Matthew Landfield's Wildly Deep History of His Childhood Home

you guys were outside. I remember the grip and electric guys come up the stairs and they had to run. Some lighting came up through my mom's getting window. Um. You spent more time with my dad that day that I'm gonna get to that. Maybe I should have been looking at the dailies. Like I said, it was my only attempt at directing. But Matthews dad, Ronnie Landfield, was like someone out of a New York past. He was a modernist painter who had raised a family there starting

in the seventies. Gentrification didn't really begin in Trabecca until after nine eleven, much later than in neighboring Soho. When we were shooting. Ronnie's block was just an Italian restaurant and a row of former industrial buildings. In those buildings, dozens of people like him made their homes and their studios. Ronnie invited me upstairs to see his paintings. He was a character with his cigarettes and a bronx accent. I thought had died off punching consonants like they were sunny liston.

I wanted to quit my movie and start a new one about him. Dustin Hoffman would play the lead. The whole scene stuck with me over the decades, and a couple of years ago, I found myself driving down the same block. The building at thirty one Dispross was gone, an empty lot. Instead, I searched the address, hoping I might find what would replace it. What I found instead was a brilliant, lyrical, almost obsessively researched, eight thousand word

essay about that single plot of Earth. It's called Requiem for a Living City, and it's the story of thirty one disprosus for ten thousand years. And who was the author of this epic tale none other than Ronnie Landfield's son, Matthew. You know my mom and that were probably some of the earlier people to move into Tribeca, a couple of their families that were already there. I didn't come along until another five six seven years later I was born six.

There was no school, there was the whole foods. No, there's no there thing. There was nothing down there were should go get the groceries. So we would go to the West Village. There was a grocery store called the Pioneer on Bleaker Street that we would have to walk to, and there was another place called Morgan's on West Broadway which to get the grocery had little house on street. I mean, it sounds crazy, but at that time it was like living in a pioneer lifestyle in the middle

of this urban wilderness. It has a group on a farm. It was like that. So what happened with the school, I guess a school called PS three Annex was opened by a pioneering principal woman named Blossom Galertner, and she was very progressive. She had a very kind of open minded perspective and education, and she opened a school inside

of Independence Plausit which was a large housing development. Tiny little school, but um in those days there were so few children that the city didn't want didn't want to keep the school open, and and a lot of the residents, including my mother, had to fight the city to keep

a school in that area of Tribeca. So in the film Pollock, you probably know the ad Harriston, there's a scene where, you know, uh Pollock and Lee Krasner are are talking in and he says, hey, let's make a baby and she says, no, you know, you need and you need and you need, and uh she she turns him down because they don't have any money. He's kind

of crazy. Yeah, he's you know, he's got all and so no, look, my dad is not Jackson Pollock and my mom was not Lee Krasner, but they faced a lot of the same issues, a lot of the same challenges. You know. They they didn't have a lot of money. They were My dad grew up in the Bronx. He was just basically just a working class kid. And my mom was um raised by a single mother and the the East Side. My grandmother was an artist, so she never had any money either, and so my mother was

very lived about, very bohemian life. Um. I was going to show you a picture later of of one of class Oldenburg's Happenings with My mother was one of the cast members of of one of those those performance aren't kind of thing. She was a performer, dancer. Where did they meet. I think they met in woodstock folk dancing or something that that was the Was your father into that too? Yeah? They were all into that in those

early sixties. Yeah. Yeah. If you wanted to meet a woman that you were attracted to right away, you were into whatever. She was into it. Oh yeah, I'm into that dancing. I was sure, I do that all the time. I know that deal. Yeah. My my my ex wife said to me, I'm a vegetarian. I said, so am I that's so funny. I had a hamburger like three hours ago. I was like, anyway, so there. So she was a performer. So my mom, my mom had been a performer. She had a clothing store with my grandmother

for a little while in the East village. But you know, my mother and my father got together in the sixties, and um my, my father at the time was sort of, like I wanted to say, like an alfontrib of of art in a way, like he was very young compared to so many of his compatriots. But he was very ambitious and very for success, very very driven, and his

pace exactly um. But you know, like succeeding in the art world is was is never easy, even if you are coming at it with with lots of resources and support from family, money and all kinds of things, and might didn't have any of that. He had to fight his own family to become an artist. Now what does dad do? A delivery man? And he was a working classic working class And the grandmother that had the apartment of Chelsea was whose mother that was my mother's mother.

