eRuv: A Street History in Semacode by Elliott Malkin
“In 1907, Rabbi Yehoshua Siegel, a renowned Talmudic authority who had immigrated to the Lower East Side from Poland, published Eruv V’Hotza’ah, in which he wrote: ‘With regard to the city of New York, where we are presently living, the issue has come before the trembling ones that it is possible to permit carrying on Shabbat throughout the East Side. The argument is that the water which surrounds it on three sides should be considered a complete wall because of its depth. The fourth wall is a door frame like none other: the elevated iron pathway which stretches the length of the city, from one end to the other, from the water of the southern tip, South Ferry, to the water at the northern tip, without any interruption to Harlem.’ The eruv was soon refuted by other prominent rabbis and rejected en masse by Lithuanian Jews who also lived on the Lower East Side at the time.
eRuv is a digital graffiti project installed along the route of the former Third Avenue elevated train line in lower Manhattan. The train line, dismantled in 1955, was more than just a means of transport; it was part of an important religious boundary – an eruv – for a Hasidic community on the old Lower East Side. Using semacodes, the former boundary is reconstructed and mapped back onto the space of the city. Pedestrians with camera phones can then access location-specific historical content linked through the semacodes.”
(via archinect)
See also:
Hack Sabbath: Hasidic Jews are way cooler than you, and it has to do with something called ‘psychogeography’ by Julian Dibbell
Notes on Social Architectures as Art Forms by Sal Randolph