The entire experience of this project was an interesting beast that lead to a lot of unexpected occurrences. The first came from the initial research of Washington Square Park. It was pretty jarring to hear, from both my reading and from what others found, that this park has a surprisingly dark past. For example, the entire park is essentially a mass grave where several thousand, unmarked people were buried. Many of these people were, in fact, killed in the park at “Hangman’s Elm” Which is a tree primarily used for hangings that can still be found in the park today. The craziest part of that is the fact that it is not marked in any way, as if the history has been covered up. So going into the project my group knew that the other groups would tackle these subjects and we wanted to find something a bit different and possibly a bit more light hearted. After some deliberation we decided to do our project on something peculiar we found out about the parks history. We found out that there was a creek that used to flow right through where the park is. As it turns out, the creek was diverted completely underground to make way for the parks construction. It has been that way for so long that people are unsure whether it is even there anymore. We thought this would be an interesting topic to focus on. At first we had the idea of somehow roping off where the creek was to show everyone what used to be there, but, as it turns out, the creek was much to wide for us to be able to do that, so we had to think of something different. After some observation, we noticed that we could have something represent the flow of the river, and what is always flowing through the park? The people. We wanted to mimic and highlight what happened to the creek so we had the idea of diverting the flow of people through the park. Not underground obviously, but in a way that would be inconvenient and possibly make them think about why it might be like that. So we decided we would use blue flash tape, similar to what they use in construction sites, and block off certain areas of the park, forcing people to go around. These blockades would have signs posted on them that read something along the lines of “Caution, dangerous waters below.” So, this was idea, and in theory, it would work as a great installation. However, theory and practice do not always line up the way you want to. On the day of the critique, my group started putting up our blue tape, there were a lot of people around where we wanted to put it, and it felt very awkward, but we slowly started putting it in places that would not obstruct as much at first. Then as it was getting closer to the time of the critique, I decided to bite the bullet and just go for it. I went up to one of the main side walk ways and started blocking it off. To be fair, for the brief while it was up, it worked. People would turn around or try to move around it. I did end up getting sprinkled with some colorful language from passersby but, such is the life of an artist, I guess. As I was putting it up, I was approached by park security. I knew before they even got to me that I would have to take it down.