My mother's father was an artist also, he was a graphic artist. He and his brothers had been They were born in Savannah, Georgia, all of them, there were four of them, but their mother moved them back to Lithuania as children and so like in the nine twenties and thirties they lived in Lithuania and they had a very very very difficult time there and then when they left,

their mother stayed and died in the Holocaust. So my grandfather, my grandfather and his brothers were extraordinarily talented in the arts. They were and they were uh, cartoonists and draw drawers, basically illustrators. My My grandfather's brother is a cartoonist known by the name of Val Jaffee who does the foldings um, and my grandfather worked with him for a little while doing cartoons. But um, my grandfather was was I think

a little more fragile than al was. And and um never really recovered from the loss of his mother in the Holocaust, and so uh he he uh struggled with depression and basically PTSD for all of my mother's childhood and wasn't around. And so my mother was raised by my grandmother and her grandparents in uh in Florest Hills and whatnot. So um, but I want to get back to your parents. They were sort of like these kind of you mean kids just kind of on their own.

And my mom was very devoted to my father, and my father was very determined and he uh, she was very devoted to your phone. She lived under these I mean, I don't want to describe it like it was that tough. But was the place warm was did they turn the heat on? Sometimes that's what kids so you say, the politic reference and the like, you know, don't we gonna get out of here? Or was there was she was she down the line, she was with him. She was.

And but you know, neither my parents graduate from college. My father attended art school for a short time and decided that wasn't gonna crap. No, he was. He actually went to the Kansas City Artist Too for a little while, but decided that, you know, all he really wanted to do was paint, So he came back to New York and and went into painting. My mother, uh didn't didn't

didn't finish her college education. And I think that that was something that she may be regretted over over time and sort of was you know, she's of a generation of women where that was not as important to typical right, and and so, um, did your dad have a gallery that represented him back then? Do you do you have some success right away? He did. He in the in the in the late sixties. He was right in there with a lot of of important painters and sculptors who

were doing I love your dad's painting. Oh good, I'm sure he would love to hear you say that. You know, he was. Things were working. Yeah. By the time I came along, my dad had already dealt a reputation in the art world, was selling his paintings pretty regularly. And their housing was affordable, which is important for your career

for an artist. That's everything. So I come along, and then my brother comes along, and then what happens in seventy nine, actually when the year that you you came to New York, the rent was tripled and and all of a sudden, um, this manageable life becomes a little bit more difficult. And my my dad still continued through the early eighties to have success in the art, in the arts, selling his work, but it was, it became harder.

It just was harder. And of course you have a family, have two children, and getting more expensive, things are more challenging, and so you know, uh, it was. It was not. I wouldn't. I would not say that their life was a panacea. It was. It was a challenge. It was always difficult. Um. And he last there how much longer? I mean they lived there until two thousand and twelve,

two thousand and twelves. So when I saw him, because I want to paint this picture quickly before I forget, which is and again this is where you're really going to correct me if I'm wrong, because when I tell this story, I always turned your father into like a dustin Hoppin character, and Dustin Hoppin would play your father. He doesn't have a very very New York accent, correct, because I play him like he's had a really thick New York accent. You know. Um my wife would say

that he does, but he doesn't. Really like there's certain words that he In my movie version of this, your dad is a really super thick New York he smoked. Because remember this is my Remember this is one I remember. I'm standing out in front of this building and your dad shows up. It's freezing cold, and I'm sitting there and he starts talking to me. He goes, you're making a movie here. And I'm like, yeah, we're making it. He's like, yeah, you're Alan Bowin, right, you were like

an actor, right. I'm like, yeah, I'm directed this. But he was like, yeah, yeah, you're living. He's like, yeah, I live here with my wife. I'm a painter. And he lights a cigarette and I go, you got an extra cigarette on it. And I love when people look at me like you're a rich movie star and you're bumming a cigarette off from me and I'm living in this loft and this grocer street. Sure, okay, I'll give

a smoke. Here we go, and I'm sitting there smoking a cigarette with your father on the street, and and and just something happened to me. I'm like, I gotta live in this building. I want to live in there. I want to get a whole floor of this building. I want to have a con section of this building to myself. And I'm gonna blow it all up and fix it all up. But um, he lasted till two thousand and twelves. I mean they basically they were forced to Hurricane Andy, really kind of Sandy. Where were you

at the time. I was living in Brooklyn with my face. You've never left the city, have you? It was in college, but I haven't lived in other places. Where'd you go again? I went to college in Vermont at a place called Middlebury College. I love Biddleburgh. He went to middle for four years, four years. What did you study? I studied theater. I studied filmmaking, geography, Uh, you know, arrangement, mostly acting, mostly theater, mostly film. What do you want to do?

