Main Space
By Being Empty, and Saved That Way, Five Blocks Halt Progress (April 30 - June 7, 2009)
Triple Candie is pleased to present an exhibition celebrating the Forrent Land Trust, an urban land trust dedicated to the preservation of empty storefronts in West Harlem. The Trust aims to obtain permanent "for rent" conservation easements on unoccupied storefronts from West 147th Street to 152nd Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenues, and maintain them as is--with "for rent" signs on their facades. If successful, the Trust's land-management initiative will curb predatory commercial development, slow rent hikes, and retard the rapid increase in property values and taxes in the area. The ultimate goal is to preserve the social and cultural fabric of a highly vulnerable community.
The exhibition visualizes the Trust's plans. It includes a large-spray-painted map of the neighborhood and the target properties, a sprawling found-object floor sculpture that reflects on issues of cultural preservation, nearly one hundred photographs of the targeted storefronts--picturing them in the present and ten and twenty years into the future--and an installation that incorporates a sample Conservation Easement, rewritten for the Forrent Land Trust's purposes. The exhibition is an attempt to float an unusual proposal and to help visitors in the neighborhood see the aesthetic benefits of keeping these properties as is.
There is the risk that this massive lock-down on empty properties will only increase demand, resulting in short-term price increases in adjacent properties." Regardless, the Forrent Land Trust's biggest challenge is likely to be legal: it will need to make a convincing argument that the properties in question all have "conservation value" as defined in Section 170 (H)(4)(A) of the Internal Revenue Code. The argument to be employed is that they are "historically important structures" not for any intrinsic value but rather for their significant role they have played over the years in maintaining the area in a state of perpetual under-development.
