I can’t imagine a time and place where it was considered in any way necessary or practical to put the face of a human, an animal, or some other creature, on the face of a building.
These figures, generally called “Green Men” are now almost entirely relics of a vanished civilization. This face, and the dozens like it in my New York City neighborhood, has more in common with the ruins of Babylon or medieval Europe than it does with the modern world.
Once, a face like this symbolized great power—a summoning of magical forces—of the deep currents of an unseen world. Now it’s nothing but a low-level curiosity; something of interest only to collectors of architectural trivia or a wandering Luftmensch (man of the air) like me. In the Here and the Now, I doubt whether anybody entering or leaving this building, or—for that matter—walking past it, actually sees this face or even knows it’s there.
No one looks up in the city anymore. Heads are either tilted down at a 45-degree angle, fastened to the tractor beam of their phones, or having an animated ear-bud conversation with a disembodied voice. They may be with a friend, or walking solo and wrapped in an internal monologue, leaving only memory and their five senses, or their phone, to guide them from city point A to city point B.
In the inevitable buzz and flood of the Here and Now, the meaning and power of face like this one—no matter how distinctive or powerful it might once have been, has, for all practical purposes, pretty much disappeared off people’s emotional and spiritual radar screens.
Who put up this building (somewhere between 1890 and 1920)? Was this figure, called a “Green Man,” something the owner personally wanted on his new building? Maybe it was a concession to the European artisans who designed and decorated the facade? Or maybe the original owner, himself an immigrant—having made it big wanted this figure placed over the entrance of the building to remind him of similar decorations; buildings he saw in some old imperial city, left behind when he boarded a ship to the new world.
About these old architectural decorations in my neighborhood, I wonder: what deep spiritual or emotional well do they draw their power from (whatever power they still have)? Did these Green Men once represent the great collective consciousness of the entire race; the urges, fears and suppressed dreams that, whether we know it or not, are always with us, keeping us company on our journey from birth to death.
I think the original builder made a bargain with these primitive powers: “Here’s the deal I’ll make with you,” he said: “I’m a modern man—living the life of a modern American capitalist, but I know you’re right there, always somewhere beside me. So, I make this deal with you: Give me luck in my new venture—don’t turn against me; and—as long as my building is there— respect will be paid to your strength and power.”
And, I sometimes think about it another way; these faces and figures, these human creatures on old buildings in the city, are concrete and stone versions of the faces you can see every day in the thousands of visions of ogres, demons, witches and demigods that populate the oldest of old stories—the ones that lurk in the eternal cast of scary spirits that endlessly fill the pages of children’s books, ghost stories and horror movies,the pages in some books I deliberately tried to skip so as not to scare my kids when they were very young.
One day these bas-relief half-human creatures on the facades of my neighborhood’s old buildings will vanish, along with the buildings that hosted them since the very beginning.
But what they represent will never vanish–whatever is ineradicably and universally alive in all of us, the part that instinctively resents the intrusion into our lives of all the CGI images, robots and the AI replacements—the real things that never cease to be at the center of our sleeping and waking lives.
Any effort to pretend these ancient spirits are dead and that they’re nothing but relics of a primitive state of existence, is doomed to failure… Better we look up once in a while, make friends with these old, sculpted spirits. They were put there to remind us that we are always thinking, feeling human beings, not soulless, programmed consumer units.
These spirits and demi-gods watch over me as I run errands in my neighborhood or merely walk around, absorbing the world around me. Their very primitiveness offers me protection, a shield from the encroaching mass of meaningless and dehumanizing forces constantly trying to turn me into a soulless machine.
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Mike Feder is a former radio host who hosted weekly shows on WBAI-FM in New York City and on Sirius XM Satellite Radio… He is the author of New York Son, The Talking Cure and A Long Swim Upstream.