We spent this weekend in Manhattan visiting old friends and pretending that the aches from our ankles gave us license to eat more than we should. I've enjoyed enough of James Lileks' ruminations on ghost ads that I spent a lot of time looking at the sides of old buildings for traces of the past. No luck with the ads, but I did spot quite a few ghost buildings, and one phenomenon that puzzled me.
Say you spot a twenty-story masonry building next to a three-story one. The top two floors of the masonry building have windows exposed on the side, but the windows are bricked up from floors four through eighteen. Obviously a seventeen-storey building once stood where the three-storey photo lab stands now, and that ghost building was constructed after its taller, longer-lived neighbor. Nobody would build bricked-in windows from scratch, so they must have been a reaction to the construction of the ghost building.
There's just one thing I don't understand: why wouldn't you re-open the windows after the neighbor had been torn down?
Posted by Ben Brumfield at July 11, 2006 11:01 PM