And in downtown Englewood, N.J., officials have been working block by block to revive a section of a shopping strip that only recently was scarred by drug dealing and abandoned buildings.
Organized by the Shanghai-based mattress company Bellarest International, the attempt was held in an empty section of a shopping mall in that city, and took 11 minutes and 11 seconds to complete.
The image looks as though it belongs in a dusty old book, found in a healthy living section of a charity shop.
And there is a sign of the sort you might find in the novelty section of a gift shop: "Well-behaved women rarely make history".
"I came to the conclusion that we were going to create a lost Jellyfish documentary, one which went straight to video and never aired on TV, found at the bottom of a pile in the video section of a charity shop," says Conroy.
Recently, she was spotted browsing the feminist section of a Manhattan book shop.
Wearing costumes that seem to have been raided from the polyester section of a vintage clothing shop, dancers flit between roles of bratty children and irritated mothers with little distinction.
One recent afternoon, Akira Matsumoto, a spiky-haired 20-year-old who lives in Harlem and works as an intern at Hearts and Minds, a clearinghouse for nonprofit groups, was one of several young men who milled about a section of the shop devoted to Japanese comic books, or manga.
Fashionslave, with its graphic design-inspired fittings, was one of the city's first stores to cater to the fashion-conscious male, with personal grooming in one section of the shop and a stylist on hand to help you select the best European designer threads.
Then there's the supplement section of the shop, boasting a collection of tinctured wellness hokum marketed with enough questionable health benefit claims to make Gwyneth Paltrow blush.
