Neighborhood codes

Having just written that item the other day about QR codes, I couldn’t help but be intrigued by this sticker in the Lower East Side. Mild investigation indicates that the relevant project, Semapedia, is guided by the idea of sticking code chunks like this in various physical spaces, where you can scan them with your (tech-appropriate) phone, and get information from Wikipedia. Directions for creating Semapedia tags, and thus a fuller explanation, are here.

So in this case you’d get the Wikipedia entry on Loisaida. Or maybe just material taken from that entry. Here’s what the URL on that sticker delivers, and I assume it’s what you’d get on your phone: link.

I think this also caught my eye because I’ve always been interested in the fading of the term Loisaida, which to me had a kind of socio-political undertone to it, in favor of the more hipster-friendly and trend-ready shorthand, LES. Maybe ABC No Rio is the last vestige of Loisaida and Alife Rivington Club, practically next door, is, for better or worse, the epicenter of LES. Anyway, I can’t remember ever hearing anyone under, say, 30, refer to the Lower East Side as Loisaida. And at the moment I first saw this sticker, I was on my way to dinner at one of the new “boutique” hotels that are part of the 21st century LES experience. Now that I think about it, once the boutique-hotel aesthetic takes over completely (and even brand-underground pioneers like Alife get run out in favor of, I don’t know, Marc Jacobs or whatever), it will be safe to trot out Loisaida again, as a kind of retro-authenticity signifier. Maybe there will even be a hotel with that very name.

On the other hand, the reason that my snapshot here is so terrible is that this sticker happened to be on the edge of a small, vacant lot that was teeming with rats. So some piece of the pre-boutique Lower East Side still exists.

Here is the Semapedia Flickr pool, and here are all Flickr photos with a Semapedia tag.