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by Wade Graham, May 13, 2016
On Thursday, Los Angeles got some good news. Pershing Square, the park at the heart of a revivifying downtown, has been handed over to Agence Ter, a French landscape architecture firm, for its next big makeover. The plan, which was chosen from among four finalists in the Pershing Square Renew design contest, won with a stratagem of simplicity and a modicum of good sense. It has at least a chance of re-establishing the five-acre square, bounded by Olive, Hill, 5th and 6th streets, as a great urban public space.
The odds weren't in the park's favor.
Long ago, Pershing Square (once known as Central Park and even earlier, Plaza Abaja, or lower plaza) was Los Angeles' premier civic gathering place, a grand city refuge. But in the 1950s it was remade as the lid of an underground parking garage. Then urban renewal widened its surrounding streets into raceways meant to move as many cars as possible away from downtown. Ever since, the park's been an arid and frustrating conundrum, cut off from potential users by walls, ramps and the massive one-way thoroughfares on its borders.
Attempts at remedying the square's ills in the 1980s and '90s proved unsatisfactory, leaving the city with the current arrangement of patchwork grass and pavement, punctuated with inexplicable architectural ornamentation: rows of standing pink stucco tubes, huge metal spheres placed here and there, and a strangely looming purple stucco tower.
In 2015, when Pershing Square Renew, a public-private partnership, announced its redesign competition, its first decision was a puzzling one. The competition wasn't open to all comers but instead cut straight to the stars: Only A-list architects and landscape designers were invited to enter, cutting down on the chances that a truly out-of-the-box solution to the park's problems would materialize.
Submitted "starchitect" resumes were whittled down to 10, and then to four finalists: James Corner Field Operations (designer of New York's High Line and Santa Monica's Tongva Park), working with local architect Frederick Fisher; Thom Mayne, of Morphosis, working with landscape architects SWA; wHY + Civitas, a joint effort of firms in L.A. and Denver, and Agence Ter, with its own cast of local supporting players.
What emerged was predictable: bright, shiny, starry sameness. All four park concepts were composed mostly of standard parts from the kit that defines today's "landscape urbanism."
Even the winning Agence Ter design is busy, just not quite as busy as the other possibilities. They were all crammed full of what's known in the design business as "program, " a nearly identical laundry lists of amenities: "flexible" spaces for farmers' markets, theater and music performances, cafes, dog runs, edible gardens and splashy fountains for kids. There were biomorphic canopy structures, plots of thatchy native plants, and themed nooks labeled to accommodate "tai chi," "moonlight," "sun" and even "thinking." The three that were passed over also featured a passel of too-familiar design tics and gimmicks: oblique paths, squiggle shaped planting beds, built up berms and manufactured hills and valleys.
All four park concepts were composed mostly of standard parts from the kit that defines today's 'landscape urbanism.'
Sustainability was de rigeur: Several plans included rainwater harvesting for irrigation, which is a good idea. But water treatment wetlands, included by SWA/Morphosis and wHY + Civitas, are purely didactic exercises in infrastructure that ought to be left to the Department of Sanitation. Taken to an extreme, the green impulse yielded this absurdity: SWA/Morphosis' solar-powered hydroponic farm tower, meant to grow organic salad greens for an onsite restaurant and to provide "green" job training, making the square a "net-positive ecotopia" that would prove Los Angeles was a "global leader in green technology and sustainability." That's design aimed at pleasing political impulses of the moment, not creating a park for the ages.
Worse, three of the four plans fundamentally failed to redeem the square from the Original Sin committed in 1951, when parking-lot access ramps and walls severed it from the city on all four sides. Each of these designs left one or more of the park's edges cut off from the street by a raised structure in order to accommodate access to the garage. The Corner/Fisher scheme was the biggest failure in this regard, almost entirely blocking access from 5th and 6th streets with two grass-covered slopes, their low points at the center of the park and their high sides looming over the sidewalks on the north and south sides of the park, creating a sort of tennis-stadium effect, where visitors would face inward, looking at each other, waiting for something to happen, instead of interacting with the neighborhood.
Agence Ter's plan succeeds because it is the least like a post post-modern amusement park. It is all on one level, connecting directly to slimmed-down and repaved streets (Olive is reduced from five lanes to three), and accommodating just two perpendicular driveways into the underground garage. Most of the square is left open, either studded with trees or as an unprogrammed Great Lawn. A block-long shade canopy extends along Hill Street, like a 19th-century open market, topped with solar panels, ready to shelter farmers' stands, restaurants, performances, or kiosks that pop up by design or happenstance.
This plan comes closest to realizing the holy grail of good public squares, which is providing people a place to stage their own programs, spontaneously and unpredictably, without micromanagement by designers. The best such spaces, such as the typical Italian piazza, may have nothing in them at all, just four streets edging a wide-open, shared commons, where life may play out according to its own plans.
Now the winning Pershing Square scheme has to navigate the journey from heavily photo-shopped architectural renderings to a real, built, physical space. If in that process the plan becomes even simpler, downtown Los Angeles will regain a dignified, functional and lovable public space at its pedestrian heart.
Wade Graham is a Los Angeles landscape designer and author, mostly recently, of "Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas that Shape the World."
Los Angeles Times
by Wade Graham, March 6, 2016
Architecture and urban design are in the throes of a green fever dream: Everywhere you look there are plans for "sustainable" buildings, futuristic eco-cities, even vertical aquaponic farms in the sky, each promising to redeem the ecologically sinful modern city and bring its inhabitants back into harmony with nature. This year, two marquee examples are set to open: Bjarke Ingels' Via 57 West in New York, a 32-story luxury-apartment pyramid enfolding a garden, and the Louvre Abu Dhabi, by Jean Nouvel, a complex shielded from the harsh climate of the Arabian Peninsula by an enormous white dome. The dreamers' goal is even bigger: "eco-cities" that will leapfrog the last century's flawed development patterns and deliver us in stylish comfort to a low-carbon, green future.
In part, the dream reflects a pragmatic push for energy efficiency, recycled materials and lower carbon emissions — a competition rewarded with LEED certification in silver, gold or platinum. But it also includes a remarkable effort to turn buildings green — almost literally — by covering them in plants. Green roofs are sprouting on Wal-Marts and green walls festooned with ferns and succulents in Cubist patterns appear on hotels, banks, museums — even at the mall, as I found on a recent trip to the Glendale Galleria in Los Angeles.
Today's green urban dream is too often about bringing a technologically controlled version of nature into the city and declaring the problem solved, rather than looking ... deeper.
All of this is surely a good idea, at some level: trying to repair some of the damage our lifestyle has done to the planet by integrating nature into what have been, especially in the modern era, wasteful, harsh, alienating, concrete urban deserts. But, despite the rhetoric of reconciling the city with nature, today's green urban dream is too often about bringing a technologically controlled version of nature into the city and declaring the problem solved, rather than looking at the deeper causes of our current environmental and urban discontents.
Greening the city is not a new ideal. Ancient Romans waxed lyrical about Arcadia, a mythical bucolic escape from the ills of urban life: money-making, crime, pollution, disease and, of course, luxury and the moral turpitude that goes with it. City-dwellers have always been sensitive to the charge that the metropolis is guilty of a special kind of iniquity, which bars it from grace, and must be cleansed. (Remember Sodom and Gomorrah.) The corollary belief that the green countryside fosters all that is pure and wholesome is a foundational myth of Western culture. It is why, when most people amass enough filthy lucre, they move to the suburbs and cultivate a large, useless lawn, as if the greensward alone could buy them salvation.
Since Plato's Republic, visionaries have described the ideal human community as something less like a city and more like a big, well-ordered farm. Think of Charles Fourier's utopian phalanxes, the Shaker settlements, Frank Lloyd Wright's proposed Broadacre City, Soviet collectives, Israeli kibbutzes or the innumerable 19th and 20th century "garden cities" strewn around the American and European landscapes. A more modest contemporary form is perhaps the Brooklyn Grange, the hipsterish but messianic urban farm outfit that grows bespoke salad greens hydroponically on several rented New York City rooftops for environmentally conscious urbanites. It is undoubtedly a beneficial enterprise, but, given the realities of high urban land values and labor costs, such a model is unlikely to replace the world's nearly 6 million square miles of horizontal farms.
Today's signature eco-building, Apple's "spaceship" campus now under construction in Silicon Valley, designed by the British architect Norman Foster, is a good example of the shortcomings of the green dream. Though we are assured it will be sustainable, energy efficient and "slim" — preserving 80% of its 175-acre site for landscaping, it is by any measure a huge, complex, massively resource-intensive and incredibly expensive ($5 billion) folly, achievable only by one of the richest corporations on Earth. What is more damning is that, at the end of the day, it will be just another appendage of suburban sprawl, a white-collar workplace located next to a freeway, dependent on vast garages (even if most of them are tastefully buried) for its 13,000 commuters — and thus with no smaller environmental footprint than a conventional office park.
A look at the green dream's origins is revealing. The Louvre Abu Dhabi, Apple's spaceship and another new Silicon Valley "campus," Google's planned complex to be covered in transparent tenting that it says will "blur the difference between our buildings and nature," are direct descendants of the work of the American visionary R. Buckminster Fuller and his Japanese partner, Shoji Sadao. In 1960, Fuller and Sadao proposed building a two-mile-wide, transparent geodesic dome over Midtown Manhattan. It would eliminate bad weather and the cost of heating and cooling separate buildings. It wasn't built, but other, lesser domed environments were, all over the world, and these helped spawn a global epidemic of drawing-board futuristic eco-cities.
Among the movement's avatars were Paolo Soleri, whose projected Utopia, Arcosanti, only amounted to a few, odd concrete structures in the Arizona desert, and the Japanese Metabolists of the 1960s and '70s, whose plans for massive floating city-farms and modular megastructures in the sky were outlandish. (They nevertheless directly influenced the development of undersea exploration modules, offshore oil platforms and the International Space Station.) Indeed, Foster was a student and later a collaborator of Fuller and Sadao, and his masterpieces — the Gherkin in London and the remade Reichstag in Berlin, to name just two of scores — are essentially climate-controlled domes, carefully modeled on his teachers' earlier work.
