Interrupted City: Grafting Rome, New York

Rome, New York is unknown to most people in the United States, rather unlike its namesake across the Atlantic. However, that choice of name puts at play a kind of surplus value. One approaches Rome through a landscape of freeway interchanges, rail lines and mucklands, feeling increasingly let down as the center, such that it is, nears. On the final stretch, as one is lifted off the ground by the concrete piers of US Rte 49, rising above an overgrown canal bed, we cross a threshold marked by a reflective green highway sign which announces: “site of Clinton’s ditch.” The sign interrupts our smooth passage in order to insert the history of the Erie Canal. One is entering a place whose identity, it would seem, is heavily mediated by historical allusions. Interrupted City: Grafting Rome, New York is a joint project of an architect and a cultural geographer.

Volume Editors
David Covo & Gabriel Mérigo Basurto

ISBN
0-935502-57-2