12 Arches, 13 Apostles: The Liminal Wealth of the Grand Union Canal

Wild Lot
March 3, 2023

The Grand Union Canal, or G.U.C., is a 137-mile-long, 220-year-old man-made channel of once purely functional water. It is now long relieved of its original vocation of channeling industrialised loads of coal and aggregates between the great smoking behemoths of London and Birmingham. Now only leisure narrowboats and lightweight cruisers chug down it, their pilotsContinue Reading 12 Arches, 13 Apostles: The Liminal Wealth of the Grand Union Canal

Philadelphia’s Reading Viaduct as Heterotopia

Jeremy Hauck
September 12, 2020

The Reading Viaduct, which once carried trains above Philadelphia’s urban core, has no purpose. It is abandoned. Yet its size and location in the heart of a major American city has stirred imaginings of a different kind of place, one that will be the opposite of what it is now. In fact, plans have beenContinue Reading Philadelphia’s Reading Viaduct as Heterotopia

The Way to Build a Better Road Is to Cover It with Dirt: The Goat Path, Part I

Jeremy Hauck
September 7, 2020

It was a cloudy May morning and I had to figure out what to do about the fence. Three strands of smooth wire, spanning the width of the meadow. Easy enough to slip under, but was it electrified? Did the eight head of cattle, black and white, lazing in the grass, need that level ofContinue Reading The Way to Build a Better Road Is to Cover It with Dirt: The Goat Path, Part I

Where a Beach Town Once Was: Phragmites, a Lonesome Pier, and Entering the Managed Retreat Era

Jeremy Hauck
February 24, 2020

Staten Island, New York

January 20, 2020

“So, can you tell us what the story is here?” Sonja asks.

I’ve been thinking about how to introduce this quest. It’s Monday, Martin Luther King Day. Since Friday, among other New Yorky outings we’ve toured Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Central Park, and the New Museum. Today is different. We’re cruising the backwaters of New York City’s least sexy borough, angling toward the southeastern shore. Still, this part of the trip is highest on my priority list: I want to see for myself what Elizabeth Rush saw in the reporting for her 2019 Pulitzer Prize–nominated book Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore.

“This is where the future has already happened,” I say, slowing the car down to look at the stretch of bare lawn between Tarlton Street and Fox Beach Avenue. We’re in Oakwood Beach. Or what’s left of it. “This is one of the first places in America that people have left the coast to move to higher ground.”

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Category: Abandoned Spaces