Thickair Blog

As a kid, growing up in Baggs, Wyoming I watched a lot of Bugs Bunny cartoons and for some reason a lot of black and white movies. I once watched ‘A tree grows in Brooklyn’ and as a nine year old, it really stuck with me.  So long as she could see the tree, growing outside her window, everything was ok. So when I moved to Colorado at age twelve or thirteen, and as my mom took me to antique stores with her to find decorations for the house, I found myself transported to another place and time in the bookcases. My first ‘antique book’ purchase, was ‘A tree grows in Brooklyn’, because it was a title that I already knew.  I think I was probably the only kid in the nineteen eighties who read hard-back novels published in the nineteen fourties. I had this wild fascination with the World War 2 era, Bugs Bunny and all things New York. I started wearing vintage hats, listening to jazz on National Public Radio and continued to watch movies only made in black and white.

So here I am, fulfilling my childhood dream, of moving to New York.  I am in a little apartment in Brooklyn, not even in a neighborhood that has a name really. Unlike Francie’s view of the tree, however sad, it still gave off the energy of hope, living and growing. My view on the other hand is just sad and vacant. I see the easement space between my building and the one next to it. In the morning the sun light wedges itself carefully into the dark slice barely reaching the edges of the window. Directly across is the window of the neighbor, slightly off center from mine, such that the brick of the building is mostly what I see. When every building was once made of brick, mason’s would come up with ‘design’ techniques to distinguish one from the other. The building I get to see everyday is the ‘messy’ brick style, where they let the mortar drip and ooze out from under every brick and then went back and threw more over for an added layer of ‘texture’ all the while marking it with a tool to make scratch textures as well. Then painting overtop the whole mess. One of the least attractive experiments in masonry. The two foot space has over time become a trash-can of sorts for random scraps of paper, dirt and rubble. I see a red envelope, opened, perhaps a forgotten valentine. My window has a long dripping of what appears to be vomit. I can only imagine that someone from an upper floor, opened the window and wretched out into the void. The mass of the building and gravity pulled the liquid such that it landed on my window. I have cleaned many disgusting messes before in my lifetime, but this is one I can’t even start to think about doing. One would have to spelunk into the space with a ladder, and scrape and wipe through the steel bars that protect the windows from potential thieves. Soon I will hang a drape and cover the window so I no longer have to look at the funky brick and the regurgitation on glass.

This entry was posted Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 10:10 am and is filed under Architecture & Design, Brooklyn, Mind Matters. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.