The Post-Industrial Sublime or Forgetting Love Canal

The Post-Industrial Sublime or Forgetting Love Canal

Karen Wilson Baptist

Abstract

If ‘space is a practiced place’i as de Certeau pronounces, then what is a post-

industrial ruin? Expunged from the practices of everyday life, these sites degrade,

abandoned structures corrode and oxidize, graffiti proliferates, the feral returns.

This suggests a moral imperative within the aesthetic of the ruin, a reminder of the

temporal nature of human existence and the redemptive power of wild nature.

Ruins have long been muse for aesthetic contemplation, inspiring centuries of art,

music, philosophy, garden art, architecture, and landscape architecture. The ruin

hosts a haunted presence where the spectral absence embodied within its presence

evokes human folly; our ambitions of eminence and immortality are revealed as

futility, supplanted by images of desolation, decay, and death. The post-industrial

ruin is equally a representation of human vanitas, but the melancholy that the post-

industrial edifice inspires transports mourning beyond an artful inducement of

sadness, for here is reflected the loss of industry, the urban decay, and the

extinction of the working class that accompanies the off-shore migration of labor

in a late-capitalist society. Equally, our grief may encompass an ecological

mourning, for the deathscape of these drosscapes may include profoundly toxic

leachates whose environmental impact endures well beyond the lives of the

labourers and the products once manufactured here. Thus a post-industrial aesthetic

is equally evocative of human conceit; in the ruins of human endeavors, our

actions are no longer washed over by the wild, rather, we are implicated in our

wantonness, greed, and destructiveness of culture and of nature. In contemporary

design practice, post-industrial sites are the new pleasure grounds, a utilitarian

solution for the Twenty-first century Park - redemptive, functional, and

picturesque. This paper reflects upon the moral imperative potentialized by

contemporary representations of the post-industrial sublime, and ponders if we

have too swiftly forgotten the lessons of Love Canal.

Key Words: Representations of place and space, post-industrial landscapes, the

sublime, haunted spaces, ruins, deathscapes.

*****

1. Introduction

While there has always been a separation of functions in the Western city;

consider the Fleshmarket, Haymarket, and Grassmarket in Edinburgh, the

congestion, lack of infrastructure, and relatively confined circles of life in the

industrial city led to an overlapping of dwelling and working, living and dying.ii


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Ebenezer Howard’s (1850-1928) response to squalor was a vision for garden cities

where functional land division within an Arcadian setting provided for housing,

agriculture, silviculture, light industry, and public spaces.iii

The contemporary

Canadian suburb is a corruption of Howard’s pastoral paradise. In an unceasing

seep across the landscape, the contemporary suburb subsumes all in its path,

farmland, forest, post-industrial sites. With ample greenfields for ripe for

exploitation, brownfield development in many Canadian cities is expensive,

undesirable, and poorly supported by government.iv Many sites are highly toxic, in

their abandonment, they often become lush rewilded places.

While post-industrial sites form a physical void in the contemporary city, the

notion of the post-industrial equally refers to a socio-cultural evolution in the

contemporary relationship with science and technology.v Bell identifies five main

components of a post-industrial society – a service producing economy rather than

one based on the manufacturing of goods, the prevalence of what Richard Florida

would refer to as the creative classvi - a society where professional and technical

classes dominate, the centrality of the relationship of theoretical knowledge

production to cultural growth, a focus on ‘future orientation’ and intellectual

technology as a force in decision-making.vii

These factors collectively act as ‘an

extension of modern narcissistic culture’ where the strands that link manufacturing

and consumption, labor and leisure, production, and social well-being are

severed.viii

As manufacturing migrates to off shore locations where labor laws and

environmental regulations are lax, Western consumers edaciously devour an

abundance of low-priced goods. But as recent factory fires in Dhaka attest, the

intimacy of globalization reveals that the true price of an inexpensive t-shirt is paid

for in human suffering many thousands of miles away. As much as one might

intellectualize the epicurean appetites of the creative class, the goods and energy

required to sate our immense consumerism must come from somewhere, but surely

not from our own post-industrial backyard.

