Violette Franchi

Starrett City documents an intersection facing a rapid urban transition in East New York, one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. This visual work revolves around sold dreams in an American landscape made of large scale housing. In a country built on promises, Starrett City uses a typical intersection between Flatlands and Pennsylvania Avenues to look at housing as one of the broken pledges. The area includes New York City’s biggest church (the Christian Cultural Center), a motel turned into a homeless shelter, a gas station among many car-related businesses, and the nation’s largest federally subsidized apartment complex. Starrett City is home to more than 15,000 people spread across forty-six buildings.

Starrett City ties together past and future in a place of multiple identities, of realities that don’t look like they do in commercials, urban plans or the news. The work looks at loneliness, contemporary city dwellers, countless windows, homelessness, pride and everyday odysseys. Through photographs, a short film, archives and streets’ ephemera, this project looks at homes and some nation’s symbols in order to question the American dream and whether it is accessible to all Americans or not.