It takes a Village/Thursday Doors

I went down to Greenwich Village last weekend to see an art exhibit at the Grey Gallery at NYU. The Village was my second neighborhood in NYC, after my year in the dorm at FIT, and the one I moved back to after a short time in Brooklyn. I lived in the West Village, and though I often visited the Washington Square area, I did not usually roam east of Broadway.

So I walked right by the Grey Gallery and ended up going around the block to find it again. On the way I passed this graffiti covered doorway, and of course I needed to photograph it.

I also did not notice the Village Voice building the first time I passed it. As I’ve written before, The Village Voice was my source of news throughout my 20s–I didn’t start reading the NY Times until much later. I thought it was totally defunct, but it turns out they have an active website, and evidently sometimes still publish a print version, though I’ve never seen one in my recent journeys around the city. I was happy to find that they still cover local news, as well as national and international news, like the recent protests that the mainstream media are busy ignoring. They also still seem to cover the arts and culture. Their current staff list of writers is impressive too.

The Voice has gone through a number of owners and iterations, and stopped publishing altogether in 2017, which is why I did not realize it had returned in 2021. It occupied this building from 1991-2012. You can rent office space there now, if you so desire. I’m glad they kept the name, and the doors, which appear to have Athena, in her non-warrior persona as the goddess of wisdom and justice, as a guardian.

Here’s a colorful food truck that was parked across from the Village Voice building. It, too, has a door.

There were lots of people out on this beautiful if somewhat chilly day, and I saw two gatherings–a peaceful and joyful one for trans rights in Sheridan Square–and a peaceful marching one that turned onto Broadway ahead of me as I was walking crosstown, which had a lot of signs and chanting but was too far away for me to hear or see clearly what it was about. We still have voices; it’s nice to see people exercising their right to use them.

My poem is a taiga, a combination of photo and tanka, for Colleen’s new Tanka Tuesday challenge, with a request that we use a black and white photo.

And look for more doors at Thursday Doors, hosted by Dan Antion.

When we say a voice
is lost, what is it we mean?
Does it not linger
in the uncontainable
echoes holding on to Truth?