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H. G. Wells

Hudson Yards versus Hudson Valley: Where Is Your Field of Dreams?

June 18, 2019
by Peter Feinman
Hudson Yards (Max Touhey, Curbed NewYork)

Earlier this spring the Manhattan skyline changed rather dramatically. As the front page of the New York Times put it: “A Gleaming Behemoth Rises, for Better or Worse”(print edition March 15, 2019; online title Hudson Yards Is Manhattan’s Biggest, Newest, Slickest Gated Community. Is This the Neighborhood New York Deserves?).   It’s called Hudson Yards. Do you think there will ever be an historical society there? What kind of place is it?

Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for the paper, was fairly critical of this addition. To the publicity that the Hudson Yards was inspired by ancient Indian stepwells, Kimmelman asserted, it is about as much like them as Skull Mountain at Six Flags Great adventure is like Chichen Itza. Space does not permit a full expression of his criticisms so I will present only some summary comments that go the heart and lack of soul of the complex.

Over all, Hudson Yards epitomizes a skin-deep view of architecture as luxury branding. Each building exists to act as a logo for itself. The assortment suggests so many crowded perfume bottles vying for attention in a department store window display….

It is, at heart, a supersized suburban-style office park, with a shopping mall and a quasi-gated condo community targeted at the 0.1 per cent. A relic of dated 2000s thinking, nearly devoid of urban design, it declines to blend into the city grid….

Hudson Yards glorifies a kind of surface spectacle ⸺as of the peak ambitions of city life were consuming luxury goods and enjoying a smooth, seductive, mindless materialism.

The best feature of the complex is the 1100 feet high observation deck. It will have bleachers next year raising the height of one’s view even more. And that view is spectacular. You can practically see all creation. From there one can gaze upon the most magnificent vistas of New York imaginable…because from there you cannot see the Hudson Yards!

Kimmelman compares Hudson Yards to the beloved Rockefeller Center of Christmas tree fame and the new edifices are found wanting in almost every way imaginable. It’s not a place where Jane Jacobs would live, where organic communities will be nurtured, or where a community historical society will take root.

In the New Yorker, Hudson Yards is the Hotel California of New York, Alexandra Schwartz lambasts “unremitting artificiality” of the place. This supposed “neighborhood of the future” is a high-end corporate park enclave sustained by $6 billion in tax breaks, more than Amazon sought for its failed attempt to locate in Queens.  Schwartz even mocks the seeming triumph of urban reimagination as the “embodiment of this narcotic nowhere-ness” the nearby High Line exemplifies: a beautiful highway that has sliced through a living neighborhood, Robert Moses style, leaving luxury buildings in its wake.” Hell’s Kitchen has character, Hudson Yards has superficial slick size.

A subsequent article Hudson Yards: A City Within a City: New York’s newest neighborhood drew inspiration from Battery Park City, but is filled with 21st-century twists by C. J. Hughes in the New York Times, specifically notes this dichotomy using the 20th-century Battery Park City in lower Manhattan also along the Hudson River for comparison.

While Battery Park City may embody the lessons of urbanist Jane Jacobs, who favored short blocks [as in her beloved Greenwich Village], Hudson Yards can feel derived from her opposite, the master builder Robert Moses, whose approach was often big and muscular.

Hudson Yards is located in New York but is it really part of New York? Where does it belong?

Consider the view of Sebastian Modak, a New York Times reporter assigned to visit every place on the “52 Places to Go in 2019” list (New, Strange and Familiar, It’s Still New York, print edition April 7, 2019; I Walked the Length of Manhattan. Here Is What I Found.

My parents live in Dubai and the only way I’ve learned to like that superlative-obsessed, chrome-and- steel glass city is by gravitating toward the polyglot migrant communities that built the city and the scant traces of the pearl-diving beginnings that haven’t been swallowed up by the drive to build, build, build. To me, Hudson Yards is New York City trying to be the Dubai I’ve always avoided….

Getting back to the Hudson River Greenway was a relief, and entering Central Park made me ecstatic.

In another article (It’s Really Two Malls in One, print edition April 11, 2019; At Hudson Yards, One Mall for the Rich, and One for Everyone Else in New York Times, reporter Jon Caramanica takes to task all those people who have been comparing Hudson Yards to Dubai: “That’s a grave insult to Dubai [!]”

Two different lifestyles are being contrasted here. One is high above the river and for the very rich people; the other is at the street level where the real people live. As the superstar cities from Manhattan to San Francisco increasingly cater to the rich, the stratification increases. Sometimes it reaches a point where normal people cannot even afford to live in the city anymore.

