The (Dis)possession of Gansevoort Peninsula: Devaluation, Sanitation, and Seeing Ghosts

Abstract: In the spring of 2021, the Whitney Museum of American Art announced the completion of Day's End , an homage to the late Gordon Matta-Clark installed by David Hammons at the base of Gansevoort Peninsula. This essay explores how the Hudson Park River Trust—a coalition that includes city officials, architecture firms, and a Whitney executive—has co-opted Day's End to proclaim emptiness as the prevailing feature of a revitalized waterfront and to promote the newly opened Gansevoort Peninsula Park. I theorize this redevelopment within systems of land devaluation and waste management, wherein demolition and displacement have been historically coded as sanitation . I conduct a microhistory of Gansevoort Peninsula from the late nineteenth century onward, as landfill, incinerator, cruising scene, and encampment community. To resist the displacement and memorialization of the public within neoliberal cityscapes, I rely on a methodology of palimpsest , which surfaces a multitude of narratives at this site in order to understand potential futures. In conversation with theoretical frameworks from critical geographies, Black studies, queer and trans thought, and the study of visual culture, palimpsest offers a space-time analytic that historicizes empty space as emptied space and reanimates the visual plane.