Comprised of brown, Lego-like edifices, they were raised as part of the boom of low-income and middle-class housing in New York City after World War II. Across the street from it was one of the last strongholds of public housing in the Lower East Side, the Lillian Wald Houses, which were built in 1949. The dilapidated tenement stood out against the recently constructed luxury buildings with upper-class and predominantly white families lining the block. I passed by this condemned building frequently between 2011 to 2013, having found myself intermittently living with a Puerto Rican friend in one of the public housing buildings nearby. While living in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, or, as the Puerto Ricans who live there call it, Loisaida, I encountered a Luxor Obelisk-like structure: an abandoned tenement. It is a structure ripped from its historical and geographic context, an indecipherable relic. The obelisk’s hieroglyphics do not mean anything to the French public. For the immortal stands like this obelisk, regulating the spiritual traffic that surges thunderously about him – and the inscription he bears helps no one.
In such a way does all fame redeem its pledges, and no oracle can match its guile.
How does this apotheosis appear in reality? Not one among the tens of thousands who pass by pauses not one among the tens of thousands who pause can read the inscription. Had that been foretold to the Pharaoh, what a feeling of triumph it would given him! The foremost Western cultural empire would one day bear at its center the memorial of his rule. What was carved in it four thousand years ago stands at the center in the greatest of city squares. In One-Way Street (1979), Walter Benjamin writes of the Luxor Obelisk, stuck in Paris: After the first arrived, and was installed theatrically at the centre of Place de la Concorde, it proved to be too expensive to move the second. Jean-Baptiste Apollinaire Lebas, a French engineer, devised an elaborate barge in which to take the ‘gifted’ obelisks to Paris, one at a time. In exchange, the Egyptians were given a mechanical clock that has been faulty since the day it arrived, its hands not ticking as they should. In 1830, then ruler of Ottoman Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha – by choice or by force who is to say – ‘gifted’ the obelisks to France. Napoleon, ever conflicted about his small stature, decided he wanted a grand souvenir from Egypt, the largest he could get his hands on. Time, and the elements, made their mark upon their hieroglyph-inscribed surfaces, but there, beside the Nile, they remained in place, enduring across epochs. They were erected outside the Luxor temple along the Nile River, in what was once known as Thebes.
A symmetrical pair, they were designed to mirror each other, twin columns of stone. The Luxor Obelisks stood in Ancient Egypt for thousands of years.
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