Graffiti and History and Baseball
If I discover something that's been sitting in a crate for 43 years, it's not enough that it really, really, really looks like an old Yankee Stadium ticket booth. It has no other ephemeral trail apart from a few offhand remarks in books and newspapers. Nobody cared about holograms and letters of authenticity at a 1973 Bronx fire sale. Paired with photographic evidence, the graffiti helps make the case for provenance. The location of the booth at the time of its removal can be identified. There is numbering on the kiosk itself, but the graffiti is corroborating evidence backed by historic images. I would have loved to find it in its 1923 condition, but this was the only flavor available.
I think it's both vandalism and history. The attached image is from the bell tower of a cathedral that I worked on a few years back. We were able to trace it to one of the workers who hung the bells in 1861. It eventually led to our ability to correctly recast a cracked bell 155 years later. Romanes eunt domus
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