The brick wall along the entry corridor of my apartment whispered me inside the unit like a sentimental ghost, seductively haunting from a bygone era. Aesthetic is its own language. How do I describe being drawn to something that is beautiful only through the lens of my own nostalgia and storybook mentality? Charming, quaint, old-world… none of these quite right in describing the aged texture of brick, marked by construction and weathered, a history absorbed in porous clay.
The leasing agent showed me three available units in the building. Having spent a month slogging through the tedium of apartment hunting in 2020, the brick wall with built-in shelving woke me up. The apartment wasn’t exactly what I’d envisioned for myself, post-break up and looking for an impossible place so amazing it would smooth out everything in me that felt prickly. I went with the best option. Originally constructed in 1899, the building was in an ideal historic neighborhood of Jersey City that I loved. Plus, the brick wall.
Looking at the wall one day, it occurred to me that the shelves were originally windows and the brick wall was once the exterior of the building. At some point my apartment was added on.
It was never in the original blueprints to turn the exterior of the building into the interior. They constructed around it, turning windows into bookshelves and the resilient, mortared façade into a hallway. When I came to this epiphany, I loved my brick wall even more.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art went through one hundred years of architectural expansion. The Met’s original Central Park building was completed in 1880 with Ruskinian Gothic style arches. Critics of the day detested the way it looked and eight years later a new architect designed a new entrance to the building in a more classical style. The Ruskinian Gothic façade then became a courtyard walls. By the time the new exterior building was complete, more space was needed to house the Met’s growing art collection. In 1895, Richard Morris Hunt then designed The Great Hall pavilion entrance that welcomes visitors along Fifth Avenue. The museum continued to expand in every direction through the twentieth century. Today, the Ruskinian Gothic façade and the subsequent classical façade can still be seen as walls, fragmented inside the Met.
What prompts these architectural expansions? The need to take up more space as a collection grows, more rooms to house more people, money, an exterior more aligned with a particular vision. Yet, the original is still vital to the whole structure. And something that is no longer presentable on the outside becomes appreciated on the inside.
I adorned the two built-in alcoves along the brick wall with books, antiques and other bric-a-brac as soon as I moved in. 2020 turned into 2021 turned in 2022, facing down my solitude, my demons, the parts that needed healing. I had no choice but to fill the spaces inside me just as I filled my apartment. My apartment became my home, solitude became a sanctuary, and my demons became my friends. Healing came slowly and painfully in those years, but it came.
I am now called to expand into new spaces in my life. After spending the last couple years in deep healing and growing inward, it’s time to grow outward. It’s time to create, to give something of myself to the world, to build something new around the space I’ve already curated.
