Space Available

In the fall of 2009, about one year in to the economic crisis, I had the idea of walking river to river on a random street in Manhattan—14th Street—to photograph the recently closed businesses (of which there were many). In our interview a few days later, Bonnie Fox, at the time an unemployed office manager, spoke of the loneliness of the job search in the modern era. Both the search for aid and the search for work are conducted mostly on-line, with little actual human contact and only seldom a glimpse of the millions of fellow searchers. No relief lines, bread lines, unemployment lines. In this environment, the ubiquitous “Space Available” signs denoting recently failed businesses are among the only public markers of the scale of our economic distress. In 2010 the New York Times reported the equivalent of 920 football fields of vacant commercial space in Manhattan alone. Something like this has turned out to be true most everywhere I have traveled—Los Angeles, San Antonio, Minneapolis, Gainesville, Binghamton, Lexington, Chehalis. One readily finds specimens of virtually every sort of abandoned property, too—factories, car dealerships, supermarkets, small retail storefronts, tiny bodegas, giant box stores. The “Space Available” signs are conspicuously inconspicuous: we are meant to notice them as potential tenants, perhaps, but not as citizens or as social observers. The present gallery documents this public monument to our vast economic devastation across the country, and seeks to encourage new habits of seeing and noticing the social stories told by our city- and townscapes. mj