ILLUSTRATIONS#3

TITLE
CONTENTS

ABSTRACT
EPIGRAPH
INTRODUCTION
METHOD
ILLUSTRATIONS

(1) Pleasures

(2) Opportunities

(7) Ambivalence
DISCUSSION
APPENDIX
REFERENCES

Write us.

ILLUSTRATIONS

(3) Loved Ones

New York's my home --

Let me never leave it --

New York's my home sweet home.

-- Gordon Jenkins (1946), "New York's My Home"

A third upbeat and optimistic theme tended to identify New York with the presence of certain important friends or loved ones who make the City a meaningful place or treasured home in which to live.

In this connection -- one informant simply associated the City with a local concentration of close friends from her days in college at Cornell:

NY is the place where I am closest to a significant number of my good friends. It is the place where even those companions that don't live in NY come to socialize. Since I developed relationships with almost all of my current friends while at Cornell University, I have photographed the lobby of the Cornell Club. In this space isolated from the crowds & the noise of NY I am surrounded by images of Cornell and nostalgic memories of time spent with friends. At the club the reasons I came to and remain in NY are the most clear to me.

This informant's photo of the dark interior at the Cornell Club came out as somewhat underexposed and (as explained later) in only two dimensions (PHOTO 3A). However -- expressing himself in a similarly positive manner and shooting a more strongly person-centered stereo photograph (PHOTO 3B) -- another informant described his experience of New York in the context of a love for his girlfriend Candy [disguised name], whom he considered to be a "real" New Yorker. It seems fair to say that his telescoping of the New York Experience into this rather passionately romantic expression of devotion and its successful reflection in three dimensions appear both penetrating and touching in the context of an otherwise routine class assignment:

I [took] my "what New York means to me" picture in my apartment on 120th Street. The subject of my picture is my girlfriend, Candy....

I met Candy ... in the spring of 1995 after I finished my first year of graduate school. We've been dating for 15 months. She is a native New Yorker, and so I decided to take her photo.

When I write that Candy is a real New Yorker -- I mean it like this. She was born in Manhattan, she was raised in Manhattan and she has lived in Manhattan her entire life. She has no driver's license because she has never had a need to drive. Whenever she talks about an address, she always gives cross streets. For example, she says that she goes to such and such [a] doctor "on 86th and Madison" or that her cousin works at a place on 52nd and 3rd."

Candy's ethnicity is Hispanic: her mother emigrated from Puerto Rico and her father is Spanish. To say the least, Candy has struggled her entire life; her mother raised her alone in Spanish Harlem. Through a lot of hard work and discipline, however, Candy received a scholarship from Columbia College and graduated Magna Cum Laude.

I love Candy very much.

For another respondent, when combining both the verbal and visual components of her contribution, the expression of person-centered contentment seemed more bittersweet. Thus, she took a darkly underexposed photograph of a dreary skyline seen from her apartment window to show a rather unflattering bird's eye view of her neighborhood and then proceeded to describe the picture in glowing terms that focused partly on the excitement of her surroundings but primarily on her relationship with her boyfriend Jim [disguised name]:

My view of New York was taken from my apartment window at 305 Spring Street, showing a street scene from Greenwich Street to the Hudson River. This view represents different things to me at different times. After a long day at school and work, when I turn the corner from Hudson to Spring Street, usually around 9 or 10 pm, the flashing bar signs, night time revellers, and street traffic are somewhere between salvation and temptation. I know I am a few steps from home, my boyfriend, and dinner, but I feel like a hermit unlocking the front door when the rest of New York is outside my building partying, moving from McGoverns or the Emerald to the Bell Cafe, Don Hill's, or the Ear Inn. On a beautiful day when Jim convinces me not to do my homework we walk down the street to the river and enjoy the Hudson River Park, and on a good night we enjoy a drink with Jim's brother who bartends at the Ear, or Tommy at the Emerald who knows more about Ireland than my Irish boyfriend, and chase the gossip which travels from bar to bar. A really good Friday night ends with a visit to Gary at Don Hill's who runs the door at Squeeze Box, better known as transvestite night, never making us pay, letting us in before the hipsters who wonder how the two squares got in. New York to me is a city of neighborhoods, and this view represents my neighborhood and the good feelings I have for the people who live and work there, and the great times I have there with Jim.

