~5.1~

A writer for a noted architectural journal once wrote “Jericho is every city.” She had been writing about the incredible diversity of building forms found within its boundaries. The article did not attract a lot of attention, and the writer was shortly thereafter let go. Not for any reason that could be connected to the piece in question, naturally, though she was never able to interest any other publications in her work on the same subject. The national consciousness of America never dwelled on Jericho easily or for long.

She’d had a point, though. The city now called Jericho was among the older in a young country, and its buildings spanned three centuries’ worth of styles. A lot of its residents saw only the grim and gray industrial center of the east and the glass skyscrapers and art deco towers of the west, but these were simply the most recent imprints, like the top layer of an archeological site: a city built over the ruins of a half dozen other cities.

If one looked in the right places, one could find great big Victorian dollhouses, gothic cathedrals, neoclassical monuments, soulless postmodern cubes, and more. There had been a time in the early eighteen hundreds when a vogue sprung up among the wealthy for Mediterranean-style buildings more commonly seen in warmer climes, buildings built around elaborate Spanish courtyards with fountains, statues, and greenery.

These days, many of these buildings still stand. Centuries old, many of them have been refurbished multiple times without much care or attention to historical detail. From the outside, they might not seem any different from the apartment buildings they rub shoulders with. The difference remains in the secret heart of them, the hidden gardens.

If you walk down the street past a big arched passage set in the side of a drab building, closed off with an iron gate and you look through it and catch a glimpse of a splashing fountain or a bronze satyr, congratulations, you’ve found one.