We turned around to face the yellow stucco wall and began our ascent to the main entrance, with each step gaining a more complete view of this concrete expanse, this Tetris city. The grand wooden doors stood slightly ajar encouraging the temperate breeze to sweep across each wooden board--nail-stained and buffed by the years of scuffs and weighty steps. Following the dark metal streaking, my eyes skipped over the thinly milled boards until I was standing in the center of some grand entrance hall looking up into the smog-encrusted panes of a lead-frame glass dome. Dropping my sights again I saw a carved wooden railing marked with caution tape obscuring the form of a cubicle on the floor above. Perhaps this cubicle was where I would encounter the keeper of this building’s history? Scanning the flexing floor on which I stood, I stared perplexed at the letters emblazoned on the caged-metal elevator shaft. We called out to this hollow skeleton of a structure for Felipe, the Liberdade police department’s longest-serving officer and keeper of the building’s story.
We had been walking in the crowded streets of Sao Paulo’s Japan-town, our feet pressing into the paving tiles dyed to resemble the taiko drumming symbol. Sao Paulo welcomed a flood of Japanese emigrants beginning in 1908, now boasting the world’s largest population of Japanese outside Japan. It is this neighborhood, Liberdade, once called “Hanging Square,” where that population found visual expression, cultural comradery. The image is almost complete, the vision almost realized, save for a few cobble stones peaking out from beneath the paved expanse, a weathered catholic chapel wedged between concrete towers and the yellow stucco police station that hovers over Sao Paulo’s main east-west highway.
Despite the vibrancy and distinctive character of the neighborhood, I found myself drawn to these skimmed-over skeletons of history—they stood like jars, pushed to the back of the kitchen shelf, their labels obscured by settling dust and their contents absentmindedly left unsealed in the hurry to make the next batch. They rot ever so slowly, the faintest whiff of decay unidentified in the kitchen.
“Ele foi ao dentista.” A middle-aged man called out to us from the staircase behind the elevator shaft. Alas, we had missed our chance—the history keeper had a toothache and was tied up at the dentist. Seeing me shift my eyes away from the three letters marking the elevator, the man explained, “as inicias do barron café”—the initials of the coffee baron—so the history had at least two keepers. He led us to the back porch, tiled like an Italian villa and looking out on a sloped parking lot strewn with police cars. Feeling a tap on my shoulder I turned around to be confronted by the portrait of a young woman rendered in stained glass—it had been hidden from the interior by a storage closet. It was the daughter of the coffee baron—“e do outro lado, a outra filha”—the porch was flanked by these daughters of a largely forgotten man in a remote time. The government had claimed the estate long ago when the baron was unable to pay off his many debts. The rot had been given much time to take hold, the dust plenty of time to accumulate. I walked down the grand staircase feeling uneasy, unsure if this skimmed over skeleton would soon be crushed, it’s significance forgotten.
We expect to find skeletons in museums, artifacts behind glass, ancient ruins beyond gates—but what about our more mundane cisterns of collective memory? What about our contemporary ruins? Why so eager to pave over, to re-build, to tear down? What informs this disregard for recent relics of the past? Indeed, why not clean up Detroit’s vacant Michigan Central Train Station, clear out the towering skeletons of elaborate office buildings now empty and treat them as the grand ruins of our times? Can we not find something to celebrate, something to learn from these now-vacated monuments to our times? Perhaps this attitude mirrors our delayed valorization of fine art as with the now coveted work of Picasso whose work was ridiculed and dismissed by contemporaries. We must learn to find value in the present, not only in the long ago and long to come eras of our imaginations.
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