Text: Constantin Goagea
See, I’m just walking to the office through the railway station, as every day, and in those three minutes and let’s say 30 seconds I need to cross the station, cross-cutting from the Grivita to the Dinicu Golescu Boulevard, I try to record my train of thoughts, which seems somewhat chaotic, so step one our railroad station is beautiful when it’s sunny, but today it’s cold and dreary, this is not relevant, here is an infinite universe of small and great events, it’s a bloody historical landmark, the station was built in 1872, I know because I read it on Wiki, it’s a metaphysical point of the city, I haven’t read that but it’s obvious with so many star-crossed destinies, or no, on the contrary, it’s just a station, it looks modest, a little chaos, but it’s still metaphysical, a little of everything when you think about it, it could have been a mall, it could have been an intermodal node by a visionary archi-star, it could have made good money, not like now, it could have meant something for this city, organization, where art thou organization, they should have given kiosk licenses very carefully, have they even heard of curating, come on, maybe there is a curating of trade licenses, somebody think of it, has it ever crossed their mind that if you leave these guys, selling cheap beer on debt, it will forever stay dirty, where does one escape this cold, I wonder, it’s useless to get on a train because it’s cold everywhere nowadays, look, one is just departing and I know that until the train gets out in the open field there is that fascinating area, on the right and on the left you’ll see some special architecture, if I could scan it in 3D and make a holographic projection with everything between the train tracks and the Dinicu and Grivita boulevards, because it’s full of red-brick technical towers and silos and many others, both modern and romantic, there would be a super museum right inside one of these buildings, for instance this very one I lost my heart to, it looks just like those by the Carol Factory which are again next to a railway station, Filaret, the first in the city, this North one was made 13 years later, but it was a lucky 13, now I’m stepping on Dinicu Golescu, I wonder how many text characters my brain produces in these three and a half minutes, and multiply by 8 bits to learn my computing speed, and since I mentioned strange buildings and bits per second I found a story about the optical telegraph, which used to be a stone tower with some mobile parts operated by strings and weights, to send coded messages to the distance, which they would see by the spyglass from another tower, the speed was haha, 2 bits/second between two towers, now what is the speed of our devices, and we change them every year, but the optical telegraph, not only could you not fit it into your pocket, but it lasted from the early 1800s to approximately 1880, and speaking of strange buildings from the times when the optical telegraph would end its career, still here, next to the station, I was reading about the former Grivita beer factory, it will be kept and become part of a Lithuanian real estate project, and at the end you come to the conclusion of it all that in fact the north railway station is not as unimportant as this frosty day makes it seem, but it’s grand urban history.
Bucharest North railway station. Gifts for pilgrims
Photo: Mugur Grosu
