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FROM THE DEPT OF CALCIFIED HISTORY

From time to time, a car with a camera on its roof drives through a city, snapping photographs for Google's Street View application. Since Google began the project in 2007, this little historical hobgoblin has offered some odd glimpses of the recent past. For example, there's the deceased still chatting on benches; a mugging, nifty insects and frame-by-frame proof that one of the Google drivers maimed a deer on a highway in upstate New York.

So far, so benignly quirky. But in an especially strange case of inauspiciousness, the Google car happened to be snapping its frames of 7th avenue and 49th street in Manhattan on September 13th 2008, capturing the Lehman Brothers building in all of its bold LED-screen glory on the Saturday before America’s top economic policymakers decided to let the investment bank fail. (We know the date because it's displayed on the front of the building.) In seven images, Google chronicles oddly hushed streets (where's the midtown bustle?), a security guard keeping vigil and men in dress-shirts hovering near black livery cars. Steam rises from a pipe and the words "LEHMAN BROTHERS... where vision gets built" scrolls across screens that now read "BARCLAYS WEALTH".  A year on, Google Maps has not updated its photo stock.

One can imagine the anxious employees inside the building, solemn, caffeinated and desperate to fix things. Or maybe they are at home, awaiting the verdict that dictates their lives and jobs. The building might be empty save for some custodians and an emergency board meeting on the top floor. The security guard may have just straightened his tie.

Google's accidental anachronistic flip book gives little away. Instead it shows a building called Lehman, in the shadow of midtown on a bright day in September.   

~ COLIN BAKER
 

Picture credit: Google Street View