The ramshackle San Jose hodgepodge of Park Avenue history beckoned me once again. Ghosts of Leather Masters and the Radiator Doctor returned to life.
Nearly ten years ago, on this very page, the columnist explored the older portions of Park Avenue, inspired by William Dalrymple’s travel book, City of Djinns. In Dalrymple’s telling, the djinns, the old ghosts, emerged everywhere in Delhi, his home town, an ancient metropolis sacked over and over again throughout millennia, often leaving a beautifully incongruous clutter of structures along a single stretch of road. The ruins were precisely what fascinated him.
No matter how often planners colluded to create new colonies of gleaming concrete, Dalrymple wrote, no matter how hard they tried, crumbling towers, old mosques or abandoned ruins suddenly appeared, intruding on the city blocks. Even though much of the old city from centuries or even decades earlier had been destroyed by violence, the old buildings, just like spirits, often came out of nowhere, even after they were pushed out for shiny new constructions. The physical and the temporal aspects of Delhi seemed to merge. No matter how many times the city was destroyed, pieces of it always seemed to reincarnate…