The corner of Washington and Water Streets in Dumbo: a location that has become one of the most popular tourist photo ops in the city. Each day the crowds descend down the hill and begin swarming the corner, staking out their claim to a portrait or selfie in front of the Manhattan Bridge, sandwiched between industrial artifacts (now turned multi-million dollar condos). Tripods, photo lights, selfie sticks; group pictures, wedding portraits, amateur fashion shoots. Behind this bustling parade of cheap photographic paraphernalia their lurks a desperate neediness, which is the impulse to capture the precious souvenir. This quintessentially New York arrangement of architecture, water and sky sits there like an empty stage set, beckoning the determined traveler to mount its cobblestoned proscenium. The colonization of the street has gone to far that taxis routinely have to inch their way along, honking in frustration as the group poses reluctantly disassemble themselves, tripods are moved, smartphone-touting Europeans scatter confusedly left and right. I often wonder what it would be like to live above this melee, to be a condo-dweller in one of the glorious industrial relics that lines this street, to have to pass through the throngs coming and going, to glance out the window at any hour and see tourists doing what tourists do, oblivious to the fact that people actually live in this nadir of industrial chic. A sense of Schadenfreude accompanies these reflections, for I know that these same ‘victims’ of the tourist influx are directly responsible for the ruination of this selfsame industrial gem!