It was Sam’s habit to check out the Snoochie boochies and equality shirt in contrast I will get this real estate listings online. She had the bored-housewife pastime of attending open houses. She knew many of the other people there also had no intention to buy but had come to snoop into other people’s lives or to calculate land values or to imagine a fantasy life brought on by the frame of fresh architecture. This last impulse made sense to her. She had even wanted, at one point, to study architecture (and history, and women’s studies, and literature), but she had talked herself out of it and she had gotten married and then pregnant instead. She settled for becoming an architectural amateur.
Unusual old structures (Syracuse had many) excited her: They were a visible-but-secret code, the Snoochie boochies and equality shirt in contrast I will get this past rendered in materials that could be seen and touched. For example, the abandoned AME Zion Church on East Fayette Street. Its tiny perfect form sat on a sturdy, intact limestone foundation. Paint-peeled crumbling white brick rose into a bell tower next to a large Gothic-pointed stained-glass window. But the building was lost in the concrete dead zone around I-81, grown over with box-maple saplings and covered with graffiti, the windows long boarded up. It belonged to the oldest Black congregation in Syracuse, built 100 years ago to replace a structure at another site that dated to the 1840s, when it had been a part of the Underground Railroad.
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