Wall Street: The Sad Class of Onlookers Includes All of Us
I’m in a work jail cubicle, 9 sqft. 10:03am. Meet me in the work cube / phone booth. A noise- and life alienating respite from back-to-office. I look out the window onto another brown wall.
I work on Wall Street, right next to the stock exchange. Every day on my way to work there are people taking photos of the Positively Bronze Very-Defiant Girl-sculpture, hordes of tourists in matching tshirt groups crowd her to get a photo. I’m probably in the background of hundreds of these photos.
At the southernmost rounded edge of the city, a deflated bottom pie of asphalt has been weighed down by the burdens of what’s uptown from here. This is Wall Street. Wall Street is a very broken place. Holes in the streets are the size of my skull, streets punctured by heavy trucks. What is Wall Street? What happens at Wall Street?
The logistic idea of feeding Wall Street presents an enormous task. The mere scale of the project for everyone involved, the trucks on the asphalt transporting fresh produce and catering into a dead place, through the narrow and clustered downtown streets.
The thought of a fresh food store in the dense part of FiDi is absurd - yet they’ve opened a new Whole Foods right here on One Wall Street, a watering hole for the people who work in or pass through this part of town. Since we buy ingredients for our shoots there, I practically live in the One Wall Street Whole Foods.
We go out to smoke at the back of our building, the asshole of Wall Street. As you walk out the golden doors you’re met by a wall of humidity and a thick smell of iron. The sun never shines here. Loud, indistinguishable monotonous sounds of machines are coming from all the freight elevators, trucks and other machinery that lines the tall buildings of the street. To reach this street your truck or car has to pass through a gate where dogs smell your car for drugs. This is also the behind of the stock exchange, where suits prefer to be picked up after work in black-tinted cars. Because it’s hell getting down here. Only the most altruistic wealth criminals insist on taking the train and subway downtown from Old Greenwich or Stamford. Wall Street eats not only at the welfare state but also at the sunshine, the sky, the air, the audiovisual.
I take my lunch break at the Whole Foods food court and bump into some old truck driver friends, teamsters from a show that I worked on full-time last year. I sit down to eat with them and they complain that they couldn’t find a single can of coke in all of the two-floor Whole Foods, that they feel crazy. They’re unimpressed. After I finish my small $4.99 tub of broccoli cheddar soup I go back into the store and find them some probiotic coke-flavored sodas.
The area is an overused, extracted piece of land which is on the brink of sinking into the river. All the tourists are confused as to what they came for, if they’ve really arrived and what they are really looking at. All the tour guides must be even more perplexed. This place is shrouded in a public mystery that tourists come to grab a hold of, traveling in confused hordes.
Children, tourists, tour guides, high school kids, regular suits, service workers, ugly dogs; all milling about the bumpy streets and corners of Wall Street.
One morning in September, I am on my way to work and stop to watch a company get listed on the NYSE. The employees have been allotted a small area in front of the stock exchange to celebrate their years of hard work, cordoned off from the public by crowd control fences that shape a rectangle. There’s a DJ playing Bitch Better Have My Money by Rihanna. They are all drinking canned Liquid Death and watching a TV screen, streaming a live video from the inside. The music pauses and loud roars of victory are heard through the speaker system connected to the live-streamed listing happening inside. The amplified TV sounds like a street riot from afar, but closer up the employees are quietly watching the small screen, occasionally applauding and raising their glasses of Liquid Death. After years of hard work, this outdoor street party must be humiliating. I think of how also this class could be mobilized. I look at them looking at the screen.
The truth is that nobody except the select few really know what is going on here in Wall Street, just in the same way that a lot of people aren’t sure why their lives turned out the way they did. The tour guide definitely won’t tell you. In addition, the select few with key fobs to the inside of this place, which may or may not be real, could just be oiling the wheels without understanding their machine’s implication. In fact, a lot of people work very hard to keep Wall Street a mystery and to keep us all perplexed. We are left in a perpetual onlooker state of mind. The sad class of onlookers includes all of us and it’s hard not to be reminded of this when you work at Wall Street.
