By: Selina Pedi-Smith, Pellere Foundation
The garage at 403 W 2nd St is gone now.
Not entirely. The stone and concrete base is still there, along with the remarkably respectable pile of brick and stone we salvaged from the walls. But the little building that stood there for nearly a century has, after several weekends of increasingly determined persuasion, ceased to be a building.
I’m a little sad about it.
Only one wall was bad when the roof came off. It was the wall along the alley, and I have my suspicions about what happened to it. The alley itself is older than the garage, paved in brick and traveled for decades by cars, trucks, delivery vehicles, snowplows, and whatever else has rumbled through there since folks decided to carve up the hillside into plots and roads. Decades upon decades of tiny vibrations may simply have shaken the mortar apart.
By the time we removed the roof, there wasn’t much holding that wall together. In places, it was less a wall than two vaguely cooperative stacks of material: rough-cut stone on one side, terracotta block on the other, with fine rubble and what had once been mortar filling the space between them. Take away the rafters leaning across the top, and everybody started reconsidering the arrangement.
Then, unsurprisingly, the walls that had been depending on that alley wall became less enthusiastic about standing up themselves. That’s the way the domino tumbles. And I’m not ashamed to admit I hated watching it disappear.
I liked that garage. Simple box that it was, it had character. The rough stone, old brick, terracotta block, eyebrow roof detail, quaint little coatroom, and piles of evidence of a hundred years of people adapting it to whatever they needed at the time. We’ll rebuild something there eventually, but I don’t know that you can build that kind of character on purpose. You can make something attractive. You can make it whimsical. You can use old materials and strange details and do your level best to produce something unique.
But character might require time.
I keep wondering about whoever built that garage in the 1930s. Did they stand back afterward and admire it? Were they deliberately choosing stone and brick because they wanted something beautiful that would last? Did somebody take particular pride in the masonry?
Or…were they running late? Was somebody yelling that they needed the truck inside before winter? Did one guy mix the mortar a little badly that morning because he was tired, or cold, or thinking about something else? Did anyone involved imagine that nearly a century later, a bunch of strangers would be standing in the alley carefully setting aside their bricks because they seemed too good to throw away?
We may never know.
Roots & Renewal is where the Pellere Foundation shares the people, projects and occasional mud behind our work. Read along here, check out the podcast on YouTube or Spotify, or find us at pellere.org.
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