Bryce Goyer Dérive 1
February 19, 2018, by Bryce
#Dérive 1
At first I was a little hesitant about the prospect of doing this Dérive. The idea of walking around for at least an hour with no music, no texts, no distractions made me nervous. I thought I would get bored, or worse have to be alone with my thoughts. This being said, I ended picking a beautiful day to do my Dérive. It was sunny and clear out, and unseasonably warm for February. I started out by walking from my apartment, conveniently located in the West Village, down to Charlton and Hudson, my starting point. It was interesting to have my Dérive take place in an area of the city that we haven’t really talked about that much in class.
My roommate and I had just recently been talking about this area, south of West Village but not quite Tribeca yet. It’s an odd limbo and I feel that reflected in the architecture and overall mood of this area. The street where I started was just North of the entrance for the Holland Tunnel. The buildings all around me were a minimum of 10 stories high, successfully blocking the sun and making the whole street feel cool and grey. It was very commercial, with a few chain restaurants/ coffee shops and a few hotels. There was also a fair amount of scaffolding around, again further preventing the sun from shining down. As I moved towards Varick Street, traffic picked up, as this street is four lanes wide and going into the Holland Tunnel. Even though automobile traffic had picked up, pedestrians were still few and far between.
I walked along Varick for a while before turning left onto Clarkson St., moving towards more of the quintessential West Village streets. Immediately there were much fewer cars, and three parks and a school all on this one street. As I turned right onto Leroy Street, one of those oddly bent streets so common within the West Village, it felt like a whole new city. The tallest building on this street, and for the majority of streets around it, were at most 4 stories. It automatically felt more residential, with row houses lining the left side of the street, and a park with elementary school kids playing soccer on the other. At this point it was what people may call the “Golden Hour”, it was around 4 pm and the sun was beginning to make its descent for the day. The result was the street was bathed in a golden and warm light, making the entire street feel cozy. There were a few clusters of people strolling along the street, stopping to look at the row houses and chatting to each other. I heard some Italian words drift my way, and automatically assumed they were tourists. Besides the occasional conversation of a couple passing by, or a child laughing while playing in the park, it was very quiet and serene. I could even hear birds chirping, and didn’t hear any noise from a car.
As soon as I neared 7th Ave though, this all changed. 7th Ave is obviously a much larger street than the one I had come from, and this leads to many more cars and people. It was ironic that at this point the Dérive App told me to find silence. I turned away from the bustling avenue and onto Bedford Street. A street that I have long had a love-hate relationship with. This street leads truly into the heart of the West Village, it’s very historic and beautiful, almost looking like a perfectly preserved 1800 New York City street. But, this also means the streets are extremely narrow, and this includes the sidewalks. It is impossible for more than one person to walk on the sidewalk, also making passing people impossible. As Bedford leads to the Friends Building, a popular tourist site, the desire to pass toursits with their maps out is very strong, but impossible to do. This brought me back to Sante’s chapter The Streets in which he discusses the streets of the 1800s in New York. I always imagined this time to be beautiful with the cobblestones, but the reality was a lot like the frustration I have while on this street. Although it might be beautiful, it was horribly crowded and narrow. Luckily though I didn’t have to deal with the waste and dead horses that were common on the streets of New York in the past. To cut off of this street as quickly as possible I took a left onto Commerce Street, a street I’ve never even noticed before.
Commerce Street again is oddly bent, almost in a complete L-Shape, a quintessential West Village street. This street was even more old-seeming than Bedford. There was an almost full-sized colonial house, preserved in full, taking up most of one of the sides of the street. Next to this house was a theater, called Cherry Lane. According to their website, this site has had a long and varied history, “The site of a silo on the Gomez farm in 1817, the building that now stands at 38 Commerce Street was first erected as a brewery in 1836 and later served as a tobacco warehouse and box factory.” It then became a theater in 1924 and has been one ever since. I was actually expecting this theater to have a longer history as a theater, like the theaters of the 1800s in the Bowery that Sante discusses. This made me more curious about the West Village/ Greenwich theater scene, when it started and it’s history. I would like to delve more into that moving forward.
The Dérive App at this point told me to sit down somewhere for two minutes, and there just so happened to be a bench in front of this theater. It was the most calm I think I’ve ever been on the streets of New York. There were only three couples that wandered onto the street the around five minutes I was sitting there. The rest of my Dérive I was able to walk around some of the more well-known and nestled in streets of the West Village. I found so many streets that I never even knew existed. I thought it was interesting that whenever there was an influx of people they were usually tourists and it was usually for a super well-known New York site, such as the Friends building or Magnolia Bakery on W. 11th street. When I was walking on Hudson again, this time more North, I came across a rather large building for the West Village, meaning it was more than four stories tall. The building had “Storage Liberty Moving” painted on the building, it what appeared to be old lettering. But, this building housed a toy store. This reminded me of Mattern’s piece on Deep Mapping the Media City in which she discusses how deep mapping can reveal the “presence of multiple histor ies .” (Mattern, 44) This building reveals the multiple temporalities and histories that have taken place in this one building. It appears to have at one time been a storage facility, and now it’s a toy store. This could help us further compare networks of this City over time and throughout history.
Overall this Dérive ended up being a great experience, it not only gave me quiet time to reflect on the city I lived in, but also enabled me to fully explore an amazing area of the City. This activity also brought Mattern’s idea of Deep Mapping a city to life for me. It made me realize that maps of the City, in their most basic and typical form, are lacking. The filed atlas I followed couldn’t tell me that the bench outside of Cherry Lane Theater would become one of my new favorite spots to get away from the craziness of New York, nor did it tell me how warm and inviting Leroy Street is during “Golden Hour” on a Sunday. These “informal infrastructures are uncovered…through on-the-ground fieldwork, interviews, participant observation, and other qualitative methods” and these are what help construct a deep map. (Mattern, 41). Deep mapping is “the attempts to record and represent the grain and patina of place through juxtapositions and interpenetrations of the historical and the contemporary, the political and the poetic, the discursive and the sensual; the conflation of oral testimony, anthology, memoir, biography, natural history and everything you might ever want to say about a place.” (Mattern, 33). I believe the small amount of observation I did on the West Village could add to an existing map of this area, making it deeper and revealing more about it.
