M. and I walk through Soho several weeks after the protests in the wake of the George Floyd death. High-end boutiques have been boarded-up – some in order to replace windows that were smashed during the looting, others to protect undamaged windows from further vandalism. Now, on the otherwise deserted blocks, street artists have descended. On Wooster just above Broome, several artists are perched on ladders, their paints and brushes spread out on a drop cloth at their feet. Further along Broome, window after window features a dense collage of graffiti in the form of tagging, BLM sloganeering, or whimsical liberation imagery. This colorful tableau, which, I can’t help thinking, hearkens back to the pre-Wall Street art boom of the eighties, is a powerful statement in its own right: the manifestations against police brutality are essentially arguments against a racist, capitalist police state. But perhaps it is the very transient nature of this ‘reclamation’ that makes it feel like such a poignant expression. This is SoHo after all and money is king here – that much we all know; but try to imagine, just for a moment, a more innocent fate for these landmarked, architecturally iconic streets…