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Recalling 1993 by Droga5 (review)

New York City is never lacking in stories or storytellers. Capitalizing on this fact, advertising agency Droga5 came up with Recalling 1993, an interactive narrative companion to the New Museum’s exhibit, NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, dedicated to the city’s art scene as it was twenty years ago. Using the borough of Manhattan’s five thousand payphones as veritable oral history portals, Recalling 1993 allows narrative enthusiasts to call a phone number (1-855-FOR-1993) from any payphone in Manhattan and access a short recorded story about the area they are calling from during 1993. Notable locals from a wide range of industries, including art, music, politics, fashion, and food, recount their lives to create a narrative landscape of NYC as it was two decades past. In these stories, Droga5 managed to offer what most of this city’s numerous historical walking tours cannot, yet so many tourists yearn for: stories of NYC from actual New Yorkers who have experienced it firsthand. The New Museum’s exhibit features artwork first shown twenty years ago, which, as the institution would argue (very convincingly, in fact), was a pivotal moment in cultural and political history. The fifty-two narrators of Recalling 1993 reiterate the implied importance of that year. Indeed, in the recordings, which range in length from ninety seconds to three minutes, a listener gets the sense that many things in New York started (or ended) in 1993—careers, dreams, collaborations, social and political movements, neighborhoods, crime waves, and health crises. Furthermore, the topics of these narratives resonate in present-day New York. For example, David Barton, founder of David Barton Gyms, talks about opening up his first gym in Midtown in 1993. He says, “It was an amazing time in New York. Gyms were few and far between, and the people that I knew—people in night clubs and like downtown kind of scenesters—they wouldn’t be caught dead in a gym. I wanted to make it cool for people to go to the gym” (http://www.recalling1993.com/#). And now, as anyone who has been to the island of Manhattan more recently can attest, gyms here can now be as frequently sighted as pigeons, Starbucks, or frozen yogurt shops. While many of these stories imply that 1993 was a bellwether for the NYC we know today, there are a few other narratives that paint a picture of New York