Digging the LowLine

★ Now the boys were feuding over the air conditioning and would keep the feud alive through the day, the skinny older one asking to have the cold shut off and the sturdy younger one climbing up on the couch to turn it back on. Again the foulness was more telling than the heat. The new exhaust from idling traffic blended with the general filth of the atmosphere. A thick canopy of trumpet vine, surging south, shaded a bench on the Broadway median. The children survived a detour to the grocery store without wilting or even whining. The late-day air was still thick, but not as saturated as real high summer—heavy, rather than sweaty. Unfamiliar kids drifted into and out of and back into the playground wiffleball session, fusing for a spell with someone else’s netless volleyball lesson in short left field. The wiffleball was one adult against two or four or three children, each baserunner circling the bases without stopping till chased all the way around to home plate. It took four cans of seltzer to rehydrate the pitcher afterward, in the darkness of late dinnertime. Out in the night, partygoers milled in the lights by the grills on the new luxury building’s roof, fading into a shapeless mass of bodies where the light gave out—more bodies, surely, than yet had moved into the stacked glass-fronted boxes below. Now and then whooping and other sounds of enjoyment carried across the avenue.

I mean, holy shit. Look at it again.

It is the year 2015, and everything touched by a major movie studio—certainly the 24th installment in one of the medium’s most enduring franchises—is a/b/c/d/e/f-tested TO DEATH and this is the poster we get.

If you stand on the end of the platform shared by the J and M trains in the Delancey-Essex Street subway station and squint past the rails of the M line, beyond the columns supporting the street traffic above, you can see a gloomy-looking expanse of empty space pocked with puddles and ringed with graffiti. A bit more than an acre in size, the cavernous rectangle stretches for three blocks below Delancey Street, between Essex Street and Clinton at the mouth of the Williamsburg Bridge.

Opened in 1904 as the Essex Street Trolley Terminal, the space served as a depot for streetcars operating along the bridge’s Brooklyn-bound trolley lines until 1948, when private trolley service over the bridge was suspended and control of the space was transferred to the newly formed MTA. No longer running streetcars, and without an obvious need for their strange vestigial infrastructure, the MTA had the space sealed and abandoned it.

A few years ago, two thirtysomething friends, Dan Barasch and James Ramsey, decided that the space should be a public park—a subterranean science-fiction cousin to the High Line’s verdant boardwalk, called the LowLine. They proposed using an arrangement of lenses and tubes to collect natural sunlight from the surface and pipe it below, illuminating the space and supporting photosynthesis in what they are calling “the world’s first underground park.” In much the same way that the High Line’s modern repurposing of underused infrastructure redefined a long stretch of West Chelsea, the LowLine founders describe their project as “not merely a new public space, but an innovative display of how technology can transform our cities.”

The LowLine’s crusade to carve a park from an underutilized corner of belowground transit infrastructure is an innovative solution to a persistent problem: Community parks are a public good, and the Lower East Side is a neighborhood severely lacking in green space. The LowLine could be a subterranean respite in a neighborhood where real estate prices on the surface are inhospitable to the idea. What seems left unconsidered, however, is how it would fit into the future of a changing Lower East Side—and whose priorities “the world’s first underground park” would service.

★★ The haze was starting to resemble a cheery fog, one invulnerable to sun. A woman reached through the fence around Sherman Square to pull seeds out of a withered sunflower head. The heat of the heat wave was present but somehow abstract; what registered instead was the dirtiness of the air. Only down in the subway did things truly swelter; the eight-year-old voted to hop into the air conditioning of a local train rather than waiting on the platform for an express. From the Flatiron, downtown was a gray blur, but in the other direction, the ray patterns on the fins of the spire of the Empire State Building stood out. By evening rush hour, the middle ground had sharped, but the smudginess persisted in the distance.

If there’s one thread running through the dozens of app updates I consent to each week, and the updates to the operating system beneath them, it’s this: it is becoming easier, over time, to get things out of my phone, and to put things into it. Various apps and services have become either more demanding or more compelling, and software and interfaces have learned how to get out of the way.

Autocorrect’s extreme assertiveness mostly eliminates friction. Gesture keyboards remove a thumb. Beyond typing, you can dictate into your phone. You can mash emoji. Much more easily, and perhaps more often, you can express yourself without language: double-tapping a photo, liking, sharing, retweeting. No time, or desire, to type? You can make a face, press a button, and hit send. You can heart a group message and leave it at that. Savvy services recognize that software is both a conduit and a bottleneck, and do whatever they can to make space and remove friction. And so our inputs and outputs increase; at least, they transfer to the phone.

This, I think, has had a strange effect on my computer use. I spend most workdays in front of a keyboard, typing into a variety of boxes: a CMS, social networks, email fields, instant message windows, group chat apps. Group chat use in particular has ballooned—I used Campfire and Hipchat in other workplaces, and with friends, but Slack has absorbed a surprising amount of utility, time and output. Chat, like instant messaging, seems to allow for a looseness not always permissible over email, where you can’t immediately jump in with elaboration. It also encourages volume. Typing into a chat is less like sending a message than jumping into a stream, or chiming in to a verbal conversation. A point is made or a purpose conveyed through a dozen short messages and responses instead of a single encompassing email. Timing matters as much as anything.

