Thursday, October 8, 2009

Greene Monsters

In Fort Greene, a pair of Frankenstein monsters can be found across the street from each other.

On Lafayette Ave, someone has turned a brick tenement's lower half into a modernist condo, leaving the upper half still tenementy:



And this lovely, 40-year-old cleaners lures you in with its antique signage, only to reveal its lower parts have been transformed into a "dressed down luxury store":



It all reminds me of those mix-and-match books I had as a kid, where you put chicken legs on a cat's body or an elephant head on a rabbit.

In a related item, some scary news comes in from The Local. The Lafayette Grocery & Dairy just had its old sign ripped down. I took these photos recently, happy to find one of these antique tin signs, an increasing rarity in the city:



To see the destruction, click here. Luckily, reports The Local, the sign is in storage and will go back up once the work is done. No monsterizing for this grocery store.

3 comments:

  1. That Dry Cleaners sign is so gorgeous that I can only praise the boutique owner for leaving it intact. Not that I can afford to patronize such a place, but they made the right choice.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The modernist re-do has been there for years. The renovation housed the since closed Restaurant Gia, one of the strangest restaurants I've ever seen.

    ReplyDelete

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