Flatiron

Not long ago, I found myself in a forgotten friend’s loft, unsure of how I had arrived. The place felt more like the ruins of an obsession than someone’s home. Paintings were scattered with reckless abandon—against walls, windows, furniture, and across the floor as if the space had surrendered itself to them. Each canvas pulsed with color, fractured yet deliberate, a chaotic hymn to one of New York’s most iconic landmarks: the Flatiron Building—which loomed like a ghost outside the loft’s floor-to-ceiling windows.

Minutes stretched, then folded in on themselves, as I wandered between the canvases. An hour slipped, maybe two; I had no idea how much time had passed.

All the while, the artist, Jerry Greenberg, stood over my shoulder, breathing through his nose like a bull that had just crossed the finish line at Pamplona. This was his life’s work, a syncopation of otherworldly retro-futurism, a pandemonium entirely his own.

Greenberg himself was a paradoxical chap. His wealth afforded him the luxury of masquerading as a bohemian, yet he lived like a king, with a king-sized view of the Flatiron. He was the sort who craved fame yet despised its superficiality. The sort who saw himself as misunderstood yet took pride in just how misunderstood he was.

For him, art transcended Warhol’s quip, “Art is what you can get away with.” Each brushstroke carried existential weight—a puzzle he alone was destined to solve. The toll of this pursuit was etched in his scowl, a silent testament to his simmering frustration. He was a character, strutting about in a full-length paint-splatted smock, a wool scarf an old girlfriend had knitted, and a pair of Converse high-tops.

"I don’t recall ever seeing anything so familiar, yet so utterly strange," I admitted, my voice barely more than a whisper. It was as if I had stepped into a memory I had never lived—something known, yet unknowable. The paintings, the Flatiron beyond the window, even the air itself felt charged with a presence I couldn't quite place, as if I were witnessing something I had seen a thousand times before but was only now truly seeing for the first time.

Greenberg’s lips curled into a secretive smile.

“I paint only the Flatiron,” he said. “It’s all I see. It’s all I want to see. And to truly see the Flatiron, I must see it for the first time every time.”

My connection to Greenberg was a passing chapter in a New York minute—our acquaintance a byproduct of his ties to Alex Alessi, my forgotten friend.

I hadn’t seen Alex in years. At some point, I’d realized I must have sought him out on a whim earlier in the day. I suppose I had nothing better to do than to be carried by the city’s timeless pulse, but Alex wasn’t there when I arrived. He was just a name lingering on the intercom.

“Alex is gone. Where have you been?” Greenberg sneered after he answered the door and gave me the once over.

It was one of those New York things—time passing unnoticed until, all at once, it was apparent. I recalled a New Year’s Eve Party here. I thought then the loft’s floor-to-ceiling windows that framed the Flatiron precisely seemed fated to be an artist’s muse.

“Most people think they’re looking at an optical illusion,” Greenberg said of his work. “But even that’s not real.”

“You mean the illusion itself is an illusion?”

“I’m saying I’m not sure if what exists outside my window is even there.”

“No, it’s there. I just walked past it,” I said unsure if Greenberg was half-joking.

“Don’t patronize me,” he said dead serious.

“I was on my way here, and I looked up at it—”

“—and your mind registered it as the Flatiron, because it always has.”

“I then walked by it. Crossed the street.”

Greenberg shook his head. “You may have thoug