I wanted to be an actor when I got out of school, and then a filmmaker, which is what you're doing now, which is what I do now now. So two thousand, he leaves only because so he would have stayed. There have been many years of legal battles with the landlord, and you know, you know, they had basically been living with the specter of eviction from seventy nine until, you know, the whole the whole time they were there. Eventually, though,

their their place was rent stabilized. Everyone in the building, their their units were rent stabilized, and they had a right to stay. So then the storm comes. So yeah, so in Sandy, you know, and my my father's studios on the ground floor, and you know, my father, being who he is, it's a little bit crazy. They stayed in the building. They were there the whole, the whole time. They did not evacuate. He did didn't want to leave his work, He didn't want to leave the place. So

he witnessed the whole neighborhood flood. Where did you go? They went up to some of the upper levels of the building because other folks, your father in my Destin Huffin movie, he's smoking, I'm not leaving. Everybody else's leaving. I'm not going anywhere. You're pretty much right, That's exactly how he was. He said. The lights went out, Um, the cars, the cars flooded up to almost the roof of the cars, and um, you know that was like that for about three hours and then the water went away.

And you know that part of the city is in a tidal estuary. The basement of our building would flood a lot over over the many years because it was landfill and it was technically part of the river and so, uh, that wasn't a surprise to him. But the flooding in the street was he had never seen. Then. I asked him the other day about it, and he said, never, ever, ever, ever, ever, in the forty three years of their life, there had

he ever seen flooding. That that was the big one like that, that was that was interesting how people who don't know that about landfill and and maybe you know this because your article speaks to a lot of that history,

which I am not mistaken. Just as excavated material from the World Trade Center was responsible for some of the build out of Battery Park, absolutely, it was excavation from the subway system that built out some of Rebecca correct or no, no, no. Governor's Island, for example, is mostly the excavation from the Lexington Avenue subway right but Rebecca, because that Triple land was was land filled between eighteen

o three and eighteen no subway at that time. Most of it probably came from the leveling of hills in Manhattan, because Manhattan and I had a lot of hills in those days. And also oyster shells and garbage and broken ships undoubtedly, right, people who drowned and men control buildings exactly so so so he so the it comes and when it comes, and they they did have to leave. They did have to leave. And basically the city went

through the neighborhood and declared their building, um condemned. They condemned that building, yes, and and then the tenants fight that. They did have to fight that, and there was a court case which was there was a little article in the New York Times about it. Um. You know, there was a lot of contention about you know, the state of the building before Sandy had not been great because it hadn't been maintained, and the landlord objected and all

this stuff. I can't totally disclose all of the details because there was a settlement, um, but it resolved, and then they decided to leave Upstate, Yeah Valley. They to the Hudson Valley. So so did they try to make it work in New York before they went to the Hudson Valley. You know, my father is a and I'm sure he'll listen to this and chuckle, you know, actually doing my impresonation. Come on, spawn on, come on. I think you're a terrible But I just that's my memory

with this tough looking early guy painter. I'm a paint to see. Come up and see my paintings. He was such a New Yorker team he was, he was. He's got a little more of the Bronx in there, I think than than that. But you know, the thing with him was that is that he he's um. He's someone who likes to stay. He's a very grounded person. So his initial um impulse was to move back to the Bronx. He needed a studio. Yeah, I mean, the fact of the matter is my father had a big studio in

Lower Manhattan. And there is no way that you can replicate that and talk about what happened Tobacca Price Chebecca. But I forget Brooklyn, forget about it. Even I'm going to talk about that too, and so so we can't replicate it in the Bronx. The Bronx are gonna be torn down. Now to the Bronx. All my friends and

are real estate executives. That's the that's the not even the next they're there now they're tearing everything down and they're talking about million and two million dollar condos overlooking Yankee steady him, that's good to your view. And then they're talking about two movie studios they're building up. Their Silver Cup went up there. Absolutely, they were all going to take their properties in Queens, tear that down, build housing. Yeah, I'm not going to name name some of them. Some

of them can tear their spaces down. Some can's if there's a financial incent of you know, in New York there's the land is worth more money as residential housing for overlooking the river. You're right over there on the foot of the fifty Night Street Bridge in Long Island City. Some people who will remain nameless that I know, have told me they're going to go up to the Bronx and move their whole operation up to the Bronx. You know that that wasn't My father's first impulse was to

move up there, and my brother from exactly. Yeah, my brother and I kind of invade upon him to to look to look a little further out, and so you know, he found a place that that where he was able to build a new studio. He built, Yeah, he built one. So he settlement and everything put him in a position he was comfortable. He's doing okay. So he built a new studio, which was the right thing for him to do. He got a place where he could live and work. Uh, comfortable.

