A walk in the park May 10, 2024
The rain held off long enough for me to get back to the
train last night, but even that only dotted the windows as we headed north.
I was exhausted from the walk – to the historic train station,
down the cobblestone road, then back again.
The skyline, with its glass face, reflecting the last rays
of the sinking sun, making the Big Apple look as if on fire.
The view changed with the extinguishing of the sun, a
different, internal glitter of building lights replacing the fire, haunting in
the sense that is revealed residential occupation that did not exist when I
grew up.
While I used to marvel at the sky line when traveling from
Paterson along the Weehawken overlook, much of downtown became dark as offices
closed.
I went to the park yesterday for an event at the historic
train station, lots of kids, lots of noise, and I was grateful for the relative
silence once free of the building – if you discount the constant buzz of helicopters,
hired to haunt the green lady at the far southeast corner of the park.
All this is destined to change as forces – including a very
rich golf course owner – seem to bring social justice to a park that has a long
history of welcoming immigrants, but failed to live up to the agenda to provide
a public space for the people in the neighborhood. Although peaceful on the
surface, the park has become a battle ground, where the founders struggle to
keep control of its destiny, while other forces seek to change it to meet
contemporary needs.
I am caught in the middle of this conflict in that I hate the
whole nature of progress, which does its best to destroy what it cannot
reconstruct, and the city around the park, a place where immigrants settled and
found their share of the American Dream, is being converted into a playground
for the wealthy as towers loom over it, filled with people whose arrival from
the suburbs is rapidly forcing local people to leave.
Who can afford to rent any of these place except the super
rich and the supper poor. Those unfortunate people who thought they could build
their dreams in one or two family houses, must seek refuge elsewhere, beyond
the reach of Manhattan and its influence, progress being imposed in order to
keep up tax revenues to cities who spend more than they should, and have become
job mills for political supporters at annual rates that no ordinary tax payer
can afford.
Even with all this looming over the park, the open space is
a relief to all that, a testimony to an original vision of a place where people
can come to and rest and not worry about the impact the future will have on
their lives.
And while the walk from the light rail to the train station
is a bit stenuious, I take the trek rather than drive my car there, needing to
fill my lungs with air unpolluted by food trucks and the hogwash of the more
developed waterfront slightly north.
I even appreciated the bits of rain, as if god’s tears came
to help wash away the grime left by well-meaning but deluded officials, whose
vision of the world excludes people like me, while Journal Square, these
officials plot to take over another plot of land that stands between them and
their vision of progress.
I suppose every generation goes through this insanity, only we
never step back, we can’t recover what each of these progressive steps take
away, and in the end, we have lost something valuable, something we can’t ever
get back, and still we boast that we have created a better world. But have we?
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