Marshal Grigory Potemkin, one of the more artful lovers of Catherine the Great, accomplished many things during his long domination of Russia, but he is best remembered for an illusion. To impress Catherine with the prosperity that he had brought to her subjects, he is said to have built handsome fake villages all along the route of her tour through southern Russia in 1787. Historians doubt this tale, which they blame on malicious court gossip, yet there is something about the idea of "Potemkin villages" that lingers in the memory as a symbol of political craft.
Let us therefore salute Anthony B. Gliedman, New York City commissioner of housing preservation and development, who is carrying on a program worthy of Potemkin at his most imaginative. Confronted with the dilapidation and general ruin of the buildings he is assigned to preserve and develop, Gliedman has found an ingenious solution. He pastes vinyl decals over the broken windows of the city's abandoned slum tenements to convey an illusion of cheery life inside. Some of the decals look like curtains, some like Venetian blinds; some even contain illusory flowerpots, where illusory geraniums blossom in an illusory sunshine.
Not only has Gliedman so far spent $100,000 to gussy up 330 vacant houses in various poor neighborhoods, at $6 per decal, he is now spending an additional $70,000 of federal funds from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to extend his good works through the most devastated areas of the South Bronx. This pleases the inhabitants and reduces vandalism, he says; it is also supposed to make a favorable impression on potential investors who might be driving past on the way to the suburbs.
"We don't want anybody to think we're doing this instead of rebuilding," the commissioner told the New York Times. "But that will take years and require hundreds of millions of dollars. And while we're waiting, we want people to know that we still care. We want people to feel good about their neighborhood. Morale is very real. Perception is reality."
Perception is reality. Could Plato himself have said it better in his speculations about the imaginary cave where prisoners see life as a series of shadows flickering on the walls? Wasn't that what Shakespeare meant when he had Prospero conclude his pageant by declaring that "the cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples" would all dissolve, for "we are such stuff as dreams are made on"? Trompe l'oeil (trickery of the eye) is the artistic term for it, and Italy is full of palaces with flat ceilings painted to look vaulted and plaster made to resemble marble. Even Renaissance landlords liked to economize.
Perception is reality. It is the motto of pickpockets, but also the police. Los Angeles authorities discovered a few years ago that an empty police car parked alongside a speedway would serve just as well as a manned cruiser to slow down traffic. In fact, at least one Beverly Hills denizen has taken to keeping a fake patrol car in the driveway to deter thieves. Mere burglar alarms are obsolete today; the up-to-date suburban paranoiac installs timers in his house to turn lights off and on while he is away.