Backlogs - Escaping the endless city (Sunday December 1st)

Deserted beach in Cold Spring Harbor 

The fascinating thing about a city this big is that I could take any subway, move a couple of kilometres up or down (one should not entirely forsake a measurement system just because people here prefer pounds and feet), come up to open air and be hard pressed to recognise that something has indeed changed… This is not truly a sentiment that is pervasive: unique landmarks appear everywhere and give different flavours to each metropolitan village, a very nice building here, a peculiar subway station there, the umpteen monument to soldiers or responders somewhere else. And yet the everyday NY street presents a unified front that is at times reassuring and at others begs for more variety in the lay of the land. 

Harbor in the eponymous Cold Spring

It was therefore with some elation that we went, this past weekend, for two consecutive adventures in Long Island and Tarrytown, in the east and in the north of the state, respectively. While not our first foray into un-urbanised land (we went, after all with Marion's family to Dia Beacon), it was the first in which we actively walked through field, beach and sand. We were privy to an insider tour of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (where James Watson discovered the structure of DNA in the early fifties) and a technical and informative elucidation on modern neurophysiological research, followed by a visit of the campus with its small two-storied houses and tranquil beach. We learned about horse-shoe crabs and understood how science-fiction films just have to look at terrestrial biology to get examples of really scary stuff. And we were able to experience first-hand what east-american highways look and feel like (we were, after all, traveling on the weekend after Thanksgiving).

The following day saw us forsake a guided tour in the Lower East Side, to give us some time to recover and prepare four our next excursion to Tarrytown, where Marion's host of past times welcomed us for an aperitif, a walk through town, enjoyable discussions on city vs. countryside life, photography, society and politics, and finally a feast in a picturesque italian restaurant where quality, quantity and choice strive to outdo one another. All this in a place that seems pulled straight out of a Edward Hopper painting, with winter afternoon lights illuminating wooden planked buildings as characteristic as they are charming.

A Hopperesque house being built on the CSHL campus

Two things struck us during these expeditions, one on an architectural level, the other on an urbanisation one. The first realisation was that while the places we visited were home to a very wealthy american population, the constructions consisted without exception of traditional american abodes, with opulence expressed by the usual mixture of wooden patios, mediterranean pillared entrances with round windows, and other architectural gimmicks. Not a single example of modern architecture, as one is want to see traveling around the european equivalent. Even in Ticino, with its ghastly disregard for aesthetic cohesion when it comes to building houses, there are always a couple of testimonials of a taste for modern spaces and forms that decorate the otherwise eye-jarring landscape.

President Teddy Roosevelt's house in Long Island

The second epiphany was that we are not used to the type of clustered colonisation that seem to be the standard here. Travel 1-2h in any direction outside a swiss city, and at no time will you see a place that is empty of the occasional farm, factory, church or residential building. The land is interspersed regularly and continuously with a density that raises when nearing a village or town, and lowers again as soon as we move on. Here the separation between land and village is clearly defined, and no buildings can be seen, gleamed or glimpsed from the stretch of road between cities, and it is hard to understand why a village was placed here instead of 2 or 3 miles down. (I suspect that a study of the lay of the land and the history of the 18-19th century would much better explain why each population centre resides on its actual location).

Industrial bridge on the Hudson river in Tarrytown

Our return to the city marked a stark contrast with the imagery we had been experiencing for the past two days, and plunged us back to another landscape, another density of inhabitants and another rhythm of existence. But for a while, we felt how the less frenzied and more laid back atmosphere of the countryside can attract people to these places just outside the City.

Back to New York on the 25A highway