Oh!

I have complained in the past about construction seeming to take forever on various projects and non-projects around my own neighborhood and others that I frequent. There is, for example, the pile of rubble remaining from a demolished residential structure a few doors down from my own (if one counts as doors disasters areas that have no door). It seemed that one was on the fast track, but a pile of destroyed foundation it remains. Might it ever become something?

There is something out there which needs no such wondering, for it is so obviously becoming something. Indeed, it is being completely with such lightning-quick efficiency that it is hard to recall what it was when it was nothing. As it happens to be on the way to the subway station, I pass by it most days. I have watched as it rose up from a pit in the ground, and if I were diligent enough to take photographs on a consistent basis, I would have the makings of quite a viral video. Alas, I have no such diligence.

Today it boasts an imposing facade, though it seems yet to be hollow and unfinished inside. I swell with pride merely to know that four walls have been erected there, that men have been paid to labor in their creation day by day and left to spend their paychecks somewhere in the metro area each night. It did not matter to me at all what the building was. It might have been yet another gym or dance studio, and I would have been pleased at the existence of something I would never patronize.

As it happens, I have found out what it is to be. I feel as dumb as a post to not have connected it with the thing I knew about but could not locate. This building is to be that thing we have wanted so badly in the neighborhood, a classy movie theater. For so long, we have had but the cheap theater a couple of miles away and the first run theaters one city over. We had fine video stores (and one might as well boast of their areas's cave dwellings), but no movie house of our own. Today I am secure in the knowledge that we have gained something very nice. Opening night awaits us in December.