New York City, 2003

When I lived in New York City, I received a daily infusion of subject matter by just walking down the street. Neglected window displays, piles of trash accumulated in snowy tree planters, Philip Guston paintings at MoMA with my corporate pass, whatever was up at Zach Feuer, bubble tea from Chinatown.

I biked out to the edge of the city sometimes to find the flotsam and jetsam of capitalism’s erratic march and brought back photographs and the fragmented mood of its waste. I was swept along through the city’s constant non sequitur, out to its burnt edges where abandoned cars sat in quiet harbor waters. Ship graveyards, the pre-park wilderness of the High Line, a spilled ice cream cone in Brooklyn. I felt like I was making an illegible treasure map of these things, one where the “X” that marks the spot constantly changes meaning. So much perilous beauty in everything left behind. So much there always being left behind. Seemingly endless dead treasure.

One of the more interesting spots on my ever-evolving map was an Overhead Slide Gate fronting a rotting pier on Beard St. in Red Hook, Brooklyn. “Overhead” because wheels operated on a track above to allow the gate to open and close. I have not seen myself, but I understand that a lot of this area is taken up by an IKEA now, so I don’t know if the gate or pier is still there.

At the time, though (2002-03) I would visit this gate frequently to draw it and to meditate on how it came to be in the state in which I found it. For me, it became the locus of all my adventuring around the city a documentary and an object of praise for I’m not sure what, but each visit the gate felt like a kind of devotion to the ephemeral.

I’ve included all of the pages of the book, so you can read about this tiny blip of defunct industrialization and how it impacted me at the time.