Fixing a broken NYC… with Legos?

New York City is a strange and wonderful place, made all the more bizarre by the fact that its 8 million inhabitants are confined to the tiny island of Manhattan- posing difficulties in reinforcing an infrastructure that’s one of the oldest in US history.

New Yorkers are familiar with urban decay, and exploding manholes and crumbling buildings (and the dangers posed therein) are a part of the consciousness of the city. German artist Jan Vormann has a colorful, if not necessarily practical, solution to New York’s ever aging landscape… the humble Lego.

New Yorkers aren’t the first city-dwellers on the receiving end of Vormann’s “Dispatchwork” project- Rome, Berlin and Paris have gotten Lego patches of their own prior to the New York City initiative. Reaction to the project was largely positive, reminding many New Yorkers of when street art was more commonplace and Disney didn’t own Times Square:

“I’ve never seen anything like that before. It’s cool,” said Anna Marciano, 20, admiring the 1-by-1-foot patch. “They should put more around the city.”

Vormann wrote on his Web site, “I went to New York City . . . to support Mayor Bloomberg in his everyday struggle to make this city even more amazing.”

“I liked it. It’s a nice public-art project,” said Francesca Gentile, a saleswoman at Milan Luxury. “It was nice to have it in this neighborhood where everything is corporate. I wish it were still here.”

Although residents were largely supportive of the Lego repairs, all but one “patch” has been removed. You can see more of Vormann’s street art in New York City at the Dispatchwork website.