Like driving a $85,000 Tesla, designing a perfect green building or eco-city isn't enough to save the world.
These projects are, then, really the fulfillment of a set of blue-sky dreams from the Dr. Strangelove era — where every cinematic space colony contained a domed conservatory and keeping the plants in the greenhouse alive was all that stood between humans and disaster. In the end, those dreams are not about reintegrating society with nature, but leaving Earth itself behind for an
engineered habitat under the dome, in the sky or at least on the roof.
Like driving an $85,000 Tesla, designing a perfect green building or eco-city isn't enough to save the world. Although our buildings, like our cars, have been woefully inefficient environmentally, architecture isn't responsible in any meaningful way for humanity's disastrous environmental impacts, nor can it hope to solve them alone. An economic system based on the destruction of nature and the shifting of real costs onto those less fortunate and onto the future, is the real problem. No dome can protect us from our own profligacy and improvidence, nor can any number of hydroponic lettuce farms blunt the damage being done to real nature, or what is left of it, on planet Earth.
Instead of making "nature" into an urban lifestyle accessory, architects and planners must work to design better relationships between the parts of our cities and nature, and to promote just relationships between the people in them. The work of this year's Pritzker Prize winner, the Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, is a case in point. He is less interested in making technologically impressive buildings than in collaborating with residents themselves to design low-cost, efficient housing solutions for the urban working class, especially in the wake of natural disasters. It is a more productive path forward than planting shrubs on skyscrapers.
Wade Graham's latest book is "Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World." He is a landscape designer as well as a historian and adjunct professor of public policy at Pepperdine Unversity.
October 27th, 2015
Segment with Frances Anderton on KCRW 89.9 re remaking Pershing Square in Downtown Los Angeles:
By Wade Graham, Los Angeles Times, Sunday, September 27, 2015
It would seem to be just in the right place for a city park: a five-acre square in the heart of downtown Los Angeles, bounded by Olive, Hill, 5th and 6th streets, with the elegant front of the Biltmore Hotel on one side, the busy office towers of Bunker Hill on another, and the lofts, restaurants, and nightlife of our newly vibrant urban core on the others. It is clean enough, and well-enough patrolled, and it offers a children's playground, a dog run, and benches and grass to sit on.
And yet it feels all wrong: the rows of standing pink stucco tubes the size of water heaters, the huge metal spheres placed here and there, and the strangely looming tower are inexplicable. A maze of proliferating walls chop its expanses of concrete into odd shapes, and block access from the surrounding streets. In spite of ample lighting, past sundown the square feels unsafe. Outside of weekday lunch hours, and weekend special events, it is mostly given to the homeless.
In the midst of downtown's extraordinary revival, Pershing Square remains a perplexing failure.
It wasn't always like this: Set aside in 1866 as La Plaza Abaja, "the lower plaza," it was L.A.'s indispensible civic space for more than 80 years, with grass, palm trees and lush tropical vegetation. It was a place to meet, stroll, muster troops, and argue a cause, with its speaker's corner like London's Hyde Park. And, like New York's grand urban refuge, it was even called Central Park for many years.
After the turn of the century the square was redone in the formal Beaux-Arts style by John Parkinson, the architect of City Hall a few blocks away. In 1918, it was renamed for John "Black Jack" Pershing, the victorious American general of World War I. His statue still stands, next to a monument to the 7th California infantry regiment that fought in the Spanish-American War of 1898. From the 1920s to the '60s, the square served as the center of what was known as "the run," a gay cruising corridor along 5th Street, stocked with nearby drinking establishments.
Social disapproval of the run, along with the general perception that downtown was "blighted," might have been a factor in the decision to prescribe the open-heart surgery of Urban Renewal for much of downtown, including Pershing Square and Bunker Hill.
In 1951, the park was ripped out to make way for a three-level, subterranean parking garage. Access ramps and stairwells replaced the greenery, but for a thin layer of turf atop the concrete. Some of the palms that were dug up were moved to brand-new Disneyland's Jungle Cruise —a fittingly ironic fate, as, like Disneyland, the new square was part of the machine of suburbanization remaking Southern California, built around the private automobile.
Widened, one-way streets — like racetracks around the park — connected to the new regional freeway system, speeding white-collar workers from office towers that replaced bulldozed apartment buildings to their homes in suburbia. Once bustling at all hours, downtown became a ghost town after 5 and Pershing Square became the resort of drug dealers and the homeless.
Before the 1984 Olympics, an embarrassed city spent $1 million trying to clean it up, but the mostly cosmetic changes didn't help much.
Nearly a decade later, in 1993, cash from the developer of Gas Company Tower, which rises kittycorner from the square on 5th Street, paid for a remake by the Mexican modernist architect Ricardo Legorretta, aided by landscape architect Laurie Olin and artist Barbara McCarren. They decided on the symbolism of the region's old citrus empire: big oversized orange spheres and a little bosque of actual orange trees, a stylized earthquake fault, and the oversized tower, meant to symbolize the San Gabriel mountains from whence water flows to the city. Few visitors to the square have any idea what it means.
Now, another downtown developer, AEG, has put up $700,000 to study the problem of Pershing Square. According to the area's City Council member, José Huizar, "Everything is on the table." That's good, because even without spending a dime on a study, it should be clear that no amount of landscape-architectural creativity can turn the roof of a parking structure into an integrated part of downtown's urban fabric.
Parks work because they welcome people, not cars. The city's Original Sin at Pershing Square was sacrificing public space on the altar of the automobile, cutting it off from the pedestrian life of the street grid in favor of parking lot access and confusing and off-putting walls and changes in grade. It is useful to remember that New York's Central Park succeeds because its designers blocked most streets from the park, and placed the few major crossing streets below grade, out of sight. Walkers, cyclists, and even equestrians there experience a place scaled to people, mostly undisturbed by car traffic.
Any real attempt to return LA's "lower plaza" to its former liveliness and relevance must first reverse the historic mistake of the parking garage. It would inconvenience a some drivers, yes, but it would also begin to redeem Los Angeles from its century-long car-and-asphalt binge.
A solution short of that would require putting the square's car circulation on a radical diet, slowing streets and slimming ramps. Most important, it would mean removing the maze of walls that block the space from passerby's eyes as well as their feet, signaling that the park is open and welcoming, its first priority to support the rich pedestrian civic life of downtown—not commuters.
Give Pershing Square back to the people.
January 9th, 2012
Wade Graham is a Los Angeles, California -based garden designer, historian, and writer whose work on the environment, landscape, urbanism and the arts has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's and other publications. This year, he authored two distinct works about gardens – American Eden, a beautiful volume that takes a sweeping look at the history of America's gardens and the visionaries behind them; and Jesus Is My Gardener, a little gem released as a Kindle Single that offers a consciousness-raising view of the laborers who tend today's gardens. Here, introduced by some of his recent musings, is an excerpt from Wade Graham's Jesus Is My Gardener.
By Wade Graham
I have often wondered what it is that I'm doing—what we are doing—when we make gardens. I wrote a book, American Eden, to explore that question and its flipside, what our gardens say about us. By us, I tended to mean the designers and owners of gardens. The book says too little about the third party at the garden party—the people who work in our gardens, who frequently build them and more often than not maintain them. It is remarkable how little we think about these others, our partners in the garden transaction. Because the business of gardens is a transaction, with economic, political, psychological, and ethical dimensions.
Who are these people? Where do they come from? They have always been there: Jefferson's slave labor force at Monticello, the Irish and Italian laborers in the gardens of the Vanderbilts and Goulds, the Japanese who built the great California estates, and now, the Mexicans with their powertool-burdened pickup trucks. How do they experience their side of the garden transaction?
To get at the mechanics of this murky transaction we're all parties to, I wanted to write about it from the third party's point of view, as well as I could grasp it. I've spent time with the gardeners, as they call themselves, in my own garden and in those of my clients. We are all good people, well-intentioned; all of us have our own unresolved contradictions, even if not always as gaping as those who leave two Priuses in the (well-manicured) driveway while taking a private jet to Aspen for the weekend. And I've spent time with the gardeners, in their homes, at their celebrations: riding horses in a dry river bed, and barbequing chicken and chivos in a huge, dome-shaped wood-fired oven made from cinder blocks, chicken wire, and horse manure-reinforced adobe. We should all be invited to one another's tables.
I don't claim to have found the solution, or a template for perfect communication, much less trouble-free garden maintenance. But in telling some of the stories, I see a real possibility for a better transaction, for all parties, in the garden and out of it, and the possibility of knowing, at least some of the time, what it is that we are doing when we make and keep gardens.
People pay me to design paradise for them, however small: a private Eden with trees, flowers, maybe a small fountain with just enough water noise to "wash" off the city as the owner returns home, and some vista, no matter how small the allotted space, to beckon one inside. A garden need be little more than this to salve the soul. Here in Los Angeles, even just a few doors away from the lurid billboards and crawling traffic of the Sunset Strip, where some of my most successful clients live, one can step through a garden gate as if through a kind of navel into another world of miraculous tranquility, where one can almost imagine that the roar of the city is drowned out by birdsong and the breeze moving through the leaves.
But this calm is maintained by a storm, once a week: men dressed in green chinos and battered boots pile out of a dinged pickup, fire up machines, and fan out like soldiers, trimming hedges, mowing grass, sending clouds of smoke and green confetti flying. Mostly silent amid the racket, occasionally barking something in clipped Spanish, they move determinedly, sure in their well-practiced choreography, yet also swiftly, as though they know their time will soon be cut short. This is the agony in the garden. When the cutting is done, one man will strap onto his shoulders a leafblower, la sopladora, its one- cylinder motor whining like an angry, fifty-pound mosquito, gas sloshing in a dirty plastic tank on his back, and, by expertly swinging the plastic air tube in circular motions, will herd a rising column of clippings, leaves, trash, dust, and acrid blue exhaust ahead of him in a stutter-step waltz, as if he were backing an unruly animal into a corral.