But he is he up there and a year goes by, and does he turn to your mother and go, man, we should have done this twenty years ago. You know, did he just really sit there and go, why did I break my ass to stay in Manhattan? Or did he miss New York? Every time I visit them, we have this conversation, what does he say? We go through it over and over again, and you know he does miss Tribeca and misses that neighborhood because there are a lot of things about it that that made it a

wonderful place to be. Um and it's and it's it is sad to be gone from there, but the things he likes, their plus is about being up there. It's lovely being away from the city too. And I think that Um, when we think about what Rebecca has become, where their neighborhood became in the time even before standing building they're putting up in place of that building is like yeah, I mean, but it looks like something made of legos. Their community. The people who were there when

they came, all of them are gone. They either have been bought out or or forced out or passed away. And you know, it's it's a generational turnover. It's funny how people don't realize. I mean in my lifetime, I mean I came here and that was the dawn of the build out of Soho, and then Rebecca beyond that, and then the battery part. Did you ever imagine that apartments would sell for thirty million dollars right around the corner for where you grew up? I mean it is.

I mean I think it's unrealistic in a lot of ways. But but at the same time, everybody wants to live there. That's reflective of the bigger trends in our economy and our politics and our work about right now, I mean talk about how it plays up in New York. Well, I mean New York is not divorced from the economy of of of the United States. It's it's part of it,

and it always has been. Go. You go all the way back to um the very very beginning of that neighborhood of Tribeca in those days, to Alexander Hamilton's and and the things that they were dealing with after the revel luction. And if you look through my piece about the evolution of that particular neighborhood, it's always been connected to the economy of of America and right now is

no different. And right now we're living in a in a plutocracy where you have you know, billionaires right and left, and they and and really they have unfettered power to buy and sell real estate, and that is very clearly distorting the marketplace in the broader economy. Matthew Landfield on Changes at thirty one De Sproses Street, and around the globe, the battle between preservation and development in New York can be brutal. Perhaps New York's most prominent preservationist is Andrew Berman.

He's the one who led the charge to landmark the iconic streets of southern Greenwich Village. After fifty years of people trying to get that area landmarks, we were able to get it landmarked in two stage. We actually had

an almost blackmail the city. They wanted to get an area adjacent to that reasoned as a stop to a developer Trinity real Estate in this case um and we pushed the city council to say, we won't approve the reasoning that you the city want, unless you move ahead with this landmarking that the community has been asking for for years. Here the rest of that interview at Here's the Thing dot org more with Matthew Landfield coming up. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing.

No political battle and recent memory has crystallized attitudes about gentrification more than Amazon's proposal to build its second headquarters in the Queen's neighborhood of Long Island City. Overnight, the real estate values in Long Island City were went through the roof. And you know, I think that that's just another indicator of aspects of economy that are just broken. I think that's true of the whole city in a

lot of ways of Manhattan. You know, it's very uh manicured in a way, and it's I don't want to say it's never going to go back, because one thing that i UM found in doing the research into the history of of Um where I grew up, was that the city waxed and waned described a period where it

waned well between eighteen seventy and nineteen forty. All of Lower Manhattan was this massive sport, just a gigantic shipping hub from from from the very tip of the battery all the way up goods and and all kinds of foods and services until after the Second World War, when shipping trans formed into container shipping. The technology of container ships was developed, these enormous tanker size ships that could ship more, that could ship faster, and it was just

it was less expensive. So all of that moved to the Port of Elizabeth in New Jersey. That meant that the entire west side became a ghost town and you have this sort of vacuum of space, and and into that vacuum artists started exactly exactly. So that's that's one version of how the city, that part of the city

has waxed and waned Um. But even before that, when Um, the neighborhood was first settled by really by Trinity Church, because Trinity Church owned a lot of the land down Um and still does own a lot of land, Trinity owns a lot of stuff. Trining owns this building. So after the Revolution, the church burned down, had burned down during the war, there was a terrible fire burned down.

