An Invitation to Walk within Walls: A Salt Shed

Abstract

Across New York City lie mountains of road salt brought to its shores from mines as far as Tarapacá, Chile. These migrant minerals spend most of their days in sheds across the five boroughs until they are dispersed atop the city’s grid in anticipation of inclement weather. Before the salt disappears snow and ice though, salt mountains are themselves disappeared by a maintenance infrastructure that keeps them inaccessible to the public. “Out of view, they die a second death,” as Michael Jakob writes; road salt, in fact, is rendered visible only where it is absent—in the piles of snow and patches of ice that accumulate on the asphalt. An Invitation to Walk within Walls calls attention to the city’s mountains of rock salt by revisiting a salt shed on Pier 52 that was demolished in 2016 amidst the gentrification of the Meatpacking District. As opposed to the sanitized, idyllic visions of New York City’s waterfronts where traces of industry allude to a nostalgic heritage, this project fuses industry and leisure, enabling a broad public to circulate within the shed’s skin. In this surface tangent where walls contain salt and people, visitors behold shed’s decaying, rusting, and leaking, admire salt’s gradual consumption of the building, and witness the maintenance work upon which the city rests. On a site where disappearance is experienced in more ways than one, this intervention makes salt unmistakably present and invites it to escape, and eventually conquer its shed.