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I started seeing the tag “Muffin Milk” scrawled on walls around the neighborhood this past February. It is so incongruous, making illegal graffiti with such an innocuous concept, that it makes me laugh. Now it looks like the tagger has gone on to something else. Mickey Mouse body and is that a Nike swoosh?
Civic Fame was commissioned by the City to celebrate the five boroughs uniting to become the City of New York. Adolph A. Weinman (1870-1952), designed the statue, perched atop the tower of the Manhattan Municipal Building, as well as the relief sculptures on the lower floors of the building. Weinman’s credits include the Liberty Dime and the half dollar.
Saturday Sept 3 this iconic location under this American Elm in Tompkins Square Park was used for one of the General Assemblies to plan Occupy Wall Street.
It has been raining for most of the week this protest has been going on. People have been keeping dry wearing ponchos and sleeping underneath these tarps.
The media center is beneath this free-standing beach umbrella. Live Vide Feed
This Elm was cut down in 2003 and I shot these photos then. It may have been afflicted with Dutch Elm Disease. Some neighbor nailed wooden tags to the rings giving radical perspectives on local and national history starting in 1931. It looks like the tree was a few years older than that. The stump is no longer there, the tags lasted a few months. The tree was near the corner of 10th Street and Avenue B. No tree has grown there since.
I was inspired to dig these photos out of my archives by the initiation of the online interactive map for my Tompkins Square Park Tree Identification Project. This project is rolling out slowly, I have thousands of photos to edit and add.
I shot these photos in 2003 with my cheap first digital camera and have enhanced the tags for legibility. The 1981 tag refers to the discovery of AIDS. The 1988 tag has police riot scratched out and replaced with “dirty animal.” The 1989 tag mentions Dinkinsville though David Dinkins wasn’t Mayor until 1990.
This is a work in progress with many errors still to correct, and many trees still to positively identify. But it is in good enough shape for me to put out there, for comment and correction from the public. I will be putting updated versions here as they happen. Hi-res version for printing. I will soon have a Flickr group devoted to this project.
I assume the DOT is using this design to discourage jaywalking.
The protester kind, not the criminal kind. occupywallst.org
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