The
old Pabst brewery sits abandoned and boarded
up. It was built to look like some sort of Bavarian castle. When CNN or The
Times wants to show Milwaukee as a city on the rise, they show our
lakefront, our art museum designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.
When they want to show us as another crumbling rivet in the rust belt, they
show the old Pabst brewery, a vast and weedy lot in the foreground.
Katie
and I took a Polaroid down there once to try to take some arty photos. I stuck the
camera through a hole in one of the plywood boards where a window used to be.
The flash went off.
Leaning
against the big brown bricks, we watched together as the image slowly rendered:
a mattress, atop the mattress, a man sleeping in his dirty clothes; a long
hallway, in a dark and empty castle.
Tyler Koshakow
koshakow@gmail.com
City of Glass
Paul Auster