Kick in the Head

People who haven’t lived in New York very long won’t get this one. I lived in the NYU dorm across the street from this church during my freshman year. Plus Forbidden Planet is nearby here so I pass by this church on a regular basis. Last week I was walking past it when I noticed something was terribly wrong. It was like the feeling you get when you walk past a place where the scaffolding has been removed after being there for over a year. Or when you go to Brooklyn for the first time after being in Manhattan for your entire New York experience. Namely, that there’s this huge amount of space above your head that didn’t exist before.

I was meeting my freshman year roommate this particular day, and I had him walk down to the church with me so that he could confirm I wasn’t crazy and that something was definitely different. It took us a second to put our finger on it but there used to be tree(s) that used to block basically everything you can see behind the fence in this picture. Why they did this I don’t know. When I took this picture I saw this woman acting out surprise and shock to some other people who were obviously sharing their initial reaction to seeing that the trees were gone. Sad.