Marine Park in Winter
Photos by Dave Mandl
Text by Holly Tavel
In J. G. Ballard’s Concrete Island, a businessman, Robert Maitland, is trapped in the liminal space created by a confluence of superhighways after his Jaguar crashes through a barrier and goes over the embankment. Injured, dazed, he manages to claw his way back up the steep slope to a point theoretically visible to oncoming traffic. It soon becomes apparent (to us, less so to him) that he’s fallen through a crack in the world, or in space-time. No drivers stop. He’s become lost, invisible. Unable to flag down a passing motorist (average speed 90 kph), he is forced to adapt to his surroundings, eventually subsumed by the landscape into a semi-feral, Robinson Crusoe–esque figure.
Ballard’s tale feels near-futuristic even though it shouldn’t; all the elements of the novel are only the elements of the present day. That feeling, of the future in the present, is everywhere. The landscape he finds himself in is right there, both hidden and visible from the highway, yet he might as well be on another planet, so extreme is the rift between worlds.
This is not just liminal but negative space, a landscape which only exists as a direct result of the superhighways overhead (as brutish as anything conjured by F. T. Marinetti and the speed-and-violence-obsessed Italian futurists).
By contrast Marine Park, though evoking a similarly haunted, marginal landscape, is positive space, soft and blurry; it seems we might round a corner and find the remnants of arcane rituals, or walk across a field and into the seventeenth century.
The incongruous presence of random objects such as traffic cones, rusted hulks, pieces of fabric, discarded bits and pieces that could substitute for flags, and armor suggests an abandoned land-art project; an arrangement of stones suggests an unknown ritual—in short, the landscape provides a suitably amorphous backdrop such that all manner of designs and meanings can be superimposed on it.
Marine Park’s spaces are spaces filled with absence—in contrast to most of Brooklyn, where even desolate areas are hardly empty, affording vistas of industrialism gone to seed and neighborhoods in varying states of exhaustion/renewal. Initial plans for a massive city park were conceived in relation to Central and Prospect Park, designed according to the Olmsted model encouraged a proto-psychogeographic practice: Winding paths would draw the stroller through a surprising, ever-changing series of vistas, hidden and then revealed.
Marine Park is thoroughly haunted by the ghosts of its past, the living embodiment of what might have been. In the early twentieth century, this chunk of Brooklyn was undeveloped, underpopulated, practically rural. Urban planning was in its heyday and infused with Machine Age optimism (and grandiosity). In 1911, noted Chicago planners Burnham and Bennett—architects of the 1909 “Chicago Plan” which overhauled the city with visionary fervor—were invited to come to Brooklyn. Among their suggestions were for the city to acquire and develop the land around Gerritsen Creek in southeast Brooklyn. Over the next twenty years, the project passed through multiple hands and took several labyrinthine turns (Congressman Sol Bloom was in charge for a time in the 1920s: he wanted to use the site for a world’s fair—inspired by the Columbian Exposition, with space for forty-six international pavilions), before landing in the lap of Charles Lay. (Actually Lay fought for the project and eventually won, helped by family and political connections.)
To say Lay’s plans for Marine Park were ambitious is an understatement—utopian is more in the ballpark. Speaking of ballparks: Lay envisioned around eighty baseball diamonds—along with two hundred tennis courts, three swimming pools, a skating rink, and spaces for bowling, bocce, badminton, archery, and lacrosse. There would be a (state-of-the-art) zoo, an open-air theatre, and dozens of restaurants, all accessed via crisscrossing bus lines and a dedicated subway stop (on the Utica line). All told, Marine Park would have dwarfed Central Park, to say nothing of Prospect Park—larger, in fact, than the two combined.
Furthermore, not to be outdone by Coney Island, Marine Park would be fully electrified, and (Lay dreamed) host nocturnal pageants—we imagine something of the scope and “vibe” of recent world’s fairs such as the 1915 Panama Pacific (nighttime electric lighting was still an audience-wowing novelty). The singular spectacle of the 1939 World’s Fair was just a few years off.
But the biggest claim to fame of this never-realized version of Marine Park is doubtless its winning of an actual medal, the first won by the US that year, in the 1936 Summer Olympics, held in Berlin—the Nazi Olympics. Indeed, Lay’s vision of Marine Park as a conduit of healthy activity—the emphasis on active,oriented toward active sports rather than pensive strolling—embodies an ideal not only in keeping with that of the Olympics generally, but embodies a zeitgeist of the era that found plenty of expression in Nazi ideas of physical fitness as a vehicle of moral rightness (blond, rosy-cheeked Hitler Youth hiking through meadows).
Town-planning as Olympic event is an idea that could only have arisen in the heady days when the Olympic games were becoming the overwrought spectacle they are today (the decades that also gave us the surrealist movement, the Weimar Republic, People’s Parks, Busby Berkeley, and WWII) after a more subdued beginning when competition hewed more closely to the model of the ancient world and gold medals weren’t even a thing (silver was the top prize until 1904). It’s perhaps not surprising that Lay’s ideas for the redevelopment of the park would have appealed to Nazi judges in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and of a piece with “people’s parks” in Europe. Lay’s ideas, though, were in keeping with and influenced the “playground movement” of the time, which conflated healthy leisure activity with moral uprightness of the working classes (providing opportunities for, say, sailing rather than wasting away the hours in dim poolrooms, which after all represented—cf. The Music Man—trouble with a capital T).
Of course, none of this—that is, Lay’s monumental dreams for the area—was to be. The plans for Marine Park were given the kibosh when, in 1934, LaGuardia won the mayoral race and promptly appointed Robert Moses parks commissioner. Moses, though eager to make use of the New Deal money flooding into NYC, found Lay’s ambitions for Marine Park ludicrous, overly extravagant, and formal. Not only that, his override of Lay’s plans was fueled by personal grievance: Lay had first run afoul of Moses in the 1920s when he convinced wealthy inhabitants of the area to oppose Lay’s parkway plans in Long Island; and again when Lay rallied voters in Hempstead to defeat Moses’s plans to build Jones Beach.
Geologically, Marine Park is mostly a salt marsh fed by fresh water from what remains of Gerritsen Creek. Much of the Marine Park salt marsh in the south is dominated by phragmites, an invasive and notoriously difficult-to-get-rid-of weed. A non-native species, phragmites appear to have been, somewhat incredibly, introduced to the East Coast (and eventually across America) by way of its seed pods being used as a kind of primitive packing material in shipments. It presents as wheatlike stalks of tans and browns, filling space that should be occupied by native flora and fauna. Nature abhors a vacuum (and here I’m reminded of the alternately empty and overflowing spaces of Ballard). Otherwise, the weeds of the wetlands (mixed among or at the edges of the vast, sweeping fields of phragmites) have names that sound amusing and picturesque to a non-botanical ear: marsh skullcap, hairy willowreed, and (my favorite) spreading panic-grass. Bird-wise, you’re likely to encounter terns and osprey, red-tailed hawks, grebes, shore, and wading birds such as egrets and, in winter, ducks and loons.
Marine Park in winter is a place of more colors than there should be (crisp yellows and browns, many shades of gray into white). It’s a site of absence and presence, both empty and overstuffed. It tips into the zone of the ambient—Brian Eno could provide a suitable soundscape. It beckons but also conceals (stepping onto what appears to be a solid thick sheet of white could easily result in sinking up to one’s hips in icy muck). It lurks, silent wonderland, waiting for the thaw. ◼️