Friday, March 18, 2011

The invasion of the building snatchers

During this past year, I started taking photos of the old and new buildings brushing up against one another around here ... The new buildings seem like intruders — lurking, menacing in the background ... Like those unwanted interlopers who find your bar or move in upstairs with desires to take over ...

Here are a few of the shots... It's a work in progress... (a progress in work?)











For more along these lines, read Jeremiah's post from a few weeks ago titled "Schizo New York," in which he writes ... "There is a split in the city ... It's often expressed architecturally —the war between old and new, the radical shift, the loss of bricks to glass and sheen."
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8 comments:

  1. shmnycMarch 18, 2011 at 9:20 AM

    That's a cool idea. Back in apx. 2007, when new buildings were going up every day along The Bowery, I started taking pictures of the buildings that I thought would probably be torn down in the near future. I need to go through those and upload them to my flickr page.

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  2. EV GrieveMarch 18, 2011 at 9:29 AM

    Cool. Let me know when you upload them!

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  3. LisaMarch 18, 2011 at 10:13 AM

    So sad. (And I don't want to hear from ANYONE about the inevitability of change and how NY is always evolving, blah blah blah. There's change that works and change that don't, and these photos definitely delineate the latter.)

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  4. Marty WombacherMarch 18, 2011 at 11:22 AM

    Lurkers, indeed! Great work!

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  5. AnonymousMarch 18, 2011 at 12:26 PM

    And today there is this article in the NY Times - No Longer for Down and Outs, the Bowery is Up and Coming

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  6. AnonymousMarch 18, 2011 at 11:02 PM

    these new buildings built next to old buildings are going to attract the fratboy element to the neighborhood.

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  7. Cass in MelbourneMarch 20, 2011 at 9:57 PM

    One day in the distant future, the old buildings will be gone, the new buildings will be old and people will be tearing their hair out about the changes in the city. Just an observation.

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  8. A little night musingMarch 20, 2011 at 9:57 PM

    This reminds me of one of the very first place I lived in NYC, West 11th Street, nearly opposite the infamous building that was blown up by a Weather Undergrounder and replaced with an architecturally incongruous modernist weirdness.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich_Village_townhouse_explosion

    http://www.complex.com/city-guide/2011/02/look-up-18-west-11th-street


    Less intrusively or oppresively Other than the ones you have shown, but I think of it as the beginning of the end...

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