It Looked Familiar

I took the picture above, of Broadway looking north from Pine Street, because I was pretty sure I’d seen something familiar and wanted to check it out. The something was in a mediocre science-fiction graphic novel called “Memories from the Civil War.” This may not be widely known, but artists for graphic novels and comic books, faced with the need to create enormous amounts of artwork, often trace backgrounds from photographs. So if you see something that looks familiar, even if it’s set long in the future, that may be because it is familiar. Here’s the frame in question from Memories:

I don’t known anything to the right of the speech bubble and it may well be original art. But to the left…that’s 1 Liberty Plaza right over the bubble and 115 Broadway to the left. The building on the far left, is 111 Broadway, where our office used to be located. The wide space between 1 Liberty and 115 is the end of Zuccotti Park. The artist appears to have copied the first bay of 1 Liberty exactly, and copied the outline of 115 while simplifying it a bit. The fancy door is gone, for example, but the water-table at the second floor is exactly the same. I didn’t have a copy of Memories with me when I took my picture so I missed the framing slightly – you can’t see 111 in my photo above. Here’s another shot where you can see all three buildings:

It’s mildly pleasing to know that, hundreds of years in the future, these three buildings will still be there exactly as they are now, with the big orange sculpture removed from Zuccotti Park.