Remembered Spaces

We carry with us footprints of vanished places; houses we moved out of years ago, ice cream stores like T&W (Terwilliger & Wakefield) that went out of business, bars like Espositos which stopped serving, neighborhoods where only the street names remain the same. This is the long gone geography of Ridgewood.

These were places, and I'm sure you all could add many more, we knew almost by intuition until they vanished, leaving behind only the strange sense of knowing our way around a world that no longer can be found.

Thanks to Verlyn Klinkenborg for the inspiration.

Homage To Small Hometowns

Ridgewood will always be a small town to me. No matter how many restaurants it has and how few empty lots remain without a McMansion.

I saw this today on the James Lileks site:

"If you grow up in a small town, your love is inevitably unrequited. Which is why you return, the grey swain, flowers in hand. Remember me?"

If anybody could ever sum up why I have a blog and a web site devoted to the Ridgewood High School class of 1977 James Lileks could. He is a writer living in the midwest who loves New York city for the same reason I do: The Buildings! Please visit his web site. You won't regret it.