Main Street Meltdown: Economy

Abstract

On October 29, 2008, the seventy-ninth anniversary of Black Tuesday, the stock market crash that caused the Great Depression in 1929, Nora Ligorano (b. 1956) and Marshall Reese (b. 1955) of the art collaborative LigoranoReese (formed 1986), installed a 15foot-long (4.35 metres) ice sculpture of the word Economy at Foley Square in Lower Manhattan in front of the New York State Supreme Court building, near the heart of the US financial district. Occurring less than two weeks after the Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy and Bear Stearns collapse, the ephemeral sculpture only lasted 16 hours before disappearing. Additional documentation of the project can be found at: Marshall Reese, ‘Main Street Meltdown,’ World Policy Journal Blog, October 28, 2013, http:// www.worldpolicy.org/blog/2013/10/28/main-street-meltdown.