City Critic
Invasion of the Pop-Ups: Time for a Smackdown
Stan Honda/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
UBIQUITOUS Pop-ups have included a bowling alley in Grand Central Terminal.
By NEIL GENZLINGER
Published: August 12, 2011
Somebody get me a large mallet.
Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
The East Village outpost of a Brooklyn restaurant.
There’s an epidemic in this town that seems to have reached crisis proportions in recent weeks, and it cries out for a whack-a-mole-style response. This has turned into the Summer of the Pop-Up.
Pop-ups — temporary business or cultural enterprises that materialize in empty storefronts, vacant lots and such, flaunting their own ephemerality — are hardly new, but suddenly they are everywhere. So are the news releases announcing them, which is the first clue that this phenomenon has lost any guerrilla chic it might once have had.
Roberta’s, the revered Brooklyn restaurant, currently has a pop-up version of itself in the East Village, associated with the mobile BMW Guggenheim Lab on urban life. Nearby, the Alphabet City Dolly Film Festival was scheduled for this weekend, billing itself as “a pop-up pub crawl and movie marathon.” (If “pop-up” and “pub crawl” seem to you to be a contradiction in terms, you are not alone.) Someone put a temporary bowling alley in Grand Central Terminal the other day for a teenagers’ competition, and same-sex weddings were performed last month in pop-up chapels in Central Park.
For a study in just how out of control this phenomenon is, stop by the northern end of the High Line park at West 30th Street.
As you come down from the park, an ugly stretch of blacktop (or, to quote the park’s Web site, “a vibrant and diverse gathering space for the neighborhood and the city at large”) is home to a pop-up food court called the Lot, which materialized a few months ago. Beside the Lot is a pop-up roller-skating rink sponsored by Uniqlo, a Japanese clothing concern. And now, beside the pop-up skating rink, two cube-shaped stores have popped up. Last weekend they were selling T-shirts and cashmere sweaters.
That’s right, a pop-up has sprouted a pop-up, which has in turn sprouted two more pop-ups. Whack, whack, whack, whack.
I’m not saying that pop-ups can’t be worthy.
Pop-Up SoHo on Wooster Street, an art exhibition staged by an outfit called the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, has compelling stuff in it, some of it by young people from a program at the Hetrick-Martin Institute.
The institute promotes a kind of tolerance for alternative versions of sexuality that did not exist a few decades ago, a contrast that was startlingly evident on Tuesday night when the pop-up hosted an evening featuring performances by the students: poetry, plays, even a fashion show.
As the students performed, on a wall nearby was an artwork called “Sip-In” by Tim McMath depicting a protest in 1966 by three gay men challenging a discriminatory passage in regulations governing liquor service. The New York Times put this headline on its article about the protest: “3 Deviates Invite Exclusion by Bars.” Sheesh.
So, no, it’s not that pop-ups are inherently evil. My objection is, in part, to the term itself, and its sudden ubiquity. So many people are tossing it around now that it has achieved “hipster” status: that is, as with that word, merely using it labels you a shameless bandwagon-jumper.
And who picked this term, anyway? I’m not sure which usage came first, but why continue to label something with a phrase that also describes the second-worst thing on the Internet, the pop-up ad?
Computer aficionados knew better when they went searching for a name for the No. 1 worst thing on the Internet. “Hmm, we need a way to describe this gremlin that’s destroying our computers. What word has really negative connotations in the real world? I know: ‘virus.’ ” Perfect.
But when the tables were turned, the mental calculation went inexplicably awry. “Hmm, what phrase can I use to make people want to come spend money at my temporary T-shirt cube? I know; I’ll pick something that annoys the heck out of everyone who has ever touched a computer keyboard: ‘pop-up.’ ” It’s akin to naming your skin-care salon Leprosy.
Beyond the annoyance factor in the term itself, though, I’m concerned about the effect the pop-up phenomenon is having on two of our most vulnerable populations: tourists and children.
Tourists have enough trouble finding our most permanent, most visible attractions, as evident from the fact that you cannot linger in Midtown for five minutes before someone asks you where the Empire State Building is.
It won’t take many exchanges like this one before our tourist industry goes the way of garment-making and meatpacking:
“Excuse me, I’ve come 4,000 miles to see the Archery and Anchovies sports-booth-plus-pizza parlor that I read about last year. Can you direct me to it?”
“Archery and Anchovies? That was a pop-up, pal; it shut down last October. I think there’s a Pinkberry there now.”
And don’t children have enough impermanence in their lives, what with parents getting divorced, pop-culture heroes being jailed, pets dying, television shows being canceled and so on?
“Mommy, please tell me that the Gallery of Post-Proto-Feminist Fabric Art won’t disappear like Daddy did when he ran off with my nanny.”
