#83: At Home He's a Tourist
I can't think of many infrastructure-based insults off the top of my head, but "bridge and tunnel" is certainly one of the most widely used. A pejorative term for people coming into New York City from the suburbs, it was apparently coined by Studio 54 owner Steve Rubell in 1977 ("on the weekends, we get all the bridge and tunnel people who try to get in") and it endures today as an elitist way for city-dwellers to differentiate themselves from those who supposedly swoop in to consume the cultural abundance that they've been stoically producing (thus it became possible to refer to bridge-and-tunnelers hanging out in Brooklyn, now reverse commuting from Manhattan). "Bridge and tunnel" is a fascinating turn of phrase because it compresses the very meaning of transportation infrastructure into its message: a new link in the network that opens up a wormhole between places that were previously disconnected. If a bridge or a tunnel is truly useful, in other words, its construction should result in a lot of bridge-and-tunnel people showing up somewhere new. Back in the '70s, maybe, Rubell's derision stemmed from the fact that the throngs outside Studio 54 had more recently ditched the city for the suburbs, but that distinction has since faded.
If the "bridge and tunnel" phenomenon results from enhanced mobility, from networks becoming more connected, and from the kind of perpetual tourism that results, then consider the corollary to that: We're all bridge and tunnel now. The original version was more visible and comprehensible, with rails and then roads shuttling people in straight lines at high speeds between home, work, and leisure in regular patterns. When suburbanites showed up at Studio 54, it was obvious how they got there. Now, the wormholes that transport us are faster and more powerful—the internet of course, but also the physical spaces that the internet (and cheap air travel) has shaped. What's the equivalent term for the new urban travel patterns that Uber made possible, or for someone who lives in Florida and spends a week at Coachella every year, or for the "Instagram hordes" that overran Mykonos and then Tulum?
If nothing else, this development should induce humility. Thanks to the internet, we rarely occupy anything we could call our home turf, and when we are, it's unstable and ephemeral, probably about to dissolve and reassemble elsewhere. We'll probably even have to go searching for it. So we can scarcely invoke the authenticity that "bridge and tunnel" implies for whoever says it. The online experience of constant communion with the rest of the world is confusing to our slow-adapting brains, mostly happening in no real location and giving us no firm ground to stand on; the faster we can dispense with obsolete territoriality the faster we can evolve. In 2006, Senator Ted Stevens infamously described the internet as a "series of tubes," for which he was ridiculed, but his statement has aged well as a metaphor if not a literal description: a visual reminder of the wormholes we're teleporting through to reach one another, the digital bridges and tunnels—the infrastructure we arrived by.
Reads:
Damon Krukowski on Myspace's massive data loss and the difficulty of archiving the internet. "It's not just that the files are lost...it's that no one was looking for them" (thx Kyle).
Subway reefing: If you're in NYC (or somewhere connected to NYC via bridge or tunnel) there's a photo gallery exhibition in Grand Central on the artificial reef in the Atlantic Ocean where the MTA has dumped thousands of its decommissioned subway cars. It's worth reading about regardless. Source: Aaron Gordon's great newsletter about the NYC subway, Signal Problems.