| Friday, February 25, 2011 |
| Walking the dog |
An upturned Jack-o-Lantern, loose cobblestones, a yellowing Christmas tree. The remnants of a fire-escape, doors and windows sheet-metaled or plyed over, a blue tarp rising and falling with the wind. And the dog oh the dog, taking stock of this bombed out world.
But what about that those transoms? The casement windows with the venetian glass? The oxidized copper on the ground floor? Peer up into the second floor - those joists holding up the third? The spruce rising out of the ground, the winter-killed azalea sure to come back with spring?
So the paradoxes get summed up quickly as the dog roots around, faintly annoyed by the rain. Further on
down we have pressed squares of tin tacked into the masonry, above the skirtboard where the stairs once ran. Mortar filling in where the brick was hogged out for the treads, or perhaps the stringer bolted into the parting wall. Tin turned the color of shakshooka, a couple remants from the foyer. Further along, beyond the fenceline, a new development.
The dog takes stock of it all.
Behind us a bumpout wrapped in corrugated galvanized tin, a misshapen fruit tree of some sort seeming to hedge its bets on whether that fence will or won't remain. Fish-scale freize, tin soffit at top. A lost art, except to folks like Dave Brooks who, thank the sweet lord, keep it alive.
The dog doesn't care for cobblestones. Maybe when they were chinked in with sand or mud, when horse hooves clotted over them, when they didn't have great gaps betwixt, he might have become accustomed to their humped backs. Now his paws slip into the gaps, especially in the rain.
But he does like these morning cruises, perambulating along this backwater behind fourth street, where resilient folks like Audrey Cooper pile split logs from the Firewood King (real name Dusty Tace - he should have been a baseball player) behind houses to burn in their rebuilt open fireplaces. Where trees get long shrift of airspace, and the dog gets long shrift of groundspace.
We walk on an old Philadelphia Street interrupted in the last fifty years by a subdivision smack in its path. A sewer runs through it. Rainwater from a warehouse downspout runs through a subdivision of moss. The dog sometimes take sips.
The walk is always too short - so he says right about at this point, with this absurd look, as we step through the gate we cut to get to Audrey's house, and arrive back at the shop. A pile of CMU, plastic piping for the graywater system at the Pennsylvania Horticulture Society, a dumpster from Revolution Recovery, Christmas trees we plan to de-limb and make fenceposts from, rescued joists from all over the city. We hope to put a chicken coop on top of the building. Vines climb the brick wall, a toupé for the filled in openings. The truck full of biodiesel courtesy of Moaz on South Street and the genius of Steve Richter.
We do our best. The dog knows it. |
posted by Brendan Jones @ 9:19 AM   |
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| A blog addressing the importance of re-using material, and building with existing structures. A strong emphasis on architectural salvage, as well as the people that make the difficult work possible. |
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Name: Brendan Jones
Home: Philadelphia, PA, United States
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Greensaw is dedicated to using architectural salvage to enhance modern living spaces. We respect history, our environment, and the material with which we work. We recognize our clients as partners in the process of using old to build new. |
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