When the Streets Were Swept by Hand

In most cities of the developed world, mechanical street sweepers are a fact of life. Even New York’s carless commuters are fluent in strategies to use on “alternate-side parking days,” when the scheduled passing of a street sweeper forces all of a block’s parked cars to one side of the street. It’s easy to forget that, before these behemoth, motorized sponges began scrubbing the streets en masse, even the widest boulevards were cleaned by hand. This street sweeper in 1910 New York would have his work cut out for him after his beat — Fifth Avenue — was considerably widened that year. Although the mechanical sweeper had debuted in 1840s Manchester, it took nearly a century to catch on almost everywhere else.

Of course, street cleaners — some wielding handmade brooms — are a common sight in the poorer countries of the so-called Global South. But old photos of individual sweepers toiling to keep dry the rain-soaked streets of currently presently, hypermodern Tokyo come as a bit of a shock. The photo above, from the collection of the Dutch Naational Archief, is dated “circa 1930,” though some commenters think it might have been taken even later, perhaps in the immediate postwar era. Almost nothing here is recognizable as contemporary Tokyo — except maybe the electronics store in the background. Many of the street sweepers are wearing conical hats typical of agricultural field laborers, and some are even sporting a mino, a traditional form of raincoat made from straw.

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Two Cities’ Scale Models

Set in the seclusion of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, well inside the largest of New York’s outer boroughs, the Queens Museum of Art doesn’t attract the same blockbuster number of international visitors as the megamuseums and power galleries of Manhattan. That hardly means it fails to draw from cosmopolitan sources — in a borough as diverse as Queens, appealing to the local population means displaying art that speaks to many points of origin. But the museum is best known for a work of very local significance: the Panorama of the City of New York, a vast scale model of the five boroughs built on Robert Moses’ orders for the 1964 World’s Fair.

Despite an occasional lack of updates — including one twenty-some year gap — the Panorama has been kept fairly timely. Though the last comprehensive upgrade took place in 1992, sponsors can now adopt buildings and ensure the accuracy of a given plot on the map. There are some exceptions where updates are off limits; the museum preferred the World Trade Center towers remain standing rather than represent Ground Zero (they will be replaced when the new site’s new towers are completed). But by and large, the model is a decent representation of the city — precise enough to use for mapping geodata.

Last year, urban planner and artist Damon Rich did just that, taking advantage of the Panorama to detail the extent of home foreclosures in New York. Reasoning that, for many New Yorkers, the foreclosure crisis appeared to be something taking place in far-flung Sunbelt suburbs, his aim was to bring the extent of the national real estate debacle home to a city that didn’t yet seem to realize the problem had reached its front stoop.

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Van Brunt Street

For all the questionable writing that’s abused or insensitively applied the term “urban frontier”, Brooklyn’s sleepy, sometimes desolate Red Hook neighborhood actually feels like one — and nowhere is this more apparent than on somnambulant Van Brunt Street.

The neighborhood’s main commercial thoroughfare sets the pace for Red Hook’s streetlife with its lack thereof: as much a testament to the street’s sedateness as to the pioneering urban horticulturalists who tend them, giant sunflowers sprout from the sidewalk cracks, leaping to human height. The still life composition of Van Brunt’s Hopperesque facades brings to mind country hamlets closed up on Sunday. And on a streetscape that conjures the Great Plains, a prominent restaurant bears a coincidentally appropriate name — Fort Defiance.

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Gentrification: Y2K to Today

Change is a constant in most cities, and it’s no surprise that a decade can yield dramatic alterations to a specific street or even storefront. Take this slice of San Francisco’s Mission Street, photographed by Eric Fischer, creator of the locals v. tourists photography maps, which he captured in 2000 and again just last year.

In 2000, the block was showing evidence of prosperity. The millennium bug hadn’t shut down “Y2K Furnishings”, despite its ominous name. And the space next door is decorated in retro-50s futurism, reflecting a latent desire to resurrect that decade’s optimistic streak. But what Y2K didn’t do to San Francisco, the dot-com bubble’s burst ultimately did. In 2000, Y2K Furnishings was already having a going out of business sale. Today, save for one floor of the building it formerly occupied, the entire block looks mothballed.

The story of Y2K’s block is fairly rare, but it’s not wholly unique. It demonstrates one way in which cities have defied the narrative arc of unremitting, sometimes totalizing gentrification that U.S. cities have been said to confront throughout much of the 2000s. At worst, the last ten years of gentrification have been more mild, and less sweeping, than many critics have assumed.

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Locals vs. Tourists

Montreal

We’ve always known there is a gulf between the city as experienced by tourists and the city lived in by locals. Now we have a fun visual representation of that divide. Using various types of data from Flickr, one user of the photo-sharing website, Eric Fisher, has created maps that indicate the spots photographed by tourists and those shot by locals. Local photographs are blue, tourist photos red and undetermined photos yellow.

There are some problems in the methodology. Whether a Flickr user is a local or a tourist is determined by whether they photograph a given location over a long period of time (like a local would) or in just a few days (like a tourist would). That seems fair enough, but not everyone geotags their photos, which could possibly skew the results one way or another. One person who obsessive geotags all of his or her photos could have a disproportionately large representation on the map. You can see this in Vancouver, where one person’s geotagged cycle routes are prominently displayed.

Still, just by looking at the maps you get a strong intuitive sense that they are close to reality. In the Montreal map, tourists overwhelmingly stick to Old Montreal, St. Joseph’s Oratory and the Olympic Stadium while locals take photos throughout downtown and the Plateau, with an especially notable cluster of local shots around Lafontaine Park, Maisonneuve Park and the Botanical Gardens (which, interestingly enough, are right across the street from the Olympic tourist hub).

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Subway Colours, Metro Colours

New York

Montreal

Waiting to Cross the Street

Shinjuku, Tokyo

Robson Street, Vancouver

East Village, New York

The City Gets Pixelated

True, Patrick Jean’s 8-bit 80s arcade game-inspired New York invasion video, “PIXELS”, will soon be featured on nearly every blog on the internet. But it struck me as so in keeping to some of the other work featured here — from Jan Vormann’s Lego brick street art to this Berlin housing block game of Tetris (repeated on an art deco skyscraper above) — that it would be a shame not to put it in context with these — not to mention some earlier antecedents (the appearance of a frog hopping across the street — a clear reference to the old game Frogger — brings to mind the meta-heroics of Seinfeld‘s George Costanza, attempting to push an old Frogger machine across a busy New York street in a fashion similar to the game itself).

Combined with tilt-shift videography, which has made actual cities appear toylike, these projects all seem to share the same underlying theme: a certain deconstruction of the barrier between the imaginary world (particularly of play) and the actual — a desegregation of virtual and reality. In the video, this is literally (and dramatically) illustrated by the explosion of pixels from the TV screen in which they’d been confined. Such works seem to presage in art the emerging world of augmented reality, which recently began to filter into the consumer mainstream with the release of Google’s Goggles application, in which a smartphone photo can be translated into a digital data stream, integrating networked data into the public sphere.

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Street Food in Bangkok

It’s a familiar scene across Asia: a small cart bright with fluorescent light and flanked by rickety fold-up tables and plastic stools. Simple, inexpensive dishes are served on brightly-coloured melamine plates.

If it’s in a Taipei back alley, it could be beef noodle soup; in a Hong Kong dai pai dong, French toast with a glass of milk tea. In this particular case, it was pad thai on an uneven sidewalk in Bangkok, inches from the roaring traffic of Asoke Road.

I placed my order (which wasn’t hard — most stalls only specialize in a few dishes) and sat down on a bright blue stool at a table with bottles of fish sauce, vinegar and chili. A few minutes later, the cook handed me the pad thai. It struck a nice balance between the full-mouthed savouriness of the fish sauce and dried shrimp and the tang of lime and tamarind. All told, it was probably one of the better attempts at the dish I’ve had. I paid when I left: 30 baht, just under one Canadian dollar.

