The City Reliquary’s show celebrating Stanley Wisniewolski’s eccentric oversize styrofoam icons that once accessorized many Williamsburg storefronts is just the type of quaintly doting showcase of local obscura I’ve come to love about the Reliquary. Thanks to a neighborhood resident who loved the character Wisniewolski’s sculptures gave to storefronts so much that she took the initiative and time to research them, Karen Hudes, a Brooklyn writer, found out the hoisted sculptures were painted styrofoam that had succumbed to the elements after their creator passed away.

I was attracted to a sketch of Grand-Metro Street Improvements by Brooklyn Union Gas and the Saint Nicholas Neighborhood Preservations and Housing Corporation that hung on the wall, prominently featuring Wisniewolski’s icons hanging from storefronts and a neighborhood pennant he also designed. Wisniewolski had worked at Saint Nicholas in an artistic capacity in the 70s and 80s, and was able to provide a distinctive design element for Williamsburg’s retail strips. Many stores hung his three-or-four foot three dimensional mobiles next to their signs for decades: a hammer still hangs outside the Crest hardware store on Metropolitan Avenue.

I spoke with the curator, Karen Hudes, about her inspirations. She noticed the icons when she moved to the neighborhood in the 1990s and was spurred to find out more about them as their numbers dwindled. A cigar icon, hanging from the ceiling at the Reliquary, captured Hudes’ eye for looking intriguingly old (I would say it looks almost deco). It turned out St Nicholas still had several of his icons in their basement, and the city’s Municipal Archive had pictures of many others. I found her research and exhibit to be an inspiration for anyone who’s ever had the passing interest to research a design element or relic of a bygone era seen around town.

I also spoke with one of Wisniewolski’s daughters who was delighted that Karen had taken an interest in her father’s work. Particularly notable at opening night was the lively mix of older longtime Williamsburg residents and the younger artsy urban history wonks, mingling in the gallery and pouring out into the backyard. It turns out the cigar had a reputation of being vaguely phallic, and made a popular picture background among longtime neighborhood residents.

The Vanishing Icons of Metropolitan Avenue: A History of Williamsburg’s Handmade Shop Signs from the 1980s runs through mid-July at the City Reliquary in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It showcases recovered sculptures and pictures of storefronts decorated with Stanley Wisniewolski’s design elements. Looking at the exhibit’s website, the icons don’t really pop as much as the newer high saturation color plastic lettering that many stores pictured now use. But imagining a Williamsburg past when a painted styrofoam sign would really catch your eye reminds us of the details of the built environment that we take for granted, sometimes even after they have vanished from view.

The City Reliquary Museum
370 Metropolitan Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11211

Call 718-782-4842 for opening times.


Jesse Mintz-Roth is a practicing city planner, originally from Berkeley, who now lives in Fort Greene. As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Photographing work by Gabriel "Specter" Reese

As a design professional, I’m used to the concept that communities don’t like change. When I read that the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) was presenting an exhibit to examine how urban planning, eminent domain, and real estate development are affecting Brooklyn’s communities, I was admittedly hesitant about a topic that seems like old news. I’ve read about gentrification so many times in New York City real estate blogs and academic urban planning literature that it’s become the implied context of any discussion of any New York City neighborhood, and especially brownstone Brooklyn. More to the point, today it’s hard to imagine a New York City not in flux.

As a forum for twenty artists to comment on gentrification, the exhibition accommodates tones that run the gamut from nostalgia to hostility. As an amateur photographer myself, I wish I had the guts to visit the condemned buildings in Nathan Kensinger’s photographs, which inspire a nostalgic feeling for an old working class Brooklyn that’s being cleared away to create new canvasses for real estate developers. On the adjacent wall, Jess Levey photographs some of those new developments next to older residential buildings, and in one case satirically superimposes an image evoking Hitchcock’s The Birds on top as if to question whether the adjacent old and new are really as bad as we thought they’d be.

Neighborhood racial composition is, I think, a dicier topic. On one hand it’s hard not to recommend seeing Gabriel “Specter” Reese’s pissed off oeuvre that includes a sign, “Don’t move to Crown Heights,” and a video/still set connecting the political Buy Black movement to black displacement. On the other hand, some of the other artists who comment on race either don’t present a holistic picture, or depict a seemingly dated reaction. Josh Bricker altered several young children’s toys from multi-color, multi-shape, and multi-track at one end to an entirely all-white single-track single-shape version as his sculpture moves across the floor. While toys conjure young families as gentrifiers, I don’t think the color to colorless crescendo is a fair depiction since no New York City neighborhood is entirely homogeneous, and even if he’s making that argument as a trend it’s similarly unfair to brand the starting point as heterogeneous. Another intriguing media choice is Rosamond King’s pile of fortune tellers (the folded papers that children play with, which museum goers are encouraged to pick up and open) stashed in a corner of the room, like trash on a sidewalk. This made me think of the fortune tellers and tarot card reading storefronts on neighborhood retail streets in Brooklyn that are likely on the decline. But the text of her work, “Gentrification is…,” feels simplistic. Sure gentrification is artists and money and bike lanes and sour feelings about rich white people moving in, but in 2010, now that gentrification has been happening here for years, aren’t we having more complex or nuanced responses?

(Fort Greene in) Sarah Nelson Wright's "Locations and Dislocation"

What I was hoping to see more of, which is in the minority among the artworks, is what artists think about gentrification as a force of active change now that it’s no longer a surprise. Sarah Nelson Wright presents an abstract multicolored set of lines that track the paths of gentrifiers and gentrifyees as they move over a map of Brooklyn that we can’t see. She confided that the area where most of the lines cross (that isn’t labeled) is Fort Greene. Her statement describes the lines as illustrating a poetry to their movement, that I, as a city planner, want to know more about.

But perhaps the best thing about the opening night to me was how packed the museum was, and the diverse composition of the crowd. That’s one of the things I like most about Fort Greene: there are still bars and museums and restaurants with unusually mixed crowds. Fort Greene is a gentrification “success story” in part because it has maintained a large black population, but less discussed is how that black population has become more middle class and also attracted itinerant young black professionals just like the more visible white ones, both of which contribute to make its retail corridors vibrant. This can’t be lost on a ten year old non-traditional African art museum that shares its floor with the local business improvement district. As New York City’s population continues to grow, responses to successive waves of gentrification will certainly be ripe for future artistic exploration.

Photos by Jesse Mintz-Roth. As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Jesse Mintz-Roth is a practicing city planner, originally from Berkeley, who now lives in Fort Greene.