The Metropolitan Building

Not to usurp my last post, but...I just discovered something really special. Unfortunately, lots of hipsters have too, and I will have to fight them off with my voodoo stethoscope...Words cannot express how much I love this place and the woman who goes along with it. The New York Times (this bride's father's Bible) featured the proprietor in 2006 (let me know if you are unable to access the piece), and I was truly touched by the concluding line:

"I think it was childhood's dream, when I always wanted to be in a really bad neighborhood, and there would be a wall, and there would be a door. And you would open the door through some fairy tale — this was tiny childhood — and there would be a long corridor, with nothing, very little, and then you would arrive in paradise."

When I was a little girl, my brother and I would break the rules and sneak through a hole in a fence behind our building. Through this hole and past the building's trash heap lay a warren of alleyways where I vividly remember passing my first dead rat. I think I was about eight or nine. Above one corner lived an opera soprano who practiced her scales - I always imagined her as fat with a lot of rouge. If you shimmied up a low brick wall and headed east through alleys belonging to the other buildings on our block you arrived at my fairy tale corridor and door: the back of the St. Agnes Branch of the New York Public Library. This usually being summer, the windows on all floors would be open. And I remember standing there, alone in my alley, staring at the windows and dreaming of ways to enter through them. What would it be like to break into the library, to enter through this secret back door? Does breaking into the library count as a crime? Would I be tried for my thirst for knowledge?

I never understood why adults insisted on perpetuating fairy tales. They only broke your heart when you grew up to learn they weren't real...

But for tonight, I'll dream of my "fairy tale wedding" in this space to wake up tomorrow to a harsher reality. Above, a picture from a MS Weddings (!) photo shoot held in the space, and below courtesy of their website.