I-95 Punctuation

Up ahead, police and ambulances attend to an accident no one can see. All of us here, in rush hour traffic, are miles away from the scene of the crash. We don’t know what happened. We look at each other. We move a few yards every few seconds. The day is almost over.

At this pace, I-95 changes. Something as obvious and single-purposed as a highway now begins to reveal a certain character. Some of the exit signs have layers of graffiti splayed across their backs. Someone climbed a metal pole above the highway to write SKRIK in black spray paint. A mile or so down the road SKRIK also wrote on the cement wall bordering the Sun Pass lane.  Some writing is more difficult and more dangerous than others.

Further down the highway, maybe a mile, I took this picture from my car of a strange kind of architecture. This device, a rusted cone with bent edges cut with a hacksaw, stands against the blue sky like a hardened flag. I immediately try to imagine various ways I could climb up the pole to somehow avoid being cut open, but these jagged metal teeth provide no room for maneuver. This architecture’s argument quickly becomes a convincing admonition. No doubt SKRIK saw this pole. She did not tag this exit sign.

           

I think of the neighborhood below this highway. Opa-locka means “high land” in one Native American dialect. In 2004, Opa-locka had the highest rate of violent crime for any city in the entire country. Much like SKRIK, highways also function as urban statements with profound messages. These two darkened holes literally function as a kind of punctuation mark, as exclamation points on the violent way in which architecture is so powerfully used to silence certain voices.