I am studying in Columbia University. I go to the Wallach Gallery in the Lenfest Center for the Arts, there is a square in front of it, it feels familiar. I see the sign, the updated one, a bunch of chairs on a black square on a steel sign.
I go to google maps, scroll back through time.
The sign appears in March 2023
NYC.gov outlines the legislation on signage:
Additionally, all new and existing POPS are now required to post public space signage per the standards specified by DCP. DCP updated the POPS logo in 2019, which now must be included on such signage. The provision of clear, visible, and readable signage is essential to identify POPS and provide information about the POPS, such as the hours of access, required amenities, and the names of those responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of the POPS.
I go up to the 8th floor, look out the window, the coloured chairs are in a seemingly scattered formation. I go the next day, I take a photo out the window of the 8th floor. The chairs have moved, nobody is sitting in them. I try to visualise the information, what privately owned public spaces feel like, the data is the chairs moving, how people interact here.
The opening of the MFA thesis show is on the 26th of April. I am standing in a space that one of the students has designed, looking out of the window onto the POPS below as students place a long black tarp on the floor of the POPS. “Free Palestine”
One Public Safety Officer arrives within three minutes, and is joined by five more over the course of the next three minutes. They instruct the students to remove the tarp from Columbia’s privately owned public space. A standoff ensures, professors walk out to ask what is going on. The boundary of the POPS stretches just 5 metres beyond where the tarp is lying, but to any passersby the space is all the same; open, public. Later, one of the students tells me that the first public safety officer quietly whispered to them: “This is private, but that is public.” He pointed to just beyond the boundary of the POPS. The students move the banner. The public safety personnel leave.
Three weeks later, one of the students is barred from entering the gallery where I had stood before, taking photos from above of the POPS. They tell me they are unsure if they are even allowed in the POPS anymore. They are told if they enter Columbia property, it is grounds for arrest by the NYPD - the public becomes private becomes public. A Columbia student could be arrested by the NYPD for standing on a portion of Privately Owned Public Space, a space which seems public but is private and privately surveilled but can invite the NYPD on to police for them.
I come back to class, I layer each image over the other, the amount of time it took for public safety to enforce the rules.
