Images
Church Window
For at least a few years, this was a window display at The Strong Place Baptist Church on Court Street. Although I’ve walked past it hundreds if not thousands of time, I know only that its congregation appears to practice in Spanish and that it seems connected to an era when the neighborhoods in this part of Brooklyn1 were perhaps less delineated by wealth. That is, until the last 10–15 years or so, there was less distinction between the working class Latino population living mostly east of Smith Street and the working class Italian population living mostly west of Smith Street. Vestiges of this earlier overlapping period include this church, the only remaining Latino presence on the border of Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill as far as I can tell; and Paisano’s butcher shop on Smith Street, an Italian outlier in an otherwise Latino, or more recently, gentrified area.
🎵 Listening to Melodic Art-Tet
No Air
This lot used to be an auto repair shop. Visible from almost any direction was a sign reading NO AIR, just in case any deflated motorists or cyclists on Smith Street had ideas about filling up there. The garage burned down years ago, so I’m not sure whatever is going up constitutes gentrification, but given the state of things in that part of the neighborhood, I imagine it will be expensive and therefore exclusive, which is what we usually mean when we say “gentrified.”
Shabaka and the Ancestors
Wisdom of the Elders, 2016.
Julius Hemphill
Raw Materials and Residuals, 1978.
Adam
Manhattan Beach, CA, February 2018
There’s a wonderful scene in Wim Wenders’s Tokyo-Ga where he visits a model food manufacturing facility. He’s discussing the difference between things and the images of things.1 This is my small contribution to that mode, seen on the street in Manhattan.
A pretty hot topic at the time and something we should no doubt be paying closer attention to right now.↩
Radio City Reflection, NYC
A friend had just played Radio City Music Hall. My wife and I were waiting for him on 51st Street when the reflection caught my eye.
No doubt the blue glass at CLT is not just ornamental, but sitting there watching planes take off, it was difficult to imagine a better use of the tinting.