Explaining The Spring Street Project:
“At the corner of Spring Street and Varick in fashionable Soho Manhattan, a temporal and spatial rupture was exposed between an unassuming car park and neighboring building. This ‘no-place’ became ‘some-place’ in the winter of 2006, when burial vaults and their contents were unearthed during construction of Trump Tower Soho. Rediscovered on historical maps and in archival records was the Spring Street Presbyterian Church (1811-1863). This was a gathering place for people from diverse ethnic, racial, and class backgrounds, led by pastors preaching a radical abolitionist stance. It was also a target of mobs during the 1834 race riots, when the church was occupied and vandalized. While a city in chaos above, quietly resting below were the corporeal remains of some 200 people associated with this unique congregation. Active for only about 30 years (ca. 1820-1850), the burial vaults would, over time, fade into no-place as things came and went in the alleyway above. Yet rather than firm boundaries in time and topography, [a collaborative exhibit at Syracuse University consider[ed] permeable borders and transformative processes of experience and memory. Presenting the work of New York City artist Cora Glasser alongside the historical artifacts that inspired some of these pieces, [the] exhibit [drew] on her previous work with “voids” – absences, gaps, or that which is unseen or unknowable – to explore modern perspectives of the past.” – Shannon A. Novak, Phd, Associate Professor, Dept. of Anthropology, Syracuse University