| "Canal Street Canal" is a mass-produced postcard that was originally shown in a side-related exhibition on Canal Street. The card was sold by vendors along Canal Street in New York City alongside the postcards usually sold to tourists. Canal Street takes its name from a small drainage ditch that replaced a natural stream in lower Manhattan in the late eighteenth century. Prior to that transformation, a proposal was made to convert the stream into a shipping canal and the area into a commercial harbor. The postcard, instead of providing visitors to New York City with a souvenir view of Canal Street as it is, imagines an alternative past, implicitly asking if it is possible to be nostalgic for something that never was. |
