My father loved his city passionately, and he taught me to love it too, in all its particularity. He especially loved the now-all-but-defunct commercial neighborhoods (the flower district, the fur district, the photo district, the garment district), any and all ethnic enclaves, and architectural relics that spoke to lost practices - coal chute covers in slate sidewalks in Park Slope, the pneumatic tubes used at the NYPL, the granite blocks that came to NYC as ballast, to be turned into cobblestones in the MeatPacking district. Much of NYC is now architecturally and commercially undifferentiated from any other large city in America, and my dad hated that. "Where are you supposed to get a key copied, for Christ's sake?" I can hear him saying. My Grime a Day project is a response to the ongoing erasure of that city - his city - and the ways that New Yorkers, and New York itself, fight that erasure, in a myriad of small ways. It documents where and how the city and its people continue to maintain their differentiation - hodgepodging together unique solutions to urban problems, putting their own marks on others' infrastructure, practicing their distinctive rituals in public spaces, and treating the city like it's theirs and they can do whatever the hell they want with it.