The X-ing

At the intersection of Broadway and Fifth Ave stands a building. It has two addresses – 204 Fifth and 1124 Broadway. It has two virtually identical facades, dominated by large semi-circular windows on the third floor facing both streets. The facades display no reflection of the extreme diversity between Fifth Avenue and Broadway, thus making no registration of geographical and cultural disparity between two streets. Even though the building is a part of New York grid, 204 Fifth / 1124 Broadway, it is located only a few hundred feet of the intersection of the two streets – and its apparent conformity to the city parallel grid makes the Broadway “grid violation” especially vivid.

We propose to install X-ing – a juxtapositions project at this location. Given the building’s façades (and especially windows) are a virtual bridge between Fifth and Broadway, it is our proposal to install two projectors inside the building (on the third floor) that would broadcast a recording of a trip down each street from North to South. Each window will be divided in half – each half containing a feed from either of the two streets. The feeds will be looped, but will run a different time intervals. On the Broadway side the loop will run at the speed of an average car driving down from Yonkers to Bowling Green the whole length of Broadway – and the second portion of the window will display the trip down the length of Fifth Avenue, but stretched to the same time frame as trip down Broadway. On the Fifth Avenue side the opposite will be true – the Broadway trip will be sped up to run concurrently with the Fifth Ave trip.

The idea behind this installation is that after dark the unique geography, culture, economy and anthropology of New York’s two most famous streets will be presented in situ, in direct relationship to each other.