-The question that I want to present is this: Can a building be sick? There is Sick Building Syndrome (SBS) but it only refers to the inhabitants of a building getting sick due to some structural and/or design flaw: poor insulation, improper chemical use, shoddy ventilation, etc. But I want to expand this a bit further and suggest that a physical location, divorced from human occupancy, can be sick.
-I bring this up because I was walking through my old neighborhood (in Oakland, CA) and was disturbed to find a particular storefront empty. I lived around the corner from this place for close to five years and there were nine different businesses that tried to make a go of it. Obviously, all of said businesses failed.
-The spot help everything from a fruit and vegetable market, to a café, to a barbershop, but everything failed in that location. Is that storefront sick? Is it even possible for a location to be sick?
-Were the business owners just poor proprietors, or is there a convergence of energies and circumstances and histories that are not conducive to sustained habitation in that locale?
-I’m planning to do more research on the location. I’m going to research the history of the place, who built it and in what year, then I’m going to search through news archives to see if any murders or other tragedies happened on the premises. Then I’ll track down the previous tenants and get their opinions as to why they thought their businesses did not succeed.
-Another question I will address is the symbiotic relationship between places and people. Do we affect our habitats as much as they affect us?
-I’ll keep you posted on the results of my investigation.
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