Abandoned

13-04-2009   Brooklyn, NY

The wind blew hard from the north and made an odd whistling sound through the bars in the decaying fire escape. I took another step and felt my feet give weigh beneath me. My hands held fast to the railing and eventually I swung myself up onto the stairs above. The fragile rusty step couldn’t bear the weight and had broken off, clanging noisily along the crumbling framework three stories below. Luckily, there hadn’t been any people passing by and my presence had gone unnoticed. I jimmied one of the dusty windows open and tried to push open the wooden board which had been nailed over it. The thing wouldn’t budge. I would need to kick it open to get inside the abandoned building. That would make a ton of noise however, so I needed a distraction down below in order to complete the break-in. Less than a minute later, an old bag man came rumbling down the avenue with an overflowing shopping cart. He stopped at the corner and began rummaging through the garbage can, bottles clinking and clanking together as he emptied it. The stars were aligned! With three swift kicks, the wooden board pried loose with a loud squeak and I was able to squeeze into the darkness.

After shimmying through the narrow opening, I fell into a billowing pile, something soft. The smell inside the place was intense, an odd mixture of old books, dust, and bird droppings. Using the LCD light on my camera screen, I saw that I was laying on a huge mess of clothes. The whole room was filled waist-high with them! I walked toward the doorway on this layer of old cloth, it was like walking on a cloud. The low grey light from the LCD cast an eerie glow on everything in the room, shadows danced along the peeling walls as I moved towards the hallway. After walking from room to room, I noticed the place was filled with furniture, books, old records, toys, posters and boxes. Clothes were still neatly hung in the closets, toiletries still stocked the bathroom shelves, dried flower stems hung listlessly in dry vases, even beds were still made. It was as if whoever owned the place had just vanished one day and never returned. Signs of decay were pervasive. Paint peeled off the walls in large uneven swaths, water damage revealed piping in the ceilings and walls, tiles were ripped up and scattered all over the bathrooms, and staircases had splintered after years of neglect.

I wondered if the place was haunted. At various points during my journey through the house, I listened and closed my eyes, trying to feel some sort of presence. Sounds of the house settling and the occasional scurrying of rats was all I heard. If there were any wayward spirits, their intentions seemed to be benign. I imagined for a moment being a spirit trapped in that house, cowering in the darkness of one of the decrepit rooms, sick from the stench of bird shit and fading newspapers, looking out onto the avenue on a sunny day and watching the people pass by below, knowing all the while that I would never be noticed again.

After poking around the rooms, I eventually found my way onto the roof. The absolute stillness up there was incredible. Before my eyes, a beautiful sweeping view of Brooklyn and Manhattan spread out into an infinite matrix. When walking in the canyon between the buildings at street level, it’s hard to notice how residential Brooklyn is. From this vantage point, you see how few buildings rise above four stories. The Manhattan skyline looms like Mount Olympus over Thessaloniki. People once called Brooklyn ’the bedroom of the city’, and from the roof it was easy to see why. The glow from all of the light pollution cast an orange aura over the buildings, bathing them in a soft haze. The distant street lights hummed and twinkled like stars. City dwellers have a virtual galaxy at our fingertips, we just need to get up above the lights to notice it.

The house moans beneath me, and it’s quite clear that I have overstayed my welcome. I am a flea on the back of a dying dog. I make my way back down from the roof, through the cracking hallways and crumbling staircases, through the room piled high with clothes and back out through the broken wooden plank. With my eyes fixed tight to the ground, I slowly creep down the old fire escape, careful not to step into the abyss my feet created on the way up.