a crane in the neck: the purgatory of murray hill and madison square park

View of Empire State Building is disappearing behind new building in Murray Hill (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

My wife and I have lived in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan for more than thirty years, an area that David Kaplan, portrayed by writer-director Jesse Eisenberg in his latest film, A Real Pain, refers to as “the purgatory of Murray Hill,” in a scene where he recalls the demise of a favorite local restaurant, Hudson Place. Ellen and I frequented Hudson Place, a beloved American bistro on the corner of Thirty-Sixth and Third that closed well before the pandemic and remained vacant for years, until the building was torn down and construction began on a huge new residential tower that will block views of the Empire State Building from the street.

So far, we can still see the top of the ESB through our bedroom window.

I’ve felt a personal connection with Eisenberg through much of his career, beginning with his performance as the teenage Walt in Noah Baumbach’s 2005 dysfunctional family drama, The Squid and the Whale. In 2009’s Adventureland, Eisenberg portrayed James, a college student working a summer job at an amusement park so he can earn money to travel to Europe after he graduates. The park is loosely based on the actual Adventureland in Farmingdale, Long Island, where my nondysfunctional family and friends often went in the 1970s and ’80s. I also worked during college summers so I could backpack through Europe after I graduated.

The parallels continue: In A Real Pain, David and his cousin, Benji (Kieran Culkin), head to Poland to visit the home where their beloved grandmother grew up, as well as to see the Majdanek concentration camp and other Holocaust-related sites. Born in Astoria and raised in East Brunswick, Eisenberg is a third-generation American Jew whose ancestors were from Poland and Ukraine; born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island, I am a third-generation American Jew whose paternal grandparents came from Poland and Russia. (Eisenberg recently became a Polish citizen in honor of his heritage.) When my best friend and I went to Europe after college, we spent a day at Dachau, the German concentration camp that was in operation from 1933 to 1945. David is a socially awkward family man with OCD, while Benji is a bipolar ne’er-do-well who both loves and hates people; if they were to have a child, it would be me.

The new structure going up in Murray Hill, where Hudson Place used to be, made me think of the current public art project in nearby Madison Square Park. French-born, Brooklyn-based queer Jewish artist Nicole Eisenman, who is of German and Polish descent, has installed Fixed Crane, a toppled 1969 Link-Belt industrial crane lying on its side on the Oval Lawn, some of its pieces scattered around the fenced-in area. [Ed. note: One of Eisenman’s collectors, Martin Eisenberg, is unrelated to Jesse. However, “eisen” means “iron” in German, and iron, cranes, and buildings are certainly related.]

Visitors can enter the lawn and get up close and personal with the crane, touching it, sitting on the counterweights, and finding bonuses welded to it in unexpected places — Eisenman calls them “barnacles,” such as a large and shiny nipple ring, a can of tuna, and a small viewing door where, inside, a ghostly figure is cooking a sausage. In one corner of the park is the remnants of a foot in Birkenstocks, perhaps all that remains of the perpetrator who kicked the crane over in utter frustration.

Fixed Crane is not an attraction like those currently at Adventureland, where you can ride on the Moon Chaser, the Mystery Mansion, and the Turbulence Coaster; it’s a protest against the endless construction happening all over the city as local gems are torn down and ugly supertalls and sliver buildings replace them, including an 860-foot-high structure that blocks views of the ESB from certain sections of Madison Square Park.

In their artist statement, Eisenman explains, “New York City is continuously being built, even when this unceasing development seems unnecessary, considering that nearly a quarter of all office space in Manhattan still sits empty. I found the crane in a crane graveyard in Tennessee. Now it is toppled over, reclining; gravity has won. . . . What can a machine without purpose do? It is a shape. It has an interior space. It can be climbed on or sat on. It can become a sculpture to be walked around and looked at. It is peculiar, lying on its side on the grass in a park; it is idle now, it has opted-out, it’s dreaming of what could be.”

We can still see the top of the Empire State Building from our bedroom window — at least for now (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

In some ways, the crane is each and every one of us — well, unless you’re a greedy developer with no sense of history, decency, or style — as we search for purpose and dream of what could be. “To use space is to destroy space,” Eisenman points out. “Destruction and construction are two sides of the same coin.”

Or maybe the crane has found a kind of public purgatory all its own in Madison Square Park, on its way to a special place in hell.

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