His voice reverberates through the empty building.
"It was just an empty building.
WHILE 122d Street next to Mount Morris Park is burnished and prospering, the same street a block to the west, between Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, includes vacant lots, empty buildings and burned-out shells.
Then one day they drove by some buildings in Harlem that were just shells, and those empty buildings, some so burned out you could see through to the back yard, started looking pretty good.
The shell-shocked hinterland of the Detroit suburbs doesn't make sense unless you've got your own vehicle: public transport is sporadic at best, and there's real dereliction visible in the crumbling sidewalks and hulking, empty buildings.
There are ruins of historic buildings - shells of brick and wood with empty window frames - on the town's main street.
Without the electric blood that ran through its veins, the city seemed an empty shell; the buildings stood like black skeletons, dried out and motionless.
But in 2013, Casa Aztlan lost the building to foreclosure, and for years, it sat empty, a shell of its former self.
As you reach the street of Braće Krsmanović, in the heart of Savamala, you're greeted by the empty shell of a building against the backdrop of Branko's bridge, spanning the wide Sava river.
All that's left of the animal feed factory is a vast empty shell of a building in the town of Orito, where a plaque offers gratitude to the US development agency for its donation to build the plant that would "generate for our farmers a legal economy".
So we just carried on as normal, and it wasn't until we actually came out and we were all upset when we signed our last bits of paper that we thought, 'Well, why did we go quietly?' Why did 30,000 of us go quietly?" She was irked by news reports showing the final minutes of the Liverpool store, with the workforce conga-ing round the empty shell of the building as the shutters came slowly down.