In the eye of this cyclone stands Jesus, my gardener. Jesus comes from a small city in Zacatecas, where the state motto is "Labor vincit omnia," work conquers all. He and his men, who he calls muchachos, many of them cousins or nephews, are—or once were—horsemen, having grown up on family ranchos. They still wear cowboy hats and put stickers of bucking broncos and horseshoes on their American pickup trucks, the metal steeds of an immigrant cavalry now earning its frijoles by keeping the yards of Los Angeles orderly, green, and clean.
Just as "everyone" now has a gardener, everyone has a nanny, a housecleaner, and a handyman—and almost all of them speak Spanish; most are Mexican. Each morning, they infiltrate entire districts of the city, and each evening they withdraw to their own—a rhythm as regular as the tide. As with the bees and birds that pollinate flowers, there can be no gardens without gardeners. After many years of experience, I know this with scientific certainty. Once upon a time, the districts where the garden owners and the gardeners lived were thought to be well removed from one another. They were never as distinct as some believed, and now they bleed into one another, mix and meld, as the demographic fabric of the region continues to change. Of California's 36,961,664 people, as of 2010, 37 percent are Latino. Of Los Angeles County's nearly 10 million (9,848,011), 48 percent are Latino.
"They still wear cowboy hats and put stickers of bucking broncos and horseshoes on their American pickup trucks, the metal steeds of an immigrant cavalry now earning its frijoles by keeping the yards of Los Angeles orderly, green, and clean."
Somebody has to do the dirty work. If we don't do it ourselves, then we have to be careful not to treat those who do as mere machines, leafblowers, because, along with the dead leaves, la sopladora blows away life, all in the service of a perfect, unchanging, Arcadian image. That image—the American landscape as we know it—was, as it happens, invented in a cemetery, Mt. Auburn in Massachusetts, in 1831, where horticultural entrepreneurs mated the aristocratic British estate garden of endless, laboriously tended lawns with the labor-saving lawnmower, invented that same year by Edward Budding in England, to be pushed more often than not by an Irish immigrant laborer—Pat O'Shovelem. The peaceful, green repose of Mt. Auburn may have seemed like the afterlife, the ultimate balsam, but it sent us toward the loss of connection to vitality—ours and the land's.
I must confess that I've made bad gardens: though lush, expansive, and expensive, thoughtlessly destructive, requiring too much water, gasoline, chemicals, and labor, all for the illusion of fecundity, but giving nothing back. I resolved, not for the first time, to make better, more-conscious gardens, to relearn and rethink the vocabulary and purpose of the garden. Is it a series of symbols, of lawn and flowers, signifying productivity? Or is it a place of real productivity? A place where dead leaves aren't a cause for mechanized war but might be tolerated, or even, like the Zen gardens of Japan, exalted, as are gingko leaves falling on gravel? Is there a way to reconcile our American ethics with our aesthetics, our convictions with our desires? I'm not sure, but I'll make the effort to return some small amount of natural process, and agriculture when it fits, to our backyards and front yards, without them ceasing to be gardens and turning into vacant lots or, worse, in some people's estimation, into farms. I start with a big advantage: We can grow the same things in this climate as in the garden of Gethsemane: olives, figs, and grapes, plus some new additions, in the same spirit—kumquats, limequats, loquats, guavas, persimmons, pomellos, Buddha's hand citrons, kiwis, pineapples, artichokes, and always the indispensable, ever fruiting Mexican cocktail limes. In Spanish, the verb "to enjoy" is disfrutar, literally to pick the fruit, and eat it. And why not? ¿Porque no?
Published June 14th, 2011 by Wade Graham
When the second section of the High Line Park opened this month between 20th and 30th streets along the West Side, it marked roughly a century and a half since the opening of Central Park in 1857. There are obvious differences between the two: covering 700 acres, Central Park is a landscape-scale facsimile of an ideal countryside, built when there was still open land on the island of Manhattan, while the High Line is a mere ribbon–not even of land, but elevated railbed strung between buildings, the only vacant space left on which to make a landscape. Yet their underlying similarities reveal that the essential dynamics of property and money in New York City have changed very little in 150 years.
Like Central Park, the High Line proved an instant hit: when its first section opened in 2009, from Gansevoort to 20th streets, it was filled with people strolling, enjoying its plantings, carefully-curated to resemble the weeds once blown onto the abandoned freight tracks by the wind, without distracting from the views of the New Jersey skyline across the Hudson, of the buildings that jostle around and even over it, and mostly of one another.
And, like Central Park, the High Line is a testament and monument to the power of rising Manhattan real estate values. In 1853, when the New York State legislature paid more than $5 million for the land for the park, from which were forcibly evicted 1,600 or so poor homesteaders, mostly free blacks and Irish, from their shantytowns, it didn't do it out of the goodness of its heart. Just as in the 20th and 21st centuries, New York City was forced to compete with outlying garden suburbs that beckoned well-to-do city dwellers with naturalistic landscaping, open space, and cheap commuter steamer and train service.
The legislature expected a return on its investment, and it got it: the park immediately became the fashionable place to be seen in one's carriage, and adjacent property values skyrocketed, as the wealthy abandoned lower Park and Fifth avenues and moved uptown in droves. It was one of the most financially successful episodes of slum clearance in history.
This has long been the logic of urban parks: the blueprint was established in 1820 by Great Britain's Prince Regent (later crowned George IV), who, with a keen eye for a good investment, hired the architect John Nash to subdivide one of his hunting parks near London into elegant terrace houses surrounding a picturesque park. Regent's Park made the prince a mint, and it was followed by Holland Park, St. James's Park, Green Park, Hyde Park, and Kensington Gardens, transforming London's West End from marshy pastureland into the most sought-after address on the planet. Like a golf course at the center of a modern Sunbelt resort development, the parks were the amenities used to sell the bricks and mortar.
Ever since, a fine park has been the bellwether of residential fashion. Hitherto a byword for muggings and rapes, the renovation of Central Park in the late '80s and '90s by the private Central Park Conservancy signaled the restoration of New York City as a place the upper middle class and the truly rich could again be proud to call home, after the city's nadir of near-bankruptcy and blackout in the 1970s. Replanting the grass and flowerbeds was a horticultural case of applying the "broken windows" theory of criminologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, who argued for cleaning up the subways and fighting graffiti as a means of civic revival (and, after Rudolph Giuliani was elected mayor in 1993, of arresting "squeegee men").
It is tempting to dismiss such costly park-making as gentrification. But the renewed flower beds are best understood as a marketing investment in the battle between central cities and suburbs for customers–tax-paying residents as well as tourists–a battle in which only recently have the cities begun posting a few victories.
The High Line is the jewel in the crown of a spectacular transformation of a section of Manhattan that was as recently as the mid-'90s known for transvestite hookers in stilettos traversing sidewalks coated in blood dripping from the meatpacking houses. Now, through the alchemy that turns industrial lead into postindustrial real estate gold, it is one of chicest urban scenes anywhere, packed with trendy galleries, restaurants, hotels, and supremely self-conscious condominium buildings by the world's biggest name-brand architects. The High Line didn't cause the changes–Chelsea and the West Village had been rapidly gentrifying for decades–but it ratifies them, and announces their ascendancy to the world, like the cherry on the icing on the cake.
Meeting its cost–$152 million, or an impressive $30,000 per lineal foot–required $44 million from corporate and private sources, many owning property nearby, including $10 million from Barry Diller and Diane Von Furstenberg. Maintaining its intricate plantings and high-design fixtures will require more money, likely to be raised with a tax on area property owners. They will more than recoup their investment: a further rise in values is all-but inevitable, with big-time developers moving in, like the Whitney Museum and Related Companies with its gargantuan Hudson Yards development at the park's northern end. The real estate gravy train has left the station.
And, like Central Park, which was intended by its designers to be "a specimen of God's handiwork" in nature brought into the city to relieve the anxieties and stresses of urban life, the High Line is also about recalling the nature that the city has obliterated. Instead of bucolic scenes of lawns and lakes, the High Line's studiously weedy plantings help 21st century New Yorkers, many of them new colonists to the central city, see themselves as akin to the scrappy flora that once recolonized the rusting rails, thriving in an optimistically romantic and yet still satisfyingly, if superficially, gritty setting. No less than Central Park before it, the High Line is a triumph of America's urban culture, and proof of the old saw of real estate: it's about location, location, location.
Published July 4th, 2010 by Wade Graham
This July 4th, Americans celebrate the 234rd birthday of the United States and the 184rd anniversary of the death of one of its founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson. We revere the 3rd president for his statesmanship and for the ringing prose of the Declaration of Independence, which he authored. Less well-known is the fact that Jefferson was also America's founding home and garden addict, a detail-obsessed improver who designed the perfect dwelling at Monticello, then endlessly remodeled it. He sank huge sums into landscaping his grounds in the latest styles and entertained a constant stream of guests with spreads of heirloom vegetables and fine French wine so lavish as to make Martha Stewart blush.
In doing so, Jefferson set the standard for the irresponsibly over leveraged American homeowner, mortgaged to the hilt to enjoy the good life. At his death on July 4, 1826, Jefferson was so deep in debt to foreign creditors that everything he owned—including his slaves—had to be sold off.
It's hard to square such luxury and self-indulgence with the stern defender of the common man we know from history textbooks. As chief executive, he fought bitterly with Congress to cut the national debt. He famously disliked pomp and circumstance. once receiving a British ambassador who was in full military regalia, wearing only his dressing gown and slippers. It caused an international incident.