2. Background

Contemporary cities may sprawl, but they are hermetic, inward facing, a series

of concentric settlement patterns with little overlap between communities. In the

voids created by contemporary urban growth patterns, one might locate the terrain

vague.ix For the contemporary urban adventurer, these between places offer myriad

opportunities - an escape from the confines of the manicured city, a place for

independent life, wildlife, freedom. What is stirred within the contemporary soul

when we invade, intrude, or voyeuristically gaze upon images of the post-industrial

landscape?

Ruins have long been a source of contemplation and intellectual speculation for

the creative class of previous generationsx and while elevated rail-lines, gas plants,

and former gravel pits are not the Roman Colosseum, to the contemporary flâneur,

these post-modern edifices present an opportunity to experience something beyond

the everyday. There is a charm to ruins, an artfulness of decay evoked by the way


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that ruins occupy a half-life that teeters between wholeness and obliteration.xi The

regenerative power of nature is witnessed in ruined sites, trees crack asphalt; vines

invade pane-less windows, and deer graze on hillocks of toxic tailings. Equally

present in ruins is the spectre of death, an evocative on loss, longing, grief, ruin. As

Simmel remarks the ruin is ‘the site of life from which life has departed’.xii

The

post-industrial ruin is reflective of human folly, the temporality of human avarice,

and the futility of ambition. In the abandonment of the ruin, its silence and

emptiness, we may read a vacancy within our selves. ‘Ruin’, as Derrida observes

is, ‘the self-portrait’.xiii

Indeterminate nature, the beauty of decline, the contradiction of devastation,

the simmering danger of rot and rubble infuses post-industrial ruins with a

compelling identity. For Ginsberg the ruin connotes completeness for within

entropy disparate parts forge new relationships.xiv

Encounters with ruins can

initiate an aesthetic experience in the true etymological sense of the word - a deep,

sonorous, sensual, perceptual interchange with otherness. Ruins are equally

traumascapes, spaces marked by loss, violence, and suffering.xv

In visiting such

spaces, the haunted presence of absence invokes mourning and grief for lost

possibilities. As Tumarkin notes, ‘It is through these places that the past, whether

buried or laid bare for all to see, continues to inhabit and refashion the present’.xvi

Ruins may be experienced as restless, haunted locations where memory

remains alive, even if that remembering is flawed and partial; it is as Armstrong

states, the ‘lack of fixed meaning that renders ruins and wastelands deeply

meaningful’.xvii

Perhaps it is the wild meaning broadcast within interpretations of

the post-industrial ruin that provides us with a contemporary identity for the

sublime. ‘It is ironic that through dereliction we can again experience the concept

of the Sublime, so recently lost to us through the taming and commodification of

wilderness’.xviii

Ironic too, that a sensation once associated with nature can be

rediscovered where the wild and the cultivated joust for dominance.

The sublime is clearly associated with contradictory notions. For Kant, the

sublime is the culmination of the ‘ascendancy of the rational over the real’.xix

Longinus associates the sublime with the potential of human verse to rhetorically

‘overcome the rational powers of its audience’.xx

The dichotomies of such

definitions tend to scramble the contemporary mind more attuned to multiple

meanings and itinerant subjectivity. Burke’s interpretation seems more compatible

with the contradictory nature of the sublime, clashing notions of astonishment,

violence, terror, and aesthetic satisfaction.xxi

While it is clear that the sublime is, as with all human constructs, is a filament

of the imagination, experiences that evoke the sublime such as terrible storms, the

fragment of a girder in a smoldering maw, or a stroll in a suburban park, have the

power to remind us that we are diminished beings in reflection of the power of

nature and the wrath of humanity, and yet that we remain intimately woven into the

womb of the world. As Nye explains, all sublime experiences have a basic

structure: ‘An object, natural or man-made, disrupts ordinary perception and


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astonishes the senses, forcing the observer to grapple mentally with its immensity

and power’.xxii

In the post-industrial era, sublime sensations remain wondrous

experiences of space and of place – even if those sites exist only in our

imagination.

