How To’s John Wilson Reviews Architecture in New York
Sorta. Plus, the city’s leaky Superfund Sites and MoMA’s blunt-force psychedelia
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A Man About Town
New York is a city of exhibitionists. Documentary filmmaker John Wilson is happy to oblige.
by Eric Schwartau
Wildfire smoke from Canada has enveloped New York City. The sky is an eerie orange, reminiscent of Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049. NYRA columnist Eric Schwartau wears an old N95 mask and breathes heavily as he approaches the Ridgewood, Queens, residence of John Wilson, which features prominently in his HBO series, How To with John Wilson. (Season Three premieres today.) He clicks the digital buzzer marked “Wilson, 2nd floor.”
ERIC SCHWARTAU: John!
JOHN WILSON: Come inside before it’s too late.
ES: Oh, my god, I can’t believe I made it. And you’re watching Blade Runner 2049.
JW: It smells so crazy outside.
ES: I felt like I had to pull out the old N95. OK, so I already started recording to do a preamble about me walking up to your house during this apocalypse, but this is not a Diane Sawyer type of thing. Anything you say, it’s safe with me.
JW: Okay. Do you want a seltzer?
ES: I would love a seltzer. I feel like in the show you portray your apartment as such a depraved space. It’s actually really cute.
JW: Well, yeah. I try to only shoot certain corners. I can show you what corners I tend to usually shoot.
ES: Abject corners?
Super Toxic
Rising sea levels and new weather phenomena portend an uncertain future for New York City’s Superfund Sites.
by Ameena Walker
Last year, Time Out magazine declared Ridgewood, Queens, the coolest neighborhood in North America and the fourth coolest in the world. Ridgewood, incidentally, happens to be home to the former Wolff-Alport Chemical Company, one of four Superfund sites in New York City. The company—which manufactured thorium, a chemical used in the production of nuclear energy and sold it to the federal government in the 1940s—vacated the site in 1954, leaving the area radioactive. Sites designated under the Environmental Protection Agency’s federal Superfund program are among the country’s most contaminated, their hazardous waste posing major risks to human health. In addition to the Wolff-Alport site, New York’s Superfund sites include the hundred-foot wide, 1.8-mile-long Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn (the city’s most notorious); Newtown Creek, located on the Brooklyn-Queens border, between Greenpoint and Long Island City; and the Meeker Avenue Plume, which spans several city blocks and is the largest, most residential, and newest (it was designated in March of 2022).
The five boroughs contain another sixty Superfund sites recorded in a separate registry: the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s list, which includes sites slated for investigation, remediation, or management. As climate change causes more frequent natural disasters, like flooding and hurricanes, and because New York City is already highly vulnerable to sea-level rise, these sites’ potential to spread contaminants into neighboring communities is rising steadily.
Bad Trip
In Unsupervised, everything comes to you from the giant LED screen and aiming straight for your eyeballs. Call it blunt-force psychedelia.
by Enrique Ramirez
Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised is a bad trip. It reminded me of my first bad trip, a Saturday morning in 1989 when I met my friends for breakfast, dropped acid, and went to the Art Institute of Chicago. You know that opening paragraph from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where Hunter S. Thompson lets you know when and where he could feel the drugs kicking in near Barstow? I could tell you that on that brisk fall morning in Chicago in a pre-internet world, I knew something was up when I emerged from the El station, walked into a Walgreens, and thought I had entered some kind of nineteenth-century phantasmagoria. I saw men with pointy beards and stovepipe hats! I saw corseted, straight-backed women with hair done up in twists, buns, and braids—but with no faces! Even scarier: lamps with goosenecked arms covered in fur! I only wanted a bottle of water. Once out of this sepia-toned nightmare, I ran away screaming—to a museum.
New York Review of Architecture reviews architecture in New York. Our Editor is Samuel Medina and our Deputy Editor is Marianela D’Aprile. Our Publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
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