Olaf Eliasson Waterfalls of NYC Tour

Olaf Eliasson's Waterfalls on the East river of New York is most similar to an industrial waterfall. Like the one in Paterson, New Jersey. Not overwhelming, in the way a natural waterfall can be. Not really overwhelming the way an art installation can be, either.

Best seen from a tour boat. Proximity, a key to waterfall viewing, is not allowed. They were no Gullfoss. You can't get your feet wet.

Ginger Strand's Inventing Niagara covers all the major components of waterfall management: building tourist traps, altering the landscape to accommodate throngs of people, sending weird things over the falls, and polluting.

Penn's Cave

Penn's Cave: Rocks, Underground

The quality of a "tourist cave" (a term I swear I am not making up) depends up its quality of the morphization of its rocks by the tour guides. The proper guide can conjure up all manner of fairies, demons and food from the minerals. Penn's Cave is home to piles of rock looking vaguely like the Statue of Liberty, a Nittany Lion, bacon (a pereniel favorite), the Pope, and other tasty morsels. Or so said the tour guide. To me, they looked like rocks. Can't they just be rocks? All representation is morphic. You have to see the duck in flat line shape and color to "get" a picture of a duck. It's magical.

Did Clyfford Still's abstract paintings, often characterized as "cave-like" suffer through double morphization? Is that brushstroke a dog represented by rock formation?

Penn's cave is navigated in a long narrow boat, six of which are floating through the cave at any given time. The boat goes through the narrow, winding series of rooms and passages, then out a hole blasted through the hillside, into a man made lake. You edge by some ducks and the dam, which backs up the natural stream that fills the cave half full of water. Penn's cave, when discovered, had a stream flowing through it. Now it has a lake in it, thus making it : "Penn's Cave - America's Only All Water Cavern and Wildlife Park".