Self-Erasing

Soho

"That is New York as I know it: the city that sets about erasing itself the moment you take it out of the box."
John Freeman Gill, The Gargoyle Hunters

New York Cartography

Lexington Avenue

"Every New Yorker has his own idiosyncratic system of cartography, his personal method of charting the points of correspondence between the external city and the landmarks of his interior streetscape. No surveyor's equipment is necessary, just a wry acceptance of the ephemeral. For many of us, the resulting map is a distorted but truthful rendering of New York in which vanished buildings and storefronts are as present as surviving ones, even more so."
John Freeman Gill, The Gargoyle Hunters