Business turnover is constant in every neighborhood in New York: bakeries replace Mexican restaurants; glasses stores replace butcher shops. In his essay, “City Limits,” Colson Whitehead wrote about this change as a natural condition of New York. But what if the experience of being in a neighborhood––the experience of that very change––has itself changed? With the rise of e-commerce, social media, and the Covid-19 pandemic, have New Yorkers begun approaching the storefronts in their neighborhoods differently? We have created a database of all the storefront businesses in New York City from 2010-Present using publicly available business data. To create the database, we used business licenses and inspections, which we acquired through OpenData NY and by filing FOIL requests. To understand our database in a humanistic way, we will augment it with actual materials on the meaning of these places for local residents––what they experience and what they remember. We are collecting these personal experiences of New York Storefronts through an interactive website and interviews. The website provides the info from the database in an easily accessible forum and will solicit written responses and photos from users in response to historical location data. A pilot program in the spring and summer of 2022 targets the website and interviews to a four-block radius of Manhattan. With residents’ permission, we will post the interviews next to profiles of the businesses from 2010-2021 on our website.
Researcher: William Swett, Ignacio Lopez Gaffney, and Jeremy Ben-Meir