Encounters with the post-industrial sublime potentialize an intersubjective

exchange between self and other. The interruption of the everyday initiated by

encounters with the sublime disturbs taken for granted ways of knowing the world.

Speculative wild meanings fill the mind and we may question our place in the

universe. The contemporary post-industrial sublime awakens questions regarding

the relationship between humanity and nature, life and death, grief and mourning,

but could the intertwining that occurs within experiences of the post-industrial

sublime inspire an ecological empathy that might alter the way in which we attend

to our planet?

3. The Aesthetic Agency of the Sublime

Photographer David McMillan became a frequent visitor to the Chernobyl

Exclusion Zone following the 1986 nuclear accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear

Power Plant.xxiii

McMillan first visited Chernobyl in 1994 and has returned to the

site no less than eleven times.xxiv

The site of his investigation is the town of

Pripyat, once considered the gem of the former Soviet Union, a contemporary city

of 45,000 people.xxv

McMillan’s images are devoid of inhabitants, but the Ferris

wheel appears suspended mid arc, awaiting the next rider, and toys are strewn

about a child-care facility as if they are waiting to be picked up and enjoyed.

These are images of a place haunted by swift displacement. As time passes, interior

wall-coverings absorb seepage, peeling and curling as if planar tendrils of an

atomic trailing plant; and in the playground, the verdant vitality of a community of

young poplars. Everywhere is wild growth – even in the entropy of human

structures, we witness the evolution of new forms of being as once familiar shapes

morph into post-nuclear mutations. Chernobyl has become a wildlife sanctuary and

even a destination for eco-tourists eager to view the abundant fauna – rare birds,

grazing animals such as elk, deer, and Przewalski’s horses, and predators such as

lynx, wild dogs, foxes and wolves.xxvi

The rebirth of nature placed against the ruin

of human inhabitation lends a numinous quality to McMillan’s photographs. In

speaking to the work of W.G. Sebald, Wylie (2007) notes ‘…an aesthetic

sensibility prizing qualities such as lightness, delicacy and evanescence. These

qualities perhaps speak with especially haunting effect when they are set against a

background narrative of trauma, loss and displacement.’xxvii

His words seem

equally applicable to the sublime qualities of McMillan’s work.

The post-industrial landscape of Chernobyl appears in McMillan’s images as a

‘spectral geography’ – a ‘landscape of restless ruins’xxviii

where human time is

suspended and replaced by the furtive temporality of wild nature. The images

inspire melancholy as the human absence is everlasting, and one might imagine a

time in when all tracing of human being are erased. Clearly the latent subliminality


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present in McMillan’s work rouses the viewer, but how that awakening is activated

remains the responsibility of the individual.

4. The Post-Industrial Sublime - Too Much of a Good Thing?

New York’s Highline has been implicated in what is know as the ‘High Line

effect’, a global movement to transform abandoned urban rail-lines into linear

parks.xxix

The High Line has even inspired an inverse landscape intervention – the

‘Low Line’ Delancey Underground in New York City.xxx

The High Line effect has

created more than a series of copycat parks; communities that dodge the new park

reap economic benefits, increased urban renewal, and the influx of tourists. For

some, however, the High Line effect is detrimental, leading to a crush of visitors,

the destruction of community character, and escalating real estate prices – a

veritable “Disney World on the Hudson’, as one journalist describes it.xxxi

The High Line was initially a spur line that delivered cargo to west Manhattan,

once the largest industrial district in the city.xxxii

Industrial use of the High Line

ceased in 1980 and the site was all but abandoned.xxxiii

As in Chernobyl, in the

absence of humans, the site became a wild urban meadow. The photographer Joel

Sternfeldxxxiv

is credited with bringing the High Line to public consciousness; his

images, dating from 2000-2001, ‘were important catalysts in conveying the

potential for the space as a public green space, and helped convert many people

into supporters of the movement to save it from demolition.’xxxv

Sternfeld’s images

expose a sublime version of the High Line, a silent two kilometre ribbon

unraveling through low slung warehouses and couture shops of the meatpacking

district, slicing past the galleries of Chelsea, and abruptly terminating in Hell’s

