical context, emphasizing in her photos only the decay and risk of the old waterfront rather than the room for artistic experimentation that it afforded many in New York’s queer community. A more in-depth article deep within the park’s website describes how Seccombe’s pictures “beautifully [depict] New Yorkers’ interactions and explorations among the ruins” in a time “when the decaying piers became an official playground of sorts for people seeking freedom at the water’s edge.” Many people in the queer community, the article describes, found the waterfront to be fruitful for “spontaneous, unsanctioned by government uses,” in particular “to gather, recreate and to create art.”
In the spring of 1983, artist and writer David Wojnarowicz, along with painter Mike Bidlo, wrote the “Pier 34 Statement,” issuing a call to other artists to embrace the abandoned waterfront spaces by declaring that “there is no rent, no electricity, no running water, no dealers, no sales, no curatorial interferences. There is 24 hour access, enthusiasm, deep sudden impulse and some sense of possibility for dreaming.” As opposed to the one-sided narrative of decay, danger, and decline told by the current park’s promotional materials, queer artists saw the waterfront as a place of freedom, a space where values of rebellion and expression could be held in higher regard than economic gain.
In addition to Wojnarowicz and Bidlo, artists like Jean Foos, Luis Frangella, Peter Hujar, and many others made their mark on Pier 34, along with countless anonymous graffiti artists. Their collaboration offered a “possibility for dreaming,” the opportunity to oppose dominant cultural values and to develop new ways of thinking in opposition to the dominant cultural values of heteronormativity and consumerism.
The park display, however, obscures this vision of innovation. Instead, the Park Trust tells a story of natural, inevitable progress, expressed through then-and-now pictures that contrast an abandoned, bleak past of industrial decline with current images of greenery, calm socialization, and family life. The “now” photos suggest sanctioned social activities of exercise and relaxation, often framed by sunsets that evoke a utopianism that glosses over the struggles of real life. None of the representations of the modern park depict moments of artistic creation or political organizing. In the eyes of the Park Trust, this is a space that does not require someone to dream of other possibilities; the dream has been dreamt and it has resulted in this park.
The narrative espoused by these posters echo those of the politicians and business leaders of the ‘70s and ‘80s who promoted simplified stories of a dangerous, derelict and socially useless waterfront to justify its development. Schulman calls this storytelling a “gentrification of the mind,” which obscures reality and replaces it with something that feels more palatable. Replacing complexity with simplicity, mental gentrification results in passivity and a lack of awareness of the active processes through which social progress actually comes about. It ignores the real suffering, rebellion, and death inherent in social movements like those during the AIDS crisis and instead presents progress as an inevitable natural force. The modern park does not open new possibilities, as the old waterfront did; instead it aspires to be simply a space of obedience and conformity.
This conformity was apparent from the very start of my exploration up at the park at Pier 57, which now boasts a redeveloped warehouse with Google offices, a food court, and public work spaces. Looking south from the pier’s rather bare rooftop park, I could see “Little Island,” an entirely new park pier, financed, designed, and controlled by billionaire Barry Diller—a revealing start to my walk. Pier 57 offered a clear view of the park’s recent trend toward commercialization, hinting at the ways the park’s new design encourages consumption and economic productivity in everyday life, in addition to its narrative of historical progress.
In his personal history of the park, Creating the Hudson River Park: Environmental and Community Activism, Politics, and Greed, Tom Fox, the first president of the Hudson River Park Conservancy, claims that the original, community-based planners had different aims in mind, including the preservation of the natural habitat, the expansion of maritime activities, and open public access to the river. This hybrid design promised to extend the innovative, collaborative ecology of the queer waterfront while the emphasis on nature and open access promised to break down the artificial barriers between both the urban and natural world and between different groups of people. However, Fox writes that the city and state reduced public funding over time, opting instead to encourage commercial development, which oriented the design incentives of the park away from natural and cultural preservation and toward increasing real estate values in the adjacent communities. Fox puts it simply: those in power “put a ‘For Sale’ sign on the park.” No wonder, then, that the park and adjacent real estate now host offices for corporations such as Google, Citigroup, Disney, and RXR Realty.
Today’s waterfront architecture orients park-goers toward consumption and productivity. Through the hectic bike path that traverses the park, the ferries and water taxis that speed along it, and the congested Route 9A adjacent to it, the park turns the waterfront into a space for commuting and consumption. It facilitates the acceleration of daily life, encouraging us to make use of the slightest increment of time as a commodity. People might try to resist this frenetic pace through activities like yoga, meditation, and relaxation, which the park encourages. But rather than serving as strategies of collective creativity and true re-creation, these “decelerations” operate mainly as refreshment to stave off burnout and fuel lives for yet more production and consumption.
City residents can, of course, act against the commercial and social stories conveyed by the Hudson River Park’s structure. However, the ability to collectively take a stand intimately depends on the existence of alternative communities like those of the queer artists of the waterfront in the ‘80s and ‘90s, which no longer have a conspicuous presence along the waterfront. Schulman claims that as artistic production has become more professionalized and gentrified, there are fewer opportunities for finding alternative forms of value. As a result, reimagining the world becomes much more difficult, and it starts to seem essential to simply reflect back the values of those in power.
