A site’s ugliness can itself inspire transformation

Evidence

Part of the inspiration had been their size, of course: they were 1,346 acres, a Central Park and a half. Part had been their location: they lay almost precisely at the geographic center of New York; as the city’s population shifted, moving steadily eastward, its population center was moving steadily closer to those meadows, too—a park there, Moses felt, would be a true “Central Park” to the whole city. For a man with a vision so broad that it required vast open spaces for realization, here was a vast open space—at the city’s geographic and population center. And in some way the very ugliness of the meadows seemed to furnish inspiration, too. They, and the Riker’s dump beyond, were “a cloud of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night,” he was to write. Rereading Isaiah, he came across “Give unto them beauty for ashes”—after that, his dream had a slogan. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 4412

Categorization

• FICTION: The ‘beauty for ashes’ ark — turning the ugliest place into the most beautiful — is a resonant counterpoint motif for a redeemed-location story.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s trees-as-infrastructure essay and the ADDENDUM on place-transformation; also to the ash-dump imagery of Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby valley of ashes. — connects to: Aesthetic experience acts as a laboratory for reworking values — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 429

Broader Connections

• Aesthetic experience acts as a laboratory for reworking values #expands (0.80) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 429