Everyone's City
Early on in researching for PSG I found a brochure advertising a conference in history of gardening: "When writing about landscapes, Greek authors spoke not only of topologia, (a place) but also topothesia (an imaginary place)." Just like NYC: Times Square, Broadway, Wall Street, Hester Street, Crossing Delancey… the actual place names segue without a hitch into song and movie titles. The West India Company established New Amsterdam as an administrative and supply hub for fur trading activities. But, the cozy depiction of a fort protecting a tidy array of buildings was never that single-minded: colonial pigs rooted in the streets, destroying fortifications, Company slaves lived (and were buried) outside the settlement, local Native Americans continued as best they could to maintain their normal lives, and the polyglot population (reportedly 18 different languages by the time the settlement was 10 years old) kept insisting on citizen, rather than employee, status.
I came to NYC in the 80's to be a dancer. I lived on 9th between B and C and was both fascinated and terrified by the dirty, icy streets (it was January), laundromats, roaches on the kitchen table, the sudden beauties of sharp winter light and the odd bit of marble tiling… Whatever I'd imagined, none of this was it, but it was perfect; I'd found my own private Idaho.
PETER STUYVESANT'S GHOST is, partly, the result of wanting to understand NYC after 5 years abroad. It is also wanting to show the City to other people in the way that makes me happiest: by walking around and noting what is still there and what has gone away. So, even though it bears his name, PSG uses 'Peter Stuyvesant' mainly symbolically. The Dutch colonial period is fascinating because it was within those 60 or so years that the NYC we know was born—at the expense of the cultural and environmental world that had flourished here previously. This landscape was no empty wilderness, its beauty and lushness no accident. As described in 1633–4 by Belgian Reverend Isaac Jogues:
"The first comers found lands quite fit for use, formerly cleared by the Indians, who had fields there. Those who came later have cleared in the woods, which are mostly oak. The soil is good. Deer hunting is abundant in the fall. There are some houses built of stone: lime they make of oyster shells, of which there are great heaps, made formerly by the Indians, who subsist in part by that fishery."
What leaps of imagination did it take for willing immigrants to come in the first place; what cultural and historical realities wove together to allow New Amsterdam to take root and become New York City; what lost riches might once again be nurtured here—PSG doesn't answer any of these questions, but it is inspired by wondering about them. Mostly it is a project about how a place and imaginary places intersect.
The East Village once contained: marsh, Lenape hunters, an annual migration of a billion passenger pigeons, tanneries, the 2nd Avenue Deli, a huge drug trade, PS122 as an operating school, no community gardens. What is and isn't present today is the result of choices and actions directly affecting our daily lives. No fictionalized version of New York City is ever as interesting as the real thing. PSG, hopefully, presents aspects of both past and present 'real things' that might otherwise go unnoticed, and unloved.
—Lise Brenner
