Inviting or what? Paul Goldfinger photo © Re-post 2014..
It’s funny about architecture. People respond almost viscerally. Photographers love to capture decrepit, broken-down places. Why? It’s because they see and feel something that moves them, and it doesn’t have to be explainable or classically beautiful.
George Tice, the famous New Jersey photographer, is known for photographing old buildings that look ready to collapse. He is best known for those Jersey images of dreary Paterson buildings, water towers, White Castles and gas stations. Often those photographs move viewers because they suggest the blue collar immigrants who once lived in those places, and sometimes still do.
Some years ago, at the Maine Photographic Workshops, they ran an exhibit of Tice’s work. I was taking a printing course with him, so I wanted to”get” why he was so popular. Sure his prints were exquisite, especially the platinum prints, and you could enjoy the work just on the basis of a beautiful object–the print itself.
But I just couldn’t warm up to those pictures of broken down Paterson buildings. Yet, after a lot of staring and talking to others, I began to see it.
A couple of years ago I went to Paterson with Carl Hoffman of Ocean Grove, who grew up in that neighborhood. He loved those Tice pictures, and seeing the place—the old factories and the Italian-American club houses and old barber shops, it made a lot more sense. So context is what you sometimes need to understand art, whether it is the little house above, or some gory scene from the Renaissance at the Met.
In Ocean Grove, people love the Victorian houses, and the more splendid, the better.
But they also love the cottages that seem inviting for various reasons. Those quaint buildings call to some people—– they exude a certain vibe that rings true.
The house above at the corner of New Jersey Avenue and Mt. Tabor Avenue seems to be like that. We have posted images of it before. One Grover recently told me that he “lusts after ” this place and that he would love to buy it.
Others revealed similar sentiments about this small house with a small yard and porch, made from cinder blocks. I think that people react to architecture from not only an aesthetic point of view, but because of some echo from their personal pasts which they feel intuitively and respond to. They feel that they could be happy, safe, and comfortable in such a place.
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2022 Addendum: About two years ago the property was demolished, and the owner replaced it with a Craftsman home that fills every square inch of that lot. I spoke to him, and he is very happy with his new home. It is at the corner or New Jersey Avenue and Mt. Tabor Way.
THE EVERLY BROTHERS