Thurston Saw

In poor neighborhoods, history is a bit more legible, more transparent. Houses are less often painted, signs less often replaced, while abandoned buildings experience a long afterlife of slow decay. Within their walls, the artifacts of the distant-recent past sometimes remain for decades, suspended in time even as time accelerates for the world around.

I remember visiting an empty Providence mill building in the mid-2000s with a friend. It was built in the 19th century and housed Thurston Manufacturing Co., maker of precision cutting saws, until its closure some time in the early 1990s. In the top floor office was a dried-up potted palm tree next to an orange armchair, the floor strewn with business letters and squatters' clothes. In a room nearby was a desk cluttered with blueprints and boiler reports going back to the 1930s. Amazing, that such ephemera could survive for more than a decade after abandonment. To be in a place like that, one feels the arrest of time, and it is a shock to the senses. Adjacent to Thurston Saw was Interstate 95, from which the angry drone of cars tearing by offered a perfect counterpoint to the stillness inside.

Thurston Saw has not made the switch to digital record keeping.
Thurston Saw does not accept web-based orders.
Thurston Saw does not enforce a no-smoking policy.

So what does this have to do with the South Bronx? Both the mills of Providence, RI and the neighborhoods of the South Bronx were casualties of the regional transition from an industrial to a 'knowledge-based' economy, along with the flight of jobs and capital to the suburbs. In both places, the built environment ceased to function as a dynamic symbol of progress, in effect ceasing to mark the passage of time-as-progress. The clock stopped for thirty years or so, and even now a few blocks remain unchanged from 'the bad old days.' To walk them is to slip through a crack in the edifice of our 'homogenous, empty time.' To do so without having to takes spirit, like opening a letter from a collections agency.

photo by Richard Townley.

The Global Village

Rap engages time in a unique and radical way, both through lyrical content (which invokes the past) and sampling (which appropriates its material artifacts). The influence of African diasporic cultures (especially Jamaican) and the creative possibilities opened by recording technologies are defining features of the music, and these are well known.

Less appreciated, I think, are the external adversarial forces that worked upon African-American culture in the early days of hip hop, forces that were deflected or 'flipped' into aesthetic practices. I am thinking of the postindustrial landscape of the South Bronx, where the physical decay and planned destruction of neighborhoods exposed strata of history and memory in brief flashes preceding total loss. It was a “permanent state of emergency,” and for young people, the formulation of a cultural-artistic response was a matter of life and death.

When I see pictures of the South Bronx in its saddest days, I am reminded of Walter Benjamin's 'angel of history':

There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned towards the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at its feet. Th angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows towards the sky. What we call progress is this storm.

The desire to “awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed”—this is the source of hip hop's continued vitality, and as the storm spreads to the new slums of the 'global village,' it is no wonder that the human casualties of progress adopt its basic forms.