New York, unfailingly throwing up surprises

New York is always full of surprises. I left a dry and parched Ahmedabad to arrive in a full monsoon, with pouring rain and warnings of hurricane-like winds and a huge storm over the weekend. Luckily the meteorological services everywhere are prone to incorrect predictions and the hurricane did not appear.

There is an interesting debate going on here about the real work of fire departments. In the US, the fire department is part of what are called emergency services. The police and the ambulances and hospitals form part of the same service. Technically, fire stations attend to fires and ambulances to medical emergencies. However, the pattern over the last three years has shown a very different trend, a trend reviled by some and accepted, albeit with resignation, by others. In some cities, Washington DC amongst them, more than 40 per cent of the calls answered by fire stations are medical — someone is found drunk and reeling on the street, someone has had a heart attack, someone has severe abdominal pains, and they call the fire station.

On an average, the station’s response takes four to five seconds. And the firemen are off. Ambulances, though they should not, take a few seconds longer as do the police. So more often than not, the firemen, also trained in emergency care and first aid, and equipped with medical equipment and oxygen tanks, get there first. The other two follow a minute or so later.

The question is should all three services be doing the same thing. The firemen argue that those first few seconds could lead to a life being saved. And in any case, with smoke alarms increasingly being put into buildings, actual fires occur less frequently. Isn’t this a good way of keeping firemen employed? About 45 per cent of last years’ calls handled by the city’s firemen were medical emergencies. And for the city’s poor, the firemen are angels of mercy — and their only chance of survival.

There is a real buzz in New York about its first and most unexpected European-style public promenade. It’s called the High Line and its development is a story of civic activism.

In the 1930s, the Meatpacking District on the lower west side had a railway line to carry goods between docking ships and processing factories. The line was at street level and as the population rose, the line killed more and more people. Engineers decided to raise the tracks, and did, by 30 feet for about four miles. By the mid 1970s, the railway was no longer being used and fell into disrepair, a big dark and foreboding overhang that was off limits. Soon after, the government decided to knock it down. But not before two young men had discovered it.

The two men, excited by this long overhang of strange proportions, skirting the industrial district and going along the beautiful river, thought it needed to be developed as another public space, like the old parks of the city. No new park had been developed, and certainly not in this part of the city. They started passionately talking to people. There was some interest, but not much, and the city officials really didn’t want to be bothered. Till the New Yorker magazine published stunning pictures of this wild landscape, with strange plants growing amidst iron and steel structures of urban discard. Soon public voices dominated the debate and the city officials announced a competition amongst architects to suggest ways of reclaiming the rail tracks.

The High Line opened in June and has since become a rage. It is a magnificent understatement of intrusion, with minimalist but beautiful design interventions and moulding of the existing wild nature into a promenade. It is a place to meander, to look at the waters, to get a strange bird’s eye view into buildings and cityscapes, a surprise amongst the rundown factory buildings and warehouses now turning into cafes and boutiques. And if the number of people promenading there is any pointer, the city has accepted it with open arms.