In science fiction, the dichotomy takes on extreme forms. H. G. Wells wrote The Time Machine (1895) about time travel to the future but reflective of his present. The future division of beings into Morlocks and Eloi were a projection of the two classes he encountered: the one who struggled with ceaseless physical labor often underground while the other surface-dwelling leisured class was capable of producing nothing. In the Star Trek episode “The Cloud Minders,” once again there two classes of people. The Troglites mine the earth doing the physical labor while the intellectuals reside above it all in Stratos, a luxurious metropolis which literally floats in the sky. New York did extend the subway to reach Hudson Yards, but I cannot help but wonder if that is more for the people who work there then who live there. How did Gene Rodenberry know? In effect, these Hudson Yard residents are part of a global community like Spectre and not a local or national community.

At the same time that Hudson Yards was garnering unfavorable publicity, Hudson Valley was reaping more positive press. The article “An Instant Community in the Catskills” is about how people created an instant community in the Catskills. It’s about a group of people from the city who all bought homes in a tiny Catskill hamlet. According to the reporter, almost everyone in the group said they have richer social lives and deeper bonds as a result of having bought homes in Sullivan County. Critical to that result was having a sense of community in a place where none of them had lived before. In this case, they brought a community with them and then became part of the larger local [native or indigenous] people who lived there.

A similar pattern occurred in Hudson, NY, according to “Is the Hudson Valley Turning Into the Hamptons?” In this example it was a case of Brooklyn moving north to an Amtrak stop on the Hudson. However, the article serves as a cautionary tale about what the Hudson Valley maybe losing if it replicates West Manhattan aka the Hamptons.

As it turns out even the commuting suburb of Westchester where I live has become part of the story. Once upon a time, post-World War II and Korean War veterans and families moved north in great numbers from the city to find a piece of the American Dream. When they did so, they cut their home ownership or rental ties to the city. A new trend is for people to maintain their city residence while acquiring a second home in Westchester or Connecticut. In a “Close Escape from New York,” a broker exults:

There is the assumption that you have to go far away for it to be wild and natural. But we have areas where, thanks to rocky outcroppings, lakes and streams, you swear you are in New Hampshire.

One such person waxed poetic in her love of her new dwelling in Connecticut:

It was the stone walls that got me. You pass over the Saugatuck River, and there is this little house in Wilton where the road turns from two lanes to one, and when I see it, all of the tension from my neck and back falls away. We see woodpeckers; we see hawks; we see deer. But we don’t see people, and we don’t hear them. It’s a true escape. For us it’s a refuge.

Just as Central Park is for the city dwellers in the example cited above.

Another person making the move to Pound Ridge in Westchester shared similar views.

With young kids, it can get harder to travel. So we created our own Shangri-La up here. The benefit of the location is unbeatable.

The reporter observed of a third couple: “They longed to wake up in nature, by the water, for longer than a weekend.

Or as the couple said:

I feel much healthier out here. It feels good just to breathe fresh air.

Perhaps it is James Earl Jones, resident of Pawling in Dutchess County and supporter of the Friends of the Great Swamp in Putnam and Dutchess Counties who said it best:

For it is money they have and peace they lack.

And all these locations have historical societies too. We need to belong in time as well as space.

Hudson Yards is glitzy, glamorous, and soulless. It appeals to the 1% who want to be above it all living lives of conspicuous consumption. Meanwhile, the real people seek a connection with nature and community. Keep these thoughts and observations in mind when seeking to understand the true issues at stake in the culture wars between Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Tikkun Olam. Repair the World.

Alien Invasions: Orson Welles and Sean Hannity

January 16, 2019
by Peter Feinman
Fake News in 1938 (https://www.goodreads.com/)

The aliens are coming. The aliens are coming. The aliens are here!

Perhaps the greatest alien invasion of the United States occurred on October 30, 1938. While December 7 and 9/11 still are remembered by Americans (aren’t they?), this earlier invasion is often overlooked or forgotten.

This invasion occurred before television, before cell phones, before the internet, at a time when radio was the one way to reach a national audience at once. It is easy to overlook the significance of this phenomenon in American history. Everyone in the country might watch the same movie but it took weeks for it travel from town to town. Its opening in each theater was a big event. Movies did not open nationwide, it was radio which provided the venue through which one voice could reach out to a nation.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had availed himself of this new technology to communicate with the American people. His fireside chats helped Americans to face the darkest days of the depression with the positive message that there was nothing to fear but fear itself. Normally, this powerful means of communication was used for entertainment, music, comedy, and stories of the Shadow with Orson Welles. They now could be experienced by millions simultaneously. There were other possibilities as well.

On Sunday, October 30, at 8 p.m. a voice announced: “The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the air in ‘War of the Worlds’ by H.G. Wells.” As Ed Sullivan and the NFL later learned as well, Sunday night was a good time to reach out and touch the American public. And what followed was part entertainment and part an interplanetary Superbowl.

