Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

113. THE SCHMUCK BROTHERS LANTERN FACTORY (nyc,1967):
They'd just finished tearing down the Singer Building right by Park Row along the area of City Hall and that was near the same spot where the old Post Office also had been - another massive red-bricked facade on a huge building built in that now obscure style of some 1880's flamboyance which took up space and seemed all to weigh about a billion pounds - they don't make buildings like that anymore and the only things you can find like that are occasional leftover crumbling midtown police stations or old church schools and stuff - and there was rubble everywhere real rubble not just glass and steel and in that rubble were thousands of items to salvage and pick and the trick was to somehow get the deal or buy the rights to as much of that stuff as you could get your hands on - in those days all the regulations and limits and stipulations about things were not in place as they are now so it was relatively easy to get to these things and just tramp around at will which people did - contracted people and regular people too walking over mounds of junk - and from places like that these guys like the Schmuck Brothers and many others would find their raw material and there'd be trucks and vans parked all askew with guys loading them up with anything and all that took a month or two or more to clear and the wreckers by then would have moved on to the next building - most often nearby too or right across the lot or wherever - for the developers at that time were trying to connect parcels and build 'larger' sites where before there'd have been two three or four buildings it wasn't large enough unless they were now all conjoined and contracted as one for the sorts of large steel/glass buildings they were putting up with plazas and dead street areas and setbacks and entryways and all that so this meant there was plenty of rubble and wreckage going on and the way of dismantling buildings back then was huge iron and concrete wrecking balls which often would just continually smash into the walls and things one hit after the other until various portions just fell - not too much controlled demolition and explosive devices as are used now - it was a much different operation with cranes and shovels and steam pickers and trucks and things all over the site while huge cranes would stay in position as they each held an operator who would just keep swinging the demo-ball over and over into whatever and people scurried around below and beneath and stuff just flew and fell everywhere - it was a true mess at times - and then just as suddenly it would simply stop cease come to an end and all would be quiet except for the occasional groan and crash of something which tardily would decide to give it all up and come crumbling down : and that then was the situation all along the area of downtown as in addition to everything else they began the final process of deconstructing and dismantling and destroying the entire lower westside for what was to become the late lamented Twin Towers of the World Trade Center mysterious state-sponsored lucre Mammon boondoggle without any sense of being that it was and all for nothing really as hundreds of businesses and literally thousands of people within their neighborhoods were displaced moved and made essentially homeless too and the whimper that went up meant nothing to anyone as the continental rigors of state-powered force reconstructed whatever it wished and wherever it selected and at the same time too as up in the village the enraged and sensible voices of Jane Jacobs on Hudson Street and all of those people sought to stop the same stupefying destruction and dismantling of Greenwich Village with through-streets and highway/byways which would have churned up and recultivated the whole area this time for automobile access and the full and unhindered traffic and passage of cars trucks people cargo freight and junk from one faint shore of the island to another and that too was then later in the 1970's superseded again by the huge fight over Westway - which too would have decimated the westside as the elevated highway came down - and the whole circus play of fight argument demonstration and rage had to take place over again and though I was present for most of this stuff I stayed apart from the fray in a manner more reminiscent of one who observes and studies than one who does not care - it was in a way all too real or all too cumbersome for me to take up as a cause in the sense that 'reality' has always obscured me and I never got along well with it and anyway my one silly voice in this fray would not mean a thing because eventually it all happens anyway one way or the other the way it was meant to be and even the plans and such if they're not taken up immediately then a sort of 'defeat' is accepted and in about 7 or 10 years they end up getting what they wanted anyway and if you don't believe me just take a look around - it's all programmed and finalized way beforehand and there's never room for error and mistakes aren't built into the planning or the budgeting and again if you don't believe me just try walking down Houston or Canal Street any day or time of the week and see if there's room for even your body to pass without getting run down by something.