Kitchen. One can imagine what it might have been like to trespass upon this

elevated urban wildscape before the annual throngs of an estimated 3.7 million

visitors transgressed the site.xxxvi

Although the landscape architects (James

Corner’s Field Operations), architects (Diller Scofidio + Renfro), and the planting

expert (Piet Oudolf) were inspired by the wayward flora,xxxvii

the density of use and

popularity of the park may at times overwhelm their carefully conceived

intentions. And yet, the seasonal variations in the plantings, the chiaroscuro of the

city cast upon the site as day passes to evening, and then again, when crisp eastern

light incises the site, provides plenty of opportunities for a sublime experience.

One might mourn for the loss of the derelict character and exhilarating discoveries

once found here, but frequent visitors and tourists alike can still find moments of

solitude, experiencing the city, yet being apart. In this, the High Line continues to

evoke yet another contradictory aspect of the sublime – the significance that grows

with repetition, and the joy of the ‘unexpected encounter’xxxviii

where an

astonishing urban experience may initiate an intercorporeal exchange between self

and city and nature.


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5. Terror and Beauty: The Sublimity of Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord

The rusting carcass of the former steel plant rises like an iron behemoth from

the verdant forest that has overtaken a post-industrial site in Duisburg Germany.

This 200-hectare landscape park was once the site of a coal mine, a coking plant, a

massive blast furnace, and transportation infrastructure. Landschaftspark Duisburg-

Nord, designed by landscape architects Latz + Partner (completed 1991) was

deliberately planned to remediate the toxic grounds of the site and to integrate the

industrial edifices remaining here.xxxix

De-industrialization of the site over several

decades displaced thousands of workers.xl The design objectives for the site

responded to a rational agenda inclusive of preserving existing landscape,

harmonizing the disparate sectors of the site, and establishing a parkland,xli

but

equally Latz was moved by the mythos of the site, likening the fearsome ruins to

the mythical dragons that inhabit the Bosco Sacro of Bomarzo.xlii

I cannot say why these ruins incite fear. They are truly gargantuan, a post-

industrial sarcophagus, dwarfing human scale. And although the massive furnaces

are silenced and the workforce dispersed, one is fearful to enter the maw of the

iron works should the fires reignite and the engines spring to life. It is as if one has

entered a post-modern day rendition of J.R.R. Tolkein’s Mordor. In a seeming

defiance of the litigious safety rules that emasculate North American tourist

attractions, entering the ruins is permitted. Steel stairwells invite visitors to

penetrate the ruins, to stroke caving brick walls where once were housed material

processes unfamiliar to the callous-free hands of the contemporary visitor. One can

ascend the steep staircase up, around, and through the oxidized pipes and fittings.

For those who harbour a secret terror of heights, the vision of the treetops, many

stories below, may initiate unwelcome sensations of vertigo and a desire to quickly

scurry to the ground plane below. Fear observed Burke, is an essential element of

the sublime. ‘Whatever therefore is terrible, with regard to sight, is sublime too,

whether this cause of terror be endued with greatness of dimensions or not; for it is

impossible to look on anything as trifling, or contemptible, that may be

dangerous.’xliii

Descending to the forested floor below, mind and body are flushed with the

aftermath of terror, perhaps yielding an aroused desire to live life fully and

completely. Landschaftspark Duisburg Nord provides many post-panic pleasures,

bicycles to tour the generous grounds, a theatre on site, and a diving facility in a

massive storage tank. Closer to the ruins, one discovers walled secret gardens,

climbing walls, sandboxes, sliding tubes, and a small bistro where one can find a

decent sauvignon blanc. Indeed, one might say that the complexity of the design,

the variety of programming, the intricacy of the ruins, the scale of the remediation

and the pride of place that employees express, are collectively evocative of Buffalo

