Cover Letter for Final Essay

December 19, 2011

Professor Sacha Frey

Dear. Professor Frey:

I have attached my final essay and its drafts and feedbacks here. My claim is “mapping the internal structure of L subway and 14A and 14D buses with our bodily movement enables us to be more aware of where our body is in relation to the place and value of our current space.” On the first draft I focused on the effects of mapping the subway and the buses, and claimed that they limit our senses and movement in the process of expansion. However, this is the final conclusion I am making about my map, and I focused on the question of “how” and “why” on the final essay. My focus of the map is on our body’s movement as a crowd, attention to senses, and the city population’s movement in public transportation. The general focus is on the Walkers’ patterns of movement and rules they create while riding on the two transportations. My first draft did not have a consistent theme and it did not have a focus because it was unclear how I made connections with different social classes and the rules of transportation. I explained further on the quotes and the ideas I referenced, such as Perec’s emphasis on being aware of where we are and De Certeau’s notion of walkers. I clearly stated what my map is mapping and why it is necessary to observe our bodily movement. I tried to make clear visualization on my statements. I am happiest with the development of my introduction. I think the most challenging part was condensing my ideas into four pages with unified central structure because I had many ideas I wanted to include. I followed your advice you wrote on my author’s note, about how to make the essay consistent, and creating the draft of map before revising the essay. They helped me focus my ideas and make a developed claim.  I omitted my statements about different social classes and the function of public transportation as the connectors to other regions to expand more on the spatial movements within the transportations. If I had more time, I would include Corner’s idea of drift, and extend the definition to my essay. I would have discussed this further with you, about how much further I can extend the term to put it to my own use. I would also make my claim stronger.

Internal Transportations Map of L subway and 14A and D buses on 14th Street in Relation to Our Body and Space

The moment one gives close attention to anything, it becomes a mysterious,

awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.

                                                                                         Henry Miller

            Manhattan was cold and drizzling with rain on Wednesday, December 7th.  Regardless of the weather’s public nuisance, many people on 14th street were riding along the street around 10 am in the morning. I traveled among them on L subway, from 1st avenue to 8th, and came back eastbound to Avenue C on bus 14 A. In my hand were one subway map and a bus map that showed two buses, 14A and 14D, and L subway crossing 14^th street of Manhattan. The 14 A/D buses are marked by one single yellow-green line, with arrows to show the direction of the bus route. The L train’s route is marked by a gray line that horizontally connects two white dots and three black dots along the 14^th street. The two routes fit in to the crème color, gridded landscape of New York City. Although MTA maps give a clear direction of the two transportations, they omit any description of the relationship between New York City, transportations, and our bodies, such as crowdedness and movement of bodies in transportation. They limit our complete view of transportation experience and try to lead our movement rather than guide it. Such oversimplified and coerced presentation of map distracts us from
taking interest and engaging with our space.

MTA Bus Map showing 14A and 14D

	as a yellow green line crossing the 14th street.

MTA Subway map showing L subway

as a gray line crossing the14^th street.

George Perec says the following from his essay, “Species of Spaces and Other Pieces”: “We ought to ask ourselves where exactly we are, to take our bearings, not only concerning our state of mind, […] but simply concerning our topographical position, not so much in relation to the axes cited above, but rather in relation to a place […].” (Perec 83) We do not consider space as a part of our present. We are here, but we do not acknowledge it, thinking it is obvious that we know where we are. But do we? For instance, how about in transportations? The new map I am presenting allows our bodily experience to fully engage in the process of reaching our destination. Using Corner’s mapping process of de-territorialization and re-territorialization from “The Agency of Mapping”, I am drawing out the crowd’s movement and our active senses in transportation to reassemble the interior map of 14A and D buses and L subway.  The topography relating our individual body, the crowd’s movement, and transportation will make us more aware of where our body is in relation to the place and value of our current space.

De Certeau defines the idea of “walkers” as the city wanderers who use their bodies to "write" their experience of the city. The walkers’ writing creates "paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility" (De Certeau 158). Walkers create their own writing, and different writings connect one place to another. The overlapping of writings creates richness to the spatial expansion. De Certeau stated that the walkers’ writing is illegible due to their individualized path, but while the walkers are on public transportation, their poems are condensed in one cohesive manner that creates a unified statement. The walkers are also divided into two types: bus riders and subway riders.  This categorization does not only signify the type of transportation they are riding, but also their origin, destination, and time allotment. For instance, 14A and 14D buses group the local travelers who need the frequent stops along the street, and L train groups the inter-city travelers who come to New York from Brooklyn and Queens. Both bus and subway groups travel in a linear fashion, one above ground and the other underground, within the gridded map of 14^th street.

