PARK SLOPE, Brooklyn — The newsstands in subway stations have largely become a thing of the past. Rex’s Dino Store at Grand Army Plaza in Park Slope, Brooklyn is a one-of-a-kind example.
Down the stairs and around the corner a red, 7-foot-tall T-Rex has all the essentials for a prehistoric New York City in stock. Welcome to Rex’s Dino Store, a public art exhibit that’s part of the MTA’s Vacant Unit Activation program, which is turning unused newsstands into art installations. Artists Akiva Leffert and Sarah Cassidy led the Dino Store project.
The duo started out thinking, “Ok, there’s an old newsstand there. It still has all the shelving. What do we want to do with that? Then we just started iterating on that idea, of like… a bodega on the moon, a bodega for cats – but that’s a normal bodega,” explains Cassidy. Leffert says they kept heightening the concept, “like, a really old newsstand… a really, really really old newsstand. And it just kind of went from there.”
They landed on the idea of a bodega run by dinosaurs, for dinosaurs. Local references are everywhere in the exhibit and are as hard to miss as a T-Rex in a subway station.
Cassidy says, “the first joke was Steg Yun, instead of Shen Yun. There’s a stegosaurus who’s dancing on a poster. And we’re like, ‘Oh, what if there’s a cave for rent on the community board?’ You know, it just sort of spiraled out of control!” You’ll also catch ads for “Cellino & Barney” as well as “Dino Smith Will Teach You Flying.”
“New York is just like a rich text. And there’s just so much to work with. Like, everyone knows what a bodega is and they’ve got their own ideas. People would be like, ‘where’s the bodega cat?’ And we’d be like, ‘we’ve got that under control,’ says Leffert motioning to the sabretooth cat perched up on a shelf.
The installation is set to run at least until April. You can see it in person at the Grand Army Plaza subway station in Brooklyn or visit it on the web at rexs.nyc.
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