Somewhere else

 Have you ever found a little bit of your small town that looked like somewhere else and, if you blocked out whatever was on either side of it, you could pretend you were somewhere else?

Hamilton has a few of those. One of them was a passage next to the central library. For apparently no reason this passage was done up in an Art Deco style. I think it even had a name, as if it was a tiny shopping mall. There was a barbers in it, and some other business. How either of them attracted customers with zero roadside visibility is a mystery. 

Anyway. If you walked down this passage you could almost convince yourself you were in New York City. Or Chicago. Or one of the sets of either of those cities in a muppets movie. Nearby, a pizza place parped out that olivey, peppery, tomatoey, bready smell, a bit like the nose onslaught of Subway today but I don't think it was on purpose. It was more likely just a shitty building with ventilation ducts that vented into other parts of it rather than just straight outside. 

Anyway. Pizza. Art Deco. Muppets. Essential ingredients to convince one's sad library-going brain that they were somewhere far more exciting and atmospheric than bloody Hamilton. 

Apparently actual adults felt the same way, and they soon built a Mediterranean inspired passage across town, called Casabella Lane. It had white, Greek island inspired walls, cafes with metal outdoor furniture, and boutiques that seemed to just sell shit with fake flowers stuck on it. Directly outside the passage was a massive car park for a paint shop and an instrument store, and at the other end was a mostly vacant street with a Salvation Army store and a discount electronics place. 

But if you blocked out whatever was on either side of it, you could pretend you were somewhere else.