Do all 99 cent stores open for similar reasons? How do barbershops choose their locations? High schoolers in the Brooklyn College Community Partnership (BCCP) program at Paul Robeson (Crown Heights), New Utrecht, and Bushwick High Schools collaborated with CUP teaching artist Mads Lynnerup to find out.
The crews interviewed the owners of 99-cent stores, barbershops, and gift shops in their respective neighborhoods. They took the business owners’ stories and created visualizations of the stores’ beginnings, clientele, and evolution throughout the years.
The project culminated in a borough-wide get-together at the BCCP’s College Art Lab in which students shared their stores’ stories with other public high schoolers. The crew designed a set of postcards that gets at some of the trends and disparities in small businesses across neighborhoods.
Check out the postcards here.