Bill’s description of the Grand Canyon: ‘too sublime for expression, too wonderful

to behold without awe, and beyond all power of mortal description.’xliv

As Tate

affirms, Landschaftspark Duisburg Nord is the ‘embodiment of post-industrial

sublimity.’xlv


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6. The Obliteration of Love Canal

From Google Earth scrutiny of Love Canal, a small community in New York

State near the Canadian Border, reveals a dehiscence in the suburban fabric, a

small healed over blemish where turf grass, like ruptured skin, has failed to erase

the disfigurement of community and landscape. Between 1942 and 1953 the

Hooker Chemical and Plastics Corporation discarded 22,000 tons of toxic

wastesxlvi

in Love Canal, an inland waterway originally constructed by William T.

Love in the late 19th century to connect the Niagara River to Lake Ontario.

xlvii Post-

war urban expansion led to a desire for more housing and schools in the area and

so the Niagara Falls Board of Education obtained the chemical repository in the

1950’s for the price of $1.xlviii

A school and playground were built upon the site

while new housing flanked the perimeter. In the 1960’s there were numerous

complaints of off gassing and explosions surrounding the site, but it was during the

mid-1970’s when heavy snowfall and extensive rainfall infiltrated the pits that

residents became truly alarmed.xlix

A 1978 investigation by Niagara Gazette

reporter Michael Brown revealed the insidious nature of oozing fluids and

associated increased incidents of illness in the community to chemicals identified

as deposited in the canal.l Alerted by Brown’s reporting, community member Lois

Marie Gibbs initiated her own series of investigations; she rallied the

neighbourhood, consulted experts, and changed the trajectory of environmental

politics and activism.li The impact of the Love Canal was revolutionary. As Magoc

summarizes, Love Canal focused national attention on the issue of hazardous waste…

[and] … altered the nation’s environmental politics and environmentalism

itself. The even made frighteningly real the consequences of an ‘out of

sight, out of mind’ attitude toward hazardous industrial waste.lii

The Love Canal controversy is lauded for breaking through issues of race,

class, and gender and for inciting widespread resistance to the dumping of waste in

poor and minority communities.liii

And yet I was saddened to discover that in the

three years that I have introduced the story of Love Canal to my undergraduate

theory students, that few of them are familiar with this narrative of deceit,

deception, and grassroots heroism. How the post-industrial landscape is chronicled,

venerated, penetrated, and commemorated is significant if we mean to keep the

lessons these drosscapes can provide to us alive. In reference to sites of violence

and tragedy in America, Foote constructs a continuum of four categories of

landscape modification: sanctification, designation, rectification and obliteration.liv

Obliteration entails the erasure of a location from the everyday; the site is neither


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returned to use, nor repurposed. ‘Obliteration’, he states, ‘stems from a desire to

forget.’lv

Love Canal was a groundswell, but it escapes any association with the

sublime. There are no aesthetic depictions of the site, no stunning Burtynsky

images of the post-industrial landscape, nor do eco-tourists make their way here. It

might be hard to imagine how a site like Love Canal could be depicted as beautiful

or become an opportunity to experience the sublime. What is transcendent about

incidents of cancer in children and the profound suffering of a community, or the

grinding frustration of a battle to discover the truth in the wake of deception? But

the events of Love Canal are now repeated on a scale never before seen. One can

only hope that Garth Lenz’s images of this massive blight, Canada’s shame - the

Mackenzie Oil Sands Project, might begin to stir us to action.lvi

7. Summations

In truth, I cannot know what might move individuals to ecological empathy,

nor to environmental activism, indeed there is some danger that overexposure to

destruction, desolation, and decay may lead to the powerlessness of grief and the

inertia of melancholy. In the inverse, I wonder if the potentially prosaic nature of

encounters with sites such as Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord, where the post-

