This — the city’s pending ban on those corregated-metal gates that cover up every storefront in the city come closing time — is one of the strangest things I’ve read in ages. As the article puts it:
New York City’s storefront gates, like its fire escapes and stoops, are there but not quite there: the unnoticed wallpaper of New York at night. They have been battered by vandals and defaced by graffiti taggers…they have provided the clattering soundtrack of dawn and dusk, the steel canvas of struggling artists, the most compelling evidence that the city does, indeed, sleep.
Which is precisely why it’s so disconcerting, and such a strange thing for me to suddenly feel nostalgic about — corregated metal storefronts are somehow unconsciously absolutely integral to my concept of the city, one of those things so deeply ingrained into my idea of New York, visually and aurally (and also to photos of Cory Kennedy circa 2005), that I couldn’t imagine it otherwise. WEIRD.
