datacloud

(Re)Colonizing Public Spaces

Rob Walker has an interesting account of a New Orleans community re-claiming public spaces that were divided by the construction of large, wide streets. After the city ran freeways through what were formerly large, grassed and treed areas that ran between neighborhoods--called "neutral places," where people met and recreated--most of the neutral places died off: the spaces were still there, but they were now the covered by the underpasses of fast-moving freeways.

One neutral place, though, has been transformed into an odd sort of community art gallery by decorating the supporting concrete columns in wonderfully variied ways. My favorite is the collage-writing obituary-column column:

Not all the columns are painted, and I noticed one that seemed to have newspaper clippings pasted on it in a sort of cluster. They were death notices from the local paper (the Times-Picayune runs at least a thumbnail obit for pretty much everyone who dies in New Orleans). A guy sitting in his car about forty feet away waved and motioned me over. He was older black man, missing a lot of teeth, wearing sunglasses and black cap. As far as I can tell he was just hanging out in his car; maybe he was waiting for someone shopping at Circle Foods, but he was parked an inconvenient distance from there, or from anything else. He rolled his window down and said he'd seen me looking at the obituary column. "Yes," I said. "You know any of the people on there?" "Not really," I said. "Are those all people from the neighborhood?" "That's right. My sister's up there." He was smiling through all of this, very pleasant and friendly.

[via boing-boing] Posted by johndan at February 10, 2004 07:47 PM | TrackBack