Apology Project
organization
The Apology Project, a 1980 conceptual art project, was created by Allan Bridge who employed the pseudonym Mr. Apology. Bridge invited callers to "apologize their wrongs against people without jeopardizing themselves" and promoted the service by sticking up posters in the Tribeca area of New York.
Concept
The line was based at Allan Bridge's Manhattan loft and used an answering machine to record confessions from anonymous callers. Over the 15 years that the line was in operation, more than 1,000 hours of confession were recorded, with callers confessing everything from infidelity, shop lifting, drug dealing to ritualistic murder. Some of the confessions were published in Bridge's magazine Apology.
The project came to an abrupt end in 1995 when Bridge was struck and killed by a jet skier while diving in the heavily trafficked Shinnecock Inlet on Long Island. The incident was witnessed by two people on the shoreline, however the culprit was never found.
Legacy
In 2019, Mark Thomas of The Payphone Project acquired the former telephone number for the Apology Line, 212-255-2748, where it is now the official phone number. The calls are routed to the Payphone Radio stream.
The public source identifies “Apology Project” as organization. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Apology, Project and organization.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2023. The linked authority identifier is Q4780435. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1980, 1995 and 2019.
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This entry incorporates text from “Apology Project” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.