Primordial Grit and Majesty

I visited the Freedom Tunnel with a few friends on a brisk April morning.  We were told that to experience the tunnel fully, we had to be there to see the first rays of light penetrate the cavernous darkness.  So we set out at 5:00 am and entered the tunnel in total darkness.  After a few minutes of blind exploration, sunlight began to seep in and the tunnel was slowly revealing itself to us.  Out from pitch black, the murals on the walls started to illuminate.  A man with sunglasses, a cacophony of color, broken glass and the Venus de Milo - all glowing in the sparse light amid piles of rubble and trash.  Another beam of light broke the stillness and directed my gaze to a splash of red paint at the foot of a spraycan with a bullet hole through it.  I had entered a post-apocalyptic cathedral, a blurry vision of a former epoch.

The Freedom Tunnel, between the 70’s-110’s on the upper west side, was an active place twenty years ago.  It was filled with the characters who used to be a more visible presence in New Yorkers’ lives - the unshaven, the uncouth, the unclean.  In need of space to live and work amid the skyrocketing real estate, the street artists; the apartment-less colonized an abandoned piece of New York City infrastructure: the train tunnel beneath Riverside Drive.  At its height of residence and activity, thousands gathered to live and work in the Freedom Tunnel.  The tunnel was covered in make-shift dwellings - a village - a subterranean shantytown.  It was a community existing in its own set of rules.  The people who made houses in the tunnel made a place to call their own.  Like Michael Pollan, these men and women left a piece of the City they once called home because they could not work or live there anymore.  The street artists built for themselves a creative place of escape and expression.  And in setting up camp beneath the City that inspired their work, they were able to regard New York with a new perspective.  

Robert Moses built the train tunnel in the 1930’s in the same environment of public access and utility associated with his early work and planning.  But public transportation grew to be increasingly irrelevant for a culture in love with the automobile.  The tunnel was thus never used and abandoned.  It became a perfect place for those experimenting with graffiti art in the 1970’s and 1980’s because it was outside the purview of law enforcement.  The community grew and grew in the 1980’s to become a sacred place for those who could not afford a place to live.  The people of the street transformed an unused public utility into a creative workshop for artists to spread their subversive art form around the City.

But the Freedom Tunnel could not survive Giuliani’s obsessive campaign to sanitize a city overrun with windshield cleaners and boom boxes.  The people who lived there were forced out in 1991 when the Amtrak trains started running through the tunnel.  Thousands were evicted throughout the 1990’s and now there are virtually no residents.  The people left to find sanctuary in the outer boroughs, and what we are now left with is a cultural museum in disrepair - a rotting emblem of street and youth culture. 

As a twenty-two year old living in 2011 New York City, I tend to romanticize the city of the seventies and eighties.  I am nostalgic for a city I have never remembered - the city of The Warriors and Style Wars.  I long for a city of open spaces for expression and run by a mayor who is an appreciator of street art and culture.  As someone who can only visit the ruins of a former New York, I resent the twenty year campaign to rebrand Manhattan and New York City as tame and showered.  I wonder where the primordial grime on which the City was once constituted has gone...washed clean or drifting somewhere beyond the metropolis.   

The Freedom Tunnel was never planned for the activity that took place there.  Moses was probably turning in his grave when the shantytowns were erected within his pristine tunnel.  The anarchistic spirit of the place grew from it being unplanned.  Abandoned factories, warehouses and tunnels always attract artists in need for space to express themselves.  So much of post-war street art was adapting preexisting spaces and forms into works of art.  Unplanned expression, working on the fly and sometimes on the run are foundational to the murals now molding in the Freedom Tunnel.  While I find it difficult to really define authenticity, I would call the art in the Freedom Tunnel authentic.  I deem it such because of its unplanned rawness.  Realness for me is a genuine ignorance of significance.  By that I mean the moment someone or something realizes importance, some authenticity dissipates from its soul.  The Freedom Tunnel is an important place in New York, but its not really open to the public.  It is a functional Amtrak tunnel, which again complicates the Freedom Tunnel’s legacy.  The community that lived in the tunnel relied on the disuse of infrastructural space - a disuse that was the result of a booming automobile industry.  So in some way, the Freedom Tunnel was a product of the Automobile Age - a period in American history that we associate with a myriad of societal and ecological problems.  And when the tunnel resumed its original programmed use of public transport, the Freedom Tunnel died.  

Visiting the Freedom Tunnel was a conflicting experience.  I found myself trying to identify what is more important to a city: public transportation or authentic artistic expression.  But instead of figuring out an answer that does not exist, I just found myself becoming angry with the forces and institutions that have pitted public transportation against public art in this given space.  As Jacobs and many urban theorists proclaim, the presence of artists is a sign of a healthy city - street art especially because it transforms streets into spectacle.  And if uncommissioned art is some of the most authentic expressions of our culture, how do we safeguard its survival? As urban designers, how do we commission the uncommissionable; how do we plan the unplanned?  

The art that exploded from the Freedom Tunnel was an aberration in the City’s history - a fleeting moment in New York’s development that was once conducive to grand spectacles of public art.  There will never be a subway car enrobed in the electrifying patterns and colors of Dondi or Freedom.  There will never entire neighborhoods moving their feet to Kool Herc or Afrika Bambaataa.  Again I find myself romanticizing a time and place I have only heard about or seen in movies.  But I do not think I am not alone in my wistfulness.  My whole generation is nostalgic for this particular moment in New York’s history.  As my friends learn how to breakdance while clutching onto their i-Phones, I see my generation with one foot in the past and one in the future, leaving their bodies wobbling somewhere in the present.