Bridges

ABSTRACT

This article explores the relationship between the thinking, feeling, moving body, and a city's industrial architecture. It takes as its fieldwork site the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg and 59th Street bridges that dominate downtown New York, and uses this to present an ethnographic understanding of lived experience as a continuous sensory exchange between mind, body, and world. New York's bridges, towering 300 feet into the air and 7,000 feet across, established a new sense of scale against which citizens could compare their finite, organic bodies. The article draws upon a practice-based research project, New York Stories, for which I recorded more than a hundred interior dialogues of random strangers as they moved around the city. People's movement across bridges, reveals them to be complex sites of perception, sensation, and experience, which generate ongoing streams of interior dialogue ranging from the trivial to the tragic. For when walking across a bridge people are no longer attached to the land or part of the city but are instead partially in the sky above the water, “making strange” the sense of being on the ground, and subjecting people to various delirious effects including vertigo, flying, and falling, before reaching the other side. It is a story told through words and images in the form of a photo-essay with accompanying text that derives from the practice-based ethnography that is also available in video and audible form online.