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Claes Oldenburg's The Street and Urban Renewal in Greenwich Village, 1960

Claes Oldenburg's installation The Street—exhibited twice in Greenwich Village in 1960—used banal, trashlike materials to depict pedestrians, cars, street signs, and other elements of a New York City streetscape. This essay considers the work as a means of thinking about the possibilities for and limitations on the city, in view of the giant and highly controversial program of modernist urban renewal then reshaping much of New York. The essay argues that The Street offered a negative reflection on the effort to render a newly abstracted urban environment through renewal, insisting instead on the city's obdurate materiality.