Digital Death: Remembering 52nd City
A Respectful Nod to a VIPP, A Very Important Past Project
Over the weekend, I decided to look up a piece that I’d written for 52nd City, the online magazine that Andrea Avery, Stefene Russell and I curated during the earlier part of this century.
What I found was an entire site absent from the web.
At first, I was sure that the fault was mine, as I’d had a small-dollar St. Louis bank account hacked twice over the past year; assumed that Dreamhost hadn’t connected with a dead bank card, leading to the site’s falling off of the web. Ugh! After consulting a person far smarter on this topic (thank ya, Digital Detective Brian Marston), the assumption is that the site was hacked, with all of the content missing from our hosting server. While the immense guilt that I wore on Sunday has faded with this news, I’m still left with that sickening feeling of seeing a project dismantled by an anonymous and completely pointless act.
A quick history…
For a few years in the aughts, 52nd City published themed print magazines, with a heavy St. Louis emphasis, drawing on writers, photographers and digital artists from there and all over. We sunk every penny made (plus a few more) back into the zines, while publishing online-only material complementary to each issue, including one very esoteric compact disc; our art director Caroline Huth gave them a great look and the covers by The Firecracker Press were always well-liked. We bookended our eight-mag, one-CD physical media run with a second, online-only edition.
During that time, we also hosted a fun li’l something called The Kick-Ass Awards, an annual event that outlived the magazine, reaching a full decade of activity; for that, our group was augmented by co-curators Brandyn Jones and Ann Haubrich. There were also book sales, trivia nights and other random social events intended for STL smarties. It was a good time to be young(ish) and to have creative friends and a reserve of volunteering energy.
Having the digital mags remain online felt like a nice way to keep the spirit of the project alive; really, it’s the only reason I kept re-upping those annual hosting fees. After all, the content was so good, why not spend a few dollars to keep things up?
Over the past year, I’ve thought a lot about how much to share online and how to use digital media for positive ends. To be honest, I think I’ve allowed the general state of the world to beat me into a certain passivity; there’s not feeding the algorithm and then there’s taking a seat on the bench. Sigh.
It’s summer in New Orleans, which means work’s slow. Out there in the vast space of the web, I’ve got long-forgotten projects floating around. Might just be time to locate some of them, see if there’s any value, any use in organizing this digital debris.
So, into this mini-project, I go. If anything interesting turns up, I’ll happily share through Substack, which feels like a safe enough place to store digital packrat stashes. For now. And, hopefully, for a long time to come.
A YouTube Lagniappe: Let’s get out of the cloud and onto terra firma. Here’s a confession: I’d love to have the control of a big building someday, one that that served multiple, useful purposes. The problems in making this a reality are many. Money’s an issue, for starters. I’m not handy in the least and lack financial smarts. The real estate game confuses me. I’m not getting any younger and my countdown of Future Doable Projects is likely down to a select few. But daydreams? Those I’ve got. In abundance! And while I enjoy a good algorithm bash as much as the next person, YouTube offered me this amazing short the other day. If you have 20-minutes to spare and wanna witness how humans can interact in the most-positive of ways, I’d suggest you click this video. If you shed a tear during the credits, well, you’ll be in good company.
‘Til next time. And there will be one.
-30-
Have you scoured the Wayback Machine at Archive.org? It appears to have preserved 52nd City, in some capacity at least. https://web.archive.org/web/20070104105341/http://www.52ndcity.com/
I utilized the service when an entire publishing company for which I'd written for 20+ years went out of business, and gallons of my words disappeared down the virtual drain.
It's not the same as having the thing actively online, I know. But at least you can still get a glimpse, and maybe rescue anything truly otherwise lost?
I remember at the time thinking 52nd City seemed like the place all the most interesting people were. Consider this my respectful nod to it as well.
Man, Thomas, I've been thinking about you lately and was hoping all was well. I've missed reading your Memory Hall missives on a regular basis and was starting to be concerned about the silence. Anyway, so good to "hear" from you, and if you remember, my wife Terri tracked you down a few years ago so she could help me complete my 52 City collection, a GREAT project for sure. Dan O