About
There is a visual conversation that has been taking place in the streets of North Brooklyn for some time now. Walk around the empty shells of buildings and the vacant lots and you’ll see what we mean: Stickers, tags, posters, words…
 |
 |
 |
 |
People are already speaking to and about the BoomCrash and have been for a while. Of course they are, of course WE are. After all, if you live in certain parts of this city- Greenpoint and Williamsburg most notably- its hard not to notice what happened and, for some, its impossible not to respond.
What happened here is the same thing that happened all over the country: a real estate bubble- the Boom- was manipulated into being by well-financed, well-rewarded Wall Street financiers, who used Main Street as a slot machine in their casino economy, hitting it big year after year, project after project, loan after loan, bonus after bonus, as fast as they could until CRASH!
The aftermath is a scarred and soulless cityscape, a forest of vacant luxury glass tower condominiums, a working middle-class squeezed out of neighborhoods that have been shredded by greedy developers. In New York City there were more construction-related deaths in 2008- the last year of the Boom, when the money men and their crooked construction companies knew the end was coming and cut all the corners they could- than any year in the last 20 years.
The BoomCrash made victims of the many for the benefit of the few. And we can see the evidence, in the street, right there in front of our eyes, every day.
We thought it might be valuable, and interesting, to generate a more focused sort of dialogue, a closer proximity of voices, a chatter, a chorus, a Babel. We scouted for a while, looking for a few square blocks that exemplified just how nuts this all is. We like the area between Bedford and Roebling, North 9th to North 12th. Check it out. Looks half like a war zone, half like….Dubai or something.
So here’s how this works. You, or someone you know puts up some work and takes a snapshot. Or you anonymously call a photographer that’s a friend of a friend and they take photographs of your work. Or you’re the photographer and you got a random call from some strange sounding girl who tells you she just painted a mural or something. In any case, one of you sends that photo to bombed@boomcrash.org. We’ll check it out and put it up on the blog, probably.
And that’s it. We’ll try to keep this thing fresh and be posting stuff up as often as possible.
One date to keep in mind: September 17th is the one-year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the event which most official histories mark as the beginning of the crash, our generation’s very own Black Tuesday. Mark that in your calendar and try to have some work up and posted by then if you can.
