Building Characters

Abstract

Building Characters arrive at City Hall Park from all boroughs of New York City, some on foot, some by bus, some by car, and others by train. Like leviathans in the mist, they materialize at the Park's gates. They muscle themselves into the existing City Hall Loop in such prodigious numbers that, at times, they climb and topple over one another to arrive, or more accurately, grasp in futility at its center point. In the ever-growing mass characters are forced so violently by the writhing number at their backs that they begin to merge--deforming around, into and amongst one another. Atriums, gallery vaults, 'fancy stairs' and grottos replace their innards as their individuality is subsumed--contorting, and folding--into the gelatinous whole. Others, content to simply observe the writhing corpusculature or too timid to mount a bid for the middle hover around the fringes of the Loop. The wallflower-homunculi thus find themselves colonized by intrepid passing folk: cafes, pavilion-shelters, and offices emerge, and in one particularly strange case, a small storage area housing reflective, multi-colored spherical garden ornaments and battery powered light up plastic wood sprites affixed to the ends of long, thin plastic rods, dragged out begrudgingly twice a year, once on Samhain and once on Beltane. Building Characters make up this building's character.