marginalized to the point where it conveys the prospect of eternal silence a little too vividly. Abandoned, broken-glass-strewn lots behind barbed wire, vacant buildings, and mortuaries might be quiet, but at what cost?
That said, the basic strategy for locating the remaining sites of silence in your hometown is to envision it as the Costa del Sol. The beach is out of the question. All the places people are naturally drawn to for work, recreation, and shopping are going to beimpossibly loud. But a short distance inland cuts the crowds down to a dribble of locals and suddenly one finds oneself in an authentically foreign place. So ask yourself: What is the interior of the place I live? Where do surf and sand stop? What’s the road no one bothers to drive? The bench where no one sits?
In many cities, the land underneath the yawning arches where old bridges sink their foundations is a place of refuge, as are the tops of undistinguished skyscrapers. In smaller towns, historical societies and libraries with inadequate Internet connections are almost invariably deserted. Museums of unfashionable subjects are a good bet anywhere (you can almost always hear a pin drop in collections attached to schools of medicine). Cemeteries on weekdays, wherever you live, are an obvious but reliable refuge. Just remember to keep asking, Where’s the culture pulling everyone? Now turn around and walk the other way. Keep walking.
Manhattan might not seem like the most promising foraging ground for a couple of hours of silence, but I’m in an especially fortunate area for hunters of that aural truffle. My own circuit is small and more effortless than it might be in many ostensibly quieter communities.
POCKET PARKS
Within a ten-minute walk of where I work there are two marvelous and one better-than-nothing example of the pocket park. Pocket parks—also known as miniparks and vest-pocket parks—are small patches of landscaped nature generally built on vacant building lots or scraps of urban land that fall between the cracks of real estate interests.
I began my morning’s pursuit of moderate silence at Paley Park on East Fifty-third Street, just across Fifth Avenue from the Museum of Modern Art. Opened in the spring of 1967, it is one of the oldest pocket parks in the United States. It is named for William Paley, the former chairman of CBS, who financed and oversaw the park’s design on the site of the old Stork Club . When he announced his plans to create the park, Paley described it as a “resting place” and a “new experiment for the enjoyment of the out-of-doors in the heart of the city.” It proved an enormous hit from the moment it opened, and has remained popular ever since. The
New York Times
called it “a corner of quiet delights amid city’s bustle.” Early visitors waxed enthusiastic about the relief it provided from the din of the streets, and the “acoustic perfume” of the park’s waterfall.
To enter Paley Park, you ascend a few steps from Fifty-third Street into a narrow gap between tall buildings, flanked by ivy-covered walls. (The park’s landscape designer, Robert Zion, described them as “vertical lawns.”) Almost instantly, the waterfall at the far end of the park—twenty feet high and running with some 1,800 gallons of water per minute—entirely drowns out the street noise. The morning I visited, the park’s tall, scraggly honey locusts were still bare, but the gray pots scattered around the park were bright with clumps of yellow tulips. From the entrance, the rectangular sheet of brown stone at the far end of the park over which the white water flows resembles a movie screen, but as you come closer you realize that the backdrop is in fact composed of countless small brown-and-gray irregular stones that sometimes slow and highlight the pattern of falling water. It’s beautiful. Like the other two pocket parks in my neighborhood,there’s no real quiet. Water masks the grinding city sounds. It works: the
That said, the basic strategy for locating the remaining sites of silence in your hometown is to envision it as the Costa del Sol. The beach is out of the question. All the places people are naturally drawn to for work, recreation, and shopping are going to beimpossibly loud. But a short distance inland cuts the crowds down to a dribble of locals and suddenly one finds oneself in an authentically foreign place. So ask yourself: What is the interior of the place I live? Where do surf and sand stop? What’s the road no one bothers to drive? The bench where no one sits?
In many cities, the land underneath the yawning arches where old bridges sink their foundations is a place of refuge, as are the tops of undistinguished skyscrapers. In smaller towns, historical societies and libraries with inadequate Internet connections are almost invariably deserted. Museums of unfashionable subjects are a good bet anywhere (you can almost always hear a pin drop in collections attached to schools of medicine). Cemeteries on weekdays, wherever you live, are an obvious but reliable refuge. Just remember to keep asking, Where’s the culture pulling everyone? Now turn around and walk the other way. Keep walking.
Manhattan might not seem like the most promising foraging ground for a couple of hours of silence, but I’m in an especially fortunate area for hunters of that aural truffle. My own circuit is small and more effortless than it might be in many ostensibly quieter communities.
POCKET PARKS
Within a ten-minute walk of where I work there are two marvelous and one better-than-nothing example of the pocket park. Pocket parks—also known as miniparks and vest-pocket parks—are small patches of landscaped nature generally built on vacant building lots or scraps of urban land that fall between the cracks of real estate interests.
I began my morning’s pursuit of moderate silence at Paley Park on East Fifty-third Street, just across Fifth Avenue from the Museum of Modern Art. Opened in the spring of 1967, it is one of the oldest pocket parks in the United States. It is named for William Paley, the former chairman of CBS, who financed and oversaw the park’s design on the site of the old Stork Club . When he announced his plans to create the park, Paley described it as a “resting place” and a “new experiment for the enjoyment of the out-of-doors in the heart of the city.” It proved an enormous hit from the moment it opened, and has remained popular ever since. The
New York Times
called it “a corner of quiet delights amid city’s bustle.” Early visitors waxed enthusiastic about the relief it provided from the din of the streets, and the “acoustic perfume” of the park’s waterfall.
To enter Paley Park, you ascend a few steps from Fifty-third Street into a narrow gap between tall buildings, flanked by ivy-covered walls. (The park’s landscape designer, Robert Zion, described them as “vertical lawns.”) Almost instantly, the waterfall at the far end of the park—twenty feet high and running with some 1,800 gallons of water per minute—entirely drowns out the street noise. The morning I visited, the park’s tall, scraggly honey locusts were still bare, but the gray pots scattered around the park were bright with clumps of yellow tulips. From the entrance, the rectangular sheet of brown stone at the far end of the park over which the white water flows resembles a movie screen, but as you come closer you realize that the backdrop is in fact composed of countless small brown-and-gray irregular stones that sometimes slow and highlight the pattern of falling water. It’s beautiful. Like the other two pocket parks in my neighborhood,there’s no real quiet. Water masks the grinding city sounds. It works: the
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