Still another informant who spoke in terms of human relationships -- a foreign student who has traveled to the U.S. from half way around the world -- developed a rather poetic extrapolation of his ambivalent feelings concerning the view from his apartment (PHOTO 3C). These concern a sign painted on the wall of a nearby building that says "Your Ad," that lends itself to elaboration in terms of mistress imagery, and that carries strong associations with loved ones missed deeply because they are far away:

"YOUR AD." Always there, open, available, giving, generous, proud and tranquil, despite its fragility, its vulnerability from the aggression that it invites, that it advertises. When I stare out the window, it greets me, comforts me, satisfies my desires, it is my fetish, it is mine. However, it is out there for any one to take and possess. I'm constantly afraid that it will give in to someone else. I'm always on the edge, it might betray me. It flirts. It's so graceful. What a shame it would be if ever it was to be tempted, tainted, sold!

"Your Ad" is on the wall of a nearby building. I stare at it a few times a day. I often wake up in the middle of the night and sit up in my bed so I can look out the window and make sure that it is still there.

It has become in a way a substitute of my family and friends who are continents away. I sometimes read it: Your Dad. It watches over me. It is one of the last few survivors, the last few resistors, the last few poets....

Imagine my happiness upon moving into my current apartment, which overlooks "Your Ad." As I stare at its white and cracking skin and its strong black character, I feel that there is hope, it gives me courage. But my fear remains. How long will it be able to survive the madness that lurks? How long will it be before it is sold? What does it take these days for a wall to keep its purity?

Pushing the personification of the cityscape to an even more extreme degree, another respondent -- also far from her native land -- actually spoke of the water towers on New York rooftops as if they were people or, indeed, friends. Thus, she found these external manifestations of the City's antiquated plumbing systems to be "compassionate and human"; she celebrated them as "a brief glimpse into the humane part of New York." In particular, this informant has achieved a symbolic cathexis with the water tower visible from her office window and shown conspicuously in her stereograph (PHOTO 3D). She finds this numinous object to be "comforting, always dependable, always watching ... always there, waiting":

The first time I noticed them I was struck by the surreal image they created -- little wooden huts above the concrete jungle. They looked so out of place; their simple wooden structure seemed so compassionate and human, vehemently negating the hardness of New York streets. I was amazed. I was obsessed. I wanted to go up on a roof, climb the little ladder and glimpse inside this enigma.

I started playing guessing games, trying to decipher the wooden towers' function and meaning. My first guess was that they were little abandoned houses, built one hundred years ago and inspired by a passing whim of some Chinese fashion (which would explain why there are so few of them outside downtown Manhattan). My other guess was that they were built by bird lovers, who wanted to attract more birds to the city by providing them with ready made nests. Then there was the theory that the towers were placed on the roods by extraterrestrials, for observatory purposes, and that nobody ever questioned their being there, since everybody just assumed they were there from "before."

Maybe I was slightly disappointed when I found out that they were just water towers and not UFO stations or eagle nests. Still, this explained why my first impression of them was that of compassion and humanity, for what else could one think of when contemplating water. For me those water towers provide a brief glimpse into the humane part of New York, which continues to need water despite its independence and strength.

Today I have my own water tower, which I see from my office window. Up close it's very overpowering and strong. Yet it's also comforting, always dependable, always watching. I study it from my desk, always amazed that this strange vision has not evaporated yet. I watch it leak, glisten in the sun; observe the ways the wood turns different colors depending on [the] day. It's always there, waiting.

When I think about it, it still seems surreal to me to have those strange structures lounging on all those roof tops. They just seem out of place, out of date. Maybe that is why I'm so fascinated and intrigued till this day.