The number that started it all. For years I had passed this building on an almost daily basis and had always been charmed by it, but I couldn't quite figure out why. Was it the texture of the peeling blue paint? The run-down but elegant allure of an old building on a hidden side street? It was all of those things, but mostly it was that 4.
The old door with the fan-sunburst window cut-outs, rotted and duct-taped with a maintenance order, has since been torn down and replaced. A new door, painted darker blue and perfectly decent, now stands in its place. A few weeks after the new door went in, I happened to find a lament on this very alteration over at the always-interesting Lost City. It's worth a look for some good before and after portraits of NYC and its boroughs, including this well-loved building on Verandah Place. My eye still lingers over the old familiar 4 every time I pass it, though the new blue door is a neighbor that will take some getting used to.
3 comments:
Therese,
I bookmarked your page when you showed it to me at work. Gathering numbers from urban locations is such a beautiful idea- and these photographs (this one, in particular) seem to pinpoint what I love so much about the aesthetics of the city... those little corners that seem to hold so many stories. Some of the numbers here almost seem like ravished markers of passing time. Lovely photographs...Thanks for posting them!
--Jackie
Thanks, Jackie! I know the old door was such a pathetic old thing, but I still miss it. I feel like NYC is so prone to such weird nostalgic impulses: "Sure the place was a crummy dive, but it was a crummy dive with stories."
I feel similarly about living in the centre of Sydney.
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