A Brooklyn Artist Built A Tower To Memorialize Victims Of Road Crashes
The landscape of New York City is really a crashscape.
Brooklyn artist Michael Freedman has made the horror of road violence a three-dimensional experience with Crashcape, a new app that superimposes virtual images of crashes onto the very roadways where they occurred.
Point your phone at any intersection and Freedman’s app will render each crash that has been recorded there since 2022 as a 30-foot cube covered in Freedman’s own artistic renderings of the carnage. The more crashes, the more boxes.
The more impact for Freedman’s virtual memorial.
“I really wanted the cubes with the paintings around them to actually physically ‘block’ the intersections, so you could see these cubes and see the cars and trucks driving through the memorial,” Freedman said.
Freedman will demonstrate the app alongside an exhibition of his original paintings on Sunday in Gowanus for the annual World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims — an event to bring attention to the scale of a problem that most New Yorkers don’t even think about: Through Nov. 8 of this year, 176 people have been killed and 43,239 have been injured, according to NYPD data. That’s an injury every six hours.
“It’s not something that you want to pay attention to,” said Freedman, who also created Crashcount to create a frequently updated map of road violence. “And that’s why we have World Day of Remembrance.”
Why we don’t know
Why did activists even create a World Day of Remembrance for the victims of road violence — and why does Freedman fight so hard to broaden understanding of the daily carnage? It’s a long story.
A century ago, car makers used their growing influence to change the narrative about crashes, not only by shifting blame to pedestrians — aka “jaywalkers” — but also by encouraging the media to treat crash deaths as private family grief to be kept out of public view. That shift took car violence off the front pages and diluted the public debate of the growing concern of road carnage.
“We deprive [crashes] of the power that they need to compel us,” historian Peter Norton told Streetsblog in 2022.
The city’s first permanent memorial to traffic victims didn’t come until 2022 — long after tens of thousands of New Yorkers had been sacrificed to America’s freedom to drive, not to mention the hundreds of thousands who were badly injured by car drivers, their lives altered forever.
Car drivers do indeed get some benefit from their cars, but the cost of that benefit is borne by our entire society in pollution, congestion, rage, sprawl and crashes. The last one is Freedman’s main focus.
His exhibition at Littlefield includes the Crascape app, plus four oil paintings, each of which detail a specific crash with a title that references the distance of the crash from the Downtown Brooklyn performance space. For instance, the painting depicting the killing of Victor Hidalgo by an FDNY driver is called “258 Feet from Here.”
Another painting, “1,104 Feet from Here,” refers to nanny Arcellie Muschamp, who was killed by a pickup truck driver at Fifth Avenue and Union Street in 2011.
Freedman can’t paint all the horrors — there have been 52 reported crashes on the streets surrounding the venue since 2022 — but they all show up as stacks of cubes on Freedman’s Crashscape app.
And the tower grows.
“We’re not fixing the problems,” Freedman said. “We’re letting them fester.”
Obviously, there are some efforts: Then-Mayor Bill de Blasio created New York City’s Vision Zero plan in 2014 and started building out the bike network. Mayor Eric Adams failed to meet legal benchmarks for bike and bus lanes, but he did add scores of miles to both systems. And Mayor Mamdani has been reducing speed limits on some streets, as well as some small neighborhood segments.
But the bottom line — the deaths — are nowhere near zero. In fact, 210 people were killed in crashes in New York City last year, and that was considered a good year.
Amid this persistent failure, Freedman said he always asks people at events whether they know anyone who has been in a crash.
“Almost everybody does,” Freedman said.
“The Distance From Here,” noon to 1 p.m. at Littlefield (635 Sackett St. between Nevins Street and Third Avenue). Event includes a walk to Victor Hidalgo’s ghost bike. Families for Safe Streets is also hosting an event for World Remembrance Day for Road Traffic Victims, with more info available here.