In late August, nearly one hundred office cleaners at WeWork locations throughout Manhattan lost their jobs after they began protesting unfair working conditions. The office cleaners were not employed directly by WeWork, a multi-national co-working startup valued at ten billion dollars; rather, they were employees of a cleaning contractor called Commercial Building Management. Such arrangements insulate employers like WeWork from having to negotiate with unionized labor, and makes organizing such workplaces difficult. The CBM cleaners at WeWork’s offices in New York were making eleven dollars an hour or less, without benefits; according to SEIU-32BJ, the service workers’ union, the prevailing wage for unionized office cleaners in New York is twenty-three dollars an hour, with full benefits.

The cleaners—some of whom had worked in the WeWork offices for three years or more—went public with their union organizing effort on June 18th. A week later, CBM told WeWork that it would be terminating its contract with the company in New York City, effective August 23rd. (CBM is still WeWork’s cleaning contractor in Boston and Washington, D.C.) At the beginning of August, WeWork announced that it was creating “approximately” one hundred new positions in the New York “community team,” referred to as Community Service Associates (CSAs) and Community Service Leads (CSLs), in anticipation of the CBM cleaners’ impending absence. Starting wages begin at fifteen dollars per hour for CSAs and eighteen dollars per hour for CSLs. All CSAs and CSLs are to receive healthcare benefits, a 401(k) plan, and equity in the company, “consistent with WeWork’s vision that every employee should have an ownership interest in WeWork.”

More than one hundred twenty cleaners were employed by CBM at WeWork’s New York locations. “We will be interviewing all CBM employees and we expect that a number of the current CBM employees will meet the qualifications for these positions and begin exciting careers with WeWork,” WeWork’s press release announcing the new jobs said. When CBM’s contract ended on August 23rd, the cleaners lost their jobs; the next day, 32BJ filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board against WeWork, charging that the company had refused to rehire “approximately 100 janitorial employees because of their support for the Union.”

During her promotional tour for 1989, Taylor Swift wouldn’t shut up about how great the eighties were. To Rolling Stone, she theorized:

What you saw happening with music was also happening in our culture, where people were just wearing whatever crazy colors they wanted to, because why not? There just seemed to be this energy about endless opportunities, endless possibilities, endless ways you could live your life.

Why not? It makes sense that the eighties could give pop stars some direction. Pick any year post-Thriller, look at the Billboard Year End chart, and count the number of songs in one year that you haven’t been able to escape since; these are the songs of lazy DJ sets, karaoke nights, college party playlists, and desperate car commercials. There’s some forgettable garbage in there too, but even it’s still played. You hear this stuff across state lines and generational chasms. The system worked.

Of course Taylor Swift would want to emulate artists who sold millions, and of course doing so means ironing out the country, idling away from the specific. As of this month, just over five million copies of 1989 have been sold in the United States; other than Drake’s latest, it’s the only album to sell over a million copies in 2015. In the pictures publicizing Swift’s 1989 tour, the glitter rompers and pyrotechnics and celebrity cameos all add up to this new “pop” Swift, one with endless opportunities, endless ways she could live her life. This is the way she’s living her life. It looks fun, if also a little disappointing.

Swift cites “Like A Prayer” in that Rolling Stone interview, but if I have to name a lasting pop star from the era who embodies Taylor’s distinguishing qualities—performatively guileless, massive ego, insistent on possibilities while staying within the lines, someone who hides parts of herself to get what she wants, i.e. your love—I can’t go with Madonna, who was more transparently provocative and ruthless. Janet had genuine rhythm; Cyndi was downtown in a way Taylor’s Tribeca is not; and Whitney was in a vocal class of her own. I don’t think I can name a woman. I might name a man. Let’s talk about George Michael.

Preface to a Twenty Volume Joke Book

“And now, each night I count the stars. / And each night I get the same number.”
-Amiri Baraka, “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note”

I’m done with The Real World
Now I watch Top Chef

And dream about a life of tasting
And get so hungry I could die

I don’t root for the moon-face
Pale in his intention

I’m grown up
I’m rooting for the black girl

Cooking fried chicken for the first challenge
All my life I taste

“Whatever man I’m a black girl”
Shaking her afro

My feelings are pretty real
Sexism is pretty real

No one tells me I’m beautiful
I dream about tasting

In all my baby photos I have this
Look like oh my god

I feel sorry
I have always been terrified to be

This is just a taste
It’s not ready yet

★★ A hurtful glare filled the sky from the east. People in the bank, in the part of the bank that still used people, were talking about the air quality. An old butter-colored Impala gleamed in a lane of sun beside the shadows on 20th Street. Tiny flashbulbs went off in the sidewalk concrete. Past midday, clouds covered and uncovered the zenith. The thick warmth soaked into chilled joints. The later-day sky was clear again, admitting new heat. Cops and banjos flanked the subway entrance. The entrance hallway in the big public school was sweltering, but air conditioners made a racket in the old, hard-surfaced auditorium, under the dim blue of the lights. The three-year-old decided the tag in the t-shirt he’d been wearing all day was suddenly too much to bear, and insisted on making the walk home bare-chested.