On Tuesday, many notes offered support to immigrants or mocked Trump’s promise to build a wall along the United States-Mexico border and have Mexico pay for it.
“A better wall,” read one sticky note. “This is the wall that love can build,” read another.
Titled “Subway Therapy,” the installation lining the underground walls beneath Manhattan’s Union Square was the idea of artist Matthew “Levee” Chavez.
“The last couple days have been stressful and I wanted to provide people with an opportunity to engage in a small and easy way,” he wrote in the magazine Quartz.
Anyone can post a note, and more than 10,000 people have, Chavez wrote on Instagram.
Democrat Hillary Clinton bested Trump 79 percent to 18 percent in New York City.
Writers of the sticky notes took varied approaches. Some pledged political action, saying “Vote in 2018” and “I will do my part to change this!”
A blue sticky note quotes novelist Zadie Smith on the subject of despair, and a pink one quotes Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”
New York’s Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, struck a pro-immigrant message, posting a note with lines from the Emma Lazarus poem that appear on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free… I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
The defiant stance expressed in the notes is the right message for New Yorkers to send, said waitress Caitlin Cherry, 28, as she paused to look at them.
“I’m happy that people who are visiting can see that not all Americans want this,” she said.
In a separate sign of protest, three apartment buildings on Manhattan’s Upper West Side are dropping the name Trump Place and will be known by their addresses, the trade publication Real Deal reported, citing an email to tenants from landlord Equity Residential. Some tenants had circulated a petition requesting the change.
