HighWaterLine

The difference between visualizing and seeing…

Since the inception of this project, I have been visualizing drawing the line. I have spent countless hours pouring over maps, and mapping and remapping the line. I have a huge topo map on my wall, lots of different maps on my computer…

This weekend I went out and biked the Brooklyn line. And that makes the project feel different. Really different. It is all of the things that I have thought about and talked about - but hitting home, hard.

On the one hand it is this fascinating journey through these incredibly diverse neighborhoods. (Remember Brooklyn is a whole lot bigger than it looks on the subway map. On the other hand there is an incredibly powerful sense of understanding  what makes a community and a neighborhood. Whether it is the man standing in his yard in his pj’s at 2 in the afternoon, or the stretch of empty factory buildings under the BQE, or even the little shack with a million flavors of Italian ice on the banks of a boat basin. All of these intricacies are what make a neighborhood, and I am going to be walking through them, slicing a line in blue down one street and up another.

My hope though is not to be marking “this is last” “this will not” - I think of the trees marked in a forest to be cut down - but to bring together these communities to ensure that everything will last. To let each person understand the value of their own actions and their own commitment to ensuring a future that doesn’t look like the line.

I am more and more ready to take on the project, it’s intricacies and implications. I will arm myself with a hope for the future and thoughts and ideas to inspire. I hope you will join me in this…