You stand in the vacant lot and the city has given you a room with no walls. The vacant lot is the space between two buildings where a third building used to be and the used to be is the whole story. Something stood here. Something fell or was torn down or burned and now the lot is empty and the empty is not nothing. The empty is an invitation. The empty says come in. The empty says do what you want. The vacant lot has no door because the vacant lot has no walls and the no walls means everyone is welcome and the everyone is the kids and the artists and the dogs and the weeds and the weeds are the first ones to accept the invitation because the weeds do not wait for permission.

In the South Bronx in the nineteen seventies the vacant lots outnumbered the buildings on some blocks because the landlords burned the buildings for insurance money and the insurance money left and the buildings left and the lots stayed. DJ Kool Herc set up his turntables in a lot at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue and plugged into a streetlight and the streetlight became an amplifier and the lot became a dance floor and the dance floor became hip hop. The vacant lot gave Herc what no club would give him. Space and electricity and no one telling him to turn it down. The most important music of the last fifty years started in a vacant lot because the vacant lot was the only venue that said yes.

Gordon Matta-Clark was a sculptor who cut buildings in half. In nineteen seventy four he took a house on Humphrey Street in Englewood New Jersey and sawed it down the middle and pulled one half away from the other and you could see the inside of the house from the outside and the seeing was the art. The vacant lot next door was what made the work possible because the vacant lot gave him room to pull the house apart. Matta-Clark understood that the vacant lot is not empty. The vacant lot is the space that lets you see what is next to it. The vacant lot is the negative space that makes the positive space visible.

In Detroit the vacant lots became gardens. The city lost two hundred and fifty thousand people between nineteen seventy and two thousand and ten and the leaving left lots and the lots grew weeds and then someone planted tomatoes. The Michigan Urban Farming Initiative turned a block of vacant lots on the north side into a two-acre farm that feeds three hundred families. The vacant lot that was evidence of failure became evidence of possibility. The soil that held a foundation now holds collard greens and the collard greens are worth more than the foundation because you can eat collard greens and you cannot eat concrete.

You walk past the vacant lot at night and the lot is dark and the dark is the only true dark in the city because the lot has no lights and the no lights means the lot has stars. You can see stars from a vacant lot that you cannot see from anywhere else on the block because the block has streetlights and signs and windows but the lot has nothing and the nothing lets the sky in. The vacant lot is the only place in the city where you can look up and see what the city was built on top of. The vacant lot remembers the sky.