Here’s this billboard in Hunters Point advertising postcards. “Pick up US Postcards. available 24/7. 101 Hall by PT. Office.” Not even proper grammar, just this broken commercial poetry.
Postcards… that weird artifact of tourism and displacement, that thing you send to prove you were somewhere else, somewhere better, somewhere worth documenting. “Wish you were here”, the ultimate lie of the postcard, because if you really wished they were there, you wouldn’t have left without them.
You live in the city and all the time there are signs telling you what to do and billboards trying to sell you something.
Banksy
And the location, Hunters Point. Not some scenic vista. Not Fisherman’s Wharf or the Golden Gate Bridge. A neighborhood that’s been systematically poisoned, redlined, pushed to the margins, a place where the Navy left behind more contamination than opportunity. What kind of postcards are you picking up at 101 Hall by the PT Office? Views of the Superfund site? Greetings from environmental racism?
I put that Banksy quote underneath the photo, but the billboard itself is doing something Banksy could never touch, it’s accidentally profound. It’s not trying to be art. It’s just there, this weird little commercial enterprise hawking nostalgia technology in a neighborhood that everyone’s trying to forget exists.
Available 24/7. Because insomnia and displacement don’t keep business hours.
That’s the thing about the margins, all the infrastructure of normalcy shows up broken, half-translated, eternally open because there’s nowhere else to be. The billboard’s not trying to sell you anything, really. It’s just marking territory in the only language capitalism knows how to speak, even when there’s almost nothing left to say.