Tom Wilson caught sight of a lumpy, makeshift concrete ramp in front of a bodega called Ultimate State Deli in Brooklyn one afternoon. Wilson is a photographer who teaches earth science in New York City public schools. He had passed Ultimate’s ramp a million times without registering its existence.
But that afternoon, in the slanting sun, the ramp’s grooves and contours reminded him of a photograph he’d seen in a textbook of a glacier.
Spilling from a doorway to bridge the height gap to the sidewalk for hand trucks, strollers and wheelchairs, the roundish ramps can bring to mind glaciers …
… or tongues or clamshells or lava …
… or ziggurats or thumbs or ladles of pancake batter spreading on a griddle. The ramp is a Rorschach test.
These ramps are not typically built to meet city regulations that apply to many bigger businesses, with all their rules about materials, incline, width, landing areas and so on. There are exemptions for small businesses, and clearly an informal system has evolved. Wilson and I visited bodegas and other small businesses on the Lower East Side one morning and found no owner or employee who claimed to know when or how the ramps arrived, as if they had been there forever, like Manhattan schist.
“Tactical urbanism” is the term of art.
It describes a whole universe of homegrown, under-the-radar architecture contrived to fix everyday problems in a city, like entering a grocery store whose entrance sits a step above the sidewalk. For shopkeepers, installing the ramp is a boon for business. For those hand truck deliveries or customers in wheelchairs, it can be a godsend.
For Wilson, the earth science teacher who was also the unit photographer for his brother’s HBO series, “How To With John Wilson,” his Road-to-Damascus moment in front of Ultimate State Deli happened five years ago. Since then, around the city, sometimes at red lights during bike rides to school or back, he has photographed the ramps he passes, with their various oddities and accretions, making, in effect, ramp portraits.
He told me he had come to regard these ramps as “urban geology,” comparing one ramp’s imprints of shoes in drying cement to fossils, or splatters of discarded gum on another to meteorite craters. Their wear and tear and layers of concrete represent to him analogous markers of geologic time.
Geology aside, the photographs are deadpan, modest love letters to these messy little avatars of the urban compact.
“What’s beautiful about cities are the details that illustrate the care a community shows for its residents,” Xian Horn, a disability rights advocate and journalist in New York, told me. I had called her for a thumbs up or down on the ramps.
“People say they can’t afford to make their businesses and other places accessible and welcoming to everybody because it’s too expensive,” Horn said. “Assuming they’re safe, bodega ramps prove there is always a way. They should be celebrated.”
The city does not keep specific figures on complaints about the ramps, a representative for New York’s Commission on Human Rights told me. I had anticipated some blowback from other disability experts but found they agreed with Horn.
“My wheelchair weighs more than 400 pounds,” said Emily Ladau, the author of “Demystifying Disability.” “One step can be the difference between my ability to enter a store or not. A corner bodega may not have the financial means to build a ramp that meets all the legal and financial requirements we’ve created, which can become obstacles to access.”
“So if a small-business owner finds a workaround,” Ladau said, “I am the last person to complain.”
She likened the bodega ramp to the curb cut, that triangle carved out of street corners to allow wheelchair users to navigate the six or so vertical inches between pavement and sidewalk. Mandated decades ago by the Americans With Disabilities Act, the curb cut has since made life easier for everyone.
Bodega ramps are their vernacular cousins, Ladau says.
Whether you regard them as unsightly, or as urban proxies for Elephant Foot Glacier in Greenland, is up for debate just like everything else in New York.
They can also remind you of wallflowers at a prom: ungainly but hopeful. Those personalizing flourishes of color and scoring I mentioned earlier are akin to messages in bottles tossed in the sea that wash up on the shores of Bushwick Avenue and Delancey Street.
The evolving city is a collective enterprise, they seem to say.
And we all leave our marks.
Photographs via Nicolaj Larsen/Shutterstock (glacier); USGS (lava).
Produced by Jolie Ruben and Tala Safie
Michael Kimmelman is The Times’s architecture critic and the founder and editor-at-large of Headway, a team of journalists focused on large global challenges and paths to progress. He has reported from more than 40 countries and was previously chief art critic.
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