At bus stops and on subway platforms, we see a patterned dispersion as well. On December 7^th, Wednesday morning, I stand inside the transparent bus station located on Avenue C. Until the bus comes, I am not allowed to leave my spot. I walk a few steps inside the shelter, making ellipses with my footstep. When the bus arrives, I swipe my metro card and get on the one-passenger-entry door. The bus takes in whoever came to the stop first, one by one. We make eye contact with the bus driver.

Few minutes before standing at the bus stop, I am at Lorimer station, on the way to Manhattan. The massive crowd squashes themselves into the narrow space of the platform. In there, I am in a one-directional world where I just go forward. The crowd keeps walking without a glance, sweeping down. They are advancing fast but the crowd is not fast enough for them. I cannot possibly get off the forceful stream, the moving walkway.

In a subway station, the riders have to expand. The crowd starts from dots down the platform, unevenly spacing out between each other, leaving ample room for personal space. As more crowds come in, they fill in the space between the dots and extend the dots into a line. After the complete formation of a line, another line forms another set of dots. If each crowd were to be divided into first, second, and third groups and have their own colors, the aerial view of the crowd would form a seemingly unsystematic pattern that is a uniform distribution, an arrangement of order made by the prior ones who came to platform. People follow this absurd distribution as though they know how it works.

                Later I find out this order allows chronological entry to the subway car. The mass hurriedly disperses into the machine. The subway population is now spread to clumped distribution. The benches, especially the ones on the side and middle, are the most popular spots. Then it’s the bars. More than two riders claim the bar and grab it, never letting go until they reach their destination or find a seat. From the platform to subway, this distribution in small space is what every subway rider must become accustomed to. In the restricted space of bus stops, bus entrances, platforms, and subways, we learn the order of crowd. The pattern of the crowds creates an unspoken rule of bodily movement in transportation.

The two transportations’ compact and closed system requires more attention to our visual perception and auditory senses. This is another undeclared rule in using transportation. In general, the bus requires more attention to the visual aspect of the street. They recognize the bus route by landscape picture. They are more or less factual but truthful about the knowledge of 14th street. They are more factual because they know the distance it takes to get to this precise intersection and they are experiencing the visual aspect of the city, which is lacking in the subway. However, they might be less factual in knowing the exact names of the streets or the number of crowds coming at this certain time, because the bus parts the crowd into smaller groups by its frequent and dispersed stops.

The subway riders are more attuned to the sound than anything else. The sound of the train leaving, stopping, the announcement for next stops… especially when it’s crowded and you can’t see the platforms passing by, all your senses focus to auditory aspects. We depend solely on the metal container to transport us, allowing it to take full control. The subway riders are indifferent about such authoritative decisions, because once you are used to the pattern of sound, your body moves on its own. It knows where your stop is, after the third long sigh of the train at this moment. Without even registering your movement to your brain, your feet lead you out of the metal container, walking out unconsciously in what is a pre-destined routine.

The expansion of the crowd is centered toward the Union Square. For buses, the crowd begins to build from the far end of the street- avenue C and avenue 10^th. The far ends are where it’s most crowded, regardless of the bus’s direction. The number of bus riders is quite consistent until we reach near Union Square. I observe most people getting off on that stop. On the L subway, from 1^st avenue, the stops are not far from each other and the avenue numbers only increase. On 3^rd and 6^th avenue, no one from my section gets off. 4/5 of the mass gets off at Union Square, and the rest gets off on 8^th avenue.

Union Square is one major stop where the subway riders and the bus riders meet. Other than that stop, the two riders have no relationship to one another, although they share the same bus route. The two transportations on the map may seem as though they overlap, but in actuality are separate layers that disconnect the riders.

The new map is dealt with a more present location based factors: the space on the stations and in transportations, the actual bodies that travel, the connection with our senses and the transportation. Perec asks us to observe the surroundings “…until the scene becomes improbable. Until you have the impression, for the briefest of moments, that you are in a strange town or, better still, until you can no longer understand what is happening or is not happening […]” (Perec, 53). The internal mapping of subways and buses creates a new space for us to live in. In the stream of the rush and the passive surroundings, I broke down our body's use of space, and discovered that the transportation restricts the body by limiting our bodily senses and space in the process of expansion.

References and Citations

Perec, Georges. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. London: Penguin, 2008. Print.

Corner, James. The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and

            Invention. London: Reaktion, 2002. Print.

De Certeau, Michel. “Walking in the City” The Practice of Everyday Life: 157-163 University of Califormia Press, 1988. Print.

