Storefront(s)

David Michael Newstead | The Philosophy of Shaving

The awning was for a coffeeshop. The name in the window was for a mobile phone store. And the building itself clearly used to be a bank decades ago. This describes an abandoned storefront I walk by regularly. That structure has been many things over the years, but for as long as I can remember it’s been nothing. There are a lot of places like that around town. I’m always amused by that one location that’s under never ending construction. Or when a “Coming Soon!” sign tells us all a short story about plans that didn’t work out. According to this giant poster, an organic grocery chain was supposed to open here in the spring… two years ago. But it’s still vacant and probably always will be.

There’s a barbershop near me that went out of business. Everyone forgot to turn off the spinning barber’s pole out front before they left. So now it just rotates all by itself forever. The Earth is going around the Sun, the planet is spinning on its axis, and this barber pole really completes the portrait of a universe in motion. A fast food place nearby closed down too, but they left their cheesy 1990s neon lights on inside. Months went by. A year. Maybe more now. Whenever I walk by and look at it, it feels like some bleak version of the painting Nighthawks. A restaurant without people. Stories in empty places.

Every piece of blight, everything discarded, or in disrepair started off as something new once. Then, just maybe, it gets remade like that glorious old bank that eventually became a store for cheap cellphones. If you drive around enough, you can see this in a thousand interesting ways: old buildings getting a second life. A church on the highway finds much needed space in a former Pizza Hut. While other buildings are eaten away by time or the elements, this one continues on in a new way. When I was growing up, a church by my hometown closed and somehow became a coffeeshop with a steeple. For a while at least. Everything is only ever for a while.