Journaling on estrip is free and easy. get started today

Last Visit 2012-06-04 13:32:26 |Start Date 2006-02-27 14:30:33 |Comments 654 |Entries 407 |Images 203 |Sounds 3 |SWF 3 |Videos 44 |Mobl 11 |Theme |

Category: architecture

03/04/06 11:06 - ID#37275

the soul of a building

So my buddy Chris called me up to go out on a man*date tonight. When I asked him what the occasion was, he said his wife had invited all her feminine relatives over for dinner, and there were just too many women in the room, and he needed a burger and a beer. Going out with Chris is always surreal, because despite the fact that he is a lawyer and an upstanding member of his community, we always end up telling dick and fart jokes.

We drove by the site of the proposed hotel [inlink]paul,4203[/inlink] and we both agree that it is going to look great there. The grubby little stores in the grubby little houses had a certain kind of caché, but I think the hotel will be an excellent fixer-upper for that corner. If I ever had to find a hotel for someone, I couldn't think of a better place to put them than right at the end of the Elmwood strip [because really, I'd end up taking them down there anyway since it's so much cooler than my own neighborhood (MAP TO: 14223)].

Then we started talking about old buildings and new buildings. I guess his father grew up in a building that used to be a funeral home. I thought that would give me the heebie-jeebies. Not that there were still dead people coming in and going out, but that's what the building was for. To my ever-anthropomorphizing mind, it just seems natural that buildings would have memories of what they were used for, and what happened there.

It reminded me of when I used to live in the Lower East Side. I'd hang out in the East Village all the time, and there was this one building on St Mark's Pl (MAP TO: 23 ST MARK'S PL) that I always wondered about. Always spray-painted, never occupied, and always somebody shooting smack on the front steps. Turns out 21-25 St Mark's Pl had a long and sordid history starting as the Polish National Home ["the Dom"], which ended violently when a massacre went down, and eventually the building was purchased by Andy Warhol, who rechristened it the Electric Circus, where the Velvet Underground got their start. That's pretty heavy shit, all of it. The building fell to disuse, though I think some squatters were living there. Then one day, after a prolonged absence involving a move to the suburbs, I came back to my old haunts only to find it had been replaced with luxury lofts, a natural-foods store, and New York City's first Chipotle . New brick facade, well-lit, fully-occupied, no grafitti - as though nothing had ever happened.

But still, some derelict out on the front steps shooting smack.

Gotta love change.

- Z
print addComment

Permalink: the_soul_of_a_building.html
Words: 439


Search

Chatter

New Site Wide Comments

joe said to joe
Never send a man to do a grandma's job...

sina said to sina
yes thank you!
Well, since 2018 I am living in France, I have finished my second master of science,...

paul said to sina
Nice to hear from you!! Hope everything is going great....

paul said to twisted
Hello from the east coast! It took me so long to see this, it might as well have arrived in a lette...