Monumental installation on the south side of Columbus Drive near Grove Street. Behind a chain-link fence draped in green netting (a few holes at face level allow for viewing) in the space where a building or two used to be, is a minor masterpiece, a sort of anti-Urs Fischer, the Swiss artist who excavated the floor of a gallery with a bulldozer for the 2007 work “You.” In that piece, the white cube of the gallery fell away into rough earth; here, the abyss itself is the cube, a gaping hole in the ground as deathly smooth and square as Fisher’s was wild and inviting. The sheer walls are hostile, and the tangles of re-bar and scattered juice cans on the bottom imply a human presence, departed, whose echoes hang in the vast column of empty space above. It’s a post-industrialist world, but industrialism has won. On a wall overlooking the expanse is a single piece of graffito, like a warming: ELUDE. After a hard rain, the bottom is a foot deep in brackish water, which softens as well as adds to the grimness. From certain angles, you can see the reflection of the sky.

street view:

detail view: