Erasures
Each time we walk through a city we are constructing our own personal city. As one skims a familiar book, recognizing phrases and sentences read long ago, reading over the choicest parts, the walker traverses the grid of the city editing his own story out of the text spread out in front. The architecture, geography, sounds and texts of the city collage together to create an indelible presence of the city at ground level that is lost at the level of the map. Every point on the grid has a story, it just has to be made legible. The richness of the stories lessens as one moves out from the private epicenter toward the public sphere. Family histories, everyday conversations give way to historical plaques and markers as one moves from the inside of a building out into the street.
Some cities are better at erasing themselves than others. Many cities seem to be built anew each morning at sunrise. The marks of each day are erased or made illegible. Stories are forgotten, and those that did remember them pass away. Telling the history of a place when no ruin or artifact remains becomes very different with time. At some point all one can satisfy themselves with is pointing to the place where the erasure took place, without ever discovering what it was that was erased.
