The White City

The palette of MyWy’s housing stock trends towards light and bright, with brick that references the many hues of limestone from nearly white (infused with gray and green), through a lemony lunar yellow, gold with ferrous flecks, and at the deepest saturations, radiant orange.

If we can take the word of Montrose, blogging a week or so back on Brownstoner, design decisions of Ridgewood’s early 20th century developers were inspired, in part, by the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair whose grounds were called “The White City.” American architects of stature, including Louis Sullivan and McKim, Mead, and White, designed the Fair’s buildings whose plaster and whitewash facades earned the fairgrounds its name. The 1893 Fair is cited as a powerful influence on the turn of the 20th century neo-classical/beaux arts movement in American residential and civic architecture. Brownstone and dark brick facades were passé, paler materials were embraced as a means to transform American cities from shadowy squalor to sunlit splendor.

Here is Ridgewood, imperfectly reflecting the idealized “White City” of another century as property owners struggle to keep that promise of splendor despite the encroaching signatures of (paradoxically) anonymous youth. It seems likely that young men, mostly, intent on asserting their encrypted presence, pass through the night (the rightful hours of youth) and pause, sometimes, to spell out mists of heavy color in chest-wide loops. I don’t think the graffiti writers are champions of squalor, though they may be its witnesses.

Here are some places where pale brick and/or pale paint reassert - albeit with varying degrees of confidence and hope - the idyll of the White City.









Queenswalk: The Plan for Ridgewood, Part 2
http://queens.brownstoner.com/2013/08/queenswalk-the-plan-for-ridgewood-part-2/

Fungus / Algae / Lichen / Trees / Angles

Lichen, I have learned from internet sources, are "composite organisms" combining algae, capable of photosynthesis, and fungus...capable of sustaining a homeostatic environment for the algae (eg, optimal moisture.) Lichen subsist on water and dust. Mineral dust. I may be wrong but my quick reading of Wikipedia indicates that lichen aren't decomposers, they don't contribute to the decay of their host/support. So I think about the graffiti that leads to overpaintings that leads to the taking of pictures by me: the graffiti is photosynthetic/dynamic, the subsequent paint concealments establish a degree of visual homeostasis, the net effect is a visual embellishment (depending on your aesthetics.) So there's something lichen-like in the wall paintings. Maybe.

On some trees are zinc blue medallions of lichen, graphic and decorative. Others have a dusty look with specks and tints of hazy green - incipient lichen or algae free agents?

On these tinted trunks, green shades all sides of the tree, encircling north, south, east, west, from what I can tell. I could check with a compass to see if one side is most likely to be most green. After five years here I am still uncertain of the cardinal points - my sense of direction is baffled by the collision of places and shifting street plans of MyWy. We live in the irregular angles where the long-abandoned footpaths of native people and the tracks of elevated trains cross a grid laid out and lined in fireproof brick by 20th century developers.

I wish I knew the names of the fungus I find, though. The shelf fungus on a stump, the short lived profusion among tree well grasses of mushrooms with a very edible look to them, and this firmly billowing cloud at the base of a locust near the library. It's the third iteration in as many years of impressive fungal presence at the foot of this tree.

Paint in Places 1

I moved to this neighborhood five years ago. In the first months here I slowly wore down my grief for the place I had left by walking and looking. And, with effort, I found I gradually tuned my inner sense of the beautiful to what I saw around me here.

I first noticed lichen scales and the glow of mossy - almost algal – green and gold stains on phone poles and the trunks of rough barked trees. On and about these same trees and poles I noticed the prevalence of mushrooms and shelf fungi. It seemed I had moved to a place that was enhanced and made lovely by yielding to decay.

More recently the color field walls and doors where graffiti has been inscribed and later concealed with paint have come to interest me. The overpaintings - usually semi-regular polygons diverging in color (to various degrees) from the original surface – have a poignancy, reflecting a dialog of two (or more) strangers over time, each claiming dominion over a surface and simultaneously asserting and contesting the use of that surface for purposes of display.

Building owners and long-time residents, finding me with my camera trained on their bricks, have expressed to me their disgust for the graffiti (and, obliquely, for the people who write it.) For some, the defaced door and wall may wound like an indignity and an impingement on the privacy which ownership should confer. The motivations of those who tag are doubtless wide ranging and complex, but may include the desire for a semi-anonymous notoriety, a shrugging off of privacy, a hasty excursion through public life. The city presents itself, after all, as endless planes: potential supports and frames and invitations for paint. I empathize both with the inclination to mark the surfaces and to cover the marks, and in the formal arrangements of these photographs I claim the painted surfaces, momentarily, for my own purposes.

I think there is more to be said about this – about aesthetics and the sense of home – and about the mutable meanings of paint in the public spaces of neighborhoods. But for now, several examples of paint in places.