Canal St.

By Steve Wasterval

Piece description from the artist

Canal Street is a bustling commercial district, crowded with comparatively low-rent open storefronts, and street vendors to the west; banks and jewelry shops to the east. For a generation after World War II, the former segment hosted many stores selling exotic high-tech components to would-be inventors and engineers.⁷ Canal Street is also the main Chinese jewelry business district of Chinatown.⁸ Tourists as well as locals pack its sidewalks every day to frequent the open-air stalls and bare-bones stores selling items such as perfume, purses, hardware, and industrial plastics at low prices. Many of these goods are grey market imports and many notoriously counterfeit, with fake trademarked brand names on electronics, clothing and personal accessories (including the fake Rolex watches that have become a Manhattan cliché). Bootleg CDs and DVDs are common, and are offered for sale on Canal Street—often before they are even officially released in stores or the theater—in makeshift stands and suitcases or simply laid out on bedsheets. Widespread sale of these counterfeit goods persists along Canal Street and in its hidden back rooms despite frequent police raids. In addition, legislation was proposed in 2013 to try to make purchasing counterfeit items a crime; this would let the city's economy earn back at least $1 billion annually in taxes.