I posted this thread on Mastodon on Feb 27th. I would link to the original posts, but they will be automatically deleted in three months. I will make small edits here.
Yesterday they tore down a house across the street. It’s now a pile of rubble over a story tall. There are a lot of colors and textures in the rubble. Today they are loading the rubble into dump trucks.
I live in a historic conservation district. You aren’t normally allowed to just tear down houses. A woman who lived there was a hoarder. Could-have-been-on-the-TV-show-level hoarder. Her wife/partner died a couple of years ago and it took the police and fire department a long time to figure out how to get her body out of the house.
Other than one or two extra old unmoving cars in the driveway, you wouldn’t have known. We don’t have an HOA or anything where ungenerous neighbors can nag you about your yard1, and while it was slightly unkept, the hoarding did not spill outside.
Before flattening it with a the biggest backhoe I’ve ever seen, we speculated about the unusually authorized razing. We wondered if they would keep the facade, a common technique for skirting the historic designation constraints. But apparently the hoarding inside left the structure in such a state that that backhoe was allowed to just drop down on that 100-year-old brick, that exquisite chimney with two ornate brick caps, the stained glass in the entrance window, the arched living room window.
The whole thing is a microcosm of our current times, soundtracked by the loud back-up beeping2 of a large machine.
Yesterday I saw someone on here I have respected for decades drag Paul Ford based on his recent op-ed in some NYC publication, which somehow led me to the newly revived garden of delights that is ftrain. Many times over the last 15 years or so I would visit ftrain and feel a little sad staring at that last post from years ago. This morning I read and read, the way he weaves a mundane story into an emotional gut-punch.
Leading thoughts, by Paul Ford (Ftrain)
Anyway, I’ve been listening to Damien Jurado all morning. I forgot to add him to my new /important page. Will remedy that on my next deploy.
I did not get a photo of the demo or the initial pile of rubble, but here is a photo at the end of day two, the end of day one of the removal. The pile is about ½ removed. They drove 2-3 semi-trucks away. I’m not sure why they parked the backhoe on top of the pile for the weekend.
PS
Also by Paul Ford (Ftrain)…
Prayers are distributed through a supernatural network protocol they call pleamail—unfortunately most go to spam.