Two Artists from Harmon's Essay

1. Guillermo Kuitca

- Maps of Presence and Absence
Static, desolate and empty place. Maps do not represent any human figures although they are part of what constitutes geography of the area.

Bed- symbol of intimacy and bodily associations of humans and streets. The actual bedsheet can render the maps and it may not be so accurate as the streets are recognized as only subjectively. The names marked on the mattress are mislocated or repeated. This suggests that "there is an inevitable sameness to our movements, or that we're fated to being dislocated from reality". Who had the authority to name them? Why are they called as what they are?




Some Themes on mapping
Dangerous area (Guillerno Kuitca)
Subway/bus- naming, purpose of each stop, predestination

Transportations of 14th Street

Honee Jang

HMS 103A

Professor Sacha Frey

12/14/2011

Transportations of 14^th Street- replace it with my central point in terms of mapping

“Why do buses go from this place to that? Who chooses the routes and by what criteria?” (Perec 52)

 Manhattan was cold and drizzling with rain on Wednesday, December 7th.  Regardless of the public nuisance of weather, many people on 14th street were traveling along the street around 10 am in the morning. I traveled among them, from 1st avenue to 8th, back eastbound to Avenue C, and then back again to westbound, with two different modes of transportation. On my hand were two Manhattan maps; one subway map, and the other a bus map. On 14^th street, both map showed a train, L, and two buses, 14A and 14D, traveling between west and east aides of Manhattan. The L train’s route is marked by a gray line that horizontally connects two white dots and three black dots along the 14^th street. The 14 A/D buses are marked by one single yellow-green line with arrows, showing the direction of the buses. The stations are not specified on the bus map. The two routes fit in perfectly without distracting the crème color, gridded landscape of New York City. Although it gives clear direction of where the two transportations are leading me, the map is too “authoritarian, simplistic, erroneous and coercive” the street because___. I did not get a sense of the actual neighborhood until I explored the street on foot.

Walkers, 

 Even when you are used to the route, the map is still ambiguous and abstract that it is not recognizable in the actual space. It shows the destinations of the transportation but not the process of movement, about how our body experiences the transportation system, and where we actually are. After all, the routes are hypothetical that gives only the generalized area where people might land on. The white dots for bigger station and black dots for small station are excellent possibilities to show the general movement, but they are only hypothesis, not statistics. It needs more explanation. I wanted to provide a more insightful map that shows interaction between the subway and the individuals. A more-present location based factors, such as the space in transportation, the actual bodies who travel, and the connection we make instead with the transportation. Perec asks us to observe the surroundings “…until the scene becomes improbable. Until you have the impression, for the briefest of moments, that you are in a strange town or, better still, until you can no longer understand what is happening or is not happening, until the whole place becomes strange, and you no longer even know that this is what is called a town, a street, buildings, pavements…” (Perec, 53) In the drift of the rush and the passive surroundings, I stripped down our body's use of space, and discovered that the transportation restricts body by limiting our bodily sense and space in the process of expansion.

De Certeau describes the walkers of the city as the wanderers who use their bodies to "write" their experience of the city. Although they do not know they are writing, but the "paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poemsin which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility." I'd like to further explain my thesis by employing the walkers as the central theme. 

There is almost no one at the bus stop on C Avenue. I stand inside the transparent shelter, looking around the buildings and the trees. Until the bus comes, I am not allowed to leave my spot. The small bus station is all I have. I walk few steps inside the shelter, making ellipses with my footstep. When the bus arrives, I swipe my metro card and get on the one-passenger-entry door. Few others behind me get on one by one. I am still not fully awake from the rush in the subway. A while ago, I was at Lorimer station, on the way to Manhattan. The crowd filled in the narrow space of platform. In there, I was in one-dimensional world where I just go forward. The crowd kept walking without a glance, swept down by the mass. I could not possibly get off of the forceful drift, the moving walkway.

In a subway station, the riders have to expand. The crowd starts from dots down the platform, unevenly spacing out between each other, leaving ample room of personal space. As more crowds come in, they fill in between the dots and extend the dots into line. After the complete formation of a line, another line forms another set of dots. If each crowd were to be divided into first, second, and third groups and have their own colors, the aerial view of the crowd would form a seemingly randomized pattern that is a uniform distribution, an arrangement of order made by the prior ones who came to platform. People follow this absurd distribution as though they know how it works.

                Later I find out, this order allows chronological entry to the subway. The mass hurriedly disperses into the subway. The subway’s population is not in uniform but in clump distribution. The benches, especially the side and right in the middle are the most popular spots. Then it’s the bars. More than two riders claim the bar and grab it, never letting go until they reach their destination or find a seat. From the platform to subway, this pattern of population distribution in small space is what every subwayers must be accustomed to. In the restricted space of bus stop, bus entrance, platform, and the subway, we learn the order of crowd.

Once you get on the transportation, it is all about senses now. The subwayers are more attuned to the sound than anything else. The sound of the train leaving, stopping, the announcement for next stops… especially when it’s crowded and you can’t see the platforms passing by, all your senses focus to auditory. We depend solely on the metal container to transport us, giving all the control to it. The subwayers are indifferent about such authoritative decision, because once you are used to the pattern of sound, your body moves on its own. It knows where your stop is, after the third long sigh of the train at this moment. Without even registering your movement to your brain, your feet lead you out of the metal container, drifting in what is a pre-destined routine.

On the other hand, the bus requires more attention to the visual aspect of the street. Usually it is the local Manhattan residents who use buses around 10 am on Wednesday morning of December the 7^th. None of the passengers looked around to see where they were because they were familiar with the street’s neighborhood. They recognize the bus route by perception of the landscape, not by the avenue names. They know more or less factual but truthful part of the street. More factual because they know the distance it takes to get to this precise intersection and they are experiencing the visual aspect of the city which was lacking in the subway. However they might be less factual in getting down the exact names of the streets or gets to the statistical part, such as the number of crowds coming at this certain time, because bus parts the crowd into smaller groups (frequent and dispersed stops). which emphasizes only on names and sequences of avenues.

There’s a slight fear to the subwayers, especially when they are new to the train. Corner introduces the definition of “drifting” in his essay, Agency of Mapping. “Drift” means___. And I defined it further into ___. They drift, not sure if the train is going to the way they want. There are no street signs that show the train is going west or east, and we cannot look out to see which direction we are going. It’s just an act of trusting and confirming. What seems forever between Bedford to and 1^st avenue gets a little better after passing 1^st avenue. Now, the stops are not far from each other and the avenue numbers only increase. On 3^rd and 6^th avenue, no one from my section gets off. 4/5 of the mass gets off at Union Square, and the rest gets off on 8^th avenue. On the last stop, as if to caution not to rush, the doors take some time before opening the door. I get off with the rest of subwayers. I follow and see almost all goes to A/C/E station. I notice 8^th avenue is only the mediator. I also notice that from 1^st to 8^th, no one gets onto my section of the subway. L is only the giver than the accepter in the subway system. From Union Square, 6th, and 8^th Avenue where L intersects with 4, 5, 6, R, N, Q, F, D, B, M, 1, 2, 3, A, C, and E trains, not one other subwayers transfers to L. I learn that 14^th street is the aorta of all other arteries that transport its riders.

The subway is characterized by its closed system. The subwayers are blind to social milieu as much as they are blind spatially in subway. The subway set its importance on the subwayers’ occupation and stops only on the path to legislative structures, service centers, and college. Avenue C to A, and Avenues 9 to beyond are not part of train L’s route. This causes subway’s selection of certain groups such as businessmen, workers, and college student. Likewise, the subwayers are selective about their destinations miss much of what is a part of 14^th street. 

The local residents take 14A or 14D bus instead, because their preferred destination is not work-related but everyday life: groceries, walking, leisure, and meeting with a friend. The stores, restaurants, cafes, and park are all throughout the street. The buses don’t stop at every spot. It is the riders who choose the route, not the bus. However, this is also a disadvantageous to those who are riding the bus for the first time. Because it is our choice to stop the bus, we are obligated to make our own choices, and more often than not, the bus drivers do not announce next stop. First timers should always look ahead and check the street names. Other than the first timers, the rest are relaxed. They would look out the window with dull eyes. They are not rushed by time.

For buses, the crowd begins to build from the far end of the street- avenue C and avenue 10^th. The far ends are where it’s most crowded, regardless of the bus’s direction. The number of bus riders is quite consistent until we reach near Union Square. Union Square is one major stop where the subwayers and the bus riders meet. Other than that stop, the two riders have no relationship to one another, although they share the same route. The two transportations on the map seem they overlap, but in actuality they are separate layers that keep their homogenous riders. There’s not so much relationship between 14 bus and other subways that cross 14^th street either. The 14 bus is not a mediator, but the main stream.    

14^th street mediates and guides the expansion of the passers through two transportations. Although their functions are different and they serve different social classes and direct to different destinations within similar stops, the bodily and spatial restrictions allow expansion of the movement. Without understanding much of what is going on, we follow our path by the ritual of spatial distribution, use of our sensory system, and drifting and expanding our space. “Ideas about spatiality are moving away from physical objects and forms towards the variety of territorial… and social process that flow through space.”(Corner 227) 

transportation trip