More Catching Up


If you want to talk about some serious catching up, try THIS on. Remember this picture? Here's what the view from my doorway looks like now:

Notice anything missing?  Since I arrived in New York, my neighborhood has been undergoing a transformation that was just in its early stages when I arrived.  In my first month after I was full time in New York (after that nasty bit of back-and-forth between here and The Woods), I went to a Drinking Liberally event (sadly, and surprisingly, there is no longer a Williamsburg chapter), and the big local political issue was the very contentious zoning change that allowed all of the subsequent development to proceed.  And boy, oh boy, did it proceed.  When I came back from my summer in Beach Town, there were 3 new high-rise buildings in the skyline view from my house that hadn't been there when I left.  Now, while half of the rest of the country is walking away from housing rather than building more, the Williamsburg building boom has reached my own block.  The entire block across from me, save one single 3-story, old-stock residence, has been razed; two houses next to mine have been razed, and construction has begun on both sites.  I now wake up to bed-shaking piledriving every morning.  Within a one-block radius in each direction, there are currently 8 major construction projects that I can think of, and if I were to take it another block out, I couldn't even count them from memory.  By the time I leave here, the Williamsburg I moved into will be utterly plastered over, and the transformation was already well underway when I arrived.  I often try to describe to people the strangeness of having my years in Florida coincide with a transformation of my hometown so complete that while its old, agrarian roots are a palimpsest still legible to me in the body of my own family, they are utterly invisible to nearly everyone else.  I can't imagine what it must be like to be an old-timer here.  I'll be putting up more pictures at the Flickr page later.