Visions in planning of what a city could or should be tend to be
constructed around metaphors, rhetorical tropes that crystalize the
image of a preferable future city. Such metaphorizations are never
innocent: they draw on pre-existing cultural narratives and activate
particular frames of expectation. This article examines two metaphors
used in the planning of New York City, and its shores, in particular:
the spectre of the ‘valley of ashes’ and the dream of the ‘fresh green
breast’. These metaphors, taken from F. Scott Fizgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby
(1925), appear time and again in the planning and thinking of the New
York shoreline, from Robert Moses’s plans for Flushing Meadow to Major
Bloomberg’s waterfront development and Eric Sanderson’s vision of a 2406
New York in Mannahatta (2006). This article examines how the
metaphors of the ‘valley of ashes’ and the ‘fresh green breast’ have
been adapted throughout decades of planning New York City to accommodate
changing relationships, conflicts and ideals, always infused by a
pastoral undercurrent that is already questioned in Fitzgerald’s novel.