What do you think when you hear the word “gondola”? Maybe you’re soothed as you imagine a boat passing gingerly through Venetian canals, preferably at dusk, preferably whilst being serenaded. OK, now what do you think when you hear the words “aerial gondola”? Or “high speed aerial gondola”? Or “high speed aerial gondola in a major metropolis that could revolutionize forever the way a city moves and lives”?
Most likely, I’ve lost you. And that’s understandable. Imagining a ski-mountain-like cable-car system chugging above, say, New York City feels, at first flush, somewhere between fantastical and plain insane. And that’s despite the fact that, over the last decade and change, similar systems have been executed with great success all over the world, from Portland to Busan to La Paz.
In the mid-2000s in Colombia, the Metrocable gondola system connected residents of lower income, higher-altitude Medellin neighborhoods to professional and educational opportunities down in the city’s center for the first time ever. They were eventually credited with helping to cut poverty rates and with fueling the city’s famed post-Escobar economic resurgence — the “Medellin Miracle.”
Now, as we speak, a real estate macher named Daniel Levy is pushing forward on the East River Skyway, a proposal for a gondola line from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Currently those two neighborhoods are connected by the L train, but that’s going to be shut down for major repairs in 2019. The current contingency plan for the over 200,000 affected commuters will be — more buses.
The East River Skyway, on the other hand, suggests sending commuters soaring above the iconic Manhattan skyline to their destination, as many as 5,000 in each direction per hour. Aerial gondolas aren’t meant to replace subway systems; they’re there to act as addendums to existing systems. The Skyway would, in accordance with that convention, replace just a leg of the L train.
Everyone scoffs at the urban gondola
And — you’re still scoffing, aren’t you? That’s OK. Everyone scoffs at the urban gondola.
But may I suggest that your skepticism here is not rational? That it is, in fact, rooted in that most dangerous of mentalities — a bias against grand new ideas? Maybe you don’t really think gondolas are dumb. Maybe you’re just afraid of the future.
Thankfully, a Jaden Smith-starring anime is here to make you change your mind.
Neo Yokio, out now on Netflix, is a delightfully slight piece of entertainment. Created by eternally boyish Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig, it features Jaden as Kaz Kaan, a heartbroken demon-fighting aesthete in a parallel magical New York. And in this New York, the city already has a gondola.
It’s also underwater. “Ah, the Sea Beneath 14th Street,” Kaz reminisces at one point while drifting in water, inside said glass gondola. “Brings back a lot of memories. Some happy. Others, quite sad.”
“Well, we knew that we wanted our ‘Manhattan’ to be underwater below 14th Street,” Koenig told The Outline, “so we needed to figure out some kind of transportation method. Gondola bubbles seemed like the most logical answer. The only buildings tall enough to pop out above the water are the Twin Towers so if you're going to, say, the restaurant on the top floor, you might as well take the ferry.”
Otherwise, the “gondola-bubble system” is the way to go: it “starts at 14th Street and covers everything below.”
Neo Yokio’s positive gondola coverage (in its own surrealist post-climate-change-apocalypse kind of way) may be a minor thing to you. But to the gondola-heads out there, this kind of hip pop culture acceptance is rare, and much desired. As avowed g-head Brett Dodson puts it, gondolas on screen are usually “a good place to get people captured and trapped.”
Dodson is the operations manager for the Portland Aerial Tramway, which is — after New York’s own Roosevelt Island line — only the second-ever commuter aerial tramway in the U.S. (For the record: Trams have two cable cars that switch positions; gondolas feature a continuous rotation of cable cars up and down the lines). Like other members of the community, Dodson is hopeful, in an exceedingly chill kind of way, that people will one day wake the fuck up.
But to the gondola-heads out there, this kind of hip pop culture acceptance is rare
“You see a lot of European and South American cities putting in trams and gondolas in metro areas,” he says. “They’re so much cheaper per mile [than traditional rail systems]. It moves so many people, it flies right over traffic, it’s efficient. It’s a solution that’s working. We just have to figure out how to get the [American] public to accept that. In the US, it’s gonna take something to get us over the top.”
Stephen Dale, an urban planner who runs an advocacy website called The Gondola Project, agrees that pop culture has been traditionally harmful to the gondola movement. One bit of it, in particular: “Marge vs. the Monorail,” the sublime 1993 episode of The Simpsons in which a Phil Hartman-voiced huckster sing-cons Springfield into buying into the titular technology.
Sure, a monorail has nothing to do with cable-propelled transportation. But we, the Simpsons-adoring public, learned a damaging lesson from that episode: Be wary of men pushing unconventional futuristic transit. Dale has dubbed the episode one of the top five “Most Common (and Cynical) Arguments People Use Against Urban Gondola Transit.”
People bring up the episode “constantly,” Dale said via email.
So perhaps pop culture can be used for good, as well? To change hearts and minds?
“Show me a romantic comedy set in Medellin where a pair of good-looking movie stars fall in love at first sight within one of the urban gondolas and I think that could definitely help change people’s perception,” Dale writes. As for Neo Yokio — “The video you sent me is an animated television show set in a future New York. That’s not something that people can directly relate to.”
This isn’t just about gondolas. It’s about training ourselves to unshackle from conventional modes of perception.
Koenig, for the record, is a supporter of New York’s proposed East River Skyway. “I think it's a great idea,” he says. “It's interesting that our only system like that goes to Roosevelt Island. Why not expand it? What if the top of the Empire State building became a gondola hub and you could glide to various rooftops in the five boroughs without ever touching the ground? It may be the closest we ever get to the Fifth Element's vision of New York with the flying cabs.”
So is Neo Yokio fighting the good fight for gondola acceptance?
“I don't think Neo Yokio will change anything,” he says. “But if it leads to a billion-dollar public works program, I'll be pleasantly surprised.”
Look: This isn’t just about gondolas. It’s about training ourselves to unshackle from conventional modes of perception. It’s about wanting more for our cities, more for our worlds.
Surely they laughed when someone suggested turning abandoned rail tracks into public parks — and now that’s the High Line, one of New York’s most beloved attractions. Certainly they laughed at Buckminster Fuller’s proposed environmentally-conscious glass dome over Manhattan (which, at last check, no, has not been built). But Buckminster wasn’t afraid to try shit. He wasn’t afraid to dream.
Why build a gondola? Because we dare.
Of course, the true relevant tastemaker here — the one man who really could expand a nation’s minds and win its hearts — has not yet been heard of. Unfortunately, as of press time, Jaden Smith could not be reached for comment.
@officialjaden do you like aerial gondolas?
— Amos Barshad (@AmosBarshad) September 22, 2017
