Desuetude or Gentrification. Or Bust.

I am gripped by a sordid fascination with places I cannot go. This is why I had to Mongolia and Tuktotaktuk, for examples. Are there trees? (no) If you sleep outside, will you wake up dead? (maybe) Do people buy food in the store or hunt and gather it? (both) Etc.

New York tortures me with this all the time. Derelict buildings and abandoned subway stations, old skyscrapers in the financial district with one little dormer lit well into the night. The pillars of the Brooklyn Bridge have three storeys of bricked-up windows, defunct gas or electric lights hanging over now-padlocked doorways. I need to know what is in there. I once asked a cop who mans a booth in the shadow of one of the pillars, and he answered as though he literally could not see what I was seeing ("What do you mean? Nothing.").

So I went to the Battery Maritime Building the other day, because David "This is not my beautiful wife" Byrne had installed some art in it. I will not give this short shrift: the building had been rigged to be "played" - an old organ whose keys sounded off jackhammers and pipes and rattling radiators. And it was unique and wonderful and drastically creative-- but it killed me that they had painted the walls halfway up to do it, and cut holes in the pipes for the acoustics, because it shows how irreverant the renovation plans are for the building itself - that it will be wrenched from the spot where it sits frozen in time, and turned into yet another gated bourgeois backdrop.