A typical lament of aging is the observation that the hallowed places are being uprooted by less authentic interlopers. One sad effect of modernity is that many of our landmarks are merely places of commerce from which spring material transactions that are the process of sanctification and meaning in a captial driven society. But, what then, are the amulets of days past? Temples to discarded belief systems. The evolution of postmodernity will inevitably be the erections of monuments to the process of nostalgia itself.
That I find fewer places each year to marvel at is an indictment of my own passing through youth, but also a real measuring of the continued development of lower Manhattan that will mandate the eventual elision of the spaces which resonate most with me, the forgetten, the interstitial. It sounds like bad hipster parody, and likely it is.
But the ones I cling to are in fact a far sight more interesting mystery than the lastest residential ‘enclave’. For instance, for years, I have wondered about the theater building the East Village Farm inhabits. The Farm, located on the east side of Avenue A between 7th and 6th streets, was clearly once an auditorium (the emergency exit mezzanine is still on the Avenue A facade). Why hasn’t anything be done with this? Are they storing inventory in the rows? There is another, mid-block, auditorium in the East Village, the location of which escapes me now, that is similarly unused. An auditorium is hard to redevelop, but given the dearth of film theaters for so long, I’m surprised no one made an attempt to create an alternative space of some kind.
The space that was always the alluring to me was the hulking monolith on 6th Street between 1st and Avenue A. It is the kind of building that when I asked others if they had any insight, not only could they not help, they typically could not even recall its presence. About the same size of the adjoining buildings, it has far fewer windows, and perhaps fewer floors as well. It looks like it may have been a fire house, the large entry of which had been replaced with some aluminum storefront and a smaller set of doors with dense, abstract metallic graffiti neatly covering the bottom half. Regardless of the hour, it remained implacable and unchanged. One light, high up and in the rear, and some emergency stair lighting. Never a change or indication who, why, or what this building was about. It mostly became a landmark of obtuse importance, the hipster development fantasy: if no one else noticed it, perhaps I could swoop in, compensate for innumerable missed opportunities that weren’t, but only seemed so in retrospect. I figured it to be city owned, or some similarly intractable bureaucracy. It occurred to me only recently that a quick search tax records could turn up the owner. And what I found amazed me: artist WalterDeMaria has owned the site for over twenty years. So much for my longings for gentrification, even as my keen eye was validated by such a storied artist (and now developer). Of course, this entire mystery could have been resolved had I bothered to consult the incomparable work of Jim Naureckas. Maybe it is the most obscure of his long-term installations, an artwork for one, or revealed only to those who make the effort. It seems unlikely, given it’s rough state. Maybe it’s a sketch. The truth is probably far more pedestrian. I’ll wait for New York’s most dilligent real estate fetishist to clue me in. In the meantime, does anyone know of any large, underutilized and cheap properties I can shift my unfulfilled longing to?
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421 E 6th Street
A typical lament of aging is the observation that the hallowed places are being uprooted by less authentic interlopers. One sad effect of modernity is that many of our landmarks are merely places of commerce from which spring material transactions that are the process of sanctification and meaning in a captial driven society. But, what then, are the amulets of days past? Temples to discarded belief systems. The evolution of postmodernity will inevitably be the erections of monuments to the process of nostalgia itself.
That I find fewer places each year to marvel at is an indictment of my own passing through youth, but also a real measuring of the continued development of lower Manhattan that will mandate the eventual elision of the spaces which resonate most with me, the forgetten, the interstitial. It sounds like bad hipster parody, and likely it is.
But the ones I cling to are in fact a far sight more interesting mystery than the lastest residential ‘enclave’. For instance, for years, I have wondered about the theater building the East Village Farm inhabits. The Farm, located on the east side of Avenue A between 7th and 6th streets, was clearly once an auditorium (the emergency exit mezzanine is still on the Avenue A facade). Why hasn’t anything be done with this? Are they storing inventory in the rows? There is another, mid-block, auditorium in the East Village, the location of which escapes me now, that is similarly unused. An auditorium is hard to redevelop, but given the dearth of film theaters for so long, I’m surprised no one made an attempt to create an alternative space of some kind.
The space that was always the alluring to me was the hulking monolith on 6th Street between 1st and Avenue A. It is the kind of building that when I asked others if they had any insight, not only could they not help, they typically could not even recall its presence. About the same size of the adjoining buildings, it has far fewer windows, and perhaps fewer floors as well. It looks like it may have been a fire house, the large entry of which had been replaced with some aluminum storefront and a smaller set of doors with dense, abstract metallic graffiti neatly covering the bottom half. Regardless of the hour, it remained implacable and unchanged. One light, high up and in the rear, and some emergency stair lighting. Never a change or indication who, why, or what this building was about. It mostly became a landmark of obtuse importance, the hipster development fantasy: if no one else noticed it, perhaps I could swoop in, compensate for innumerable missed opportunities that weren’t, but only seemed so in retrospect. I figured it to be city owned, or some similarly intractable bureaucracy. It occurred to me only recently that a quick search tax records could turn up the owner. And what I found amazed me: artist Walter DeMaria has owned the site for over twenty years. So much for my longings for gentrification, even as my keen eye was validated by such a storied artist (and now developer). Of course, this entire mystery could have been resolved had I bothered to consult the incomparable work of Jim Naureckas. Maybe it is the most obscure of his long-term installations, an artwork for one, or revealed only to those who make the effort. It seems unlikely, given it’s rough state. Maybe it’s a sketch. The truth is probably far more pedestrian. I’ll wait for New York’s most dilligent real estate fetishist to clue me in. In the meantime, does anyone know of any large, underutilized and cheap properties I can shift my unfulfilled longing to?