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Where the Sidewalks End, and the City (Really) Begins
By RACHEL SALTZ
Photo: Willie Davis
Published: September 9, 2010

Read the article below or click here to read it from the New York Times website.

THE city as poem, art piece, happening, living theater: New Yorkers have all experienced their own versions, and the leaders of the conceptual walks that make up Elastic City want to create new ones.

What is a conceptual walking tour? Todd Shalom, Elastic City’s founder and director, said he was “still shaping the vocabulary.” But on a recent outing in Brooklyn, he offered this: “I want to bring poetry off the page and onto the streets.”

The walks go where their creators want to take them. One, in May and June, explored ground zero with a gestalt therapist; another, led by an urban designer, considers homesickness.

The two walks took in Brooklyn — “Centroids and Asphalt” in Bushwick and “Brighton Zaum” in Brighton Beach — sought to retune antennae, to look below the surface and beyond the obvious. And like all good (and bad) living theater, they were participatory, if gently so.

Neil Freeman, 29, an affable urban planner, was the artist in chief of “Centroids and Asphalt.” The walk began on an otherwise unprepossessing corner in Bushwick, which Mr. Freeman explained was the geographic center of New York City. (Centroids, check.)

Bushwick provided a cacophony of signs and wonders: churches galore, boomboxes, traffic, trains rumbling overhead, street life. But Mr. Freeman wasn’t interested in any of that, or in the sociology of the place either.

Instead he wanted to make us aware of what the city is made of. Literally. As in metal, slate, concrete, wood, brick, asphalt. (Check.) And then to think about where those things came from: a quarry, say, or a factory.

He gave the eight of us chalk, and as the walk progressed, we made drawings on the pavement of what we saw: chain-link fences, air-conditioners, animals. It was a bit like being a kid at camp, but unlike the real thing, the other campers were nice, and game too. For me the highlight was visual: a fence pierced with stunted logs that had grown so entwined they were part of it.

Mr. Shalom, 33, who calls himself a sound and text artist, led the “Brighton Zaum” walk in Brighton Beach, which is all about listening. (Talking was discouraged.) To begin, he took our keys. We closed our eyes, and he dropped set after set; the object was to try to identify your own. (I was strangely proud that I guessed mine.) In Babi Yar Triangle park, we made an ugly collage out of trash (gloves and Purell provided) and came up with an unpleasant sound, something between a yodel and a howl, that expressed it.

Zaum is a kind of Russian futurist poetry in which, Mr. Shalom said, “words are holier than what they represent.” In that spirit we scratched a poem in sand at the beach, each person contributing a word or changing someone else’s: “Quick look there’s wonder/If bobbins were under the silver sea.” It may not be ready for the Norton Anthology, but I’ve read worse.

Each tour produced in me moments of impatience and second-guessing. Why this part of the city exactly? But there were also surprises.

In Brighton Beach Mr. Shalom asked us to pair off, one of us leading the other, whose eyes were closed, down the street. My first reaction: No way! But I closed my eyes, and this listening exercise became an experience of time. It stretched, and I felt suspended. When I opened my eyes, I was oddly exhilarated.