What Lies Beneath...

Here's an article from yesterday's New York Times (the Weekend Arts section) for those of you who are Discovering New York.

This paragraph struck me in particular:

We began in Tompkins Square Park, a focal point in the neighborhood’s history, which before the 1800s was soupy swampland and marshes. The East River shoreline was where Avenue C is now; everything east of that was built on progressive stages of landfill — including, amazingly, rubble from bombed London, shipped across the Atlantic after World War II to form part of the foundation for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive.

We tend to think of cityscapes as separated into grids, as mapped out onto neutral planes of land, or as encrusted onto the blank slate of the earth. We don't always see a living city as stratified, as something archaeologically interesting, and we don't always see archaeological digs as containing the histories of remote places.

When I showed this article to a friend he said that he'd always been interested in the similar plight of the tons of rubble from Ground Zero. We treat the emptiness of Ground Zero as something sacrosanct, and yet the tons of matter have seemingly dissipated without a word or a memory. It would be interesting to trace the mass migration (or forced exodus?) of rubble, any rubble, around the globe, and I wonder if we could detect any patterns the way we can with birds or humans.

And if we believe, along with Werner von Braun -- the father of the German rocket program who came to the United States right around the time that that section of the FDR drive was being built with the London rubble von Braun's rockets helped create -- that "Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation," then we might be tempted to wonder about the future transformations of all the rubble being created these days, in cities around the world...