“Shoulder the curse of sundered parentage,” – Hart Crane

Most major cities in the world are on bodies of water: Cairo, Chicago, Louisville, Galway. New York is a port town, founded by Dutch merchants the way space-men first looked for the right place to put the flag in the moon. Today, there are more jet-skis and kayaks in the river than cargo ships, and for the last fifty years the city has been conducting the sometimes lumbering, sometimes swift process of dismantling the architecture of the waterfront. Over the past year, a significant sector of the Brooklyn Marine Terminal was excised.

Never slack as an innovator, NYC since WWII (or publication of The Recognitions by Gaddis) remains a transmitter of goods, and those goods are ideas, let the cargo unload in Jersey. 

Still helmed by the Financial District – which was the first of all neighborhoods born colonially (and where the early dot-coms utilized cheap office space) – New York has become an intense curator of itself. And the room for curatorship is made by both bearing and sacrificing the dicey effort toward full new ideas.

Think tanks are not often built where the piers once jut, but parks and housing.  This is not to say that creativity of individuals does not abound NYC, but that “creativity of individuals” is the very idea in the employ of an economy for which individuals should do as the DJ who is out to impress the clubgoers of his taste in music rather than to get people to dance.

Tho perhaps where one activist views the acquisition of old industrial space in West Harlem by Columbia University as a theft of property, another activist might champion as land use for the intellect…