Yet Jefferson himself couldn't resist the temptation of the finer things. As minister to France in the 1780s, he lived in a three-storey house on Paris' Champs Elysées, with three suites, stables, a full-time gardener, maids, cooks, and a coachman. The rent on the whole lot cost more than his annual salary.
As president, he entertained like a power hostess, inviting even his enemies to his dinner table. He spared no expense. The White House wine bill alone was $10,000 in his first presidential term. Not even patriotism could keep him from splurging on a choice item, like the solid mahogany piano he had shipped from England in 1771 in defiance of the Continental Congress' non-importation resolution against Britain.
He designed his splendid house while barely out of college, then, after his sojourn in Europe, decided to rebuild it, continuously. Monticello was a construction site for decades. He installed French three-part stacking windows, alcove beds, and a dumbwaiter sized specifically to lift wine bottles from the ellar to the parlor. He took down the second story and added a dome to complete the perfectly-proportioned façade that looks out at us from the nickel.
In the garden he banished unsightly wooden slave quarters to improve the view, laid out winding scenic drives, and built a charming pavilion with arched windows and topped with white painted Chinese railings. From his pavilion he could oversee the progress of his gardeners, who tended 150 fruit trees and up to 350 types of vegetables at one time, including some 50 varieties of peas, 44 varieties of beans, and upwards of 30 varieties of cabbages. It was an organic cornucopia to make Alice Waters green with envy.
This was Jefferson's real project as a statesman retired to his farm—not farming, but building and rebuilding his dream of perfect elegance. To the extent that he could pay for it—through credit—cost was no object.
How could Jefferson reconcile his love of luxury with his democratic ideals? As a patriarch and landowner in a Virginia society that was profoundly pro-aristocratic, he was disinclined to renounce the refinement that advertised his status. In just the same way, the economic underpinnings of that status disinclined him from freeing his slaves—in spite of the fact that he was an early and harsh critic of slavery. His own penchant for the finer things didn't stop him from denouncing the habits of luxury in others or of warning young Americans traveling to Europe not to spend too much time looking at European art and architecture because it distracted from the corruption of the rich and the poverty of the masses.
This seems like clear hypocrisy, but it also points to the deep ambivalence in the American mind between our professed ideals and our economic imperatives. We mistrust wealth, but we simultaneously worship it. Like Jefferson, we idealize the supposed simplicity of rural life, but like him we want our country weekend houses well-stocked with all the modern comforts. And, like him, we're not willing to sacrifice what he called "the pursuit of happiness," embodied in nothing so much as our national pursuit of real estate, to balance the checkbook.
We can recognize ourselves in Thomas Jefferson, because his contradictions, and his addictions, are our own.
Published March 5th, 2009 by Wade Graham
As for the actual remains, these palaces now become convents, condominiums, and asylums, surrounded by copies of Western European and Far Eastern landscapes grown up in briar and poison ivy, what is their ultimate value? They were built on the crassest piles of American loot, and the cultural history they reveal is one of frantic borrowing and adaptation of every available garden model. Yet running through their owners' lives, and implied by every casino, pagoda, and tumbling rambler rose, is a more wistful sense of appropriation: a desire to re-enter the old garden of delight. – Mac Griswold and Eleanor Weller, The Golden Age of American Gardens, 1991.
Looking back on growing up in Santa Barbara in the 1970s, I remember life as a kind of endless ramble through one big garden. I remember climbing in giant avocado trees in old orchards not yet subdivided, and I remember standing still, arms extended, in the 100-year-old Blue Gum grove on Eucalyptus Hill, covered in dribbling gobs of mating Monarch butterflies, and skateboarding by the Bird Refuge past banks of aloes blooming coral red at Christmastime. But the endless ramble also included more mysterious, hidden adventures, such as roaming through neighbors' lots (today it would be called trespassing) and discovering secrets behind old stone walls and towering pittosporum hedges. There I found sagging pergolas draped in wisteria and ancient, untended bowers, benches covered in ivy, bits of colored tile glinting on old pavings, and a reflecting pool seemingly forgotten in a bright clearing in a dark grove of Araucarias and cedars.
I especially remember exploring the gardens at El Mirador with my best friend in sixth grade. With its lake, Japanese garden, 500-foot-long Italian formal garden lined with cypresses along a staircase set with water rills, and its subterranean grotto complete with glued-on stalactites and stalagmites, the old Armour family estate on Cold Spring Road was a magnet for our wandering. Mind you, we didn't just go there for the gardens, but because of a woman. My friend's father's girlfriend rented an apartment in one of the houses on the property. She was an occasional substitute teacher at Montecito Union School, and to us she was unimaginably, irresistibly attractive. We would go all the way up there just for a glimpse, before she shooed us away like gnats. It was then that we would roam the grounds of El Mirador, which were rendered magical not only by their exotic, dilapidating follies, but by the afterglow of our encounter with a preteen obsession. It would be five years before Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher," but was in fact the year their first album was released-and believe me, we knew the words to "Ice Cream Man" and "Jamie's Cryin'."
What does the ardor, however humid, of sixth-graders have to do with gardens? Perhaps it illustrates that even at this crude level, what grows in gardens is passion and desire. Ask a flower, which is, after all, a plant's sex organ, doing everything it can to seduce a bee. Ask Adam and Eve. Or ask Thomas Jefferson, who spent much of his term as the new United States' Minister to France in the summer of 1786 avoiding his official duties, to which he often sent an underling instead, in order to spend his days in gardens around Paris in the company of one Maria Cosway, a blonde, 27-year-old who was the Italian-born wife of a prominent English painter. In one garden, a frisky Jefferson vaulted over a fountain, and broke his right wrist, an injury that made writing difficult for the greatest prose poet in American history. But Jefferson's passion for gardens never ebbed, and drove him for the next 40 years to make and remake his estate at Monticello, putting his family deep in debt, yet managing to create one of the most personal, complex, and continually surprising American gardens.
The great California horticulturist Charles Glass contributed many of Lotusland's extraordinary succulents.
After the exhilaration of Maria Cosway and France, Jefferson sought his gardening destiny at home. But other distinguished American intellects continued to range abroad in search of horticultural bliss. In Italian Villas and Their Gardens, Edith Wharton wrote about an elusive "garden-magic" that she found in only the best Italian gardens. Astute as she was, Wharton found the quality hard to define. She knew it lodged somewhere in the interplay between nature and art, in the sequencing of spaces, or in the subtle architecture of transitions from the house, to the garden, to the wild or agrarian landscape beyond. In spite of her relentless analysis, Wharton never succeeded in boiling down garden magic to a set of rules of style. Italian gardens vary widely by region and era, yet garden magic might be visible in any of them, but not in all. That imponderable something that delighted her, which fed her passion for Italy and brought her back to the hunt over and over, was evanescent. The romance of Italian gardens has everything to do with age, with patina, and with the deep time of the Mediterranean that has transfixed English speakers for centuries.
As we enter the 21st century, the great gardens of Santa Barbara occupy a curious place in American culture, at once part of Thomas Jefferson's monumental effort to build paradise here, on this continent, and of Edith Wharton's endless search for Mediterranean garden magic. Indeed, for an American city, Santa Barbara has banked up a fair coating of patina, not all of it ersatz; occasionally it can even smell ancient. It seemed that way to me as a child when my family built a house on the subdivided grounds of the old Peabody estate, Solana. When we dug under the rank ivy that covered the yard, we found an elaborate series of stone-walled terraces and fountains cascading down the hill in consummate Italianate style. This kind of inadvertent garden archaeology is something that many Santa Barbarans will recognize.
But even Solana, a 1917 neoclassical temple built for an heir to the Arrow shirt fortune, was once new, blindingly white and naked before the landscape grew in around it and softened it. Worse, it might have once seemed garish in its ostentation, like an early 20th-century McMansion. In truth, every bit of built California no matter how seemingly august was concocted out of the residua of other places by immigrants bringing their baggage. In Santa Barbara, this began with the Mission itself, a baroque mirage from Spain erected on a frontier plain to impress the Chumash Indians into submission before its fluted pink columns. Architecture, and by extension, garden design, in America has until very recently always been imported from somewhere else, with the specific intention of wowing the less-savvy locals. Like Jefferson at Monticello, Americans have forever been searching for a useable past on which to construct a new identity. It is an ironic fact that we, so convinced of our exceptionalism, have never escaped the spell of other, older traditions, whether Italian, English, Japanese, or something else. Intoxicated with new styles from Europe that he invested with the liberatory promise of the Enlightenment, Jefferson paired a rigid and symmetrical pseudo-Roman architecture with the latest naturalistic English landscape garden, all flowing lines and poetic incidents-an odd pairing, but it stuck, and for 100 years became the national style. By the late 19th century, Americans had spread over the continent, and the neoclassical buildings that looked right in Virginia or New York didn't sit so well in Idaho or Arizona or Southern California. A hunger for distinct regional identities resulted in a mishmash of regional styles: the Northeast settled for Italian Renaissance and English colonial, with gardens of box hedges and axial paths; the Midwest, newly flush with industrial money from railroads and meatpacking, tried to gin up a "Prairie" style, a variant of the English Arts &Crafts Movement, and matched it with landscapes expensively edited to look like innocent woods and meadows.
In California, Americans arrived in force just as the actual Indians and Mexicans had been brutally swept under the rug by the American pioneers, freeing the newcomers for a bout of guilt-free, romantic nostalgia. In Ramona, Helen Hunt Jackson's bestselling 1884 novel about persecuted Mission Indians, the crumbling missions themselves provided an iconography for what became the Mission Revival style, an architectural idiom that allowed California to set itself apart as a romantic, beguiling, warm idyll. People from less salubrious climes the world over bought the myth greedily and came in droves.
Prehistoric cycads are among the world's rarest and most valuable plants.
