Imagine this: You're whizzing down the Crosstown Expressway, cozy and isolated in your car, far above the mess of urban life below. Suddenly you see what looks like a huge gateway ahead — a series of canopies and billboards over and around the roadway, covered with moving images. On one surface, you see children playing jump rope under a freeway overpass. Above them, text says, "39% of homeless people are children. Support H.R. 1102 to establish a housing trust fund." On others, you see an announcement for a meeting of public housing residents, a lone figure dancing under the overpass, a series of photographs of old men playing dominoes in an empty lot, and film footage of children dodging cars as they try to cross a busy street, with text urging the city to put up a traffic light.
Art, performance, protest, civic life, politics: These are the varieties of free speech citizens might employ in this team project, which combines in-your-face free expression with the revival of an urban dead zone. It employs the underside of the Lee Roy Selmon Crosstown Expressway as a gathering place where pedestrians can communicate with the occupants of the cars above using apparatus that would generate projections and LED-animated messages for a series of huge billboards. "We're trying to pull cars and people together," says architect Sean Williams, "so instead of driving mindlessly by, you become aware of the city and of the people below."
The part of the expressway Williams would use is near the Hillsborough County school administration building at the southeastern end of downtown, because, he says, the group wanted to connect the project with a public building, and that area is the gateway from the Channel District to downtown, the city's would-be focal point.
The elevated roadway provides readymade shelter from sun and rain, and the project has a certain poetic justice: It reclaims for civic use an area devastated by the expressway, and it gives the ability to communicate on a grand scale to the people who end up occupying the poverty zones created around expressways. It also turns the table on the automobile, subjecting motorists to the whims of pedestrians for a change.
This article appears in Nov 3-9, 2004.