Witness to what was — confronting the palimpsest
As I walked down 5th Avenue from 16th street to 12th street I noticed things I’ve overlooked so many times and thought about what might change in the near future. A palimpsest is is a manuscript page, either from a scroll or a book, from which the text has been either scraped or washed off so that the page can be reused, for another document, and New York City is definitely a palimpsest on a larger scale. There is space for change all over the city, and just walking a few blocks shows me tons of examples of that. Advertisements are the most obvious spaces for change. They are everywhere- on buses, windows, telephone booths, and storefronts.Even where there is no ad there is an opportunity for one. In the city every surface is a platform for sharing information. What interested me most about seeing advertisements on telephone booths was that nobody uses the phones anymore, but they stay there as a space for these ads. People put stickers and posters up to inform the people walking by about what is going on.
There was construction being done on almost every block, which will bring change- redesigning, reconstructing, restoring structures. As I continued down 5th ave I saw food trucks, and thought of how they can drive away at any moment and another one can pop up in its place selling a different type of food. Will it be different food trends in the next couple of years? In between 13th and 12th there is a storefront open for rent. It looks like it once was a rug store, but is now closed. This is a key example of NYC being a palimpsest because there are stores closing and new ones opening every so often, and that changes how we see the area. The shops and restaurants are what attract a specific demographic. Down 12th street I saw a sign for a business relocating. This really stood out to me because I thought that even though the business is not closing, it will not be in that spot anymore. All of its customers will have to go a different route than they are used to. So, even though the store is not gone forever, it is changing and the map people have it in will change too.
