For almost a decade, the artist Maya Lin has run an interactive project called “What Is Missing,” which documents ecological loss in New York and other places. Among the missing, for instance, are the lobsters in the harbor that, back in Henry Hudson’s time, were bigger than Citi Bikes. Since the Dutch arrived, it’s been taken for granted that New York is never the same city for long, and this is part of the appeal. But Lin’s project shows that there’s scant record of what’s been lost. We don’t know what we don’t have.
Maya Lin
Maya LinIllustration by João Fazenda

The other day, Lin was at Madison Square Park, working on a cousin of “What Is Missing,” an art exhibition called “Ghost Forest,” which opens this week. A ghost forest is an entire stand of trees that has been killed by climate change. Lin was arranging a grove of forty-nine Atlantic white cedars—dead as telephone poles, from a ghost forest in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey—into formation on the lawn. “How can I make you aware of things that are literally disappearing right before our eyes?” she said. She wore a puffy green jacket, a black mask, and rubber boots. “Atlantic cedars used to be up and down the Atlantic seacoast. They were first cut down for building our cities.”

Lin had four trees left to install. She indicated where the next tree should go, and a construction crew, led by Tom Reidy, of the Madison Square Park Conservancy, dug a hole. They tied ropes around one of the trunks and attached the ropes to a crane. “Flying tree!” someone said.

“This is pretty cool,” Lin said, as the tree swung into position.

The crane beeped loudly. Over the noise, Lin said that the exhibition would also have a soundscape, made up of twenty audio recordings, from Cornell University, of woodland scenes and animals, including a bear, a wolf, and a cougar. “These are all animals that used to roam Manhattan,” she explained. The effect would be gently haunting, a reminder of what was once here and now is not. Through “What Is Missing,” Lin has picked up other nuggets from the city’s past lives. Madison Square Park, she said, used to be a dense woodland of maple and sweet-gum trees. “There was Minetta Stream down there,” she said. “There was another creek here.” There were snapping turtles, sharp-shinned hawks, bald eagles, and red-backed salamanders. How many people on line at Shake Shack had any idea? “With every successive generation, we accept what we know,” Lin said. “In the eighteen-nineties, a cod was bigger than a man. They were probably bigger than Tom! And now we think a cod is this big.” She held her hands a foot apart.

Tom was occupied at the moment, making sure that the tree, fifty feet tall—roughly nine Tom-size cod—wasn’t cockeyed. For a plumb line, he used the windows on the Flatiron Building. Lin walked over. “Hey, Tom, sorry. It looks a little crooked from the back,” she said.

Lin explained that she had an over-all arrangement in mind, but that she worked mostly by intuition. She’d handpicked all the trees, looking for scars and burrs—cedars that had seen some stuff. “I want you to connect on a very visceral, one-on-one level with each tree,” she said. Early in the spring, she said, the cedars looked normal. “I mean, if you know anything about trees, you know these are seriously dead. But as the other trees leaf in from spring, summer, fall, and then back to winter, as nature is all around you and growing and living, these will get grayer and grayer and grayer.” The trees did feel sort of ghostly, like letters addressed to a previous tenant. Perhaps it was the times. In the pandemic era, who hasn’t experienced loss? In January, Lin’s husband, the photography collector and dealer Daniel Wolf, died suddenly, of a heart attack. What was missing in the blocks around Madison Square Park? Three stately crab-apple trees that had recently aged out of existence, a couple of restaurants, and eighty-one victims of covid-19.

On the lawn, a few people gathered to watch the flying trees. Reviews were positive, but dissenters spoke up. “It’s reminiscent of an exhibit they had a few years ago which really got my dander up,” a man named Farley said. “It had the sound of birds coming out of speakers. It was really annoying. Drove the birds crazy!” Farley said he lived near the park, at Eighteenth and Third. “The building where Alger Hiss used to live,” he went on. “Between you and me, he was a boring guy. He moved out because it only had one elevator.” Farley watched until the dead tree was wrestled into position, and then he continued his walk across the park, past the cedars, toward where the crab apples used to be. ♦