There Goes the Neighborhood

First I was going to call this post, "Ponderations on Architecture and Design," then I came up with something better. The other day I was in a Park Slope bicycle shop to buy a bike pump and I saw Jeremy Irons trying to return a rental bike. My, my I thought, that's either Jeremy Irons or Hank Azaria, I always get them confused. He was rather tall and had a very regal presence so I figured it wasn't Azaria. He also had his pants tucked into boots, not high boots, but boots nonetheless. He had a black leather vest under his tweed jacket. Which reminded me that I heard somewhere he rides motorcycles in some elite club with the likes of the architect Frank Gehry. This set off a lot of different trains of thought. And if you've been reading this blog for any amount of time, you are well aware that multiple trains of thought are my speciality _ or perhaps, downfall, but we'll get to that in another post. Irons was a hero of mine from the days when he played Charles Ryder in the BBC production of Brideshead Revisited. I also enjoyed him tremendously in Stealing Beauty. He was kind of stiff in that film about Claus von Bulow, but he got off a great line about ordering his very own plate of prawns. I thought of saying something to him about how much his performance in Brideshead influenced my foppish early college years, but rather thought the better of it. Stars never return the compliment. Anyway, it got me thinking if Park Slope, or rather my humble stretch of it where it fades fast into Windsor Terrace, is the kind of place you might happen upon Jeremy Irons. I mean, of course it is. I just saw him there, but it seems a little too sleepy for that, maybe Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill perhaps, even North Slope. Whatever, you see where I live there are nice shops, restaurants, schools but they are still a little funky and you get off the main avenues and it falls off fast into those horrible houses with that awful siding. I won't say aluminum siding cause it's mostly wooden, but it's that bad. So while you do get these great old brownstones and sculptured brick row houses you also get a lot of the shabbier looking ones with the siding. Windsor Terrace itself is an archtectural hodgepodge with some great pale brick structures and these awful Queens looking deals, also brick. But real estate being what it was in New York, if it isn't that exactly anymore, had people pushing out to the edges of happening neighborhoods and that's where I found the above pictured structures. It's the two in the middle I'm impressed with, they kind of offer an elegant solution to those houses with the evil siding. I included a couple of adjoining houses with the siding I'm talking about so you understand what I mean when I talk about these evil siding houses. I would be proud to live in either one of the gussied-up ones. The problem is your neighbors are living in the ughs. So they're right next door. A block down, I found something approaching an architectural masterpiece incorporating stone and glass and I'll post a picture in upcoming days. But again the same problem, the other houses next door, just kind of bring it down. A lot of the improvements around here have been kind of hapahazardly designed, its nice to find someone thinking of elegant solutions. The question is who will prevail; gentrification or reverse gentrification? I guess it all depends on the Obamulus. When I was looking for a place to live in the fall, real estate agents kept pulling over to the far reaches of Windsor Terrace, I even made it as far as Kennsington one day. But the houses just freaked me out, I'm funny that way about architecture. Now, if people start remodeling like this there may be hope. Which brings me back to Frank Gehry who is one of those architects you can love without ever having seen any of his buildings up close. In fact, it might be better to see them only in pictures, since the only one I got to see up close on the West Side highway seems completely souless. But one balmy morning in Rio, I met Gehry at a press conference _ this was back when some still dreamed of a Rio Guggenheim _ and he said he was really impressed with the city because, without intending any disrespect for the local architects, the buildings were just buildings and yet they blended in beautifully with natural stunning natural surroundings. In New York we don't have that luxury.