Ghost shoes for a killed pedestrian look like quirky art/
Ghost shoes for a killed pedestrian look like quirky art. Charles Mudede
I have been informed by some members of a community I deeply respect (pedestrian activists) that the white shoes attached to a telephone pole on the corner of McClellan Street and Beacon Avenue on Beacon Hill, one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Seattle, are not signs of gentrification but instead reference a pedestrian who was killed on that corner by a car. They are ghost shoes in the sense of ghost bikes.

But why did I and many other people fail to recognize the meaning of these white shoes? Why did we think they were art objects cut from the exact same cloth as those horrible knitted wool things certain people force on poor trees that are just trying to mind their own business? Because it looked quirky. And quirky art is the kind of thing we expect from (usually) white homeowners who have plenty of money and not much imagination, and who feel powerfully the need to express their creativity. Creativity is a "good thing." It also does not help that the architecture of the library across the street is quirky.

And the reason this is the case is because the architects of the Beacon Hill Branch are white and this was the only way they could express the diversity of the neighborhood, a diversity that was lacking in their firm, which no longer exists. Quirky is bad because it has a vacuum at its core; it is art spun from pure nothingness like a mindless spider. Quirkiness is beloved by those who want to make art that has no consequences but looks inspirational.

So, to avoid any association with quirkiness, all that was needed was just a pair of white shoes. That's it. Chete, as they say in the Shona language! What could have been done away with is all of this busy business of lots of white shoes going in circles and grass growing out of the soil packed in them. That looks quirky.