Chapter twenty-two situates the spectator in Riverside Park, looking west towards New Jersey. The USS Oklahoma - a US Navy Battleship - was completed in 1914 and served near New York City until its demolition in the early 1940s. In 1921 it has been in existence only seven years, and represented what would have been new technology in weponry.

Especially interesting is the chapter's meditation on the familiarity of the Hudson River. The River has become familiar in ways not fully contained by the logic of the postcard’s "View of New York." It has been made familiar, therefor, in different ways, and for different reasons, than has the Brooklyn Bridge (or, as in chapter four, the city as seen from the Bridge). The Bridge has been deprived of its aesthetic power because it has been circumscribed within a reproducible, consumable, exportable image of itself; an image attractive to consumers primarily because the Bridge had once inspired such awe. The River, on the other hand, has become familiar not because it was once spectacular, but because it was never spectacular. Even to those who see it for the first time, it is merely a river.

The chapter begins by suggesting that there may still be an alternative to the world presented by the modern city Its defamiliarizing gaze - when directed at the natural - seems to undermine the distance the machine age has put between the eye and the world at which it looks. The familiarity of the Hudson, unlike that of the Manhattan Skyline, it available to be challenged, but only through a transcendental connection to nature. Like the "long reflection" of the sun, however, the spectator's "long reflection" upon (that is to say - "sustained contemplation" of) the natural world is "plowed to pieces" by the imposition of the machine. The chapter reproduces once again the narrative of which the book never tires. The possibility of an alternative to the modern world - of a return to what is perceived as nineteenth century life - is suggested only so that it can be shown, once again, to be unworkable.