Plastered Liminality in an Abandoned Bed Bath & Beyond and SoHo

Scarlett Meza
→BFA TX 2027

On a two-week road trip from San Diego to Seattle in my boyfriend’s green 1992 Land Rover Discovery with broken suspension, a particular brand of oddities reared their heads. We rumbled past co-op ladies, confederate waiters, a man selling mushrooms (not the magic kind; we asked), and even spent the night in a lovely Airstream trailer with a “farm wife” who worshiped God and organic butter.

Gorilla suit on airport chairs through the Bed Bath & Beyond window. All images by the author.

Handwritten sign from Cannonball Arts.

Bed Bath & Beyond’s original blue decals.

Many of my generation share in this insatiable desire to enter or relate to abandoned buildings. Whether we grew up watching our favorite YouTubers explore abandoned hospitals and schools, or found them ourselves, urban exploring satisfied some sense of discovering a new frontier. But instead of looking to these mythicized and played-up frontiers, like Manifest Destiny or Boomers’ obsession with space travel, Gen Z developed a penchant for crossing spatial boundaries not to “discover” them but to re-discover what happened, and imagine what could happen. These crumbling concrete and brick structures remind us of bygone eras, and perhaps spark a romanticization of past culture and design. A kitschy waterpark for family fun takes on a more self-aware, eerie sensibility when it's abandoned. Its empty pools reflect our gross overuse of water for entertainment and the outdatedness of Americana.

Bed Bath & Beyond, once the Mecca of domestic wares, now a nexus of liminality. But nobody was ever clamoring to get in behind the sliding doors of their local store. It was the big blue papery coupons that came in the mail which dragged my mother and a young me to the white fluorescents and aisles of items for the bed, the bath, and beyond. The store, thriving on sales which only made you spend more, became unattractive. An ethos of detritus. After the meme stock-status chain closed all in-person locations, it became Overstock.com. Yet, part of me still wondered what happened to those thousands of forgotten square feet.

Feeling all this at first glance of the Bed Bath & Beyond, we stumbled into what I can only describe as a quintessential Silicon Valley-type man. Bolstering his mountain bike as a barrier between himself and some overly interested art kids, he told us the abandoned store is set to be a new techno and fine arts space run by Cannonball Arts. New Rising Sun, the group behind this art space initiative, also produces the Bumbershoot music festival in Seattle. Bumbershoot—like the decals on the abandoned BB & B wall—is the last bastion of Seattle’s grunge scene, featuring the likes of everyone from Hole to Bob Dylan. But nowadays, Bumbershoot focuses less on grunge and more on indie music and arts. Seattle Center describes Bumbershoot as “Seattle’s moss-covered Mardi Gras, daring everyone to join in the spectacle.”¹ They claim to host a “diverse” audience, offer subsidized tickets, and be “by community, for community.” Scroll to the bottom of the page and a few of their listed sponsors are Amazon, Starbucks, Microsoft, and Guayaki Yerba Mate—huge corporations eradicating small businesses and close-knit communities. In an article on Cannonball Arts, Greg Lundgren, co-producer and creative director of New Rising Sun, muses that “the Bed Bath & Beyond building is an easy one to fall in love with, and it's been on our radar since the day it closed.”²

Despite the crafty quality of the handwritten Sharpie sign, inside, I was met with a minimalist, ultra-curated gallery. When I spoke to the Cannonball Arts team at those once-automatic doors, they mentioned there was still a lot of “polishing” to be done. And yet, the rubble is what I found most compelling about this abandoned Bed Bath & Beyond. Big blue decals, fluorescents, stagnant escalators shuffling nonexistent customers. Bits of plaster and plywood on the floors. Remembering what once was, and accepting that I will never know, I found that I fear the erasure of liminality.

“Gen Z developed a penchant for crossing spatial boundaries not to “discover” them but to re-discover what happened, and imagine what could happen.”

The fate of this Bed Bath & Beyond speaks to a larger phenomenon that began nearly 3,000 miles across the country, in New York’s gentrifying of SoHo in the 1970s and ’80s. SoHo’s historical trajectory epitomizes the post-industrial aesthetic, where bygone shopaholics become cult(ural) connoisseurs on the cutting edge. Life in early SoHo functioned much like my boyfriend’s duct-tape suspension repair that held up from Yosemite to Portland—jankily and with a prayer. Take Donald Judd’s 101 Spring Street studio/home: a nineteenth century cast-iron building whose quirks ranged from exposed brick to leaking oil. Robert Rauschenberg is said to have showered with a hose and bucket in the early days, when he wasn’t sneaking into his friends’ bathrooms. These OGs worked with the building’s quirks, embracing the leaks. An appreciation of dilapidation. Judd is often blamed as an early proponent of gentrification, but he actually insisted after his death that Spring Street remain just as it was.³ Instead, the interior was plastered over to stop the oil, the iron replaced, the exterior shipped and cleaned. “The industrial grime had been preserved into art, ” as Madeline Schwartz in Dissent magazine puts it.⁴ Real-estate gives people the design they think they want. The first SoHo campout was painted as a conquering of the Lower East Side, a bohemian land of the working class. Now only white-collar workers can afford to live in Manhattan proper. But it wasn’t the artists’ fault; New York City employed a twofold strategy: 1) dislodge the working class by turning property over to real estate developers, and 2) develop new houses for late-stage capitalism’s labor force.

(Left and Right) Demolition of Bed Bath & Beyond’s interior

I hate bulldozers—made to sterilize old buildings and flatten things down or remodel like an HGTV house flip. They erase our anthropology. I believe a durable space finds a happy medium between accumulation of past objects and sleek minimalism. Leaving historical elements or adding antique furnishings and allowing a little eclecticism to soften clean cut modernity maintains an appreciation for the past, especially in spaces for creativity and community. As artists, we always fear being stuck in a “dark age” where little or nothing is created. But as we’ve seen and continue to see, over-productivity and overproduction creates fatigue and paralysis. Stillness and appreciation for what we have already created is equally as necessary as capitalizing on empty spaces.

Before we set off on our road trip up the West Coast, my summer began in the Lower East Side. We walked around in the sweltering East Coast humidity, seeing trendy “bowl” restaurants housed in Industrial Age buildings. Exiting a gallery opening, I was excited to see a queue for a warehouse fashion show—until I watched everyone leave by 9 PM. A lot of NYC transplants show up to a runway or gallery opening just to say they did—to stay relevant. But the fabricated persona enforced through these art-centered events and spaces parallels the image of plastered-over buildings: an over-cultivation. I met this same performativity in Seattle, and nearly everywhere on my road trip. Architectural facelifts are often aesthetic blunders throughout New York City. Inauthentic spaces create inauthentic activity.

Liminality is formed through steps: 1) subversion creates subculture, 2) countercultures are made from those subcultures, and 3) liminality, trying to ascend above all subversion—as Bumbershoot does with Cannonball Arts—creates a completely non-offensive non-aesthetic. It doesn’t take much taste to paint the walls white. Fitting in our current culture of watered-down criticism, Craig Owens writing for Art in America amidst the great SoHo revival in the 1960s-’70s, argues that SoHo functioned “as a culture-industry outpost where ‘subcultural’ forms are fed to that marketplace as products of consumption, their vital resistance to dominant culture thereby defeated.”⁵ Counterculture itself too has become commodified, as soon as city planners realize they can exploit the post-industrial aesthetic. Today, over 45 percent of city planners say they use artists’ residencies as a means for gentrification and in revitalizing towns with shrinking populations.⁶

“The techno scene is meant for dance, to let your hair down. Only a sense of the lived-in supports this. Remnants are necessary.“

A more recent example of the post-industrial aesthetic is the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, New York. The old Romanesque Revival style factory was an icon in the Brooklyn skyline from 1883 until its closing in 2004, and was a sugar giant, controlling 98% of US sugar processing.⁷ Notably, in 2014, artist Kara Walker displayed a large-scale installation made out of sugar in response to the company’s past involving slave labor. Later, in 2017, architects from SHoP Architects and Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU) renovated the building, preserving its brick façade and building a new entirely glass structure with a skylight inside, creating a historical shell around “an activated mix of creative office space, market-rate and affordable housing, neighborhood retail, and community facilities, office space, market-rate and affordable housing, neighborhood retail, and community facilities” resulting in “a state-of the-art, 425,000-square-foot workspace housed within a beautiful, idiosyncratic urban artifact that is unique to post-industrial Williamsburg.”⁸ While keeping a New York landmark alive and visible is a step in the right direction, what could have happened if the building was left as is? How could the inside be a space dedicated to the idea of history, the unknown, the liminal?

I believe minimalism has its appropriate time and place. For example, artist Eric Orr’s work in the Light and Space movement, inspired by “reverberantly empty spaces that archeologists have found in the plundered tombs of ancient Egypt as by the indefinite and somewhat transcendental spaces,” emphasized the absence of people.⁹ A techno space shouldn’t be a tomb. Its purpose is to serve the community. Seeing this Bed Bath & Beyond completely plastered over suggests an uncanniness similar to an overly botoxed face. Call me a sucker, but there is some comfort in the bygone burlesque of shoppers in the department store. The techno scene is meant for dance, to let your hair down. Only a sense of the lived-in supports this. Remnants are necessary.

Donald Judd’s studio/home, with a mattress on a low platform, may have suggested poverty and squalor—until one notices that it is surrounded by millions of dollars of art. Industrial items thus take on a dualism of ontology, as objects both of materialism and idealism. The wide windows that once aided factory workers in seeing their product become ethereal portals to skyline views. The liminal bare lightbulb becomes a symbol of a kind of beautiful destitution, that infatuation with the starving artist. Bed Bath & Beyond already made a liminal space, and for artists to “build” onto this by painting it white would create an uber-liminal monstrosity, devoid of any aesthetic that says anything. A department store escalator is both bygone lift and stairs to a grotesque, sky-high liminality.

Scarlett Meza wants to see behind the wallpaper.

NOTES

“Bumbershoot Arts & Music Festival Unveils 2024 Arts Lineup,” Seattle Center, https://www.seattlecenter.com/events/festivals/bumbershoot#:~:text=A%20celebration%20of%20the%20Pacific,subsidized%20ticket%20prices%2C%20or%20otherwise, Accessed November 8, 2024.
Corrine Whiting, “Cannonball! Bumbershoot producers plan big splash with new arts hub in Seattle,” Seattle Refined, April 23, 2024, https://seattlerefined.com/lifestyle/bumbershoot-producers-new-rising-sun-create-huge-new-arts-space-in-downtown-seattle-bed-bath-beyond-revitalize-hub-pnw.
Alice Rawsthorn, “Donald Judd’s home and studio in New York: celebrating 10 years,” June 28, 2023, https://www.wallpaper.com/art/donald-judds-home-and-studio-new-york.
Madeleine Schwartz, “The Art of Gentrification,” Dissent Magazine, 2014, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-art-of-gentrification/.
Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan, “The Fine Art of Gentrification,” October 31 (1984): 91–111, https://doi.org/10.2307/778358.
Deutsche and Ryan, “Fine Art of Gentrification.”
Condé Nast, “Exclusive: Inside the Futuristic Domino Sugar Factory Renovation,” Architectural Digest, September 27, 2023, https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/exclusive-inside-futuristic-domino-sugar-factory-renovation.
“The Refinery at Domino,” Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, 2023, https://pau.studio/what/the-domino-sugar-refinery-reimagined/#.
Thomas McEvilley, “Negative Presences in Secret Spaces: The Art of Eric Orr,” Artforum, May 1982, https://www.artforum.com/features/negative-presences-in-secret-spaces-the-art-of-eric-orr-208306/.