industrial landscape takes on qualities of playfulness and utility, diminishes the

potential agency of the sublime. Perhaps it is, as McEvilley notes, a contradiction

to seek a contemporary identity, never mind function, for the sublime.lvii

Terror and

fear, astonishment and wonder, as initiators of agency in culture and society are

perhaps exhausted, and the sublime reduced to a trope for the thrill seeker, a

temporary pleasure that stirs one neither to reverence nor to action. Are the

contemporary characteristics of the sublime merely situated in the ‘somewhat

arbitrary ability to designate it wherever one wants?’lviii

In reflection of this

statement, I too am perhaps guilty. And yet following all this speculation and

exploration, I return to my original question, with some trepidation and

uncertainty, and wonder if yes, indeed, we have all too soon forgotten the lessons

of Love Canal.

Notes

i Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 117. ii James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of

America’s Man-Made Landscape (New York: Touchstone, 1993), 29-37. iii

Lewis Mumford, ‘The Garden City Idea and Modern Planning’, in The Urban

Design Reader, ed. Michael Larice and Elizabeth Macdonald (London and New

York: Routledge, 2007), 43-53.


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iv Jan Skerritt, ‘Buried Treasure: Dealing with Winnipeg’s ‘Brownfields’’

Winnipeg Free Press, 25 February 2012, viewed 19 June 2013,

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/buried-treasure-140406013.html v Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1976), in Margaret A. Rose, The Post-Modern & the Post Industrial,

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 31. vi Richard L. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: and How it's Transforming

Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002). vii

Rose, Post-Modern, 31. viii

Ibid., 30-31. ix Ignasi de Salà-Morales, ‘Terrain Vague’, in Center 14: On Landscape Urbanism

ed. Dean Almy. (Austin: Center for American Architecture and Design,

University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, 2007), 108-113. x Brian Dillon, ‘Introduction/A Short History of Decay’, in Ruins, ed. Brian Dillon

(London and Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, 2011), 10-19. xi Simmel, Georg. ‘The Ruin’, in Ruins, ed. Brian Dillon London and Cambridge:

Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, 2011), 23. xii

Ibid., 23. xiii

Jacques Derrida, ‘Memoirs of the Blind’, in Ruins, ed. Brian Dillon (London

and Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, 2011), 43. xiv

Robert Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi,

2004), 156. xv

Maria Tumarkin, Traumascapes: The Power and Fate of Places Transformed by

Tragedy. Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2005). xvi

Ibid., 12. xvii

Helen Armstrong, ‘Time, Dereliction and Beauty: An Argument for Landscapes

of Contempt’, The Landscape Architects: An Online Magazine Published by the

Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA) The 2006 IFLA Conference

Session Papers, 2006 (May 2006), Viewed 19 June 2013, http://www.aila.org.au/lapapers/conferences/2006-01.htm, 4.

xviii Ibid., 11.

xix Philip Shaw, The Sublime (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 12.

xx Ibid., 4-5.

xxi Ibid., 6.

xxii David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge and London: The

MIT Press, 1995), 15. xxiii

‘David McMillan, ‘David McMillan Photographs,’ Viewed 19 June 2013,

http://www.dsmcmillan.com/

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/buried-treasure-140406013.html

http://www.aila.org.au/lapapers/conferences/2006-01.htm



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xxiv

Imagining a Shattering Earth: Contemporary Photography and the

Environmental Debate, ‘David McMillan’, Viewed 19 June 2013,

http://www2.oakland.edu/shatteringearth/artists.cfm?art=28 xxv

‘McMillan, ‘ Photographs’. xxvi

Steve Connor, ‘20 Years After Meltdown, Life Returns to Chernobyl’, The

Independent (5 April 2006), Viewed 18 June 2013,

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/20-years-after-meltdown-life-

returns-to-chernobyl-472842.html?printService=print xxvii

John Wylie, ‘The Spectral Geographies of W.G. Sebald’, Cultural

Geographies 14 (2007), 179. xxviii

Ibid., 179. xxix

Charles A. Birnbaum, ‘The Real High Line Effect – A Transformational

Triumph of Preservation and Design’, The Huffington Post (18 June 2013),

Viewed 18 June 2013,

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-a-birnbaum/the-real-high-line-

