These two photos are from four years into my ten-year stint as a an office manager. At that time, I frequently ate lunch while standing in the old taxi stand outside of Grand Central Terminal at Vanderbilt Avenue and 43rd street. This was largely a matter of efficiency: in addition to my full-time job, I was usually working on some sort of theater, film, or writing project, so my typical lunch break included running to the deli across the street, grabbing a premade sandwich, and then eating it in the taxi stand as quickly as possible before jetting over to the FedEx née Kinkos to get some work done.
It feels kind of surreal to now have a photo archive deep enough that, for a Throwback Thursday post, I can throw back to a decade ago. (Though I’m sure to more seasoned photographers this sounds like the realization of a total newbie.)
More surreal, perhaps, is looking at a photo that feels to me like it was taken yesterday, but simultaneously knowing that this particular bit of urban landscape has since gone through a good bit of change. In the above scene, for instance, we’re looking across a street into a crosswalk, and on the left, there’s an office building with a T.G.I.Friday’s on the ground floor. But both street and office building no longer exist. The street (the one perpendicular to what appears in this photo) has been converted into a pedestrian plaza. The office building was torn down and replaced with the massive One Vanderbilt office tower.
Sometimes all the years spent post-college feel like they’re one large temporal mass that makes up “the present,” but I too easily forget how much has changed within that span of time, in terms of various historic events and cataclysms, as well as the more gradual changes that creep their way in over the passing of time.