Tradewinds Readerboard

Artists

Organized by members Friends of the Orphan Signs, and participation from public and Highland High School Students

For this participatory project, members of the public could text their poems to a phone number, and FOS members would change the reader board to reflect these short artistic snippets.

For many years the Tradewinds sign sat on the empty lot at Central and San Mateo reading a melancholic “closed”, where the flashy resort getaway named the Tradewinds Hotel once sat. Over the years as the freeway moved tourist revenue north and Route 66 became ignored, a slow degeneration began that gave this sector of Central Avenue its unofficial name “The War Zone”. The Tradewinds became an Econolodge, and eventually crime ran rampant on the property. After a brutal incident the city called that the last straw, condemned the building, and had all evidence of it removed.

From 2010 to 2014 the sign displayed high school students’ poetry, as well as poetry generated by community members. In 2010 UNM graduate students from UNM worked with English classes and members of the Poetry Club at Highland High School to generate our first few messages. In 2011 we created a Google Voice service phone number to generate more public involvement. We put this phone number on the sign, with the encouragement “Text poetry here”. Also, often when we were taking down text from the reader board someone would approach to chat and give us a message that we would put up immediately.