The Strange Beauty of New York’s Bodega Ramps

Art & Design|The Strange Beauty of New York’s Bodega Ramps

Tom Wilson caught sight of a lumpy, makeshift concrete ramp in front of a bodega called Ultimate State Deli in Brooklyn one afternoon. Wilson is a photographer who teaches earth science in New York City public schools. He had passed Ultimate’s ramp a million times without registering its existence.

But that afternoon, in the slanting sun, the ramp’s grooves and contours reminded him of a photograph he’d seen in a textbook of a glacier.

Spilling from a doorway to bridge the height gap to the sidewalk for hand trucks, strollers and wheelchairs, the roundish ramps can bring to mind glaciers …

… or ziggurats or thumbs or ladles of pancake batter spreading on a griddle. The ramp is a Rorschach test.