Back in November, I had to spend a week in New York for work. My hotel was in Hudson Yards, the shiny new development on the West Side of Manhattan, so my morning run took me south along the river on the edge of Chelsea and the Meatpacking District, glitzy neighborhoods where I didn’t spend much time during my two-year stint as a New Yorker a decade ago.
On one of these runs, I encountered a small bridge that led off of the pedestrian path and into the Hudson, where a strange little postage stamp of greenery was poised atop what looked like a cluster of garlic cloves:
A sign at the bridge’s entrance announced, accurately enough, “Little Island.” Intrigued, I crossed the bridge on the way back to my hotel. What I saw reminded me of the artificial landscapes of my childhood visits to the St. Louis Zoo: man-made hills covered in greenery, with the intent of evoking an environment other than the one I was actually in. Shuttered concession stands deepened the association, which, while not altogether unpleasant, struck me as somewhat pointless in the absence of elephants and zebras. Perhaps the spot would be livelier during summertime concerts, but it was a cold, damp, morning, and I was not dressed for further exploration, so I crossed from the new Little Island back to the old larger one.
My main impression of the island was that it was “neat” or “fun” in the way that so many confected urban spaces of the 21st century—cocktail bars, rooftop decks, those “immersive” plays where you choose your own plot—are “neat” or “fun”: they don’t create any real, lasting feelings, just a series of mental clicks designed to reassure you that you are having a Real Experience (“I am drinking a handcrafted cocktail and it is fun”; “I am looking at art and it is neat”) and thus that you are living a worthwhile life. Of course, if you are aware that you’re experiencing those sort of lab-grown clicks rather than actual feelings, you’re also likely to be aware of the feelings you’re not having, and thus of the emptiness of so much of urban life, which emptiness is not unrelated to the fact that many of these little click-factories are just designed to make money (those concession stands). Luckily, while the handiwork of click-factories is almost impossible to avoid in contemporary life, it is, with some practice, easy to disentangle from, and so really, Little Island was a small part of my day that I didn’t think much more about as I trotted away.
That was, I didn’t think much more about it until a few weeks ago, when J. Andrew Billingsley wrote about the Little Island (and another manufactured littoral Manhattan space, the Gansevoort Pier) in a tremendous essay for the New York Review of Architecture.1
Now, Andrew is a good friend of mine, but while that may be a necessary condition of my endorsement of his essay, it is not a sufficient one. I’m plugging the essay here because it’s just a damn good piece of writing, and it helped me understand my experience of Little Island as a vaguely charming, mildly fun, sort of neat blob of meh, floating out there in Hudson’s River. As Andrew shows, a big part of the reason is that Little Island, if not designed to make money, was designed by money (Barry Diller was a big funder). But Andrew’s critique is no cheap Marxist formula where lavish funding = bad architecture. It’s a consideration of what makes public spaces feel the way they feel, and why so many spaces today feel so disappointing; it’s serious, but also wildly funny, which is one of the harder tricks to pull off as a writer. I won’t say anything else except to urge you to read the essay, which considers, among many other subjects:
The cost of a fleet of suicide drones
The sinking of the Henry Clay
Public architecture as a mechanism of control
The distinction between sex and sexiness
Revolting wine coolers
In addition to the New York Review of Architecture, I read a few books this year. I think the most compelling was one that has long been on my list, Roberto Bolaño’s magnum opus, 2666. I often finish large postmodern novels wishing they had been smaller, but that wasn’t the case with 2666, which I had a hard time putting down. It’s an astonishing work. For several hundred pages, Bolaño sustains an almost unbearable mood of dread and foreboding as he spins a sprawling whodunit with no answer (or, rather, answers too terrible to put into words). It’s a celebration of literature, a satire of academia, a critique of globalism, and a document of violence. That it can be all these things at once and not feel pretentious or overstuffed is a testament to its greatness.
I also read two books that have been lauded as “forgotten masterpieces” for so long now that there should be a moratorium on the term: John Williams’s Stoner and Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus. I liked Stoner, but not as much as I had hoped, what with its Missouri setting; at times, it struck me as less-accomplished Willa Cather, and the character of Stoner’s wife was unbelievably strident. I did, however, appreciate the book’s belief that even a life that looks from the outside like a failure can have value, dignity, and reward. It took me a while to find my footing in the chilly emotional clime of Transit of Venus, but the final scene filled me with astonishment: only then did I see what Hazzard had been up to, and how much skill it took her to pull it off.
On the nonfiction side, I finally read Postwar, Tony Judt’s massive history of Europe since 1945. The book was published in 2005, and there is an elegiac quality to reading it now, not only because Judt died prematurely in 2010, but also because the book is a product of a moment of real optimism about the European project. One wishes Judt were still around to comment on the continent’s faltering unity and its frequent flirtations with right-wing populism.
Beverly Gage’s biography of J. Edgar Hoover, G-Man, surprised me with the sympathy it showed its generally odious subject. This isn’t to say Gage pulls punches: she makes clear that Hoover was a baleful force in Washington for far too long, and her account of his unhinged war against Martin Luther King, Jr.—by now a well-documented episode—is one of the saddest pieces of American history I’ve encountered in a long time. At the same time, Gage is interested in Hoover as a modern civil servant, a disciple of the Progressive-era faith that merit, not patronage, was the key to good government. Gage has no illusions that Hoover’s commitment to modernizing federal law enforcement outweighed his antipathy to those struggling for social justice, but she recognizes, like all good biographers, that even a rotten character is worth understanding when it’s as consequential as Hoover’s As for those cross-dressing stories: Gage concludes there probably isn’t much to them. (In the biography realm, I also very much enjoyed Laura Dassow Walls’s biography of Thoreau.)
Finally, no book was more fun to read this year than Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland. But that’s a subject for my first full post of 2025, which I hope to write soon.
In the meantime, happy new year.
The NY Rev. of Architecture is a young publication I’ve enjoyed reading in recent years, even though I’m no architect or sophisticated critic thereof. It’s pitched at laymen like me and does a pretty good job, I think, of avoiding jargon. A subscription is cheap (60 American clams/year) and you can get a few free articles if you give them your email address.