What are you complaining about? If you're a New Yorker, it's often
about noise and trash and occasionally about politics or morals.
Those are some of the concerns expressed over the past 300 years by
citizens writing to their mayor, as unearthed by an artist recently who
mined the city's archives to create The New York City Museum of Complaint.
The museum is actually a tabloid newspaper reproducing 31 letters from
1751 to 1973, currently being distributed in city parks. Some letters are
elegantly handwritten, others typed, and all of them complain about
something.
"Some of them are on the verge of paranoia,
others are on the verge of genius," said Matthew Bakkom, the artist who
created the project.
The city has preserved complaints as far back as 1700, when the
American colonies were under British rule. Bakkom discovered the archive
while doing historical research and decided these disaffected voices from the past needed to be heard.
"It just seemed to me something very vital and very original and very
striking."
The first in the collection, from 1751, seeks compensation for a series
of ills. "The report of the small pox being in this city hinders the
country people from coming to market," Andrew Ramsey wrote.
A 1900 letter on corruption from the president of the Citizens'
Progressive League decries avarice: "The only thing purely 'American' that
I can find in New York City, after many years' search, is the abnormally
developed spirit of money getting."
The 1930s are represented by five letters, including one from 1935 that
seeks a change in the law so "that girls in the burlesque shows in New
York would be allowed to display their charms without more interference of
the police."
Bakkom has a few favorites, such as one from the London woman Mary
Elizabeth Cook who, calling herself an attractive brunette of 29, wrote in
1949: "Could you possibly help me find an American husband."
"I can send photographs," she added.
It was leaked to the press and produced a spate of letters from lonely
people looking for mates, Bakkom
said.
(Agencies)
