Topographic Memory and Oxidized Spaces
“The city is in its history.” Aldo Rossi [1]
A city can never fully erase the landscape that it occupies. This is true even in New York, where an ethos of commerce and artistic culture continue to fuel an insatiable thirst to build. The density and scale of Manhattan’s urban fabric make it difficult to perceive the concealed vestiges of its ecological past. Take Canal Street, for example, where hawkers sell faux Prada bags and ‘I-heart-New York’ t-shirts along a busy corridor of guerilla retail that is now slowly succumbing to upscale hotels and hipster food halls. Five diverse neighborhoods converge along this intensely active threshold that also acts as a gateway to New Jersey via the Holland Tunnel and to Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge. Canal Street has negotiated the boundary between territories occupied by city dwellers for centuries, while also representing a significant region within the island’s pre-urban ecology. Fleshing out a critical history of the landscape embedded within this complex environment takes an imaginative leap similar to a game of exquisite corpse. The present study uses additive and reductive methods to reveal the character of topographic memory and explore the realm of oxidized space. Both categories begin to frame an understanding of how vanished landscapes permeate and transform urban contexts over time.
In the mid-19th century, the waterfront of Manhattan was a discordant stretch of boatslips and docks built on a foundation of muck, animal bones, oyster shells, and sunken ships. Ceaseless appropriation of aquatic real estate around its southern tip effectively sealed off the island’s natural watercourses from the East and Hudson Rivers. As a result, standing water frequently accumulated inland and spurred numerous outbreaks of waterborne disease that plagued the city’s slums and threatened a prosperous merchant class. Yet despite the eminent threat of deteriorating sanitary conditions, the artificial edge remained an essential conduit of a thriving economy. New Yorkers were back to business as usual after the Civil War ended in 1865. The rift between north and south only temporarily interrupted the flow of commercial expansion moving east to west along the Erie Canal, whose 363-mile stretch connecting the Hudson River to Lake Erie made New York Harbor the most powerful port in the country, if not the world. Within this context, Egbert Ludovicus Viele decided to engage a powerful form of mapping to document Manhattan’s potentially catastrophic transformation of the natural environment.
Viele first published his groundbreaking study, “The Topography and Hydrology of New York,” in 1865. His narrative examined sanitary and topographical conditions on the island of Manhattan and was accompanied by an innovative map that represented the city’s network of streets and artificial coastline in relation to the natural systems they had displaced. The study demonstrated a fundamental shortcoming of the Commissioners Plan of 1811, which catalyzed Manhattan’s rapid expansion around a two-dimensional grid, while largely ignoring the island’s complex, three-dimensional landscapes. Viele was a New York native and West Point-educated civil engineer who got his first taste of Manhattan’s penchant for erasure in 1856, when the Central Park Commission announced an open competition to design the city’s first major public park. He submitted a proposal after carefully surveying the area between present-day 59th and 106th street and based his concept on incorporating the existing topography and natural features of the site. In the end, the more exuberant “Greensward Plan” submitted by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux was selected with Viele hired on as the project’s chief engineer. Despite the triumphs of Central Park, the project’s radical manipulation of the existing landscape haunted Viele. It remained a critical impetus behind his decision to create a lasting record of the original marshes, streams, and natural contours that were rapidly disappearing across the island.
Viele's writing and drawings from this time foreshadow the concept of topographic memory. “I know it is generally supposed,” he wrote, “that when the city is entirely built upon, all that water will disappear; but such is not the case.” [2] Topography exhibits a mnemonic capacity in at least two ways within the urban realm. First, the earth establishes the underlying ground upon which cities are built. Though its surface can be altered during the course of development, the earth’s dense section has been created by forces that will continue to shape man-made contexts long after they have supplanted the natural environment. An urban ground plane always retains a trace of its sectional past as part of the earth. Second, topography is connected to a broader sense of place, which has a tendency to persist. The Greek word topos, an etymological ancestor of place and a root word of topography, denotes the perceivable boundary of an area’s containment. While rational cartographic grids delineate urban territories and establish a framework for localized architectural edges, the landscape creates the broader boundaries of a city’s regional placement within the world. Water lapping and eroding a shore, or the constantly changing gradient of light on the horizon are powerful examples. Viele knew that the innate characteristics of the landscape would ultimately limit and modify the incessant urban expansion that defined his era and this meant that an epic struggle with water was inevitable for the island of Manhattan.
