Screening of Purple film at Queens Museum-1/11/15 at 3:30 PM

Adam Purple overlooking The Garden of Eden.  Photograph by Harvey Wang, 1982

Adam Purple and The Garden of Eden, the short film featuring my photographs and Amy Brost's interview with Adam Purple, will be screened at a special event sponsored by 596 Acres at the Queens Museum Panorama.

Taken from their website: 596 Acres will present all 155+ urban renewal plans that the City has ever adopted in an intervention directly on the museum's Panorama of the City of New York, realizing the online Urban Reviewer map on a 1:1200 scale of the 9,335 square foot Panorama.  

New York City began to adopt “urban renewal plans” in 1949 to get federal funding to acquire land, relocate the people living there, demolish the structures and make way for new public and private development. The legacy of these neighborhood master plans remains active across the city, from sites like Lincoln Center to the many vacant lots cleared in East New York and Bushwick for projects that were never completed. Even after federal funding for the program was cut in 1974, New York City continued to adopt renewal plans for neighborhoods - 82 plan areas, where the city has eminent domain power to take private property for the public purpose of eliminating blight and economic “under-performance,” came into being between 1975 and the present.