Traffic signs

[24] The George Washington Bridge

There is hardly anyone who wouldn’t agree that the George Washington Bridge⁽⁴⁰⁾ is the most prominent landmark in Hudson Heights. It is the most important point of entry to New York City for all goods coming from the West via New Jersey, it is the most heavily used bridge in the whole of the US, it is well-known for (very) slow traffic not only during peak hours, for hefty tolls⁽⁴¹⁾, and so on. It is also well-known for permanent traffic accidents and most likely millions of swearwords muttered in trucker cabins. All this, plus the technical or historical details, is only one way to the view the bridge.

However, there is yet another side, another aspect to the „GW“ as this bridge can be seen from many points and under different circumstances in Hudson Heights. It’s a bridge with many „faces“, as it can hide in dense fog showing just about the contours of its steel construction, it can put on a spectacular sunset, painting the New Jersey banks in dark yellow or red. There can be days in fall (not very often), when fog fills the valley of the Hudson just up to the rim of the Palisades such that only the top of the bridge reflects bright sunshine. It can transmit well-feeling on clear days when a blue sky is reflected in the Hudson, or, miserable moods when the world behind the bridge seems to be dipped into some universal rain-driven grey.

What ever „face“ the bridge puts on, it looks completely different from various viewpoints. Seen from Fort Tryon Park some of these „faces“ are season dependent. A brisk early spring day with just a little bit of green decorating the trees offers a different view of the „GW“ as seen from the same spot when these trees have already put on their fall cloth.

And seen from tInwood Hill Park, with the Cloisters in the foreground provides yet another familiarity with the bridge.

The 175^th Street and the monstrous highway that cut the Hudson Heights into two parts, act like a huge reflection plane in the landscape, since -like the two sides of a coin -there is a view of the bridge as seen from south of the 175^th Street and one north of it. Views onto the bridge from the corners of that street with the Fort Washington Avenue are usually little rewarding as on its entrance side, for example, mostly a post with three traffic signs is visible. One of these traffic signs strangely states „EXPLOSIVES PROHIBTED WITHOUT PERMIT“.

Since the entrance to the Henry Hudson Parkway occupies quite a large area, the best views on the bridge as seen from the south is hiking down to the Riverside Park, which essentially ends under the bridge with no continuing path to the north. There, almost at the banks of the river, the bridge once again is part of the landscape with -as in Fort Tryon Park -its different seasonal „faces“. Only one geographical exception does apply: sunrises and sunsets look different as viewed from south or north of the bridge. However, in both directions sunsets can be spectacular.

On certain national holidays, special lighting flashes on at night that coats the towers of the bridge in brilliant white. On such an occasion the headlights of the cars and trucks merely look like fast moving candles.

[25] The Fort Tryon Park

There is a famous story by the Argentinian writer Jorge Louis Borges entitled „The Garden of the Forking Paths“⁽⁴²⁾. Almost the same can be said about Fort Tryon Park⁽⁴³⁾: it is a park of bifurcated trails, with staircases leading at a first glance to nowhere, covering, however, randomly the steep slope down to Broadway. Like in a proper labyrinth even dead ends can be encountered.

Already a few steps away from the entrance the path splits into various sections with some of them reuniting later on. One can either walk through a small area bordered on both sides with flower beds, heading directly to a tree that in spring is covered with a cascade of pink blossoms, or, take the main trail to an outlook terrace with a view in direction of the Bronx, or, walk down on the riverside path. However, even the riverside path splits almost immediately into two branches. Both offer a staggering view onto George Washington Bridge that spans the river like a gigantic steel bracelet. Similar to contributors to a river most of these paths join before a bridge over a steep gorge, the bottom of which serves as an entrance to the Henry Hudson Parkway.

Having crossed that bridge a large meadow shields the Cloisters, prominently positioned at the top of its own hill, from the rest of the park. A road has to be crossed to get to a small path that leads to a side entrance of the Cloisters. Alternatively, that path can be continued to the main entrance.

