A Time Machine Moment

As I begin this new exploration in the FaceBook, and having seen many of my old friends and colleagues, I realize how much they have not changed in many ways; the way of talking and their looks.

This thing is like a time machine!

One could easily be overwhelmed with the sensation of discoveries and the recollection of old memories in this exploration.

Our job as an architect could, time to time, bring about the similar sensation of discoveries of the past.

Outside

This was when I was working on a small boutique hotel in downtown a few years back. My client had successfully persuaded the owner of an old 5 stories tenement building to sell. The owner had inherited the building from his ancestors.

I was there one day, went up the upper floors and was stunned by what I was looking at. There were traces of walls in their skeleton: no plaster over wooden furring strips, they were all ripped out. This, however, was not surprising, for I was told before entering the upper floors that it was the case.

What had caught my attention were two things.

First, there were no toilets. I was taught that only in the late 19th. century, the toilets were widely built even for the poor people – for those of you who are reading this and not from my field, tenement building is the buildings that were widely built for the single purpose of housing the influx of the new immigrants in NYC in 19th. century. Seeing the floor layout without a single toilet was an unique moment of my professional experience; I immediately imagined the people of the time running up and down the staircases for going to the toilet outside at the yard during the day, and emptying their chamber pots for the night’s use. Vaporous ghosts of these poor immigrants were running before my eyes.

There was no furniture on the floor, and it was almost empty except for a few qualified antique mirrors and a few small dressers. Now, the second thing that caught my eye was this lone piece of wooden furniture that was standing next to a side lot window. Alas, it was a wooden refrigerator - all made out of planks of solid wood with metal hinges and pull bars, which I had never seen before. People of the time would either get a delivery of the daily supply of the ice from the ice man or would send their kids off to somewhere in the city blocks for a chunk of an ice. They would, then, put this in the wooden box and use it as the source of cooling their precious food.

I fell in love with the piece immediately. Only if the owner would not have told me before entering the upper floors that he would take all the pieces of furniture after the closing, I would have asked my client for it, perhaps in exchange for my printing expenses for the project.

That was one of the time machine moments for me, and it is for me now and here.