SKYBOUND SOUVIE

By MICHAEL PERKINS

SOME OF THE WORLD’S MOST STRIKING LANDMARKS ARE OBJECTS that have essentially slipped the bonds of time, surviving their original contexts or intentions to become, not mere signposts or symbols to other attractions, but attractions on their own terms. The Eiffel Tower is untethered to the 1889 Exposition that commissioned it: the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows Corona Park was once the centerpiece of the 1964 New York World’s Fair, but now stands unchallenged in open green space as a rallying point for generations who never experienced it as a meet-up point in a sea of super-pavilions. And the skybound souvie you see here serves a city who has had decades to forget why it was created in the first place. 

Urban planners in Seattle, Washington had floated plans for an aerial tram for the city as early as 1910. One such proposal would have linked the city with Tacoma, over thirty miles away.  Another idea was pitched to use the monorail as a replacement for the local streetcar line, a variant on the “els” of Chicago and New York. The discussions waxed and waned for decades with no result, until, in preparation for the 1962 World’s Fair, approval was finally given to construct a 0.9-mile (1.4 km) span along 5th Avenue between Seattle Center, where it would deliver visitors right to the foot of the other surviving feature of the fair, the Space Needle, connecting Seattle Center to Westlake Center, making no intermediate stops. Far from being a mothballed museum piece, the monorail in the 21st century survives as a major tourist attraction to this day, operating as a regular public transit service with trains every ten minutes running for up to 16 hours per day. It was designated an historic landmark in 2003.

As Donovan said, “first there is a garden, then there is no garden, then there is”. Photographing the symbols of earlier eras far removed from those eras is a little like getting unstuck in time yourself. Riding a monorail designed as a forward-thinking prediction of “life in the future” for a World’s Fair is allowing yourself to envision both periods simultaneously, to reevaluate objects in ever-emerging and fresh contexts. And for the purpose of making images, the human imagination is a subject that never fails to astonish.