Leaving the Cloisters aside and following the main path finally the lower parts of the park, namely those along Broadway, can be reached, from where quite a few stairs and trails lead again up the hill. As already said, it is a maze of interconnected paths, encircling the two hills that form the park. The large playground down there, located in the corner of Broadway and Riverside Drive has a section for small children and -as a rare facility -public conveniences.

Not mentioned up to now was the path that starts at the entrance and bypasses the Café: there, a row of benches invites to sit down for a while to enjoy for example the warmth of the sun on a clear late fall day. Since a small Russian minority is still present in Hudson Heights, one can hear occasionally elderly women sitting on one of those benches use Russian to talk to their grandchildren or friends. Because any language other than English and Spanish got to be Russian in the Heights, this path is sometimes nicknamed „Russian Alley“. The former predominant language, German, has vanished almost completely⁽⁴⁴⁾.

Probably less known is the fact that also the Javits playground⁽⁴⁵⁾ and the terrace below the 190^st Street subway station belong to the premises of Fort Tryon Park. The oversized round-about at the very end of Fort Washington Avenue separates these parts from each other: a completely unnecessary concession to cars and buses. Unfortunately, there is no access to the area of the park that extends along Cabrini Boulevard. Over the years this stretch of land became an unattractive „wilderness“.

Fort Tryon Park transmits a kind of nostalgic feeling back to a time when gas light lamp posts throughout the whole area invited for evening strolls, although in the further past the two hills were less peaceful: the park is named after Sir William Tryon, the last British governor of the province of New York and was the site of the British fort opposing Washington’s fort in present days Bennett Park.

[26] The Cloisters

There is one thing peculiar about the Cloisters⁽⁴⁶⁾: they transmit tranquility. A time gap of almost a thousand years serves as a kind of buffer between a present-day consciousness and a most likely little-known period in history, the age of the romanesque style, the time of the Crusades. A strange feeling pertains discovering suddenly features in art objects with obvious iconographic messages. Perhaps in quite a few cases we no longer understand these messages and classify certain pieces simply in terms of the aesthetics of our century.

Some of the „annunciations“, for example, look just „beautiful“, although the presence of an angel does not fit in the present days technocratic realism. But are we really as rational as we think we are? Isn’t it that millions of people believe that every single word in the Bible is absolutely true and therefore angels must have existed? Still exist today? Don’t we have to admit at least that these angels are „beautiful beings“?

The cloisters should not be visited only as a place of romanesque and early gothic art. Quite a few of the hidden messages — the ones we don’t understand — do reach up into our time. The idea of an apocalypse, for example, didn’t vanish. In fact, in the last 150 years, even in the 20th century, in the US several dates for the day of the return of Christ were suggested by some denominations — and clearly didn’t occur. A return with all the circumstances envisaged in former centuries such as the appearance of an Antichrist and angles blowing a shofar as a kind of an overture to Doomsday?

Most of us probably no longer think that Behemoth⁽⁴⁷⁾ and Leviathan⁽⁴⁸⁾ or Gog and Magog⁽⁴⁹⁾ are to be expected before that day to fight the „last battle“ between „good“ and „bad“. We have deliberately already created our own, very realistic apocalypse: a most probable climate collapse to hit future generations. Obviously Gog and Magog fulfill nowadays the play-book of „scientific evidence deniers“ and „scientific theologists“.

The Cloisters are a very peaceful place, full of beautiful romanesque artefacts well displayed. The tranquility there should induce contemplations about our own hidden messages, about the future of man-kind per se. To simply laugh about depicted devils with more than one ugly head or dragon-like extremities would be the wrong reaction: our own, self-made „devils“ have a half lifetime of about 20 000 years such as Plutonium. We even store these „devils“ carefully as self-deterrents.

The Cloisters should remind us also of the fact that the Crusades — the wars against the „infidels“ — were only one incident of wars in what nowadays is called the „Middle East“. The „Middle East“ was (for at least the last 4000 years), still is and will remain a war-zone.