A couple hours of errands on Main and Fraser Streets yesterday, all of them conducted on foot. Walking back from Fraser along East 19th I felt the pull from an alley I had never been down before and was stopped in my tracks by a garage that had a lot to say about itself. A remarkable study in colour, line and form.
Hardly a kit, nor a madman's vision, the garage stands as a record of leftovers from other jobs. Did its vinyl covered door need painting, or was its painter moved to freshen things up with paint purchased for some unfinished lawn furniture (did the painter shake the paint before applying it, clean the surface)? As for the asphalt shingles stapled to its outer wall, were they purchased for the roof of the main house? I measured the boards above the door and they are not dimensions usually found in DIY stores, but custom cuts. (For what though?) As for the garden before it, I counted five kinds of lichen.
Best of all: not the garage itself, but the infill beside it. A study in contrasts, one that makes the garage less a work of improvisation and eccentricity than a luxury in the face of a city with a housing problem. Yes, it is likely you could put an infill where the garage is, but with building costs, property regulations and interest rates being what they are, who can afford to? Something about this garage, in this context. An emblem of our time.
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