“Well, Timmy, it won’t be in this same spot — I think they’re putting a Pinkberry there — but they’re sending it to a farm upstate where it can live with all the other pop-up galleries.”
“WAAAAH.”
We need to put a stop to the pop-up infestation now. A City Council committee on the issue needs to be created immediately. Ad hoc, of course.
Pop-ups — temporary business or cultural enterprises that materialize in empty storefronts, vacant lots and such, flaunting their own ephemerality — are hardly new, but suddenly they are everywhere. So are the news releases announcing them, which is the first clue that this phenomenon has lost any guerrilla chic it might once have had.
Roberta’s, the revered Brooklyn restaurant, currently has a pop-up version of itself in the East Village, associated with the mobile BMW Guggenheim Lab on urban life. Nearby, the Alphabet City Dolly Film Festival was scheduled for this weekend, billing itself as “a pop-up pub crawl and movie marathon.” (If “pop-up” and “pub crawl” seem to you to be a contradiction in terms, you are not alone.) Someone put a temporary bowling alley in Grand Central Terminal the other day for a teenagers’ competition, and same-sex weddings were performed last month in pop-up chapels in Central Park.
For a study in just how out of control this phenomenon is, stop by the northern end of the High Line park at West 30th Street.
As you come down from the park, an ugly stretch of blacktop (or, to quote the park’s Web site, “a vibrant and diverse gathering space for the neighborhood and the city at large”) is home to a pop-up food court called the Lot, which materialized a few months ago. Beside the Lot is a pop-up roller-skating rink sponsored by Uniqlo, a Japanese clothing concern. And now, beside the pop-up skating rink, two cube-shaped stores have popped up. Last weekend they were selling T-shirts and cashmere sweaters.
That’s right, a pop-up has sprouted a pop-up, which has in turn sprouted two more pop-ups. Whack, whack, whack, whack.
I’m not saying that pop-ups can’t be worthy.
Pop-Up SoHo on Wooster Street, an art exhibition staged by an outfit called the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, has compelling stuff in it, some of it by young people from a program at the Hetrick-Martin Institute.
The institute promotes a kind of tolerance for alternative versions of sexuality that did not exist a few decades ago, a contrast that was startlingly evident on Tuesday night when the pop-up hosted an evening featuring performances by the students: poetry, plays, even a fashion show.
As the students performed, on a wall nearby was an artwork called “Sip-In” by Tim McMath depicting a protest in 1966 by three gay men challenging a discriminatory passage in regulations governing liquor service. The New York Times put this headline on its article about the protest: “3 Deviates Invite Exclusion by Bars.” Sheesh.
So, no, it’s not that pop-ups are inherently evil. My objection is, in part, to the term itself, and its sudden ubiquity. So many people are tossing it around now that it has achieved “hipster” status: that is, as with that word, merely using it labels you a shameless bandwagon-jumper.
And who picked this term, anyway? I’m not sure which usage came first, but why continue to label something with a phrase that also describes the second-worst thing on the Internet, the pop-up ad?
Computer aficionados knew better when they went searching for a name for the No. 1 worst thing on the Internet. “Hmm, we need a way to describe this gremlin that’s destroying our computers. What word has really negative connotations in the real world? I know: ‘virus.’ ” Perfect.
But when the tables were turned, the mental calculation went inexplicably awry. “Hmm, what phrase can I use to make people want to come spend money at my temporary T-shirt cube? I know; I’ll pick something that annoys the heck out of everyone who has ever touched a computer keyboard: ‘pop-up.’ ” It’s akin to naming your skin-care salon Leprosy.
Beyond the annoyance factor in the term itself, though, I’m concerned about the effect the pop-up phenomenon is having on two of our most vulnerable populations: tourists and children.
Tourists have enough trouble finding our most permanent, most visible attractions, as evident from the fact that you cannot linger in Midtown for five minutes before someone asks you where the Empire State Building is.
It won’t take many exchanges like this one before our tourist industry goes the way of garment-making and meatpacking:
“Excuse me, I’ve come 4,000 miles to see the Archery and Anchovies sports-booth-plus-pizza parlor that I read about last year. Can you direct me to it?”
“Archery and Anchovies? That was a pop-up, pal; it shut down last October. I think there’s a Pinkberry there now.”
And don’t children have enough impermanence in their lives, what with parents getting divorced, pop-culture heroes being jailed, pets dying, television shows being canceled and so on?
“Mommy, please tell me that the Gallery of Post-Proto-Feminist Fabric Art won’t disappear like Daddy did when he ran off with my nanny.”
“Well, Timmy, it won’t be in this same spot — I think they’re putting a Pinkberry there — but they’re sending it to a farm upstate where it can live with all the other pop-up galleries.”
“WAAAAH.”
We need to put a stop to the pop-up infestation now. A City Council committee on the issue needs to be created immediately. Ad hoc, of course.
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