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
“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.”
In the sky over the rush-hour congestion on Manheim Pike, they take on the grandeur of a natural event, just beyond the range of dashboard and light pole, of golden arches and Coca Cola bottling plant. It was only after I began commuting to my present job that I took notice of this nightly gathering of murders (murder of murders? mass murder?) of American crows during the winter. Until then, I had always backgrounded the crows into the urban tapestry, with the squirrels and sparrows and gingko trees.
Each individual crow flies in an idiosyncratic manner, in its own space; some stop, either as individuals or in small groups, stubborn to leave certain tall trees. Others fly against the great current of wings, or obliquely to it. Some of the birds caw out while others fly in observant silence. Heads swiveling, they scan the landscape. But the shape of all of them together moves purposefully in one direction.
Last winter, I decided to check it out, to follow them. I got my family and we got in the car and we . . . we went to the mall?
Read more about Sleeping with the Lights On: The Urban Winter Crow Roost and What Happens When Nature Reaches for Us …
The portal — a secret opening or entrance to a fantastical world, starkly different from the ordinary world that surrounds us — is found everywhere in children’s literature and film. It serves as an escape route from the mundane, and the magic of the world beyond the portal is often underscored by the drabness or unhappiness of the real world that precedes it. Examples abound: from the claustrophobic black-and-white patterned room (and, of course, Charlie’s life of poverty) that leads toward the candy-filled wonderland in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the colorless farm scenes and harrowing tornado that brings us to Oz, and of course the foreboding old mansion that the children evacuate to during World War II that houses the magical wardrobe/secret entrance to Narnia in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
Most children will instantly relate to the thrill of discovery that Charlie and Dorothy and Lucy feel when they first set foot in these wonderlands, despite the fact that this is something — entering a fantastical world through a magic passage — no one in real life can actually experience. So why is this feeling so recognizable?
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