park slope plane crash

Well, the holidays are almost upon us and everyone is busy writing papers and/or grading. The blog will be quiet over the next few weeks until the spring semester kicks in. In the meantime, here is a fascinating piece of disaster archaeology from the NY Times City Room blog:



Cityroom blog: park slope plane crash - the lingering scars

Reading Walls in North Brooklyn

I live on the very boarder of East Williamsburg; 3 doors from Bushwick Avenue and the Bushwick neighborhood of North Brooklyn. One of the distinct characteristics of not just this neighborhood, but others in the vicinity (Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bushwick, and Ridgewood, Queens), as well as quiet residential areas elsewhere in Brooklyn and Queens, is the row houses (Figure 1). As you can see, the row houses in East Williamsburg are particularly uniform in places; modular, I would say. They straddle the line between hideous/charming, but that’s what I love about them.

Like Greenpoint, East Williamsburg has been changing, largely due to these neighborhoods’ geographical proximity to Williamsburg, which has been revitalized over the last 10 years and now contains, among other things, upwards of 100 restaurants and bars, music venues, plentiful shopping, art galleries, and even now a small movie theatre. The development of Williamsburg naturally spread to the surrounding neighborhoods and we are enjoying lots of its fringe benefits on the outskirts.

One result of the impending sea change coming to the East Williamsburg area is the replacement of row houses with larger, taller, more modern buildings, in the form of small condominiums. Ironically, these buildings are often equally so tasteless that they serve as a fitting replacement for the simple row houses of old. But, even in the case of more innovative designs (Figure 2), they still stick out against the modesty of their neighbors.

Unlike the row houses, the neighborhood’s few light industry/warehouse buildings are being spared and rehabbed for commercial and residential use. Their superior constructions (usually brick or concrete) ensure their reuse. One such old warehouse in the neighborhood has for years stood with its paint peeling off the exterior: a marvelous patina that exposed the layers of paint beneath its surface, creating a brittle, flakey, multi-colored skin that spoke of the age of this dignified edifice. The building’s upper floors have been converted into loft-style residences and artist’s studios over the years, while the first couple floors are still home to a light industry of some kind. At the ground level, this warehouse was written all over with graffiti: a testament to generations of taggers and artists, whose own layers of paint mirrored those pealing off of the upper façade (Figure 3). The building even has a peeling piece by the street-artist-turned-art-star, Swoon (on the left in Figure 4).

Late this summer, the façade of the upper floors of the warehouse was refinished and painted with a poor attempt at some shallow trompe-l’oeil effects (Figure 5). The ground level was spared for the time being, but you can see the paint encroaching (Figure 4). On the eve of the day when this urban text is painted over, I find myself wondering: what does it mean?

Indeed, the signs themselves—the graffiti tags—are hard to read. It would require a specialist in urban languages to decipher many of them, especially in their worn state. Once they are painted over, they will cease to communicate at all. Or will they? These only marginally legible signs (and I would contend that even if they were legible, the meaning derived directly from these signs would be minimal: pseudonyms and acronyms without referent) speak volumes within the context of this wall’s stratigraphy. Above the original layers of wall, in a phase of decline, when the walls weren’t painted for many years and became vulnerable to vandals, this layer of urban writing tells a little story about the buildings usage and frequency of habitation, as well as being a visual socio-economic indicator of the neighborhood at large. Wall writing is an iconoclastic act. Its public statement is a form of defiance to the edifice, but it also speaks to and about a community.

The layer of new paint that is being applied to this building will undoubtedly destroy this wall’s message and with it, a chapter in the history of East Williamsburg will be erased. Traces are often difficult for the archaeologist to find in urban contexts. The replenishment of renewal often destroys critical markers of the past. However, wall reading, which has proved a fruitful endeavor in the archaeology of architecture, can provide critical clues, which not only help contextualize archaeological finds, but also lend insight into that character of a community.

As my neighborhood changes, existing walls are reused and take on new meanings. They mirror my community, but in them I can also see the past.

--Matthew Teti, Brooklyn, NY

Brooklyn Bound

"The historical usurpation and theoretical oddity that install the image within the rights of reality are determined as the forgetting of a simple origin." (Derrida, Of Grammatology, pg 37)

The people who lived here owned the property once, maybe twice. The title reads like the Popol Vuh bestowed and taken back leaving traces of past worlds behind. The house stood empty for three or more years before some one tracked down the distant relative who, in his twenties, had no idea he owned a house. The day he saw it, smelled it, he hired a realtor to sell it. She would not go inside during the open house but someone bought it. If it were any place other than Brooklyn I would suggest they salt the earth. Instead, the new owners will remove the asbestos siding and put the clapboard back. The next new owners will know nothing of the five dogs that never got walked, the innumerable visits from police and that their “adopted son” sometimes ate out of the trash cans.

