ALL THINGS NOT KNOWN

246. ALL THINGS NOT KNOWN (nyc, 1972):

Not necessarily the finest but who cared; the man was throwing garbage down from a second level and as it hit the walkway below it made solid thuds sometimes and lesser thuds other times - filled as it was with basic construction junk of insulation tiles plasterboard cutoffs and the like - and he was yelling loudly his commands and construction oaths to his workers - the glass had already been broken and shards still were strewn about and pieces of lumber and broken lathing were everywhere and as I'd seen all this before (in that both construction and deconstruction were everywhere in NYC as even the oldest places became or were deemed at least 'no good' and ceded to what the industry strangely called 'rehabilitation' or 'rebuilding for newer purposes') - it never made much sense for me to see things go as I was totally and always in love with the oldest and the most quaint of whatever I'd see - even the old leaky places the old haunted booklofts and musty bent and twisted stores tippled with brown light the old stables and dairies and taverns and bars and all of that ancient crumbling old housing now so quickly being lost or gobbled up by cranes and backhoes and wrecking balls and their crews - men ferociously going about their assigned tasks as all about them things fell and tumbled and were crushed or crashed on their own - it was sometimes a nightmare circus underway at all hours with klieg-lights and artificial lighting pushing a workday into a true 24-hour situation and the solid world melts away and is NO match for the brawn and holler of man's best work : union wages or slave wages it all came out the same and at every moment a new pyramid of Cheops was apt to appear anywhere one looked - it was late 1966 or so and most of the rampant destruction had already happened - the old train stations and platforms the wrecking of the old El stands the doddering and twisted huts and wagon sheds which once dotted everywhere along both coastlines and waterfront - all that was already gone in a million pieces and all those grand old granite and stone stauaries and pilasters and monuments of the past were recklessly cast-off dumped and forgotten to who-knew-where except the mobsters and the salvage racketeers who'd find ways to make money of that too and all-in-all I knew it was a pretty miserable and shocking world and one which the crazed and vile construction guy throwing stuff down to the street knew little about or - by contrast - knew maybe far more about than I myself would ever know : from experience comes knowledge but it never works the other way around : and I'd once asked one of these guys if they ever found 'surprises' as they dismantled buildings and he looked at me and 'all the time brother - happens all the time' and he walked away so that I was never able to clarify what he meant - bags of money dead bodies old bones stashes of jewelry or the more mundane idea of unexpected passageways old interior walls thick stairwells and hidden rooms but whatever he'd meant he wasn't talking least of all to me but just the wondering was fun and the old white building was slowly being sanitized to the present day - from which it would vacate and disappear in an actual and complete 'sanitation' which would replace it would something else again and I felt sometimes as if the entire city was coming down all around me - like the day a truck fell through the elevated West Side Highway and some crazed driver limping and livid came out of his truck and in a mad and furious manner began cursing the streets the city the state the world right up until the moment he passed out from shock with a broken shoulder blade and a broken leg and some ribs - things he'd not even known about at first.
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It seemed like that everywhere and if crime wasn't rampant than for damn sure death and destruction - each in their own way - were.