Saturday, April 14, 2012

Manhattan afternoon








Since it's so bright and warm, took a stroll on the High Line, the urban promenade park recently created out of 20 blocks of elevated railroad tracks along 10th Avenue. It was full of people walking along the length of the park, with its unusual views of Manhattan and the Hudson River.

Amazingly, for a city borough with a White population at about half, and the neighborhoods around the Line heavily Latino, the folks on the High Line were almost 95% White.

Some of the "public art" along the way was definitely White. I had to alter the photo below for legibility, but this is actually 40 feet high on a side of a building right at a turn in the Line.


Really. Who else would make this kind of stuff? :)

Asians were the next noticeable group, including a lot of Indians, maybe 4.5% . Moving from one end to the other, I don't think I saw more than two dozen Blacks, and at least half of them were with Whites. English far outstripped all the other languages I heard along the way, with French and Hindi and Chinese the occasional other ones. Not a single word of Spanish in well over an hour.


Now that's an unusual Manhattan afternoon.

6 comments:

Mr. E. Lazarus said...

Give me your trapped, your frustrated, your depressed. 
Your fat haunted mass yearning to be fit. The anxious entitled of your urban playground.
 Send these to the High Line even if they are in a creative rut. 
I send a text from this gloomy floor.

Leah said...

And that is the diversity White people are interested in.

Anonymous said...

Your "reveries of a high-line promenadeur" reveal a fascinating paranoid background in critical race theory, in terms of what population groups have been enculturated into absentness, and, once again, what population group is over-represented in presence on the High Line.

Just now, the only better reverie theme I can conceive of for such a Manhattan stroll is indignation that this urban promenade park is not yet re-named High Sirat al-Mustaqim.

Anonymous said...

Oh, well. Post-humous Freud deem'd America a Titanic mistaq.

Leah said...

Just hiked in a park in the middle of Los Angeles, yup segregation is alive and well, mostly hispanic families out and about, not an area that the whites will be spending any time.

Leah said...

Just hiked in a park in the middle of Los Angeles, yup segregation is alive and well, mostly hispanic families out and about, not an area that the whites will be spending any time.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...