effect_b_1604217.html xxx

Vanessa Quirk, ‘The 4 Coolest High Line Inspired Projects’, Arch Daily (16

June 2012), Viewed 19 June 2013 http://www.archdaily.com/254447/the-4-

coolest-high-line-inspired-projects/ xxxi

Jeremiah Moss ‘Disney World on the Hudson’ The New York Times 21

August 2012. Viewed 19 June 2013,

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/22/opinion/in-the-shadows-of-the-high-

line.html?_r=0 xxxii

High Line, ‘High Line History’, Viewed 19 June 2013,

http://www.thehighline.org/about/high-line-history xxxiii

Ibid. xxxiv

Joel Sternfeld, Adam Gopnik and John R. Stilgoe, Walking the High Line

(New York: Pace/MacGill Gallery, 2001). xxxv

High Line, ‘Joel Sternfeld, A Railroad Artifact’, Viewed 19 June 2013,

http://www.thehighline.org/joel-sternfeld-a-railroad-artifact, para.3. xxxvi

Moss, Disney, para.6. xxxvii

High Line, ‘Plantings’ Viewed 19 June 2013,

http://www.thehighline.org/design/planting xxxviii

Nye, American Technological Sublime, 15. xxxix

Alan Tate, ‘Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord’ in Great City Parks (London and

New York: Spon Press, 2001), 114-122. xl Ibid., 114-116.

xli Ibid., 118.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/20-years-after-meltdown-life-returns-to-chernobyl-472842.html?printService=print


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-a-birnbaum/the-real-high-line-effect_b_1604217.html


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/22/opinion/in-the-shadows-of-the-high-line.html?_r=0


http://www.thehighline.org/about/high-line-history

http://www.thehighline.org/joel-sternfeld-a-railroad-artifact

http://www.thehighline.org/design/planting


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xlii

Udo Weilacher, Syntax of Landscape: The Landscape Architecture of Peter Latz

and Partners (Basel, Boston and Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2008), 112. xliii

Edmund Burke, (1998). A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of

the Sublime and Beautiful. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 54. xliv

William F. Cody, cited in Nye, American Technological Sublime, 9. xlv

Tate, Great City Parks, 122. xlvi

Thomas H. Fletcher, From Love Canal to Environmental Justice: The Politics

of Hazardous Waste on the Canada-U.S. Border (Peterborough: Broadview

Press, 2003), 47. xlvii

Elizabeth D. Blum, Love Canal Revisited: Race, Class, and Gender in

Environmental Activism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 20. xlviii

Fletcher, From Love Canal, 48. xlix

Ibid., 49-49. lChris J. Magoc, Environmental Issues in American History: A Reference Guide

with Primary Documents, (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 2006), 249. li Blum, Love Canal Revisited, 86.

lii Magoc, Environmental Issues, 251-252.

liii Ibid., 252; Blum, 2008.

liv Kenneth E. Foote, Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and

Tragedy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 7. lv Ibid., 25.

lvi ‘Garth Lenz: The True Cost of Oil’, Ted Talk, (November 2011, Victoria, BC.),

Viewed 19 June 2013

http://www.ted.com/talks/garth_lenz_images_of_beauty_and_devastation.html lvii

Thomas McEvilley ‘Turned Upside Down and Torn Apart’ in The Sublime ed.

Simon Morley (London and Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT

Press, 2011), 168 lviii

Ibid., 168.

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Karen Wilson Baptist is an Associate Professor in Landscape Architecture at the

University of Manitoba and harbours an interest in ‘deathscapes’ at a range of

scales. Her forays into the urban sublime are accompanied by her partner Lloyd, a

Beagle and a Border Collie – that’s why she knows about the deer.

The Post-Industrial Sublime or Forgetting Love Canal

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