I’ve often been drawn to dilapidated areas. I used to dream I lived a trailer park by a freeway! God knows why. The aesthetic I cultivate iis far from it.
When I was a child, I visited my paternal grandmother every Sunday. She lived in a hugely deprived area in the Italian section of the Bronx in New York City. It was where my father had been raised and lived until he joined the US Army in preparation for WWII. We would leave our newly built, post WWII homestead in rural Long Island, New York and drive into the Bronx to visit with my widowed Nonna who lived in a tenement building, amongst dozens of other tenement buildings. It was a fearful place to me and, although I loved seeing my Nonna, I dreaded going because my parents would always send my brothers and I outside "to play". For a child who was used to being surrounded by green fields and nature, Nonna's habitat was alien. The only redeeming event was having Sunday lunch which I would help to prepare by removing the dried spaghetti dangling from the lines hung around her apartment. I know that the people who lived and worked in that area where Nonna lived were just hardworking, good people, in the main, yet there was, to me, a menace in the air. My soul could not accept that humans were meant to live this way. But, there was goodness and community there, evidenced by the way in which people shared what they had. My Nonna was always cooking for people, they were mostly her neighbors and her friends from Church, where she spent many hours, cooking and cleaning for the parish priests after my grandfather had died. Having lived in the community from the age of 15, when she married, until her death at 76, she would not have lived anywhere else. I think home and community is about the people who inhabit an area and there was much love where Nonna lived.
I’ve often been drawn to dilapidated areas. I used to dream I lived a trailer park by a freeway! God knows why. The aesthetic I cultivate iis far from it.
When I was a child, I visited my paternal grandmother every Sunday. She lived in a hugely deprived area in the Italian section of the Bronx in New York City. It was where my father had been raised and lived until he joined the US Army in preparation for WWII. We would leave our newly built, post WWII homestead in rural Long Island, New York and drive into the Bronx to visit with my widowed Nonna who lived in a tenement building, amongst dozens of other tenement buildings. It was a fearful place to me and, although I loved seeing my Nonna, I dreaded going because my parents would always send my brothers and I outside "to play". For a child who was used to being surrounded by green fields and nature, Nonna's habitat was alien. The only redeeming event was having Sunday lunch which I would help to prepare by removing the dried spaghetti dangling from the lines hung around her apartment. I know that the people who lived and worked in that area where Nonna lived were just hardworking, good people, in the main, yet there was, to me, a menace in the air. My soul could not accept that humans were meant to live this way. But, there was goodness and community there, evidenced by the way in which people shared what they had. My Nonna was always cooking for people, they were mostly her neighbors and her friends from Church, where she spent many hours, cooking and cleaning for the parish priests after my grandfather had died. Having lived in the community from the age of 15, when she married, until her death at 76, she would not have lived anywhere else. I think home and community is about the people who inhabit an area and there was much love where Nonna lived.