Yutaka Sone, Panorama: Little Manhattan New York, New York
We did a day trip up to NY to catch America is Hard to See at the Whitney, and caught this little gem on the High Line.
Driving into NYC as a former resident is an odd experience. Seeing the skyline as you approach triggers memories of a place that, upon close inspection, you realize no longer exists. The Chelsea of the 90's is long gone. It's a cleaner, more upscale place, with greenery growing in the shadow of two million dollar apartments, where only a few outlier meatpacking warehouses hold on in a vast sea of biergartens.
It's funny how the image of a city can imprint us, though, and live as a kind of internal map, an outline of where things happened at a given point in time. Cities are where our history happens.
I saw this to the south, for example, and it looks wrong to me. Even though we didn't leave NYC until 2007, the NY I drove into in 1994 is the one that sticks, and in that NY, Manhattan is anchored by the World Trade Center. It's not in Yutaka's sculpture or in this photo, and it won't persist into future mappings.
