Clinton St.

Filed under Installation, projects

Event Information

Artist: Ralph Borland
Website: http://ralphborland.net/clintonst

‘Clinton St.’ is a project to memorialize the demolition of a building in the Lower East Side of NYC, destroyed with all the residents’ belongings, through a micro-radio broadcast of the sound of rain.

Clinton St.’ is a project to memorialize a building at the corner of Clinton and Stanton Street in the LES in January 1998. The apartment block was torn down by the City in front of its residents, taking their belongings and pets with it.
The story of its destruction hints at the compromised relationship between landlords and City government, and the importance of land to power in New York City.
It was raining that day, the red lights of fire-engines glowing through the drizzle, the residents huddled on the wet sidewalks.
The memorial is a 24-hour micro-radio broadcast of the sound of rain, from a transmitter in the vicinity of the vacant lot.
The sound of rain has a similarity to the sound of static; tuning to the frequency of the localized radio broadcast like finding a hidden frequency of not-quite static - a ghost channel.
The sound of falling rain is both soothing and melancholy, the sound of sorrow.
A radio broadcast is invisible, a spectral presence, absent like the destroyed building, the gap in the line of buildings on Clinton St.
The older residents of Clinton St. listen to radios on the street, and in the neighborhood garden across the street from the vacant lot.
The public will be invited to bring radios to the corner of Clinton and Stanton Streets to capture the intangible radio signal and turn it to audible sound in the space it memorializes.