Community Corner
Say Goodbye To This Ellis Island Mural By Street Artist JR
The photo mural installed in TriBeCa last year is slowly disappearing.
TRIBECA, NY — The massive TriBeCa mural installed by the street artist JR last year is slowly disappearing from its home.
White paint has start to cover the bottom of the mural, as first noticed by the Tribeca Citizen. Eventually the view of the wall, which is on the side of a building at 102 Franklin St., will be obscured by a new building being built on the lot next door. When JR, the internationally renowned street artist, put up the giant 1908 photo of immigrant children in July 2016, he intended for it to remain on display through August of last year, according to City Realty. (For more information on this and other neighborhood stories, subscribe to Patch to receive daily newsletters and breaking news alerts.)
The photo, which was installed by plastering pieces of the image onto the side of the building, was put up as part of the artist's larger exhibit "Unframed Ellis Island." JR is famous for plastering black-and-white images on the exteriors of city structures. The wall at 102 Franklin St. had previously displayed a different JR mural of a ballerina.
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Watch a time-lapse of the Ellis Island image being installed over the fragments of the ballerina image:
Find out what's happening in Tribeca-FiDifor free with the latest updates from Patch.
JR's mural on Franklin Street was a teaser for a full exhibition on Ellis Island. The exhibit featured 25 additional photos, most about 100 years old, featuring images of immigrants moving to the U.S. through Ellis Island. JR plastered the photos on abandoned buildings on the south side of the island.
'When I started working on ‘Ellis,’ the refugee crisis had not yet reached its current peak,” JR told the New Yorker in 2015. "I look for what’s often missing in today’s media coverage. I want to find the story behind each person who left his or her country. I want to know what made them leave everything and everyone behind, even when they knew they’d never be able to come back. It takes so much courage. There were immigrants in Ellis a hundred years ago, there are migrants now, and there will be some in a hundred years, so we have to do what we can to try to relate to each individual story."
Soon to come at 100 Franklin St is a brand new luxury building, which will feature multiple stories of residential homes as well as ground-floor retail space.
JR did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment from Patch.
Lead image via Ciara McCarthy / Patch.
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