PreservationNation

Written by Kevin Shea Adams. [This post first appeared on the author's personal blog on January 24, 2012.]

A friend of mine once told me that your bodega knows all your darkest secrets. Being my primary water supply, East Village Farm on Avenue A in the East Village may know me better than I know myself. When I heard that they were closing I found it hard to believe; it’s clean, friendly, busy and, well, pricey. I always assumed it had long ago cleared the zenith of the retail life-cycle and was well into piloting the stratosphere of boundless, automatic prosperity. But this bodega has its own secret, one that anybody looking at the building from across the street will wonder: what’s upstairs?

The building’s exterior today. (Photo: Kevin Shea Adams)

A giant windowless brick shell traversed only by an old, warped fire escape juts up some 40 feet directly above the store front – a giant black box. I learned from people in the neighborhood that this was once the old Hollywood Theatre which shut down in 1959 – but what was more surprising was when I found out it wasn’t just another dusty, gutted empty space, but that it was the functional store room for my dearest bodega! If the store was my sparkling spring, this was its cavernous aquifer.

Not your everyday shop storage space. (Photo: Kevin Shea Adams)

I began asking regularly about going upstairs at every two-dollar hydration visit. I wanted to photograph it, and at one point late at night did receive permission, only to return the following day to be met with language barriers and gestures of denial. Eventually, I found my friend working again and received an invitation to return “after midnight.” So I showed up with my camera and tripod – he warned me there was only one light, but it was plenty. Walking through the back, past all the things you would expect, and up a small staircase deposits you stage-left in this little store’s swollen subconscious.

It’s been a while since theater-goers sat here. (Photo: Kevin Shea Adams)

After spending at least an hour shooting up there, I came down and gladly purchased a $15.50 six-pack of bud light. I’ll miss this place and the kind ladies who would sometimes slip a Haribo gummy pack into your bag. Rumor is the building and the old theatre are to be torn down very soon to make way for new development, and East Village Farm will be closed in just a few weeks.

Kevin Shea Adams is a photographer and musician living in New York City.

For another side of the story, read The Local East Village’s story about the bodega’s closing and the building’s possible future.

I was making my way through the internet this morning and came across a couple articles highlighting old and abandoned places. Not at all unusual here, but for some reason they got me thinking – thinking about our complete fascination with the images that show those places off. You know, the photos of caved-in houses and old train depots with long-shattered windows and graffitied hallways. It’s almost become an industry unto itself, yet the photographs – limited by their frames – rarely tell the full story. What does the surrounding neighborhood (or lack thereof) look like? What political decisions have made these places fail? Who is still there, struggling to create a sustainable future?

(Photo: Flickr user tibchris)

Why are we so fascinated by pretty pictures of needy places? Until this morning I’ve brushed them off as a largely insensitive well-framed, grungy counterpoints to the mediums in which we usually see these images: glossy magazines, bright computer screens, or crisp, white-walled galleries – and there’s something to that. There’s an artistic draw to the broken, and with it, the temptation to keep the images out of context. Entertainment over investment.

(Photo: Flickr user Jon Bradley Photography)

For three years I lived in Washington, DC’s historic Anacostia neighborhood. The neighborhood has its charms: dollhouse Victorians (albeit many in need of repair), open spaces, and active neighborhood groups. But it’s better known for the things that bring it down: the drug busts, bullet-proof glass retail, the crumbling facades, and the severed connections to the rest of the city. But the neighborhood doesn’t want it to stay that way, and is actively seeking solutions to repair and restore. There’s much less romance in boarded-up buildings when they exist, not printed in black and white, on your own block.

(Photo: Flickr user sebastien.barre)

But rather than disparage the “pretty pictures of sad places” craft I’d like to offer a more hopeful explanation for our fascination with them. These images get more screen and gallery space than positive images. And while it would be wonderful if there was a greater journalistic and artistic effort to highlight the good, there are reasons we are drawn to the falling down: they get our hearts pumping faster and we are connected into needs without any expectation that we’ll follow up and do anything about them.

(Photo: Flickr user Howzy)

There are at least two ways we can respond to this phenomenon. We can see the pictures and go on: Leave the gallery, turn the page, click away. Or we harness their energy, allow them to become inspirations, and become doers. These images serve as an important reminder that there is still a lot left to restore before more needs to be created. And we’re the only ones that can do anything about it.

David Garber is the blog editor at the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

As suburbia encroaches, a house is moved. (Photo: Flickr user Irina Souiki)

House moving can be a contentious subject in the preservation community. Why? Because context is such an important part of the significance and stories of old and historic places. Take a house out of that context and you risk a sort of theme park-ification of the place. And yet, moving a house can also be practical.

What about when homes are threatened by demolition? Or if moving a home to a new homesite is less expensive than other options? Should we count the wins of house moving ahead of the losses? The New York Times explores the way house moving is becoming more popular across the country:

Jennifer Davis, 38, a mediator in Everett, Wash., and her husband, Craig, a policeman, also 38, bought a 1,500-square-foot cottage in 2008 as a vacation home for a quarter-acre they owned on Hat Island.

Despite the obstacles, the damage caused by the move was limited to a few easy-to-repair hairline cracks. And Ms. Davis estimates that they saved about 40 percent of what it would have cost to build a house.

But the best part, she said, is “it’s a 1950s rambler with all kinds of details, like scalloped trim in the kitchen and a wonderful pink bathroom, that you don’t find in new construction.”

And “we saved it from a landfill.”

David Garber is a member of the Digital and New Media team at the National Trust for Historic Preservation.