Situated at the edge of Atlantic, along a section of the Rockaway peninsula, lies the largest tract of city-owned vacant land in metropolitan New York. In the late '60s, 307 acres of summer cottages were bulldozed under the authority of the Title I 'Slum Clearance Act'. The last of a series of sites within the greater metropolitan area targeted for clearance by the office of Robert Moses, Arverne has yet to receive its 'urban renewal'. The past quarter century has witnessed the failure of countless development proposals for casinos, hotels, theme parks, and high-rise public housing projects. The most recent proposal, a $1.5 billion project consisting of 7,500 apartments, as well as shopping malls, recreation centers and parks, has been scrapped due to developers' mounting fears concerning the risks involved with the scale of the project, the market 'undesirability' of the neighboring blighted context, the declining economic situation of the city government, and the lack of an adequate existing infrastructure. Currently the city has stated that it cannot assume the primary responsibility for completing it's 'renewal' program, and that it is investigating the development of a small 12 acre parcel of land with 180 two-family townhouses in the hope of attracting attention to the land and potentially spurring further development.

In the wake of this still-born 'renewal' floats the flotsam of silence: a tabula rasa awaiting a master plan that will most likely never materialize. For over a quarter century, the 75 city blocks comprising the site have served as repositories for both the material waste produced by the surrounding neighborhood as well as the ephemeral traces of actions and events transpiring below the threshold of public vision. Through this residue emerges a form of urbanism which operates through the presence of absences: a stratified environment of gaps resisting global description, perpetually traversed and realigned through the imaginative act.