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Tom Sawyer Island
Jul. 5th, 2012 08:57 amI still haven't turned on the third floor A/C! I think I'm acclimated to the hot weather now. Yesterday afternoon I zoned out on the living room sofa, in the breeze of the electric fan. We had the air conditioning set at 80F, and that's what the thermostat said the temperature was. I was chilly!
In other news, the remarkable post-industrial space -- an abandoned pier that once held Philadelphia's immigration station -- that I called "Tom Sawyer Island" is in its death throes as a place of mystery and guerrilla art -- or is being transformed into a park that will educate residents about wetlands. Take your pick of explanations.
I acknowledge progress but am feeling a little bereaved. When I was a kid and we moved to the 'burbs, there was a wild zone surrounding a little creek that ran between two sections of our development. It was overgrown with willows and other wet-place trees, and filled with thickets and wildflowers, plus places that frogs spawned. I spent a lot of time there. About three years after we moved there, the Powers That Be decreed that it should become a park and removed all the vegetation so that lawns and carefully chosen landscape trees and shrubs would sweep down to the stream. For me it lost all its charm. It had ceased to be a kid's place of exploration and had simply become another place reinvented by grownups. (I wrote an angry editorial for the elementary school paper about the "improvement" of Queen Anne Creek, but they deemed it too controversial. Cowards.)
Since we moved to Philly I've watched a succession of postindustrial wild zones become recreational areas, with former footpaths now asphalt-paved trails clogged with bikers, joggers, and mommies with their double-wide strollers. Sigh...
If you'd like to see the set of photos, before and after, for Tom Sawyer's Island, you can start here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lblanchard/sets/72157628691824571
In other news, the remarkable post-industrial space -- an abandoned pier that once held Philadelphia's immigration station -- that I called "Tom Sawyer Island" is in its death throes as a place of mystery and guerrilla art -- or is being transformed into a park that will educate residents about wetlands. Take your pick of explanations.
I acknowledge progress but am feeling a little bereaved. When I was a kid and we moved to the 'burbs, there was a wild zone surrounding a little creek that ran between two sections of our development. It was overgrown with willows and other wet-place trees, and filled with thickets and wildflowers, plus places that frogs spawned. I spent a lot of time there. About three years after we moved there, the Powers That Be decreed that it should become a park and removed all the vegetation so that lawns and carefully chosen landscape trees and shrubs would sweep down to the stream. For me it lost all its charm. It had ceased to be a kid's place of exploration and had simply become another place reinvented by grownups. (I wrote an angry editorial for the elementary school paper about the "improvement" of Queen Anne Creek, but they deemed it too controversial. Cowards.)
Since we moved to Philly I've watched a succession of postindustrial wild zones become recreational areas, with former footpaths now asphalt-paved trails clogged with bikers, joggers, and mommies with their double-wide strollers. Sigh...
If you'd like to see the set of photos, before and after, for Tom Sawyer's Island, you can start here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lblanchard/sets/72157628691824571