Nearly 150 years after Viele’s stark prediction, Hurricane Sandy inundated coastal regions of New York and several other territories along the eastern seaboard. As part of the government’s response to the devastation, FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) published a new Flood Insurance Rate Map in 2013 that significantly enlarged the flood zones of Lower Manhattan. Overlay FEMA’s map with Viele's and an immediate correlation between the city’s most vulnerable areas and the historic landscapes that once channeled, held, and mediated the flow of water is revealed. All of the artificial land and docks that claimed large portions of New York Harbor and the island’s surrounding rivers lie well within the floodplain, as well as a vast stretch of the Lower East Side where the Stuyvesant Swamp once thrived. The former Collect Pond just south of Canal Street near Centre Street and Lispenard’s Meadow also reappear as an uncanny trace. Lispenard’s Meadow once defined the western edge of Manhattan between current-day Duane and Spring Streets and linked to Collect Pond via a stream running northwest roughly where Canal Street is today. After years of contamination from the byproducts of 18th century tanneries and butcheries, the pond was hastily dredged in 1811 and a prison known as ‘The Tombs’ was erected on the muddy ground left in its wake. The surrounding topography and a network of underground springs repeatedly brought water back, which wreaked havoc on prisoners and the nearby Five Points slum. A mile-long ditch spanning forty feet in width was eventually made to properly drain the area, but it too failed and became highly polluted. When the city paved it over in 1820 Canal Street was born.
The canal that failed to drain this extremely resilient landscape still resides underground and continues to influence the dank atmosphere above. Rusted grates and warped asphalt form the outer layer of a deep palimpsest created by the struggle between man and nature. Pedestrians frequently circumvent standing water that forms during the slightest rain fall and endures for days. If the concept of topographic memory explores the relationship between a city’s ground plane and its sectional past, then the documentation of oxidized space measures the effects of this relationship on our experience. The deteriorated character of oxidized space signals the presence of altered landscapes. Fragmented by the buildings and infrastructure that colonize their environment, landscapes adopt a strategy of weathering and decay. Water is a direct catalyst for the thin film of patina that forms on the surface of metals and leaves a trace of its path as it stains masonry walls, ceramic tiles, and concrete pavement. There is little luster along Canal Street, which is immersed in a palette of dark ochre, brown, and an almost musty blueish-green. The feeling is far from Midtown’s Deco opulence or the Upper East Side’s refined stone edifices.
There are major social implications tied to the occupation of urban lowlands as well. The aforementioned Five Points slum emerged just east of Collect Pond and was ripe with what Viele and 19th century physicians called miasma. “It is a well established fact,” Viele wrote, “that the principal cause of fever is a humid miasmatic state of the atmosphere, produced by the presence of an excess of moisture in the ground, from which poisonous exhalations constantly arise.” [3] Damp conditions permeated the tenement buildings along Mulberry Street for instance, whose southern-most stretch formed a major artery of the Five Points neighborhood. The street’s notorious ‘bend’ was the direct result of builders avoiding the wet soils adjacent to Collect Pond’s former site, though the move turned out to be a minuscule concession and water seeped into building foundations constantly. Dilapidated architectural conditions brought residents, mostly poor immigrants, outside to occupy the streets. This exterior life fostered a vibrant array of adhoc markets that tied ethnic traditions directly into American culture. However, it also spawned violent street gangs that loomed in alleyways and terrorized local businesses. Jacob Riis documented the tenement buildings of Five Points for his seminal work, “How the Other Half Lives,” in which he noted that, “all life eventually accommodates itself to its environment, and human life is no exception.” [4] Conversely, the landscape has adapted itself to human life and continues to powerfully influence the spatial and social development of Lower Manhattan.
Interest in New York’s ecological history is growing parallel to society’s need for more resilient architectural strategies facing the challenges of climate change in the present. Scholarly research on New York’s original environment is reaching a broader audience through best-selling books such as Ted Steinberg’s Gotham Unbound: An Ecological History of Greater New York (Simon & Schuster, 2014) and Eric W. Sandersen’s Manahatta: A Natural History of New York City (Abrams, 2009). There are even websites (i.e., www.welikia.org) that digitally recreate the island’s once thriving flora and fauna. Simply choose a location on the map and one is transported from car horns and ambulance sirens to the gentle gurgling of creeks. The question is: how can knowledge of natural systems operating in a pre-urban past guide a more attenuated architectural response to the deeply embedded characteristics of place? The theoretical categories of topographic memory and oxidized space suggest that landscapes are never totally erased by urbanization. Highly evolutionary in character, they adapt to human constructs in ways that directly shape the social and spatial character of city life. Architects should leverage design research methods to shift society’s understanding of cities as purely constructed products of urbanization. Our future depends on reconciling the altered landscape.
[1] Rossi, Aldo, “The Architecture of the City,” translated by Diane Ghirard and Joan Ockman, (Cambridge and London, The MIT Press, 1982), 34.
[2] Viele, Egbert L., “The Topography and Hydrology of New York” (New York, Robert Craighead, 1865), 10.
[3] Ibid., 4.
[4] Riis, Jacob A., “How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York,” (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890), 163.