Does Brooklyn derive sustenance from its own history, ingesting and remaking it? The Coney Island of Requiem for a Dream was refashioned in its own image by an Italian designer, its future set to be moderated by Mike Wallace at the Graduate Center this Thursday. As Brooklyn’s history is folded back into itself, the Dodgers become the Cyclones and ticket are $5 for the bleachers.

Requiem for a dream
Save Coney Island

Jenna

the gowanus canal

This post is draws on an ongoing project about the Gowanus Canal, a severely polluted industrial waterway in South Brooklyn that was named a Superfund site in March 2010. The canal was constructed in the mid-nineteenth century, and by the 1880s, it was a vital conduit for moving building supplies (including the stone for Brooklyn’s brownstones) into and manufactured goods out of the rapidly growing borough. A range of industries mushroomed around its perimeter: manufactured gas plants, coal yards, tanneries, cement and paint factories, printing presses, and chemical works. In the 1920s, the canal was the busiest commercial waterway in the U.S., but postwar deindustrialization brought about its rapid decline as a transportation infrastructure. Today, the area hosts continuing small-scale manufacturing, several public housing projects, pockets of rapid gentrification, art studios, empty warehouses, a plethora of development proposals, grassroots environmental activism, hipster dance parties, and EPA research teams.


I. Death and Decay
There's a longstanding popular association of the canal with death, criminal activity, and uncanny hauntings. In Jonathan Lethem’s novel Motherless Brooklyn, a character jokes that the Gowanus is “the only body of water in the world…that was ninety percent guns.” Newspaper reports from the nineteenth century record frequent drownings in the canal, often suicides; the twentieth century saw the emergence of the rumor that the canal served as a dumping ground for the corpses of those killed by the mob. I'm interested in the semiotic process that linked the canal to morbidity and criminality.

One of the things that's sparked my curiosity about the canal is its evident attraction, in recent years, for a growing number of artists, urban explorers, anarchist squatters, photographers, writers, amateur historians and archaeologists. They (or we, I should say) are drawn to this uncanny legacy, and to the aesthetic and affective qualities of the canal and the surrounding landscape, with its derelict factories and crumbling warehouses. Many of the visual artists work with images of ruin, contamination and decay—in the words of one photographer, who’s been shooting the canal for decades, “the pollution creates...a great canvas.” The New York Times City Room blog, citing the canal’s “faded industrial-maritime glamour, beautifully framed vistas, de Chirico-esque natural lighting and abiding mood set somewhere between peaceful and desolate,” recently appealed to readers to submit entries for a “little online show of Gowanus artwork,” and received hundreds of images in response. I've mostly thought about this aspect of the canal in terms of aesthetics (in particular, those of the modern/industrial/urban ruin, a subject whose appeal seems to be rising), which suggests to me a question about the relationship of aesthetics to semiotics.


II. Smell and Contamination
Even in its early years, the large quantities of sewage and industrial effluent dumped into the canal created a pollution problem that earned it the nickname “the Lavender Lake.” During the 1880s and 1890s, the canal's notorious stench was noted in sanitary reports, newspaper coverage, and even songs.


The problem persists today, compounded by the presence of a century's accumulation of industrial waste (Walter Mugdan, EPA's Region 2 director, says that in many Superfund sites, the EPA measures contaminant concentration in parts per millions or billions, but that in the Gowanus Canal, they must measure in parts per hundred—the sediment layer at the bottom of the canal is 4.5 % coal tar, a byproduct of manufactured gas production). The canal is still a dumping ground for biological waste--more than fifty times a year, rain overwhelms New York City’s sewer system, dumping some 27 billion gallons of raw sewage and storm runoff into urban waterways. It's mainly this sewage that's responsible for the characteristic stink of the Gowanus today. I've argued elsewhere that the stench of the canal has become a means of indexing other forms of contamination in the canal--the dangerous, unseen materials like PCBs and PAHs--and the fears they inspire. Unlike these slow-acting carcinogens, the smell is a palpable register of the canal's pollution, perceptible in immediate sensory form. (Betty Lester, a local resident and activist, echoes other locals when she links the two: “I'm no scientist and I'm no expert, but I believe they gonna find it's more contaminated than they thought. You knew from the smell that it was unhealthy.”) My limited encounters with semiotic theory so far have emphasized visual and verbal (or at least aural) signs, but I'd suggest this is an example of a semiotic relationship materialized as scent. So another thing I'd like to consider might be the ways to think about semiotics in relation to different sensory registers: touch, smell, taste, and so on.