Following this introductory announcement, the show proceeded as a normal show. Suddenly there was “BREAKING NEWS.” The news in this case was the astronomical observation of explosions on Mars. The station then resumed its normal programming with dance music. Suddenly there was another “BREAKING NEWS.” This time it was the report of a meteorite striking in New Jersey. Shortly afterwards an on-the-scene reporter described a terrifying scene to the radio audience. The meteorite turned out to be a rocket ship and the invasion from Mars had begun.

As the radio show continued, reports of more and more landings occurred. Skillful radio announcers convincingly described the growing invasion. Truly it was a national emergency crisis. The announcers with great emotion reported on the terrified humans fleeing in panic from the alien invaders. There are debates over how many people heard the report of the invasion. People had alternative radio stations to which to listen. Nonetheless, it is evident that significant numbers of people did listen and did panic.  People did flee. People did clog some roads. One person apparently ran into an Indianapolis church where evening services were being held and yelled, “New York has been destroyed! It’s the end of the world! Go home and prepare to die!”

It should be noted that there is a long tradition in America of people believing the world is coming to an end. Usually such predictions have to do with the return of Jesus. It was almost a century earlier when the first “Great Disappointment” occurred. Now it looked like the cosmic intervention had occurred and in a way that no one had anticipated – an alien invasion.

The idea that the program was intended as entertainment and not a hoax makes some sense. After all, the introduction announced that the show was a dramatization of War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. But even if not planned as a hoax and even if the listeners had been informed in advance about the nature of the show, it still demonstrated the power of the new mass communication technology to engender fear and panic among its listeners.

Consider these examples last June when the United States government began to separate children from parents at the southern border. Laura Ingram reported that the children were being held in what could best be defined as “essentially summer camps.” It should be noted that four year olds separated from mothers to go to summer camps (or school) have been known to cry and be distressed.  She went on to accuse liberals of weaponizing these supposed separated children, a tactic the Trump Propaganda Network (TPN) would never employ.

Ann Coulter, in her typically deft, delicate, and sensitive style, appearing on TPN, denied that children had even been separated from their parents. They were child actors who had been coached by liberals. The crying was part of the scripts they had been given and not genuine emotions. She looked “directly” at President Trump through the camera and implored him not to be deceived by this act. Six months later, she similarly implored President Trump to grow a pair and not succumb to the temptation to enter into a budget agreement with no funding for the wall. Apparently the children are now real and not actors.

If one were to watch the TPN, one would realistically conclude that indeed the United States is experiencing a real invasion. Even as I am writing this post, the United States is being overwhelmed with terrorists, criminals, and drug dealers at the southern border…and normal people too who will be enrolled as Democrats and taught how to vote multiple times in exchange for safe passage. Perhaps never in the history of the United States has it faced such a massive and sustained invasion as is occurring right now. The “day of infamy” and 9/11 were one-time actions against the country while the alien invasion on the southern border is ongoing.

Just as with Orson Welles’ invasion story so many people believe Sean Hannity’s invasion story. With Welles, one might say all a listener needed to do was to change the channel to learn that the alien invasion was not real. Theoretically, the same applies for listeners to TPN. That comparison is false. The listeners in 1938 did not tune in with any preconceived ideas about an alien invasion in the first place. It was not on their radar. By contrast, the viewers of TPN today already know that the invasion is occurring. What they are saying is that thank God, our Lord and Savior is finally doing something to stop the alien invasion.

Alternate facts now trump real facts. The alternate reality now prevails over the real world. To present the TPN audience with the facts about the alien invasion is a lost cause. The fact that illegal drugs arrive through legal ports of entry and not through the barren wasteland is meaningless. The fact that terrorists are stopped in airports usually overseas and never arrive in the United States and that none have been caught at the southern border is meaningless. The fact that students and tourists here legally then overstay their visa is meaningless. The fact that people seeking asylum then disappear while waiting for the court case to be decided is the one fact they might accept. In general, their minds are already made up.

The Democrats, especially the Politically Correct, deserve a great deal of credit for forcing the current shutdown. All their hard work to terrorize white Americans into thinking they are and deserve to lose their country are now paying off. For more than a decade, Democrats have been touting the demographic deluge. There will be an ever increasing number and percentage of brown people in the country who eventually will seize control from the sexist, racist, homophobic, imperialist, polluting heterosexual white people. Truly they may be said to have done a fabulous job of delivering the message that the days of white people running this country are over, that all their heroes are bogus, and that a new world order run by the Thought Police has arrived. In the 2008 presidential election, the Republican Vice President candidate exclaimed that we Republicans are taking back our country. In the 2016 presidential election, the Republican presidential candidate seemed like the last hope to stem the tide of brown people from overwhelming the country.  The 2018 congressional election may seem like that first meteorite that landed in New Jersey in the dramatization of War of the Worlds: the alien invasion is now. The wall then has become the proverbial line in the sand, all that prevents the United States from succumbing to the alien takeover.

Kudos to the Democrats and the Politically Correct. You have been far more successful than Orson Welles in convincing millions of Americans that the alien invasion is upon us.