Even though I worked in the building for years, I was never allowed into some rooms. I could have probably asked, I would have probably been allowed to enter, maybe even to take pictures. (Though I would have taken the wrong ones anyway, for sure.)
Yesterday was different, it was better. I could hide in a crowd of hundreds maybe, snooping around the Masonic Temple on 23rd and 6th Avenue. It was one of the locations which New Yorkers were allowed to visit, thanks to OHNY.org.
It was fascinating to discover that the roof, on which I had locked myself out just a few years ago, was now almost open to the public, equipped with a protective railing, and yet surrounded by a slightly crippled view.
The sky was basically exactly the way it decided to be when the door locked shut on a drizzly afternoon some four years ago or so. But that's a completely different story. (I might have even told it here, maybe even several times?)
One of my favorite rooms in the building was one on the 6th floor of the building, a very beautiful meeting room, narrow, lined with antique book-cases, Mahogany paneling, an incredibly ornate ceiling, and with a much larger than life statue of George Washington, in a material far too golden.
The ceiling in this room is decorated with symbols that look like straight from a book about South American pre Columbian cultures.
It was interesting to be allowed to enter the room and to see the reactions of visitors to the statue, the books in the (at first closed) book cases, the really unexpectedly ornate ceiling.
It was clear that the statue was of George Washington, but why under a South Americanesque sky?
The answer to this question was a real surprise, and so incredibly fitting as an anecdote for today: The team of experts who renovated the incredibly ornate and saturated rooms of the Masonic Temple in Manhattan had been brought in from Peru. When instructed to use "Old American Symbols" for the room with the large George Washington statue, they certainly did not think of "America" as in: "United States of America", they thought of the continent, the place that was here before even the Santa Maria, the Pinta and the Niña arrived, bringing glass pearls, syphilis, liquor and... well, Christopher . This here used to be a home to people a long time before , long before Amerigo Vespucci, long before it became "America".
One has to thank the Masons that they did not have this stroke of brilliance on the side of the renovation team "corrected".
I shot a few pictures in the amazing interior on the 6th floor. I think my favorite image is the one below, and the more I look at it, the more it feels like the right one to look at today.
The couple across from me, on one of the leather sofas, in front of those Mahogany (?) paneled walls, their feet on a persian carpet with floral motivs, wearing Puma sneakers, levi's jeans (?), she sporting an italian knock-off(?) gucci bag, are staring at a ceiling that is populated with pre columbian symbols. The ethnicity of the couple places them somehow here, they are obviously the children of generations of various streams of people who came to America long before and also after the arrival of . I do not want to make too many assumptions about the origin of their genes...
Though they both do look like the future of this continent, don't they?