They had to rebuild the church, and the congregation grew, and UH, the city was starting to grow, and so they wanted to expand, and they wanted to build a new church UM a little further north, just just north of City Hall. And so they built a chapel called St John's Chapel, which was on Vestry and Verick. And in front of the church, they built a park called St John's Park or Hudson Square, and that that park

um was a private park. There were houses that were that were the Grammercy Park in fact, was the model for Grammercy Park and Washington Square Park. They built houses around the park and they wanted um. They wanted basically wealthy people who were mostly living down on like Broadway and further further south, like closer to Wall Street, they wanted them to move in there. And so that neighborhood becomes a wealthy, kind of very genteel enclave around the

park between eight and eighteen fifty. But then you have the railroad, Cornelius. Vanderbilt builds the Hudson River railroad line along Hudson Street and starts running trains up and down to ship things back and forth. And Uh, the residents of that neighborhood, I don't want to be close to the railroad, and so they start to leave. And so by eighteen sixty seven they were completely out of the area, and the park is sold and and and converted into

a rail yard by by Vanderbilt. And so again you have you have this sort of waxing and waning of life in in a in a particular area, growth and death mostly do you know, partly due to technological change. I mean you have you have the coal powered steam engine, you have railroads, and with the Jeff Bezos area was like that exactly exactly. And so what I want you to get to is what was the genesis of this

piece you wrote? So after Sandy my parents left, they moved up up to that valley and a lot of the buildings down there were empty, and um, obviously something was going to be done with them. Um, I didn't know what they knocked down the building that it was demolished in twenty end. And you know that was that was painful to to experience. It was very painful. Actually, it's very sad um and I had a lot of

feelings about it. And at the time I had I actually been recently laid off from a demanding job and I was kind of burned out and I wanted to do something a little bit different. And I went down there one day and the building was completely gone, and I was looking down into the foundation and I was like, well, wait a minute, what's in there? Like I wondered. I was like, oh, were there you know American Indians who lived there? Was there? Is there like some archaeological history

in there? I want to know what was under there because I never thought about the building and now being there. And then number two, like what it was on in the first place. That started me off in this sort of inquiry. And I didn't plan to write anything. I didn't plan to tell anybody. I just was gonna answer the question for myself. And so I started digging into it, and um, I found a lot of that in collecting

the material and looking into it. The only way I could make sense of it was to write it all down and compile it into some form that could communicate both my feelings about the experience of having grown up in this place as well as what I was learning about the history of the place and perhaps what the future of the place might be. UM So that was really the genesis of writing that particularly. I want did it take you to write the piece? There's like copious

research involved in this piece. I got a little carried away, you know, and answer these questions. It has a lot of stuff in it, and I did do a fair amount of reason church. I'd spent a lot of time in the library, which I have to say, if if anyone UH is interested in supporting an institution, the near public library is probably the best when I can think

of right now. And I just kept finding things that I was like, oh my god, look at these photographs, look at this material of St. John's Park, or these images of the docks in Lower Manhattan in eighteen ninety nine or whatever like, and all of this has gone like these are phantoms that have been forgotten about but made the city what it is. They're the reason why I was there at all, and I wanted to capture that. And in nine they moved, Yeah, my mom dad moved

there in sixty nine. And um. When they moved there, that building had been empty for probably at least five years, had been an industrial manufacturing building where they made protesting coughs syrope. There was no bathroom, there was no kitchen, there was there was nothing. When when artists moved into that neighborhood at that time, they were moving into largely commercial spaces, renting them on like ten year commercial leases and living there, which was technically illegal illegal. What do

they do about the facilities that they didn't have? Where do they put them in? Put They put in um, you know, hartwood floors and the kitchens and bathrooms and stuff. And your dad did that and rent was so the owners who had run it as the industrial building, they were commercial landlords let them come in there. They just turned a blind eye. When I came to New York in nineteen seventy nine, it was the beginning of the flip of SOHO and you'd read in the Village Voice.

