Rafael Ng
Ultimately, one leaves Canal Street with the sense that none of these objects are meant to last. The pashmina, the tchotchke, even the fake handbag, are nothing more than souvenirs, temporary and symbolic. When Sam Jacob points out that the forms ‘have almost no intrinsic value, formed from cheap, easily moulded materials, mass-produced and made without craftsmanship. They have no vernacular connection to the place that they celebrate’, 5 he may as well be speaking of the placelessness of the Canal Street environment. Yet the criticism doesn’t make it any less special. In a way, it is an altogether lucid symbol of the global consumer chain. In a city of big architecture, strong objects that are absolutely tied to its place, Canal Street has a right to be ‘weak’ yet remain as resilient and nebulous as the capitalist consumer urbanism from which it derives. ~
It is this last link of the production chain that offers further depth into the Canal Street phenomenon – that along the consumer supply line that has taken us around the world, it ends here with those who close the deal: the Africans, the West Indians, and the Chinese immigrants who push the product. In the world of haute-couture fashion with personal shoppers and professional buyers, personalities with their own client books, it’s an apt symmetry that their doppelgangers are the fleeting new immigrants to New York. Chinese women and African men line the streets, the former to the east of Broadway, the latter to the west – there are many of them, some are mobile but most are stationary, and no single person shares an affiliation to one product. Their numbers are high, but to the many that traverse Canal regularly, they become invisible, unnoticed, one part of the Canal Street ecosystem. They, like the temporary buildouts, like the products and the spaces of Canal, are interchangeable – they belong to a rhizomatic network that is constantly shifting in the open, a member of a decentralised structure that consists of transients: of the tourists that flock to the these streets, of the handbags that travelled the world, of the vendors making a living, that ultimately come to define an amorphous, pseudo-ad hoc urban form that responds to the environment, the market and the authorities.
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5 Jacob, Sam. ‘Viesdendorp Syndrome: Overwhelmed by the Geographies of Sensation, Memory, and Plenty’ Perspecta 41.Grand Tour (2008)
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