The George Washington Square Park Project

This morning I went to the dentist, whose office is Washington Square Park. I arrived a few minutes early and walked around the renovated grounds, which were covered with black-eyed susans. The effect was admittedly impressive: I immediately wished that I owned a townhouse on the square!

The aesthetic of the park is both more formal than it used to be -- via straighter paths and fewer drug dealers -- and less formal, to the extent that you have these very naturalistic tableaux installed in different sections of the park.

It's hard to ever complain about a field of blooming echinacea; it took my mind off the agony that I was about to incur in dental office, not because of the cleaning -- although that brought me no great pleasure -- but my fear of the classic-rock radio that is always playing.

Sure enough, when I went inside, they turned on the stereo and I was subjected to 'I Am the Walrus,' a song I once loved and could probably still admire had I not heard it 50 billion times.

Perhaps more disturbing was the next song -- 'Love My Way' by the Psychedelic Furs -- which made me realize more than ever that the music of my youth has been relegated to 1) obscurity, 2) the oldies stations, or 3) concert festivals with 'reunion headliners.' I remembered how that song used to strike me as darkly romantic, inscrutable, aloof and ambivalent -- perhaps even somewhat ironic -- a theme song for an entire generation of cynics and misanthropes, not to mention those years when I walked through the November rain praying to die of pneumonia (via internal melodrama). But as the deejay said, now it's just 'a great rock song' from the eighties. Some songs are 'safe' for mnstm commercial radio and some are not; increasingly I only want to hear the latter, e.g., 'Something I Learned Today' by Hüsker Dü or 'Pay to Cum' by the Bad Brains. But then again, it might be ruined for me if I heard it at the dentist, so maybe it's better just to leave such scenarios in the realm of imagination. More to the point, am I the only one who finds this 'search result' depressing (via Google): 'Send 'Pay To Cum' Ringtone to your Cell.'

The hemlocks made me wish I was living somewhere in the north, by which I mean in a frozen, inhospitable landscape in which 'artistic expression is completely divorced from the relentless pressures of capitalism.'

From a different vantage point, the flowers seemed to extend into the distance like the yellow-brick road to the Emerald City.

Comments

[cfl]

I'm blown away by the impression your images give of a lush, new WS. Far cry from what I remember. Reminds me of the beautifully wild/controlled gardens of Battery Park City -- at least as I recall them, from regular bike rides there in the late 90s.

"The Late 90s." Might as well be the late 1890s. The music of the mid-late 20th century retains its personal meaning and associations, but the original, cultural context feels obscure or evaporated. The world of "I Am The Walrus" seems ancient and disconnected from the present. Yet hopefully something transcends, and endures beyond the memories of those of us who were "there."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/arts/design/23edelmann.html?_r=3&hpw

[Matthew Gallaway]

Thanks for the insights, C -- the park really is quite lovely, albeit in a very moneyed way that's no doubt reflective of 2k9.