Eventually, the Mission Revival grew tiresome: It was too bulky, low, thick, and plebeian for the aspirations of a new set of immigrants, this time patrician Easterners rich from banking and Midwesterners rich from meatpacking, who all came to winter in the sun. They needed a more exalted version of Mediterraneanism, and found it in the notion that California-similar in climate, terrain, ecology, and Latin history to the original-was America's Riviera, and had to be made to look like it. So architects, landscape architects, and clients mounted a concerted, deliberate, and lavish effort to bring Italy and Spain to Southern California-nowhere more so than in Santa Barbara. The New York stockbroker-turned-gentleman-architect George Washington Smith traveled to Europe with his client Ralph Steedman, documenting Spanish models, then came home and built Casa del Herrero, with gardens by Lockwood de Forest, another genteel New York transplant, made up of a sequence of garden rooms linked by exquisitely tiled fountains and rills and lush with subtropical plantings. From Hope Ranch to Montecito, astonishingly well-executed versions of Mediterranean villas and gardens popped up, some spectacular in their scale, like Las Tejas, by Mrs. Oakleigh (Helen) Thorne; El Mirador; or La Toscana, an endless Roman fantasy villa, also by Smith and the Los Angeles landscape architect A.E. Hanson.
Santa Barbara wasn't unique-a few sister cities embarked on the same project of making themselves Mediterranean paradises for the well-to-do at about the same time: Pasadena, Carmel, and
Holmby Hills in Los Angeles. Yet they followed her lead, and didn't go all the way-not all the way to adopting a Spanish Colonial Revival architectural code as Santa Barbara did, at George Washington Smith's urging, before and after the 1925 earthquake, guaranteeing that Smith's austere, Andalusian-derived, unornamented version of the Hispanic metaphor now sets the city apart from the others. (And the rest of state went the way of progress, welcoming modern ideas, modern scale, modern machines, and modern expanses of developer ranch-burger houses and oceans of asphalt.)
In retrospect, Smith, Hanson, and the other talented historicists could with some justice be accused of being no more than skilled copyists. What they made was beautiful, and it often reeked of money-an occupational hazard when your clients are would-be modern Medici-but just like in Edith Wharton's Italy, it might or might not be invested with the elusive quality of true garden magic. For some, re-creating Renaissance palazzi for nouveaux riches in the American West was an empty exercise, indulging the privileged in a fantasy world, and was ultimately frustrating as an aesthetic path to an American identity: dressing up as someone else, in an over-the-top Renaissance costume, when what we are looking for is ourselves.
Within the Mediterranean Revival tide of the early-20th century was another current, cutting deeper, in some ways concealed below the surface, and leading to something new. A key figure was the architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, credited with jumpstarting the Spanish Colonial Revival style with his ensemble of Mexican baroque buildings at the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego, but whose more interesting contributions started much earlier. From a wealthy New York family, like most of his clients, Goodhue spent the 1890s as a young partner of Ralph Adams Cram, the famous Boston architect who converted to Catholicism as a student in Rome and espoused medievalism as the answer to modern life. It was Cram who brought us the Collegiate Gothic of Princeton, Notre Dame, and countless other crocketed and gargoyled college campuses. He and Goodhue were also lovers, until the latter went out on his own. In 1898, Goodhue and J. Waldron Gillespie, a rich New Yorker invariably referred to as a bachelor, traveled together through Spain and Italy, then rode 400 miles on horseback through Persia, visiting ancient gardens during the day and returning at night to watch the play of moonlight and shadow. On their return, Goodhue immediately began planning El Fureidis on a piece of Montecito land that Gillespie owned. The first of many houses, El Fureidis was a mix of styles: Persian, Italian, Spanish, and Mexican, the whole simple and little-adorned, like Smith's best work, but not beholden to one region-a new, Californian synthesis. The elegant gardens he designed, with foursquare pools, rills, fountains, and palms, were straight out of the Persian desert, but also belonged to the late Victorian Orientalist fascination with Saracens and Moguls, Sheiks and Pharaohs. It was, to be sure, movie magic (a silent costume drama was shot there in 1915), but no less magic for that. Historian Kevin Starr wrote of California in that era: "In a very real sense the entire society was a stage set, a visualization of dream and illusion, which was, like film, at once true and not true." That building of dreams on the ground is what California was then all about, and what it struggles to remain about today: the ability to remake oneself and one's vision of paradise within the forgiving, enabling embrace of a like-minded culture and a beneficent climate.
Gillespie sold a piece of land next to El Fureidis to his cousin Henry Dater, a businessman, who hired Goodhue to design a house, called Dias Felicitas, in 1915. For Dater, he made another mixed-Mediterranean house, with long terraces descending a hillside to a reflecting pool at the bottom, on a bench above Montecito Creek. Apparently Dater and his wife never used the place; author Robin Karson has suggested that he was "nonplussed by his cousin's fervid love life." Instead, he rented it to Goodhue until his death in 1924, when it was sold to Charles Ludington, a wealthy New York art collector, who died two years later, leaving it to his son, Wright Ludington, who happened to be a cousin of "Lock" de Forest, with whom he had done a European Grand Tour, studying buildings and gardens. The two immediately set about remaking the estate, which Wright renamed Val Verde ("Green Valley"). De Forest added outbuildings and a parking court and slowly began transforming the gardens: running low-walled paths through woods that he thickened with oaks, leading to "keyhole" rooms-round, walled enclosures where two paths met at angles. He replaced the lawns that flanked the house with shallow pools framed by lemons and olives and dominated by classical statues. Statuary was everywhere, and pieces of bas-relief, all from Wright's serious and expanding collection of antiquities.
On the top terrace, de Forrest built a massive colonnade, antiqued with different colors of paint and made simultaneously grand and eerie by the fact that they had no pergola on top. He complicated Goodhue's staid grass terraces with hedges of box and black acacia, and balanced dark oaks with silvery olives to give a play of chiaroscuro to the whole. He turned an unused water tower into a study and built a colonnaded courtyard for more Roman art, and turned the old reservoirs outside into pools. Paths and allees knit it all together into a stage set for Ludington's lifestyle, which bears describing: Hollywood actors, set designers, and musicians mingled with the odd European royal at lavish, louche parties. Ludington liked the idea of himself as a Roman emperor holding court, Hadrian in his villa: He threw toga parties no doubt, with young men in the baths (there are pictures to prove it) and liaisons in the garden, one can only assume. The garden seems quite clearly made to induce love: the keyhole rooms beckoning through traceries of oak branches, hedges and columns offering tentative sightlines and privacy for moonlit walks down the garden path. One may approve or disapprove of such goings-on, but must allow that the garden is perfectly of its place and time, based in traditional forms but modern in its eccentricity, and perfectly fit to the mind of its owner.
What de Forest did at Val Verde and in his other gardens owes much to Santa Barbara's tradition of exuberant, world-embracing horticulture: an outright obsession, amounting to a love affair with plants. From the 19th century onward, a fraternity of nurserymen, imports themselves-Peter Riedel from Holland, E.O. Orpet and Kinton Stevens from England, Dr. Francesco Franceschi from Italy-imported hundreds upon hundreds of plants from the four corners of the globe, giving the town the character of a slightly surreal botanical wonderland, with probably more species than anywhere else on Earth. And this love of plants and flowers has managed a nice miracle: buffing off the hardest edges of even the most combative Modernist interventions and rooting them into the common landscape. Richard Neutra's Tremaine house of 1948, built up Cold Spring not far from El Mirador, is a prime example: de Forest helped site it, focusing north on a view of mountain peaks, as he always did if he had the chance. When he died before the garden was finished, Ralph Stevens, son of the nurseryman Kinton Stevens, laid out a carpet of wild and woolly succulents, with textures and colors so unbridled they could be described equally well as psychedelic or Victorian. The effect is to make a rather clinical box of a modern house into a sensual garden pavilion-and to effortlessly bridge that sharp historical polarity.
At about the same time, just down the street from Neutra's masterpiece and up the road from Val Verde, de Forrest was engaged with Madame Ganna Walska at Lotusland, remaking an estate grounds originally settled by Kinton Stevens in the 1890s, who peppered it with stands of palms, araucarias, and dragon trees. Walska, a Polish-born ingenue and sometime opera singer, with great beauty and apparent seductive force, had lived a novelistic life moving between St. Petersburg, Russia, Paris, New York, Chicago, and eventually Montecito, first collecting men-six husbands, most of them rich-before settling down and collecting plants and making gardens. To the formal gardens laid out by Paul Thiene around the Spanish house by Reginald Johnson, Madame Walska added unique, themed gardens throughout several decades, some organized around collections of exotic plants like cycads or bromeliads, some around a quality, like the color blue. She brought to her work a true passion (likely more than she ever allowed her husbands), amassing rare things and staging them in whimsical, theatrical, often bizarre ways-like the hedge theater populated by garden gnomes. Along the way, she collaborated with a series of men to help her with parts of the garden. With several of them she had to ask, cajole, or demand participation, and her working relationships with them were often fraught with dramas of resistance and acquiescence; each garden space had its own partnership, which ended when the project was done-just like a love affair, I would suggest.
Intricate stone work lines the various paths of Lotusland.
Walking through Lotusland is remarkably like walking through the insides of someone's head, each garden room a fantasy or a dream, a mental space. Unlike most Santa Barbara gardens, which fetishize the views of distant peaks, Walska's look down or in, not up, as she carefully framed not mountains but intricate, surreal compositions of light and color and textures of plants and stones. The sum is beyond category, in the sense that it transcends canons of style or period and rejects anxieties of influence, borrows from many sources, and recombines them into something utterly new, because each moment is utterly passionate and personal. The result is garden magic; it suffuses the place. Here, in a garden made by a Polish immigrant in a long-running opera of self-creation, is a fully formed, completely American style: free, individuated, and intelligent, relentless in its gathering of bits of everything in the world, botanical and cultural, immersed in history but ultimately free of it, garden magic untethered.