You'd read about, you know, the battle to save industrial space in New York, and everyone kept saying, well, maybe it'll come back and eventually get to the I don't know what year was, seventy seventy seventy nine, where it's which basically ruled they're not coming back, and they allow the residential build out of Soho. This place was a bolt factory. This place was a sewing machine factory on

Green Street or Westboro. And they're all gone and you're in front of all these cast iron buildings they're about to flip. But T Rebecca was behind that, right exactly. I mean also under the Lenape, because the Lenape Indians were the original inhabitants of Manhattan. What I didn't really know was that there hadn't been people there before. It had been the river, that particular strip of lower Manhattan

field was it was filled. It had originally like when European settlers got there in the very beginning, all of that was was the river, and and it was filled in over over the course of several years. And I found who who filled it in. I found out who filled it in. Well, what happens is between seventeen ninety and eighteen o three the city starts to sell the water rights to the coast of the of the island and say you we will sell the rights to the

coast if you develop it. If you develop it, and so real estate speculators a guy named Hugh Gaine is one of them. Uh. He was a printer, he was a publisher, he was a real estate speculator. Um kind of was a little bit on both sides of the war in the revolution. Uh right. Um, he buys the particular lots there and starts to development and been to lots. Yeah,

they divided up into lots. Um. And so what he does is or what they do is is they they first they build these wharves, I guess, the little wars. They are called Cobb wharves. And then they start to kind of like fill in the space in between them with with junk, with with oyster shells, with detritus from the city from you know, uh, earth from from hills that have been leveled further inland on the island. And over the course of about twenty five years, the um

the West Street areas developed. So like you know, Washington Street is filled in, then the block west of Washington is filled in, and then there's there's West Street. Now, that edge of the island was still pretty rough even all the way up until about eighteen seventy when the

city goes in and really standardizes. The must be a massive engineering and it took It took a long time, but yeah, so so I found that and what that told me was that when Sandy flooded Lower Manhattan, the high water mark lines up with the contours of the island before it was settled. You can overlay the I

found this amazing. It is it is like that you can overlay the sixteen o nine version of Manhattan to Sandy the inundation zone, and it lines up right in there and doesn't like Rebecca, you know, maybe it doesn't like the settlement so much. I don't know, because before Hugh gained, before settlement, before they developed it, it it was it was swamp. I suppose the word is takeaway or what have you. But when when you look back on you spent a lot of time writing this, You spent

a lot of time researching. There's a lot of research that win this. And when you're done, how do you feel about what's happened to the property, your home? Have you made peace with that or are you still Yeah? So it's a place that I love. It's my home. It's the village in which I was raised, regardless of of the the the economics, regardless of who's who's living there, regardless of the historic preservation or the real estate or whatever. My takeaway is that my home is in jeopardy from

climate change. I think that that particular place is is at risk of being an uninhabitable place in in a generation or two. And it doesn't matter if you make a lot of money or if you are just a normal person working to to make a living. We're facing a threat that requires us to confront together or else we will have to retreat to other boundaries. Maybe yeah, I mean, well, with with my family, we had to go. We said to my father, you can't stay there because

if there's another sandy, you won't make it through. So we chose to to move to higher ground. Um. You know, there will be people who will listen to this and think that I'm crazy. Look at the property values and you can still make so much money, and apartments down there and they're selling for millions and millions, and the true threat from climate change may be far off. But for us, it's in the rear view mirror. Right. New York is an island on an estuary. It's it's a

it's it's surrounded by water. We are not immune and there are a lot of people with a lot of precious things here that are at risk, and we have to either solve our political problems and start dealing with it, or we have to make a plan. And I have not heard any politician or leader adequately address the scale of what are truly dealing with and not in this country. You know, I think I will say, like God bless her, Alexandra Kazi Cortez is one of the few who's actually

saying it. And here's the other thing about it. We're not good at dealing with problems that are beyond our imagining. If I told you on September ten, two thousan't one that by noon the next day the two towers would be completely and thousands of people would be dead, and most people would have thought you were crazy if you had said that. But the next day what happened. And and I remember seeing those buildings and and and and the whole in the from the plane and thinking, how

are they going to fix that? How how are they going to repair that? And it didn't occur to me that they weren't going to be able to fix it, that that there are some things, there are some problems that you just cannot that you can't that can't solve. And I think that with with the situation like we're facing with what is with climate change? Um, it is

one of those problems. And so either we address the problem and do what we have to do to cut emissions or whatever it is, what are those policies to try. We're not even trying. Our politics are so broken we can try. If that is the case, then we have to say, Okay, what does that mean. If it means that the whole neighborhoods are going to flood, we have to be prepared for how do we get people out

of that? At high tide the Lenapic, they could canoe from the East River up a creek into the Collect Pond, which is now where the Center Street Courthouse is, across another creek to the Hudson without getting out of the bowl. And if you look at projections of what climate change will do in Lower Manhattan, it may be possible again. Author and filmmaker Matthew Landfield on the past, present and

future of his native soil. His article is called Requiem for a Living City, Notes on a Home in Rebecca, and it's available on his website Matt Landfield dot com. I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing m