Public Sentiment
Postcards from New York

citygroup
104b Forsyth St
NY, NY 10002

They’re in pretty much every neighborhood now. Even though it’s always referred to as “luxury”, 

which gets less and less plausible as the surroundings getting more and more “gritty”, no block can be without one (or two, or three). The first signs are demolished buildings that make way for empty lots bound by rickety plywood fencing, always painted a kind of park bench green. Scaffolding is quickly erected in a circus-is-coming-to-town frenzy, the sidewalk encased in cold shade for an indeterminate period. 

 Like some form of interplanetary life announcing their arrival and that they mean us no harm, a vision of what’s to come is ceremoniously placed on the freshly painted green fencing. Smooth, frictionless, and futuristic, the arrival of these visionary renderings, despite reassurances that no harm is meant, do not always bode well for “the locals”. Often drastically at odds with their surroundings (not to mention the necessary chaos required for their realization) these visions of the future dream big, betraying an urbanism perfected and groomed for the appropriately affluent, with amenities sprinkled within to make up for any lack without.

 But they don’t stop there. As the site has been purged of whatever “old world” quaintness that may have caused the original building’s demise, the amenity packed interior of this new arrival must eventually permeate the building’s surroundings. Staying indoors is cool, having a private chef, common space with pool table, swimming pool, en suite sky garages, and all that is cool, but if you can’t 

(eventually) match the first class life inside with the same standard of living outside then perhaps the developer’s grand dreams have failed. The “new” New York must always push ahead. Perpetually threatened by the sodden 1970’s memories of “Taxi Driver” and “Ford to City, Drop Dead”, the only way forward is fulfilling the pervasive dreams of the good life which have been plastered on sidewalk sheds across the city. 

But as the material reality of the dream begins to take shape behind and above the plywood barriers, the messaging that announced its inevitable arrival plays host to an array of expressions, opinions and markings, many of which are not in sync with the hoped for harmony embodied in the renderings.  Under the shadows of the scaffold, statements are being made. Responding, often unfavorably, to the blanketing of the city with generic luxury styling, courtesy of private development, a kind of polling station has emerged. Responding with graffiti, profanity and humor, the “public” speaks.

Presenting a somewhat random selection of these responses to the ubiquitous imagery of luxury living encountered on our sidewalks, and offering them as postcard sized statements that often contradict 

the insidious messaging that treats the city as a site for perpetual holiday making, the images are  

accompanied by anecdotes that track the contradictions and tensions which evolve under the constant efforts to groom the city into a seamless, frictionless quest for lifestyle fulfillment, purging of necessity any obstacles that might lie in its path.