Tuesday, September 9, 2008

More before-and-afters from New York magazine

I had a post yesterday morning on New York's jaw-dropper of a piece this week titled The Glass Stampede. Here are more before-and-after shots from the feature:


11 and 22 East 1st Street


Palladium Residence Hall on East 14th Street.


One Astor Place


Union Square West

Also! I was so delirious looking at all this that I missed the article's reference to "one" Jeremiah Moss on the first pass yesterday.

As Justin Davidson wrote:

In his 1962 poem “An Urban Convalescence,” James Merrill captured the feverish yet methodical sacking of the city and the way it toys with our sense of comfortable familiarity.

As usual in New York, everything is torn down
Before you have had time to care for it.
Head bowed, at the shrine of noise,
let me try to recall
What building stood here.
Was there a building at all?


Among Merrill’s disciples is one Jeremiah Moss, who maintains the engagingly gloomy blog Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, which he terms “an ongoing obituary for my dying city.” His topic is the steady erosion of the city’s texture. He is the defender of all the undistinguished hunks of masonry that lend the streets their rhythm and give people a place to live and earn a living: bodegas, curio stores, a metalworking shop in Soho, diners, and dingy bars.

1 comment:

  1. I really hate being reminded of the Palladium being gone. It was the first place I ever saw a concert, in 78 - Meatloaf (ha!), Patty Smith and the Dead Boys, possibly Elvis Costello (not all at once, but within a couple months of each other maybe into 1979). After Meatloaf, my first foray into the city at night alone with friends, not knowing what we were doing, and definitely not paying enough attention, we got on the L train and accidentally wound up in Brooklyn. The L train has changed almost as much as the Palladium!

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