“Criticism is an act of love,” writer, scholar, and intrepid walker Garnette Cadogan wagered at the first session of New City Critics, “it is as much a mode of being as a mode of discourse.” For their first assignment, the six fellows, who hail from different parts of the country and the world and are situated all over New York City, were asked to explore their own block, to walk its span over the course of a week, recording its details, quirks, and daily happenings. The resulting portraits reflect the unique sensibility each writer brings to these hyperlocal settings, which in turn frame larger phenomena that include stormwater management, the politics of place names, ersatz infrastructure, the tyranny of private property, and other signs of the never-ending onslaught of change and development that characterizes our city. In the following excerpts we begin to see how the New City Critic moves in and is moved by the world.
Ellie Botoman traces fluidities and currents from the elevated dry ground of Bed-Stuy:
When it rains, the temporal torrents along the curbside recall the moats of the street’s namesake, Thaddeus Kościuszko, a Revolutionary War-era military engineer known for incorporating water into his fortifications. He dammed streams and dismantled bridges to give American troops time to withdraw across the Hudson, scouted safe passage over water crossings, and established defensive lines along the banks of the Delaware.
In the hotter months, condensate trickles down from cheap air conditioning units, anointing the sidewalk the erosive of their mechanical comfort. There are the summer block parties, where open hydrants send a soothing iridescent mist into the air and fill kiddie pools and water guns to keep the brutal heat away. The neighbors who set up their grills on the sidewalk and pass around paper-cupped libations so cool it makes your teeth hurt. There are the basketball courts where players of P.S. 256 send graceful arcs of sweat and steam into the air.
From the Manhattan Bridge, Philip Poon finds a perverse romance in infrastructure’s unscripted moments:
“Will you marry me?”
. . . is something you’ll never hear on the pedestrian path of the Manhattan Bridge. It’s uncomfortably narrow and lined with bland concrete pavers, much of it graffitied. On even the sunniest days, there are only a handful of people — mostly tourists with cameras or joggers with their headphones in. At night the path is deserted and half of the lights are broken, leaving much of it in darkness.
And the noise . . . every few minutes as subways roar by, only a few feet away, the tracks emit loud, high-pitched screeches and unpleasant vibrations that shake the pathway.
The most noticeable and defining aspect of the path is the fencing. It’s unusually tall, and most of it is generic painted chain-link that borders both sides of the pathway. But only one side, the side facing the East River, is curved — shaped to make it more difficult for people to climb. To climb, and jump.
The fencing is neither consistent nor uniform. At certain points, it is cut and torn open to allow for cameras to get an unobstructed view. At other points, these holes are patched with more chain link fencing. When the path crosses Division Street below, the fencing disappears. At the monumental stone supports of the bridge, the fencing becomes a vertical pattern of thin metal rods spaced like prison bars to form a series of locked gates. These gates prevent access to the viewing balconies overlooking Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Wait, viewing balconies?
And down in Flatbush, Daphne Lundi confronts the surreal layering of words and worlds in a neighborhood undergoing rapid redevelopment:
Walking Flatbush feels like time travel. I can find myself in front of a building that looks like it’s been untouched for decades, or I can stumble into the future. The daycare on Parkside and Bedford that my brother went to is still covered with faded murals of Black history luminaries. On the corner of the building, there’s an inscription: “This project was sponsored by Mayor Dinkins’ Office. Safe Streets/Safe Summer ‘91.” The funeral home that was once on Nostrand and Hawthorne is now a restaurant and bar. Walking down Clarkson on the way to my mom’s apartment, I’m greeted by new rentals that all have friendly, somewhat Midwestern names: “The Leah,” “The Benny,” “Rogers Residences.” If there isn’t time for Midwestern pleasantries, the name of the building and the website where you can look up vacancies is simply the building’s address. 50Clarkson.com, 150Clarkson.com, 210Clarkson.com. It would be much easier if developers banded together and bought www.clarkson.com. These new buildings display the “Equal Housing Opportunity” logo that’s required by law. In a neighborhood that’s lost 15 percent of its Black residents between 2010 and 2020, the proclamation feels hollow.
In Gowanus, Anoushka Mariwala, searching for water, considers how contamination reveals the limits of empirical measurement:
That I am standing on asphalt here is an infallible dream. This is marshland, before Gowanus, before Breukelen. The creek was named after Gouwane, a sachem of the indigenous Canarsee. Then after it was baptized, it was colonized: dredged, straightened, bulkheaded, and filled. The creek was turned into a canal.
Everywhere, I am informed, there is Trichloroethylene (TCE). Below me, inside of the ground, there are 86,000 micrograms of TCE per cubic meter of soil, an urgency that asks first for an imagination of soil as a perfect cube, and second for an invention of a concrete or bituminous lid. The TCE is most treacherous between the ground and sky — that is, at the horizon of surfaces, in stillness. Today they are calling this manufactured threat Soil Vapour Intrusion. This is the source of several urgent Interim Remedial Measures. In the beginning of 2023, an objection was raised with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, in consultation with the New York State Department of Health. “We, the undersigned, write to voice our strongest possible opposition to the fatally flawed so-called ‘expedited cleanup of contamination at the 514 Union Street site (“site”) located at 514 Union Street, Brooklyn, NY.’”
But “every water has its own rules and offering,” Anne Carson reminds us in “1=1.” “Every water has a right place to be but this place is in motion, you have to keep finding it, keep having it find you.” I have been trying to find the water by looking into the canal, all the while repelled by the knowledge that I am looking at toxicity. I want to defend it, when you ask me if it smells bad. It doesn’t smell. Not even when it rains. No, I haven’t touched it, there’s nowhere I have found that will let me get close enough.
Returning home to Crown Heights, Ekemini Ekpo contemplates whom “private property” protects:
I stuck to what I knew — my little corner of Crown Heights. And as I waded down Nostrand Avenue, I peered into its horizontal tributaries — otherwise known as Places and Streets: Sterling Place, St. Johns Place, Lincoln Place, Union Street, President Street. And floating in the waters, not to be overshadowed amongst the miscellany, were a bunch of signs.
Like: The Monitex Security signs warning passersby to “Stay Out” of temporarily condemned construction sites. I assume the empty lot needs privacy while it gets liquified in its cocoon of planked wood and reconstituted as a chromed-out apartment. And then there were the laminated pieces of printer paper reading “CAUTION: The Department of Health Has Been Treating for Rats on This Property.” That sign might as well have read: “There was a problem (it’s rats), there is a problem (rats), and there will always be a problem (rats, again).” And I almost wanted to believe that the signs that read “Dr. Gladstone H. Atwell Intermediate School” or “Dedicated to the Memory of John P. Welch,” were memorials to men who handed out smallpox blankets or orchestrated the hit on Patrice Lumumba — then at least someone would have a sign worse than mine. I had mixed feelings when I learned they were instead memorials to hometown heroes.
From the storied Bed-Stuy goldfish pond, Shirt elides the distinction between love and attention:
We’ve been doing these evening walks that I’ve come to cherish. Noticing is free. Perceiving and ruminating on our surroundings is free. “Love is you” is spray-painted on the side of a building over there and maybe that’s all I needed to know tonight. Who are we if not all that we love? The artist Chloë Bass asks, “How much of love is attention?” My answer most days is: all of it. Some months ago, before it went New York Times-article and Tik Tok-viral, we stumbled upon a makeshift goldfish pond created and maintained by guys on the block, in a part of the bare sidewalk that filled up with water from a leaking fire hydrant on the corner. Even in the cracks, even in the physical manifestation of structural neglect, new worlds can emerge and be tended to.
