Where The Building Was

When I came upon this scene in Braddock I immediately thought of Magritte’s painting La trahison des images (The Treachery of Images), where he drew a picture of a pipe and included the text “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”). Of course, what one sees is not a pipe, it is a painting of a pipe. Looking at this I do not see a building, I see the absence of a building. The shadows appear to me to be hands, one grabbing one end of a hammer and the other reaching for the other end, ready to fell more buildings slated for demolition.

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