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À Bout de souffle, version américaine

I’m a great fan of Jean Leloup not only because we share a name (though his is made up and mine is real) or because he lived near me and I used to see him on the street every other day. I like him because he’s probably the strangest, most brilliant musician to have ever performed in Quebec.

The video for one of his earliest songs, “Isabelle (J’te déteste)” pokes fun at Jean-Luc Godard’s seminal New Wave film, À bout de souffle, with some great scenes of Montreal and New York in 1991. It also opens with a fantastic cameo by Julien Poulin, the actor who became famous by playing Elvis Gratton.

Bushwick Trailer Park

Having successively appropriated so much Middle American iconography — from trucker hats to Pabst Blue Ribbon beer — some north Brooklyn hipsters may have decided that their living space ought to reach the same heights of irony as their wardrobes. Enter the Nut Factory (video below), an exclusive trailer park for artists currently situated inside a warehouse in Bushwick, east of Williamsburg.

Like homesteaders following the route of the transcontinental railroad, hipsters began gentrifying parts of Bushwick along the L train when — depending on whom you ask — they were priced out of Williamsburg or began to find it too mainstream for their liking. So while the “frontier” of their settlement has technically pushed out as far as Ridgewood, in Queens, it’s concentrated mainly along the narrow corridor easily reached by the L, and vast swathes of industrial Bushwick still invite experiments in cheap housing.

Among them, the urban trailer park may be uniquely qualified to come of age.

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Hipster-Hasid Bike War in Brooklyn

The tensions had to bubble to the surface at some point. That’s the consensus that has emerged since underground cylcing activists literally took their fight to the streets, reclaiming a fourteen block stretch of bike lane that had been removed in Brooklyn earlier this year — at the possible behest of the area’s ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish community.

The removal occurred on a stretch of Bedford Avenue, the main artery of Williamsburg. For the uninitiated, the neighborhood is roughly split between a gentrifying playground for youngish hipsters to the north and a tradition-bound, family-oriented Hasidic district to the south. The contrast between the two Williamsburgs can be stark, especially on Saturdays: whereas the northside is often packed with revelers, the storefronts of the southside are shut, and, save for families walking to and from synogogues, its sidewalks deserted.

Neither part of Williamsburg could remain contained within its own sphere for very long, and a culture clash was probably inevitable. The city cited safety concerns — including a prevalence of double parking and an increasing number of pedestrians being hit by bikes — as its reason for removing the lanes, but cycling advocates blamed Hasidic complaints that bikers’ skimpy attire was an affront to their moral sensibilities.

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New Yorkers

I’ve been keeping an eye on Flickr user sabotai‘s photos ever since he moved from Houston to New York earlier this year. He’s been taking advantage of his nice lenses and good street photography skills to take some engaging candid portraits of people on the street.

He’s done a pretty good job at representing all five boroughs, too: along with Manhattan, he’s got plenty of shots from Brooklyn and Queens, though his Bronx and Staten Island collections could use a little work.

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From Pasture to Projects

Curious about what the building his great-great-grandfather lived in was like, ex-Brooklynite Zach van Schouwen was soon researching the history of his entire street. The result is “The Block,” a series pen-and-ink drawings of how the stretch of Eldridge Street, between Stanton and Rivington on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, looked in every year since 1795.

Eldridge turns out to be fairly typical of the neighborhood, which evolved from “Delancey’s Farm” to a series of tall, narrow tenements that start replacing the street’s small rowhouses in the 1850s. Fire escapes begin to appear, in accordance with law, in the 1920s and 30s. The block takes a downward turn just after World War II, when a number of tenements are gradually boarded up, torn down, and replaced with garages and storage facilities. In 1985, the entire block becomes occupied by a single housing project.

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