I can think of nothing textual to say so I shall just post more silly pictures.
I thought this was a cool thing to see, though I may be easily impressed. The recent pavement milling and street re-paving which caused such random sleeplessness in my life (on account of the early morning militaristic megaphone announcements) has turned up an interesting undercurrent: the brick roads once typical of New York but sealed up for generations are revealed in these temporary openings along the street, porous windows of pavement shaped like continents or islands.
I have been thinking about the ground beneath the ground since getting a copy of Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, a book which uses computer visualization to show what the island of Manhattan probably looked like in 1609. Sources tell me a similar project is in the works for Brooklyn, so maybe Queens will get a turn as well. These bricks linings I saw do not hearken back across too many centuries, but since exploring the Mannahatta Project I find myself imagining that the past on which we build our cities is never really gone, and the self-satisfied notion of “the present” is a myth. The present is only a headline for the continousity of time, and an infinitely disintegrating exhalation of existence. The thrashes of the winds and the passages of the hours savor us as they embraced the immediacies of those who stood on this ground 500 years ago, 5,000 years ago. There are no ghosts, no dead, no living, no unborn, only the totality of all heritages, blowing through the same earthly breezes for millennia.
These little gashes in the pavement need not send my flights of fancy back to the days of Sunswick Beach for me to allow myself a passing feeling of communion with the past, and with the more recent of our forebears, whoever they may have been.
Yeah, have seen like this at my old hometown, they paved those brick street around 19 th century, and it is still buried, when it comes to street repaved, we saw this several times:-)
the bricks are/were relatively maintenance free. the asphalt is torn up and replaced every 10 years. why a low speed residential block punctuated on both sides by a light or stop sign must have perfectly smooth relatively high maintenance asphalt is beyond me.
and then they install speed bumps.
40th avenue is still brick, partially paved, but mostly with the brick exposed. it‘s been like that for years. 40th ave by 29th street, where the Verve Hotel is. maybe they leave it as brick for style, or maybe there‘s some other reason. i, for one, appreciated pavement last week when i used a hand truck to move some boxes. the sidewalks are a mess and i ended up rolling the thing on the street.