Famous Ankles

At the end of Alphabet City is the Jacob Riis Housing projects.  I was there on a very cold day and the smart people, unlike Famous Ankles, were inside and comfortable.

But, I have to admit that I’m not fond of this area.  Not because of anything other than the Soviet-style feel to the place and it’s general lack of any aesthetic that I can appreciate.

I guess that they may look good on paper and they are probably laid out in some nice little grid that I can’t appreciate…but I just don’t think much of the area.

In the middle of the above picture, you can see a bit of artwork that someone put there.  And to the left, there’s a children’s playground.

Here’s a closeup of the sculpture.

And the playground.

I mean, there’s nothing really to object to, but I don’t like it.  Maybe it’s because it looks like a low-income project, and maybe it is one, and such things seem to have a hopelessness about them.  But, I think it is just that it is so very sterile and there’s no signs of life here.  No sign of commercial activity, no sign of much.  I’d just walked through a number of blocks of mostly empty streets, but got none of the negative feeling I got from here.  I hope and expect it’s more my imagination than anything else, but all I can think of is that some architects really didn’t put much of themselves into this place.

-H

This entry was posted on February 4, 2008 at 5:48 pm and is filed under Greenwich Village, LES, Manhattan, Wanderings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.