Description
Water towers are the signature of New York’s rooftops. When Croton water arrived in 1842, its pressure was enough to lift it to about the sixth floor; above that, pumps and a rooftop tank were needed. The tanks multiplied from the 1880s, along with the elevator and the steel frame. They are still made of cedar or redwood, inexpensive woods that insulate against frost, and last twenty-five to thirty years; three family firms, among them Rosenwach and Isseks Brothers, have built most of them for more than a century. In 1998, Rachel Whiteread cast the inside of one of these tanks in translucent resin and set it on a SoHo rooftop, at the corner of West Broadway and Grand Street, like the ghost of an object no one looked at any more; the work is now at MoMA.
The photograph is taken from a height, above Bushwick, in Brooklyn: a district of brick, workshops and warehouses where the streets meet at right angles, and where, since 2012, the Bushwick Collective has invited artists to paint the walls. Here the city stays low: tarred roofs, solar panels, water towers on stilts, façades covered with murals. Far beyond, under a sky scattered with small clouds, Manhattan raises its wall of towers, from the Empire State Building to the spires of Midtown, present and distant at once, like a stage set placed on the horizon.
This is the New York paradox the image lays flat: the vertical metropolis everyone knows by heart and, at its feet, the horizontal expanse of the neighbourhoods that look at it. The colour sets the russet brick of the foreground against the bluish greys of the distance, the city that works against the city that puts on a show. The New York series follows the city through its bridges, its avenues and its rooftops; here, the rooftops.
