Trumble beds, long collapsed from their closets in the wall, appeared in the middle of rooms.
It’s a hodge-podge of apartments and doctor’s offices, connected by cavernous hallways filled with tumbled bricks and a thick, 30-year-layer of dirt. The building that adjoins the theater is just as incredible as the theater itself. Towards the front lobby, up a set of grand, iron-wrought staircases, I fortuitously stumbled inside one of those holes to find that it was a passageway into a completely different building. Our voices carried off into the many holes that weathering had created. It was no longer a theater of echoes, as it likely once was. A grand piano, sans legs, lay belly-down in the orchestra pit, and the original tapestry-like curtain still hung from its rods high above on the stage, itself depicting a lively mediterranean scene but darkened by years of decay. The seat cushions themselves were strewn all around the theatre grounds, which had turned from wood or cement (whatever may have been there before) into a mass of organic, decaying dirt, all harboring its own garden of tenacious flora. Orange seats in the trademark hue of the 1970s stank of mold and rotting wood. We peeked inside of the theater to find a different world than the one just outside. The lettering advertised the appearance of the “Jackson Five: Live Tonight.” Certainly in jest, the marquee held its own ironical ode to the family that made Gary famous - perhaps more famous than its steel moguls.
Whatever lasts is boring, what demands its own replacement energizes our imaginations.Īfter rolling up to a side street from Broadway, the five us found the mouldering marquee of a hulking theater on the corner. The very horizon is often oppressive, jagged with junked cars, the detritus of consumer culture, which after all is a culture of planned waste, engineered obsolescence. Miller says of Cartier-Bresson’s photos of the decaying roadsides of 1950s U.S.: If Gary is our example, and steel work is the epitome of work, then we are no longer the “Workers of the World.” When I myself brood over our post-industrial lot, I often like to reflect on a little-known introduction by playwright Arthur Miller in a book about Cartier-Bresson. Our unions no longer exist - at least not in the sense that they once did, when over 40% of the American workforce were members of a union. Today, much of our steel is imported our manpower is exported.
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