text:
By Amanda Nordqvist
A perfect match in many ways, composer Garreth Broke from Bristol, UK, and artist Anna Salzmann from Frankfurt, Germany, managed to find each other in the most unexpected manner possible – an instant connection in a Berlin-based gay club led Garreth to quit his job in England and move to Germany. They found inspiration in each other and went on to create phenomenal collaborations together, currently working on their project called December – a brief, sombre reflection on winter.
Could you guys tell me about your introductions to your respective art form, and when you started creating your own?
Anna: I can't remember a time when I wasn't drawing or painting.
Garreth: I'm kind of the same. My Mum used to play the piano, and I had lessons from about the age of 5 or 6. Mum got me a great teacher who was an amateur composer, and he taught me how to improvise. It was like a lightbulb went off in my head: I had always enjoyed the piano but never really loved it, but once I started improvising I could play for hours on end. But neither of us started sharing our work publicly until we met each other. I always felt like my music wasn't good enough to be shared. I studied music at a very traditional university where we really focused on the "greats", the western canon, Bach, Beethoven, that kind of thing. I found it really difficult to find a place for my music at university because, well, how do you compete with Bach? You can't!
Anna: I felt like I was always looking for something but I could never quite put my finger on it, and I felt like until I found out what that was, I would never be able to share it.
How do you inspire each other? Could you both describe your creating processes for me?
Garreth: When I moved to Germany I was unemployed, didn't speak German and had no friends and hardly any money, but Anna bought me a piano. I spent my days looking for work and studying German and playing the piano. I found that Anna kept getting really excited about the stuff I was composing, and it was the first time I can remember when someone other than my parents would really listen to what I was playing and tell me how beautiful they found it. It gave me a confidence in my music that I had never found before: I realised I didn't have to try to compete with Bach or Beethoven, I just had to explore what I was interested in.
Anna: And it inspired me for my own work. I started creating pieces to the music. Before I met Garreth I used to dance, and so music and movement - and creating with both - is something that I like to do. I often work in ink and watercolours, and I sometimes think that working with these two media is a bit like dancing, especially in combination with Garreth's music. It is a very physical experience. They are so fluid; they have a movement of their own. It is like dancing. When you dance you make a movement with your body but that movement goes further than your body - it influences your surroundings - and that's how it feels with ink and watercolour, these very watery media. They have a flow. I think that ink and watercolour transport my energy onto the paper or the canvas better than any other medium, and the energy is then influenced by the music, and that makes painting - at least the way I do it - so much like dance.
Garreth: We have this fairly small apartment in Frankfurt (it's so expensive here!) so we don't have much space and that means we both work in the same room. I've got a corner with my piano and my computer, and Anna has her corner with her work desk and easel, so we can work on our own thing but we're never completely unaware of what the other one is doing. I'll focus on the piano for a while and then I'll turn around and Anna will have done something which I think is totally awesome, and I'll look at it for a bit and we'll chat about what we're doing and then I'll turn back to the piano and my composition will grow and Anna will keep working and then we'll turn back to each other again. And in that way our stuff grows together and alongside each other. They sort of intertwine. It's honestly the best feeling. It's such a good feeling that I think there's a danger we could become a pair of hermits, like "yeah, I guess we better go to that party, but wouldn't it be nice just to stay in and make something!"
How did you get the idea for December? What can you tell me about the process of creating it?
Garreth: I need to explain a bit of context for it to really make sense. Earlier this year I released my first album, Coping Mechanism, which was a response to my mum's death to suicide. Anna had been encouraging me for a long time to release an album. She'd promised to do the artwork and just generally kept on encouraging me. I worked on the music for about 12 months and in June '15 we ran a successful crowdfunding campaign and then literally just after the crowdfunding campaign finished my mum took her life. She had suffered with depression for about half my life; she had been so positive at times, and then at times so desolate, so low. It was always this thing hanging over me, the fear that she would die.
And then she did. And you've got to remember that she was the one who had first encouraged me to make music, who had sorted out the piano lessons, and who kept telling me that I needed to record it. So to lose her like that when I was finally acting on her advice was pretty brutal. By that time I had got enough confidence to realise that I just had to be myself, not to try to pastiche something else. So I just poured all that emotion into the album, all the grief and all the happy memories, everything. After I finished it I was totally drained. Emotionally spent. There's one track in particular, "Mum", I think it's one of the best things I've ever written, but I can barely play anymore. I played it in a few concerts this year and I've decided that I need to give it a rest for a while because it just hurts. It just breaks me.
So I needed something different to work on, something less immediately emotional. Anna's painting professor had recommended a graphic novel / art book called The River by Alessandro Sanna and I bought it for her birthday last year. It's an amazing book. It's just a series of watercolours, hardly any text, and it depicts the landscape of the river Po during each of the four seasons, beginning with autumn and ending with summer. The paintings are incredible - they're so rich, so alive. I was never really interested in art until I met Anna and I think this book was another one of those "lightbulb" moments, when I just thought WOW.
The idea of writing something for each of the seasons just made sense to me. I grew up on a dairy farm in West Wales and I've spent a lot of time with my parents and my siblings walking through the landscape, whatever the weather. When you're a farmer you just have to get out in the weather and get on with it, no matter how cold or wet it is. So I feel kind of connected to the landscape, wherever I am. And the landscape changes so much, it's fascinating, and we have a tendency to ignore it. The idea of releasing a series of pieces that somehow recreate that experience of being in a landscape during the changing seasons really appealed to me. So I improvised a load of autumnal pieces and sent a demo to my favourite record label, 1631 Recordings, and they released it!
Anna: You love those guys.
Garreth: I really do. They're so cool, like… the artists on their list are incredible. They really are doing so much exciting, fascinating stuff. It's kind of surreal because when I was first getting into this I thought to myself "I really want to be on 1631 Recordings, but I'm not good enough, maybe that's something I can work towards", and then I just felt brave one day, took a risk, sent them an email and they took me! You can buy the September EP from them now, and they'll be putting out the December EP on 1st December. Naturally, Anna did some artwork for the September EP and she's done loads more for December.
Anna: It's just so nice to work together that it felt natural that I should make some art for whatever Garreth composed next.
Garreth: The video comes from working with Anna and noticing something which I'd never really paid attention to before, which is that when you get close up to art, when you look at it repeatedly over a long period of time, you notice all this detail that you had missed the first time. I wanted to find a way to recreate that experience. I started experimenting with making music videos that focused on the little details that I liked, and I just found myself really enjoying the process. It brings the music and the art together, tries to give the viewer/listener something more of the experience we had when creating it.
Anna: We wanted to make the artwork last throughout the course of the music. Not to be just one single shot, but to offer different perspectives and experiences of the art. I think with the details, the close-ups, you find different aspects of the art. Like with your music.
Garreth: Yeah, like the more you listen to an album, or play through a piano sonata, the more you notice the details, the little things. I recently bought Bon Iver's 22 A Million, I've listened to it so many times, and I keep spotting new things. There's so much detail there. It appeals to me on a surface level, because it's just really beautiful, but then the more you get to know it, the more you love it. And making a video of the December EP did two things: it would help people to enjoy Anna's art in the same way that I enjoy it - close up and personal – and it's a way for us to continue to work together.
Anna: And, actually, it's a way for us to kind of perform together. It's a way of showing our work on almost equal terms. My art is movement when it's being painted, but then after you've finished painting, it stays static.
Garreth: And the experience of looking at art in a gallery is something that can be quite static, which I never found that interesting.
Anna: The observer moves from one piece to the next...
Garreth: ... but the art is fixed. And my music isn't fixed. I love improvising so much that I rarely stick to the same notes every time because I find it boring. I think, why do I have to make a definite version?
Anna: I think that's why I love accidents in my art, because they make it less boring, less predictable. Like when I'm using a slightly old nib on my ink pen and it drips on the paper, and then I have to deal with that because I can't erase it. And actually I don't want to erase it, because it's good!
Garreth: I'm the same with the music: I record everything I improvise and when I listen back to it, I realise that I've accidentally done something that I really like. Life is full of stuff that you can't plan. And it's a question of how you deal with it. Do you try to carry on regardless? No. You can't. So you have to be flexible. I had no plan to move to Germany before I met Anna. Literally no plan. The whole thing happened by accident! We just randomly met.
Anna: But it was a good accident.
Garreth: Yeah. It's serendipity. If you approach life's randomness with a positive attitude then good things happen. But if you approach life with a negative attitude then life will drag you down. Think positive and good stuff happens. It's really as simple as that. Improvisation on the piano is like that: you have to know the basic rules, scales, chords, harmony etc, and then you just have to let it happen. It's hard to explain to someone who doesn't improvise, but it really is like you only have a certain amount of control over it.
The video for December will only be up for a couple of days. What motivated that decision?
Garreth: As I was composing the music for December, I was thinking about all the different ways the landscape changes during the winter, and reflecting on the landscape of my childhood in West Wales. We don't get much snow there, and when we do it rarely lasts more than a few days. In the winter we usually get frost, but it is usually gone almost as soon as the sun hits it, so if you want to look at it you have to make sure you're out at the right time or it's gone. So I was thinking about how temporary all these changes are, and also reflecting on how winter is the time of year when most plants appear to be dead, which led me to think about how ephemeral everything is.
At the same time, it's become a real commonplace to warn children about what they put on the internet, because what's on the internet "lasts forever"; what they put up as a teenager might be read by a prospective employer in twenty years time. That seems to be the dominant narrative about the internet: be careful about what you put on there, because it's like carving something in stone. That's a radical oversimplification of how the internet actually works and will likely evolve, but that's the way I've been taught to think about it. So I wanted to do something deliberately non-permanent: the video is here for a bit, and then it's gone, like the winter weather, like life. You guys can choose to look at the video if you want to, or you can choose not to. It really makes no difference in the grand scheme of things. But one thing you can be reasonably sure of is that if you don't look now, you won't be able to later. Same with the frost. Same with life.
Do you have any coming projects you'd like to tell me about?
