City of texture ii: a time of testing

The New York Landmarks Conservancy

won an injunction last week in its

effort to preserve a fragile tapes-

try by Pablo Picasso, an artist who

keeps making law and making history,

even as he keeps making artists, as-

suredly, of some few every year who

chance to discover his works.

They are who will inherit our cities,
they are who will reflect our cities,

not the legal fictions known as cor-

porations, trusts, foundations, or

boards, authorities, and all the en-

tities that cower by laws, before a 

power ostensibly untouchable, imper-

ishable, flowing from an untenable 

posture known as private property. 

Private property, as every schoolboy

knows, has air rights. Air rights, 

can you stand it, when possibly you

had thought literally unfathomable

mineral rights were amusing enough.

These interesting rights place such

a burden upon human character as lit-

erally to enslave it, for it may not

lay down its perpetuation. What sort

of burden is this, that a free soci-

ety need countenance, as the intol-

erable exposure to risk that it is,

to its future, much less its past?
For surely, too, are we not as cul-
pable for the ordeals of rights we
impose, as for those we withhold?

Were it not for this unremitting,

stark challenge to protect privity

in the right to property, would we

yet be compelled to be such fools?

Or, if not compelled, bent so low?

As much as any city needs to be a-

ble to protect itself from chaos,

every time this inhumane right com-

pels the soul to break beneath its

unnatural load of ownership, so 

does the slave to private property 

deserve our shelter from a wealth

which should never have been in-

flicted upon him. Trade him a set

of Sixties baseball cards, and  

throw in the gum at cost.

i           Abel van Oeveren
iii, iv   Martin Conte