So long, Corona Shacks?
What was it about Streeteries—those outdoor dining structures variously known as Corona Shacks, COVID Shanties, or Pandemitecture—that gave rise to dozens of Instagram accounts and Twitter threads documenting them?
@nyc_food_shanty’s bio describes this social media trend well; it’s an “account dedicated to the appreciation of COVID outdoor dining structures in NYC and preserving their history when they’re gone.” That same appreciation is seen in the photos of @coronashaxx, which claims to have posted “a shaxx a day since Oct. 2020” to “lazily document this emergent typology.” Generally well composed according to typical architectural photography conventions, the images are shot from frontal or corner, one-point perspectives, absent of people, focusing on the presentation of the built object. Other accounts take the approach of a street photographer, quickly capturing spontaneous compositions of varying quality.
In those representative bios, appreciation is followed by preservation, and a premonition that these structures in time will disappear from our streetscapes. This instinct to preserve our contemporary moment, what American literary critic Fredric Jameson called a “nostalgia for the present,” is central to what social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson, writing in The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media, terms our “contemporary documentary vision.” This is the embodied vision of social media “encouraging users to take the present as a potential document to be seen by others,” rendering “the ephemeral into something tangible and our life into something collectable, consumable.” The nostalgic vision of @nyc_food_shanty and accounts like it mimicked what the restaurant industry was doing in creating streeteries: reacting to fear of an uncertain present and future.
Nothing about the streeteries’ aesthetics or barebones function brought about their documentation. It was their novelty, their status as a typology directly tied to a particular moment in time, that engendered these accounts. Their photos aren’t just documentary, they’re social photos, distinguished by “the degree to which [the photo’s] existence as a standalone media object is subordinate to existence as a unit of communication.” Social photos document what’s before the lens, but primarily are created to be shared, and in doing so, communicate the experience of the image’s maker more than the particularities of image’s content. Mostly anonymous, the streetery accounts do create a kind of nostalgic archive, but only when viewed as individual scenes, arbitrarily collected and ordered by a single profile. When viewed in the stream, encountered in real time in a user’s feed, these images became part of transmitting the collectively—if not equally—experienced transformations in the city under COVID. While no individual account or photograph was particularly notable, the collective phenomenon was—if for no other reason than to mark an experience that soon may disappear from our streets, and soon after our memories.
As the DOT works to formalize the Open Restaurants program, it seems the streetery’s time has come—at least in the forms that we know. These accounts may become nostalgic archives after all; however, what mattered about the accounts was their capacity to witness these changes and to convey them as they were happening, in the stream of life. No need to mourn the streetery, they’ll always be available at the tip of your fingers.