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Brutalism is a style of architecture. It seems to explain itself well enough in this image made recently of the AT&T switching center on 10th avenue between 53rd and 54th. The sun shone bright did not illuminate. No light enters, and no light leaves. Waves riding another frequency slip in, deposit their messages and exit with others to carry off into the ether.
It is said that on particularly dark nights and lunar eclipses a body can pass through the solid matter walls only to be absorbed by them. If you find it following you, walk slowly until you find help. Never look it in the eye. 
Like this:
There’s the desecrated truck at rest on East 66th Street as gravity begins pulling it slowly into the asphalt. Perverse, elegant accidental street sculpture. A patron of the arts looks on.
The door was ripped from its hinges and shoved into the gaping maw of the cab like a dismembered tongue stuffed into the mouth of a decomissioned stoolie.
Danger, we are warned. Danger.
Like this:
and a few doors uptown…
…and directly across the street. They moved a block or two north on Broadway, but still… you know?
Finally, two blocks away at 79th and Amsterdam.
I walk past this vacant lot on East 33rd between 5th and Madison and it always catches my eye. Last week I saw a guy organizing garbage bags atop the fence, probably looping them on the unintentional hooks that form the top side of the fence. The bags hang on the inside, out of sight from the street.
Theory: he collects cans, glass, and plastics for recycling and stores the bags up there before redeeming. Here’s a view from inside the lot – bags in upper left corner. It reminds me of what a hiker would do with food to keep it out of reach of bears.
The rest of the lot from left to right, strewn with rubble and garbage, a modern urban ruin. Why not open this site to the public? Sure someone would invariably get some superficial injury and sue the city for millions, but why not…
In December, 2001, a five-alarm fire swept through the north transept of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Amsterdam Ave. You can see signs of reconstruction and restoration – building materials, scaffolding, large granite column sections – all along the north side of the Cathedral. Visit these grounds and you’ll see wide columns that abut the sky, light streaming in unglassed windows and stairs descending from total darkness.
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