Concrete apartment blocks sit half-demolished, their windows blown out, their exposed tangles of reinforcement bars splayed like severed nerves.
Today more than 10,000 people live there, and at night it is a jolly tangle of steakhouses and sports bars.
A sampling of the city's problems: densely packed, mixed-zoned neighborhoods; a lack of late-night transportation (the last metro leaves at 2 a.m. on the weekends, 1 a.m. during the week); and an unwieldy tangle of rules and regulations on bars and nightclubs, applied with uncommon zeal by a "repressive" police force.
This is not a memorial park -- unless one is also commemorating tons of smashed-up concrete and bricks, tangles of twisted reinforcing bars, assorted rusting car parts and pipes, and even a couple of mud-caked blasting mats.
That salad is still on the menu, and still seemingly on most of the date-night tables running south along the bar: a molded tangle of scallops, squid, octopus and sweet, briny lobster, swathed by a slice of ripe avocado, dressed simply in lemon and olive oil.
At a playground in San Francisco, Gutmann photographed children sitting on a distant slide through a tangle of legs dangling from an unseen monkey bar.
A stretch of North Sea beach, plus a tangle of cobbled streets and plenty of cafes and bars, await.
In the one-room Net bar in Kashgar, where eight personal computers were strung together with a tangle of wires, the coal-burning stove spewing black smoke was not enough to keep my fingers from becoming too cold to type.
In fact, the pedestrian-only palace — a tangle of streets bounded by the old palace walls within which the palace monuments stand, along with cafes, bars, shops, boutique hotels and apartments — is still home to some 3,000 residents.