Garreth: There are lots of projects brewing in my head but the only definite plans I have is that there'll definitely be two more EPs in this project, a March EP and a June EP, coming in March and June of 2017.
Anna: I've been commissioned by the University of Birmingham law department to work on a project with some of their undergraduates. It's a really interesting, complex project. In a nutshell the students pick a case that they have studied that they wanted to explore in more detail, and they are invited to give their personal responses: how does it make them feel, what does it say about the legal system and society etc. Then they send me their thoughts and I interpret those thoughts and add my own and turn them into art.
Aside from that, I'm working on several different series of artworks at the moment, and probably the best way to find out more is to interact with me on Instagram. Most excitingly in December I'm going to put up for sale one work of art a day, and all the proceeds I'm going to give to charity. It'll be like a cross between an advent calendar and an art auction, and the artwork of the day will go to the person who gives the most money and all of the proceeds will go to my chosen charity, WESER5 Diakoniezentrum, a Frankfurt based charity which works to improve the lives of homeless people.

subset: commoncrawl


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A ten-minute documentary about the show and our premiere at Theatre Row with interviews with the playwright and cast.
Renowned architectural photographer Norman McGrath got behind the camera once again to shoot the set of The Eternal Space. McGrath, whose work is internationally acclaimed, lent many photos from his catalog to help recreate New York's old Penn Station on our stage. Seeing the show earlier in the week, he called it a "masterpiece" and shot the set yesterday afternoon as a "dramatic and fitting climax" to his photography of Penn Station that began some 50 years ago.
Below are some photos of the master photographer shooting his own work in an unimaginable and unanticipated way. We also include a video with our Marketing Director, Malini Singh McDonald, to discuss his career, his inspiration to photograph Penn Station's demolition and his critique of our production.
The Eternal Space cast and crew were honored to be featured at the MAS Summit for New York City 2015. It was an amazing opportunity and a great success! We gained a new audience of thousands because of the MAS's live web stream of the event.
Below are some pictures and video from the evening at the Times Center.
We were given a wonderful introduction by MAS Board Member, William H. Wright II who turned it over to Justin to provide context for the context for the scene.
Below is a portion of scene one read by Clyde Baldo as activist and English teacher, Joseph Lanza, and Matt Pilieci reading Paul Abbot the construction worker and photographer taking Penn Station down while photo documenting the process. Both actors will be playing the roles in our upcoming production starting November 14th.
Many thanks again to the MAS for letting us take part in such an incredible event! We were grateful to be a part of it.
We had a blast... clearly.
On October 28, 1963 the Original Penn Station was Demolished, Forever Altering the NYC Landscape.
Over 50 Years Later, the Story of an Unlikely Friendship is Revealed.
A World Premiere Production
Written By Justin Rivers
Directed By Mindy Cooper
Performances Begin November 13 at Theatre Row
NEW YORK, NY, October 15, 2015 – The world premiere of THE ETERNAL SPACE, a new play written by Justin Rivers and directed by Mindy Cooper, will begin performances at New York City's Theatre Row on November 13, 2015.
October 28th, 1963 marked the end of an era in New York City history. The demolition of the old Pennsylvania Station had begun, and as the wrecking crew worked to dismantle the 53-year-old architectural marvel, a chance meeting between a construction worker running from his past and an English teacher who can't let his go sparks a three year odyssey where one man fights to keep the station standing while the other tears it down.
Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the demolition of the old Penn Station, THE ETERNAL SPACE uses original photography from the journalists who documented the station's destruction and recreations of broadcast recordings of the day to chart an unlikely friendship during the social and cultural upheavals of the mid-1960s.
"I decided the demolition photography would have to be central to the show," said Rivers. "Not only would it provide the backdrop for all the scenes, it would be a living presence on the stage. Since these photos communicate so much, they really became the third character on the stage with their own story to tell. They even have their own stage directions." THE ETERNAL SPACE will feature the photography of Norman McGrath, Peter Moore, Alexander Hatos, Ron Ziel and Aaron Rose.
The loss of the beaux-arts Penn Station would invigorate the efforts of the preservation movement both locally and nationally. National legislation that followed would later be critical to saving Grand Central Terminal and many other NYC buildings.
Playwright Justin Rivers wrote the first draft of THE ETERNAL SPACE in 2002 as a testament to all the things we don't appreciate until they're gone. Currently he is the author and co-collaborator of The Wonder City, a graphic novel that re-imagines the history of NYC. He is also Founder and Executive Director of The Character Connection Initiative, a non-profit organization that brings character education to inner-city middle school students and teachers throughout NYC. He has written and produced fifteen plays.
Director Mindy Cooper has been a collaborator in the New York theater and dance communities for over 30 years. Her body of work as a performer, choreographer and director includes Broadway- (Chicago, Titanic, Dracula, Beauty and the Beast, Wrong Mountain, Song & Dance), Off Broadway- (Soul Doctor, 50 Shades- The Musical Parody, Mars/Venus Live, and Five Course Love), FringeNYC and NYMF, as well as The Broadway Series at Town Hall.
The cast of THE ETERNAL SPACE will feature Clyde Baldo and Matt Pilieci. Baldo is an actor, director and photographer whose credits span more than fifty plays and thirty films. His play Glimpses was first performed at Arclight Theatre and has been performed twice in Rio de Janeiro. He is a proud member of The Amoralist Theater Company. Pilieci is a Co-Founder and former Associate Artistic Director of The Amoralists Theater Company. He is a graduate and company member of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts whose credits include Through The Yellow Hour (Rattlestick Theater) and Hotel Motel (The Amoralists).
Scenic design is by Jason Sherwood (Goodspeed Musicals: The Circus in Winter, Yale Repertory Theater: In the Next Room). Projection design is by Brad Peterson (Broadway: Fish in the Dark). Lighting design is by Zach Blane (Roundabout: Too Much, Too Much, Too Many, Suicide Incorporated). Costume design is by Tristan Raines (NYC: Bare, Tribes, The Internationals, Soul Doctor). Sound design is by Benjamin Blank (Social Life The Musical). Sara Zick is the associate producer. Public relations services by John Capo Public Relations.
THE ETERNAL SPACE will be presented at Theatre Row's Lion Theatre, located at 410 West 42nd Street in New York City.
Performances will be held from November 14 through December 6, 2015. All seats are $56.25.
To view the performance schedule and purchase tickets, visit www.TheEternalSpacePlay.com
Untapped Cities has created a special deal for NYC history buffs and Penn Station enthusiasts. As our co-promoted tours continue to sell-out, Untapped Cities is offering a combo tour and show ticket for selected Sunday performances during the fall. Beginning at noon, attendees will enjoy the 90 minute tour, led by playwright Justin Rivers and licensed tour guide Tamara Agins. We'll hunt for the relics of Penn Station past before heading over to Theatre Row on 42nd for a 3pm curtain. During the roughly 90 minute intermission between events, attendees can take advantage of lunch deals that we have created in the vicinity of Theatre Row. Bookings for this combo deal are available exclusively through Untapped Cities and offer a 20% discount on the show ticket. Space is limited, but you can read all about it here and get the combo deal here.
We hope to see you all at the show this fall!
These tours keep selling out. As we work toward's the world premiere of the play in the fall, we have a busy fall full of events that celebrate Penn Station and our ultimate opening. First up, we have added a date to calendar for yet another Penn Station tour. Join playwright Justin Rivers and our friends at Untapped Cities for the September event. Clicking here will bring you to our new Other Events page where you can find out about all the exciting stuff planned around our Off-Broadway opening.
Hey Backers!
We're in the midst of some exciting times for our upcoming production but I wanted to address some important housekeeping points for our backers.
Backer Reward Fulfillment:
Over the past six months it was necessary to use all of our time and resources to secure the theater and engage the other key components that will make The Eternal Space a full-fledged Off Broadway production this November. With most of that safely underway, I will be able to devote the month of July to fulfilling the print rewards that I know you've all been so patiently waiting for. These include the train ticket reproduction, the postcard, and the Norman McGrath prints. The only exception will be the designed production poster. We haven't printed those yet since we are waiting to confirm the talent names. Our goal is to fulfill the posters at some point in the fall. Above you will see a proof of our backer postcard as designed by illustrator and artist Courtney Zell
For those of you who filled out the ticketing request forms we thank you and want you to know that we have received and are processing your requests. Since it took a few weeks to get the The Eternal Space into the Telecharge system, we are now ready to generate your invoices and send them along. Again prepare to receive those invoices throughout the month of July.
If you have tickets coming to you as a backer reward and haven't had the chance to reserve your seats, you still can by clicking on this form. Please do so as tickets are already on sale to the public. And for those backers who don't have tickets as part of their reward package but would like to jump on purchasing tickets for the fall, visit our newly instated Telecharge profile page by clicking here.
Should you have any questions or concerns I am happy to field them and again, I thank you for your support and your patience. Launching an Off-Broadway production is a mammoth task and one that wouldn't be possible without your support.
With gratitude,
Greetings Backers,
More exciting news to report: The Municipal Art Society NYC asked me to lead three tours this coming weekend as part of their Jane's Walk NYC celebration. Jane's Walks are given in cities all over the world from May 1-3 to commemorate Jane Jacobs, urban visionary and author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She is pictured above at the AGBANY Penn demolition protests in 1963.
Of course, my walks will focus on the demolition and remnants of Old Penn Station. These will be a little different from the tours we do in partnership with Untapped Cities, but still in the same spirit of Old Penn exploration. Click here for the info. There is no RSVP or ticketing required, all the walks are free. You just show up and look for the guy standing in front of the Penn Eagle holding a MAS plaque. We even have one this Friday at 1PM if you want to come by on your lunch hour.
If you plan on attending please let me know. I'd love to say hi and if I can hand deliver your McGrath print, that would be awesome! Also, if you're interested in volunteering (mainly helping me check people in and holding MASNY plaques) let me know, it will get you into the Jane's Walk NYC celebration at the White Horse Tavern this Sunday, May 3rd at 6:00pm.
