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Fiction By John Hockenberry
Photography By Addison Thompson For Metropolis
January 2003
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Custom elements such as the flocked wallpaper, leather banquettes (above
and below), and liquor wheels behind the bar are mixed with vintage
photographs (above) and antique mirrors (below).
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Building Facts
Strip House, 2000
New York, NY
Rockwell Group
Client: The Glazier Group
When the opera-themed Italian restaurant Asti closed its doors after
seventy-five years, a huge collection of photographic memorabilia was
left on the walls. Rather than committing the images to the Dumpster,
David Rockwell used the vintage star portraits as historical anchors in
the lusty interior of the new steakhouse. |
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A crust of crumbly debris and pavement was the last bit to give way. His feet plunged through a cloud of dust and disappeared into opaque quicksand
gray. Adjusting his goggles and helmet lamp he waited for the air to clear,
and when it did he was staring at himself in an intact but darkly soiled
pane of glass. Still legible in the bottom left-hand corner were the handsomely
etched letters "Strip House."
"This is it, late twentieth-, early twenty-first century,"
archaeologist David Zadok whispered through his respirator and checked his
GPS for the coordinates of a lifelong dream.
"You all right?" The voice of his brainy young assistant, Cheryl,
far above him. They had tied up their boat at the old Zeckendorf landing,
near the rusted remains of some long flooded towers and hiked over
the barren landfill to this spot.
"I'm perfect," Zadok almost shouted. "It's a Rockwell, mint
condition, and we're the first to see it in four hundred years. Get
down here."
A moment later they were easing open the door of a ground-floor room
in a late-nineteenth-century commercial building on a downtown street in
old Manhattan back when people actually lived and worked there.
"Hand me that power unit in your bag." Zadok threw his flashlight
beam down along where the walls met the floor. "They're around
here somewhere." Darkness cloaked everything. The light revealed backs
of chairs in strange shapes, reddish leather trimmed with metal, once shiny
brass with a dull green patina. A thick carpet with a grayish pattern was
on the floor. The wall was deep red. "The simplest detail is always
part of a fucking puzzle in a Rockwell," Zadok said as he finally
found a pair of archaic outlets smartly camouflaged by the thickly
textured wall-covering.
"What are those?" Cheryl asked, becoming disoriented in the darkness.
"Electric power jacks. If I'm not mistaken, sixty cycle, alternating
current, one hundred ten volts." Zadok moved the dials on the compact
but heavy power unit Cheryl had handed him. He scrounged up a plug adapter
in the bottom of his bag and tried to match it to the two-prong socket in
the wall. "You know, the poor people who lived around here needed an
adapter for everything. They were slaves to their adapters." He chuckled
as he rummaged. "I'm living history right now."
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For more images, please see the January 2003 issue of Metropolis. If you
don't have an issue but would like to buy one, please contact us at
talk2us@metropolismag.com. |
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He pulled the matching plug from his bag, attached it to the power unit,
and eased the plug into the wall. "If we're lucky nothing will blow
up." Cheryl observed the red pilot light on the power unit.
"Watch this." Zadok pointed into the darkness. His flashlight
found a spot on the wall.
Cheryl gasped. "A face." A framed picture of a woman stared back
at her, and all of a sudden there were dozens of faces staring from crimson
walls in a long, narrow room with neatly arranged, if dusty, tables and
chairs. Three front-to-back rows of recessed and now abruptly glowing white
lights gave the ceiling the look of a landing strip at night. Circular frosted
glass sconces threw more light onto the long walls until they seemed to
be foaming with the intense red of the wall-covering.
"I don't know who these people all were, but this is a Rockwell."
Zadok removed his helmet and respirator, and grabbed the uneasy hand of
his assistant. "It's perfect, and there's not another one like it in
the world." His voice squeaked with excitement.
Cheryl let go of Zadok's hand and walked ahead. She had caught her reflection
in a mirror behind the bar. Bottles still sat on cut-glass rotating shelves.
She twirled one of the shelves. The mechanism was smooth. Colored liquid
sloshed in dusty bottles.
"Alcohol," Zadok called out as he jotted down notes and dates,
where visible, from the labels. "To get people to stay."
"So people could stay here as long as they liked?" Cheryl set
her analytical tools down and walked slowly back to a tufted-leather corner
banquette. She slid into the seat and stared back through the room. As she
relaxed she slowly felt a strange kinship with the faces on the walls.
"They sat around eating and drinking, doing nothing. That's about all
that went on in the old city." Zadok busily examined every detail on
the walls and tables while documenting everything he found on the various
recording devices dangling around his neck.
Cheryl leaned back. "What year is it?"
"That's the central mystery of a Rockwell, layers of time jumbled together.
The building is nineteenth century. The pictures are from the 1920s, '30s,
and '40s. The decorations are early twenty-first century doing early
twentieth."
"I like it." Cheryl had removed her yellow coat and used it to
clean off the tabletop and the seat around her. She stretched out, her eyes
wandering, instinctively looking for a waiter.
"You're experiencing immersion. Rockwell called it the Big Wow. All
his spaces had this quality. The writings speak of it. Complete control
of time and space. Rockwell once designed a prehistoric village where people
came to do nothing but play cards and lose money. One thousand years of
time compression in a single room."
"Like a cathedral."
"In the church of worshiping your own life."
"How do you explain the Tower of Terror?"
"A challenge: design something where people linger even in the realm
of their own fears. It apparently worked."
"So none of these designs were for government buildings?"
"Never."
"Isn't that the biggest puzzle of all?" Cheryl leaned back in
the banquette. Her eyes seemed to be watching people at a nearby table.
She motioned for a waiter. "I can't imagine a designer working for
someone besides the government. Did he do it for free?"
Zadok smiled. "Not hardly."
A glass had appeared at the tall blond assistant's table. A sealed box of
cigarettes was opened. She poured some dark liquid into the glass and inhaled.
"Let's stay here," Cheryl whispered.
"This is the biggest archaeological event of the past fifty years."
"I know," she said. "Let's stay here." She had never
thought of Zadok as anything other than a colleague. But with his glasses
backlit by the heavy fan-shaped sconce he was suddenly transformed. He had
become intriguing. "You don't have to be anywhere, do you?"
"This isn't anywhere."
"So we should stay then." Cheryl's hair had become a reddish halo.
Zadok couldn't tell if she was smiling. He stood and walked across the room
toward her. He seemed to be younger now and simultaneously as ancient as
the pictures on the walls.
Above the Manhattan landfill the wind was foul. It whipped up dust
and debris. The encroaching waters were crested with foam. The horizon was
filled with the dark remains of a civilization--jagged, rusted artifacts
of moments that had ended badly. From far away the red glow of the pocket
where the Strip House had waited quietly for all these years was the only
warmth in a cold city, a moment about to end well.
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