Changing Shifts
1996
Roman Scott (b. 1965)
Acrylic on canvas, 60 X 72
Gift of the artist and Kim Foster Gallery, 96.141

 

Against an evening sky still pale with summer light and streets slick with rain, the artist has documented the six o'clock change of shift at the Mystic Brokerage, at the corner of McGuinness Boulevard and Huron Street in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn. This is the hour when cab drivers end their twelve-hour tour and surrender their vehicles to the next team of drivers to roam the city's streets. The mundane detail of laundry shown hanging out to dry on the garage roof evidences the gradual 1990s transformation of largely industrial Greenpoint into a residential neighborhood peppered with artist's studios and lofts.

New York City's automotive taxi industry was established in 1907 with the introduction of gas-powered vehicles equipped with taximeters. Two years later the city began officially monitoring cabs by establishing a fare schedule and appointing inspectors to apprehend any violators. The ensuing years saw competition between the owners and operators of the vehicles and the municipal administration, intent on controlling pricing, safety, and licensing. As a result, in 1925 licensing control was granted to the New York City police department and a newly formed Taxicab and Limousine Commission (TLC).

Until the 1970s, Jewish, Italian, and Irish immigrants, often joined by their sons, composed the majority of New York City taxi drivers. These opinionated "hacks" became part of New York City lore and were respected for their consummate knowledge of the city's geography. Today, drivers are often newly arrived from other countries and tend to know little about the city's layout or its driving regulations,¹ thereby providing more fuel for the ongoing controversy among the TLC, the cab owners and their force of drivers, the police, and paying passengers. The vehicles have also changed. The much-loved Checker cabs gradually disappeared from the city's streets after the assembly line that produced them in Kalamzaoo, Michigan, closed in 1982. By 1999, when the last of 12,053 Checkers retired, such models as the Chevrolet Caprice, Ford Crown Victoria, Honda Odyssey, and Isuzu Oasis had replaced them.

Roman Scott holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Denver and a Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College. Since moving from Colorado to New York in 1989, Scott has found himself drawn to the painterly possibilities of the city's prosaic activities -its streams of yellow cabs, humble street occupations, barrage of signage, and the distinctive reflections in wet streets of the urban scene, especially at night. Like other young city-scene painters, he finds his subjects in the city's marginal zones of residence, where he can afford to live and work.

Notes:

  1  The Encyclopedia of New York City cites the Middle East, Latin America, Russia, the Caribbean, South Asia, and Africa as the areas of origin for more than 75 percent of New York's licensed cab drivers in the late twentieth century. Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 1155.