As announced through postcards, e-mails, twitter and blog posts, Furniture Sale on North Freeway was recently staged at the old Landmark Chevrolet Dealership in Houston, Texas.
We arrived to the site early in the morning with every object that we made for the event and set up shop in one of the corners of the empty car lot. It was a cloudy and windy day without a soul in sight, except for the thousands of cars zipping down the freeway at 80 mph. We had our first customer around 9:30am, and from there we had visitors every 45 minutes with most people coming in groups, driving out from inner loop Houston to the site. People from the neighborhood situated behind the dealership also stopped to chat, with conversations ranging from being angry about the quality of product the dealership provided when it was in business, and being angry about the 700 yd x 175 yd concrete void left behind after the business had dissolved.
Little was spoken of our intentions, or our gesture of attempting to sell six modest objects in a space that once sold and held in inventory more products than a husband and wife partnership could possibly fathom.
Our initial intentions were out of boredom, we were originally building pieces of furniture to fit our small apartment over weekends in our family run cabinet shop in Spring, TX, with materials left over from construction jobs. We would drive back and forth on I-45 passing the empty shells of former businesses and billboards selling ugly products far cheaper than someone could build and sell locally. Our point of departure for this idea were our conversations on how ridiculous it would be to find a local market for one of a kind, small-scale furniture meant for an aging 600 square foot Montrose apartment.
Next, our conversations turned towards the site, nestled along a stretch of empty commercial space. Like many, we felt frustrated by the lack of vibrant local activity in spaces like Landmark Chevy that are found throughout Houston, space that is overbuilt and left empty that many are forced to drive by everyday. Our hopeful gesture of peddling local goods was one possible, albeit unlikely solution to these empty spaces requiring excessive capital, volume of goods, and a large customer base to fill.
Our personal fantasy was a large community of modest profit, small-scale and local businesses that could occupy these empty spaces, selling whatever goods they chose to make. We imagined that this business structure could enable a dialog with the local consumer, giving them tremendous power and input to what they needed in their community, replacing the currently accepted mass produced illusion of choice of goods that are bought without knowledge of their true costs of production, labor, or environmental impact.