In other news: If you haven't reserved the performance date for your Kickstarter reward tickets please do so by clicking over and filling out the online form. Remember you have until May 15th before we open ticketing up to the general public.
I hope where ever you are, you're enjoying a beautiful day.
Happy midweek to you! Here's your weekly update on all things The Eternal Space:
- Last Saturday we had two more successful Penn Station Remnant Tours with our friends at Untapped Cities. Pictures will be coming soon. In the meantime we've set the date for our next round: Sunday, May 31 at 2pm. Untapped Cities still has a waiting list to get through but they've opened up some spots should you want to join us. Click here to reserve a ticket. I would suggest acting fast because these tours tend to sell out. If you can't make this round, we're also planning a special tour in October as well.
- For all Kickstarter backers $50 and above I sent out emails about reserving your reward tickets to our show before we put the them on sale through Telecharge. If you didn't see it yet, here's the link to our online form. Kickstarter Backers have until May 15 to choose their seats before the general public. Needless to say, I'll keep reminding you. Remember: $50 & $75 backers are entitled to one ticket, $100 and above backers are entitled to two tickets.
- Norman Print Update: I'm continuing to hold off on fulfilling the McGrath prints since artist and illustrator extraordinaire Courtney Zell is almost finished designing our official postcard. Once that is printed, I am stoning two birds in one mailing (no birds will be hurt in your Norman print/postcard fulfillment). Thank you for your patience.
I hope you enjoy the rest of your week!
There is so much... awesome... to report from last week so let's get to it.
First, we signed the lease on The Lion Theatre! Ladies and gentlemen, because of you, this production is officially a reality with a home. We will open on Thursday, November 12 and run through Sunday, December 6.
In the coming weeks we will activate our advance ticket sales through Telecharge. Backers who have tickets coming to them as part of their rewards package will be getting an email directly from me asking when they would like to attend the show. This is so I can enter you into the Telecharge system before other potential audience members can purchase those seats. In short: you guys get first dibs.
To be clear you do not need to take any action right now! Just expect an email from me by the end of this week and it will explain the next steps.
Last Wednesday evening we had a stellar event with the New York Transit Museum. The coordinators reported that it was their best-attended Platform event yet and there was a lot of positive buzz concerning our show specifically. It was literally standing room only as people were stuffed in the train cars trying to listen to the show because the platform was covered with audience members.
We are hopeful that the museum will work with us to coordinate a dedicated event just for our before our production begins in the fall. We were also appreciative to have some friendly backers attend the evening and show their support. Big thanks again to those who came out!
Here are a few more pictures from the evening. I will be posting all the photos up on Instagram each day this week.
Lastly, some Kickstarter backers have been reaching out about the Norman McGrath prints. I would like to clarify that they have not been mailed out yet. I bulk-ordered the proper shipping envelopes and awaiting their arrival before I begin the fulfillment process. Once I do, I will send a confirmation email stating that they were sent out so you know to expect them.
Have a great week and thanks!
Last week I mentioned that The Eternal Space was chosen to be part of the New York Transit Museum's Platform performance event and I'm happy to report that we've been scheduled for the evening of April 1st at 6:30. The museum describes Platform as "an open mic night for historians and urbanists… a show-and-tell for their creative musings on mass transit."
I met up with the coordinator of the event last Tuesday morning and we scoured the museum for the best performance space. For those who may not know, the Transit Museum occupies the refurbished 1936 Court Street subway station in downtown Brooklyn. The lower level is the station platform, occupied on both sides by historic subway cars that people are allowed to go in and out of at their leisure. Most of the evening's performances will take place inside those cars.
Our thirty-minute select scene will be read on the station platform between the old 1963 World's Fair shuttle train (which left from Penn Station) and a 1933 BMT train car that is worth a look all on its own. We'll be using restored Grand Central waiting room benches as audience seating and the photographs will likely be cast on one of the historic train cars.
Clyde Baldo and Matt Pilieci will reprise their roles as Joseph Lanza and Paul Abbot with technical direction by Rome Brown and stage directions read by Dan Stern.
For those who are local and want a sneak peek at the show this is an awesome opportunity in a unique space. Tickets are $15 but if you enter the code CREATE10 when you purchase the tickets from NYTM'S Platform page, you can snag them for $10. That's quite a deal considering there will be ten other artists across several media also on hand to enjoy that evening.
Click through to this page for more info and the opportunity to purchase tickets. If you plan on attending let me know, I'd love to say hi.
My apologies for being out of touch over the past few weeks. We've had a great deal going on and there's hardly been time to write. I have a long list to report and will try to do so today in brief. Over the subsequent weeks I'll focus on unpacking each point one-by-one with a little more detail.
First, the Norman McGrath prints are in my possession and they are amazing! For those backers who are owed these I will begin that fulfillment process soon. Next week I'll have more for you on the exact timing and method. Also for those interested in purchasing a print, we will have them up for sale on the website very soon as well.
Second, I believe I reported in my last update eons ago that we were booking The Lion on Theatre Row right in the heart of Manhattan's theater district. I'm happy to report that the ink is almost dry on the contract and it looks like November 12 will be our opening. I'll be sure to let you know when that is official so we can begin to schedule those backers who have show tickets coming their way.
Third, you may have heard through social media that our Penn Station Remnant Tour co-hosted with Untapped Cities was a great success. Not only did we sell out the one intended backer tour, Untapped Cities had such interest from their readership that they created a second tour. That one sell out too! Then there were enough people on the waiting list to hold two more tours in mid-April AND… wait for it… both sold out as well! Now we're looking at tour dates for the beginning of June. The backers who attended our first tour reported that they really enjoyed the tour. If you're interested in joining us in late June, you won't be disappointed. As soon as we finalize the date, I will reach out to you guys first in case tickets go fast like the others.
And lastly, I am excited to report that the New York Transit Museum has picked The Eternal Space to be highlighted in it's evening transit arts program called Platforms. We are setting the date and finalizing our offering's format but it could be as early as April 1. If you're in the area and want a sneak peak at the show you should come on down. We will be performing inside one of the most unique museums in the city.
Ok, that was a long one, but again, there are many awesome things happening for our production. Enjoy the rest of your weekend and I look forward to being in touch next week.
Photo by Norman McGrath
Last Friday I spoke to Norman about our successful Kickstarter funding. He was thrilled and agreed that he and I should pick three prints for our backers to choose from. He wanted me to assure them that he would take good care to choose pictures that have never been printed before and were also special to him.
After I give him a tally of who wants what, he will personally produce, sign, and number each print to increase their value. In addition Norman is going to increase the size of the print from an 8 1/2" X 11" to a 11"X14" to give it "more presence" should our backers decide to display it. Overall he is excited to get this process started and I am so grateful to have Norman involved.
If you didn't have the opportunity to contribute to the Kickstarter and would like to make a tax deductible donation to our upcoming production, you can click through to my artist page at The Field and do so easily. If you're interested in purchasing a special edition Norman McGrath print please contact us through our email widget on the home page and we would be happy to set that up for you.
In other news... we are putting together proposals to submit to theaters, some I'm hoping will go out before Thanksgiving. I'm meeting with Untapped Cities next week to discuss the particulars of the Penn Station tour and will be sure to update you on our progress next week.
Until then, be well and stay warm!
It's hard to believe it's been almost a full week since we funded our Kickstarter campaign. Now that we have a production to mount, I will keep you informed of our progress through weekly blog posts. I thought Wednesday would be a good day for these as I will be concurrently be doing Kickstarter Backer updates on the same day.
With these updates, you'll get an inside look at things like booking a theater space to securing production staff or maybe even some new adventures in uncovering demolition photos straight through to behind-the-scenes peeks at rehearsals. If on some weeks there isn't that much to report, I'll include another rare photo.
Either way, you're in the loop and an important part of our process. We cannot wait for everyone to see this show and now you can say you've been with us since the beginning.


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Spending the month of November gallivanting around the world is a lot of fun, but is terrible for keeping up with blogging! I have a blog list stretching further than the (weary) eye can see, because I have so many great places to share that we enjoyed before leaving London, as well as wanting to share all the fun adventures we are having whilst gallivanting.
when we knew we were leaving London we kicked off a bit of a Foodie Farewell tour. I wanted to go to a few new places that were always on our radar as well as making sure I went to the old favourites one last time.
One of these old favourites is the quasi-deli in Hampstead that we frequented for our tomatoes, cheese and occasional rare roasted beef. The joke name is "Melrose & Mortgage" and it definitely isn't chock-a-block full of bargains, but for the occasional quality produce or best tomatoes in London, it's worth the little extra.
Melrose & Morgan started down the road in Chalk Farm, where everything is still baked freshly each day. I can't vouch for the pastry section, but the salads, meats and tomatoes are incredible.
Yes I'm talking a lot about their tomatoes, but they are the best tomatoes I've had since Stanthorpe. And this from the girl who used to give up tomatoes for Lent just so that I wouldn't have to eat them for 40 days. They're really good!!
The shop itself is beautifully presented with so much attention to detail. There is seating upstairs and a few tables outside (for those brief few warmer months that al fresco dining is appropriate).
And as a leaving gift, our dear friends gave me Good Food For Your Table, a little piece of Hampstead to take with us to Abu Dhabi. I have been travelling with it, and was won over by the first topic "the perfect toast". Who knew there was a right and wrong way of toast, but having read there is, I will never slowly toast my bread and then have it sit on a plate to cool again! Its a really cute foodie read, and even has some of the recipes of their wonderful meals too!
I'm thinking we have been taking this type of life for granted a little, as we're about to trade it all in for mega-malls! But I'm hoping I can still find a bit of a foodie scene to immerse myself in in Abu Dhabi.
Do you have many food boutiques in your area? Is supporting local produce and artisan cooking a big part of your community? I'd love to hear about it if it is!!