There is, however, one new part of the park that holds some promise for alternative forms of value. On Gansevoort Peninsula, the midpoint of my afternoon exploration, I found spaces in which artistic complexity defies the overall park narrative of a sanitized history and daily life. In 2021, the Whitney Museum commissioned sculpture artist David Hammons to construct a monumental installation on the peninsula’s south side called Day’s End. Hammons designed the open steel structure to mimic the location and dimensions of the old Pier 52, where contemporary artist Gordon Matta-Clark created the first Day’s End in 1975. Matta-Clark made his sculptural piece by cutting shapes through the pier shed with a blow torch, which was seen as so dangerous and subversive by city officials that they issued a warrant for his arrest, forcing him to flee the city. Hammons’s new steel installation pays tribute to the past through its shape and name, but there are no signs explaining this connection to park-goers. The peninsula park features an artificial, sandy beach with a prominent view of Day’s End, but one wonders what people relaxing and sunbathing there make of the empty abstraction. Though it expresses the creative and communal past of waterfront warehouses, it suggests a hollowed out, absent history, a whitewashed skeleton of a more daring past.
I first viewed Day’s End as what W.J.T. Mitchell calls a “monumental abstraction,” often used in modern public spaces as a palatable but empty piece of art. However, in its sterile reference to the past, I have come to believe that Hammons’s piece expresses a truth about redevelopment. While Mitchell argues that most of the world’s public art references violence (think of military memorials, statues of conquerors, etc.), Hammons’s structure references violence more indirectly. While appearing to project a uniform, pacified public space, Hammons actually presents an explicitly empty, polished art piece that expresses the impossibility of truly representing the lost queer art of Pier 52 in a modern, gentrified context. Hammons’s Day’s End represents, above all, the violence of abstraction and simple stories of history.
In an essay for the Whitney, former Whitney museum director Adam Weinberg describes the structure as “simultaneously social and subversive. It is hybrid: architecture, sculpture, drawing, site-specific project, land art, appropriated object, and none of the above. Situated on public land . . . it is owned by everyone and by no one, open and free to all.” In its position straddling the boundary between the river and land, past and present, abstraction and harsh reality, the installation expresses the haunting of the park by its lost past. But rather than being “open and free to all,” it hovers over the water, with “DANGER” signs in front of it, discouraging anyone from attempting to interact with it.
There are hints, however, that Day’s End could be more than a static memorial, that it could frame a place of demonstration and collective action. A careful viewer will notice that low tide reveals a walkway halfway down to the structure, inviting us, perhaps, toward a subversive use of this space. Day’s End might in the end subtly make a larger statement, serving as the kind of critical public art that is honest about its own contradictions and violence.
Meanwhile, the north side of Gansevoort Peninsula presents another possibility of action, positioning the park-goer toward another future. Park designers built a salt marsh in which they planted native grasses and submerged reef balls seeded with 20 million oysters. The educational signs that describe the marsh, with graphics that depict the transition from the pier into the water, present the boundary of the city and the river as porous and gradual, encouraging a hybrid, ecological understanding of the space. This single peninsula houses a maritime fire station, a soccer field, a beach, a playground, native and pollinator-friendly plant species, a salt marsh, and much more. In its hybrid purposes, this peninsula encourages park goers to see themselves as a part of the natural world, pushing them to interact with and take a role in its preservation.
These efforts at natural restoration hearken back to the origins of the park in 1985, when the city abandoned the Westway project, an underground interstate highway. Community activists argued successfully that the planned project would rid the Hudson of the pier footings that had become a breeding ground for the striped bass. This success served as a fitting metaphor: the very foundations of the piers that used to host a social, queer, ecology saved the waterfront from complete redevelopment. It makes sense then that the park’s new piers should now make efforts to foster the river ecology. That said, laudable as the park’s efforts at natural preservation may be, they have a pacifying effect, distracting us from political and social action. By ignoring the past struggles of the waterfront and by teaching us to view environmental struggle as something that takes the form of composting and seeding the waterfront with oysters, the park turns us away from the kinds of intensive organizing and activism on a larger scale that are needed to address larger environmental problems. These kinds of efforts don’t fit well within the park’s simple narrative that individuals can solve problems through small, everyday actions, or that the solutions will occur naturally without our efforts.
Residents of the city can choose the position they will take toward the Hudson River Park. They might commute, shop, and relax within it in the ways it prescribes. They might, instead, subvert the park’s aims by gathering, protesting, and creating art within it. In the absence of established communities and spaces in which these forms of action have value, however, city residents have fewer opportunities to come together and imagine other ways of living. Those who wish to do so will find a park so commercialized and homogenized as to be without much promise in true artistic and social innovation.
Image: Will Blanche, Pause For Relaxation on a Pier Overlooking the Hudson River, photograph, 1973, (National Archives, College Park).