Michael Moynihan: Cork taxi drivers should offer an immersive experience to visitors
'We’re trying to ensure that visitors hit the ground running when they arrive – that they know they’re in Cork and not another anonymous town with the same shops as the other anonymous towns.' File picture: iStock
My thanks to the reader who pointed me towards a minor gem in one of the English papers last weekend.
Namely, the stylings of one Modesto ‘Flako’ Jimenez, who operates a taxi experience in New York.
I use the term experience quite deliberately, as Modesto doesn’t offer a straightforward A-to-B taxi service, or even a guided tour of the notable sights.
What he provides is an immersive trip called Taxilandia, which owes a little something to his background in performance art and a little something to his background as a cab driver. He ferries a couple of passengers at a time around certain parts of the city of New York, but they don’t get an anodyne recitation of tourist-friendly platitudes.
A journalist who took the trip gave some detail. Elisabeth Vincentelli showed her readers what they could expect from Taxilandia: "We double parked so he could dissect layers of graffiti, 'and right across the street', Jimenez gestured, 'the gentrification bar'. While the car is briefly in neutral, he himself is anything but."
And this was what hooked me.
What if this was on offer in Cork, a driving experience in which the driver spoke about something more interesting than a view on Manchester United, or the chances of a holiday in Spain later in the year?
What about an insight into the changing face of the city, the impact of gentrification and renewal, a la Modesto Jimenez?
The natural starting point would be a visitor arriving in Kent Station and making quickly for the rank.
“Hello, the city centre, please?”
“Fair enough. Though fair warning – this isn’t just a taxi trip: it incorporates views and attitudes which reflect the experience of living in Cork, and living with Cork. In a fluid relationship with the city itself, as it were.”
“Can you pop the boot for my bags?”
“Work away. Just off the Dublin train?”
“Yup, half an hour late.”
“That’s terrible. But of course the stripping out of the railways back in the early '60s was the kind of car-centric national infrastructure development that we’re still coming to terms with. The tram system we had a century ago in Cork linked Douglas and Blackpool through the main drag of the city, but it’s not just that.
"If we still had the rail links and spurs that we had one hundred years ago the country would be far better connected than it is now, with a far more efficient transport system – why, there’d even be a rail line just up here, across to Albert Quay, which would open up the entire county to people like yourself coming down from Dublin. Wouldn’t that be fantastic?”
“Are we actually heading away from the city?”
“This is our famously challenging traffic system, one that we’re very proud of, so we have to go east to come back west. The urban legend has it that many years ago the local authority bought too many traffic lights and couldn’t get the supplier to take any returns, so there was nothing for it but to erect them all regardless – and bend our medieval streets and ancient thoroughfares to the iron will of the sequenced traffic light.”
“The iron will . . .”
“ . . . of the sequenced traffic light.”
“That’s very good. I’m not sure about this open quay, mind you.”
“It’s a reflection of our status as a maritime power, going back centuries. Instead of denying our heritage, we embrace it wholeheartedly, so the river is accessible more or less everywhere it winds through the city. Though, yes, a guardrail or two wouldn’t be any harm.”
“What’s with that sign up ahead, Port of Cork?”
“There? That shows the very end of the island which makes up the centre of the city, something we don’t really make enough of, in my opinion. There should be a more conscious positioning of the city as a mystical place that’s half-land and half-water, a little bit like Venice. Though without paying five notes for a Coke like in St Mark’s Square, am I right?”
“But with the same flooding problem, I believe.”
“Well, don’t mention the war.”
“Is that the same place the skyscraper is supposed to go, in behind the port sign?”
“Supposedly, though I have to say I’m torn. On one hand, I’m unsure about a steel shaft reaching to the clouds from such an obviously historic site.
"On the other, we’ve got to build upwards: it makes more sense, clearly. It embarrasses me, really, having this kind of equivocation on show rather than flourishing a dogmatic sense of my own rectitude, but I also like to give a notion of the person in full. An indication of the dissembling you’re likely to encounter in this city of marshy boundaries, if you like, where nothing is quite as it seems to the unwary visitor.”
“Hence the need for guardrails. You mentioned skyscrapers earlier, could you swing by the Elysian? I want to take a photo for my kids. If that’s okay.”
“Absolutely. If that’s what you want, to see what happens when a city tears its own heart out.”
“The Elysian was built on the heart of the city?”
“No, look – see that empty space on the corner here by the river? That was a bar once. The Sextant. A great spot, with a tasty lunch trade. Now it’s just a car park, a temporary lacuna that torments us with its symbolism even as we await the latest glass box to be imposed on us instead of a building with a soul.”
“Why are there people sitting out further down the quay?”
“I’ll show you – the Elysian will still be there when we get back.”
“Is the meter running on this?”
“I’ll give you store credit. Those people are spilling out of the Marina Market, in behind the quay. That’s repurposing a big industrial space that was disused for years, but now it’s being used for artisan food stalls and other small local makers, which is what people want, not corporate dinosaurs stomping around the city, flattening independents and outliers like a . . . like a giant stomping thing.”
“Hang on a second. What about people who want something different, like a job in one of your glass boxes? Isn’t there room for another opinion?”
“Who are you, Daddy Warbucks? Please don’t interrupt my narrative with these inconvenient questions.”
“Well, if I could get to the city centre I wouldn’t be interrupting. Can we head back towards town?”
“Fair enough, though you’re missing out.”
“What’s that there to the left, the motorway?”
“That’s the South Link, it leads west – of course, there was a time when it was the main rail link to the whole of West Cork before –”
“The car-centric national infrastructure development, you mentioned that earlier.”
“If I’m repeating myself you’re free to disembark. We’re trying to ensure that visitors hit the ground running when they arrive – that they know they’re in Cork and not another anonymous town with the same shops as the other anonymous towns, but a place that’s dynamic and different and distinctive.”
“Here’s fine, I’ll jump out. Next time just ask me where I’m going on holidays, okay?”
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