Time's Magpie - Myla Goldberg [31]
Only the old ladies keep their dogs leashed here. Their terriers and Chihuahuas can’t compete with Stromovka’s true sovereigns. Though dogs are permitted everywhere in the city—including on subways and inside restaurants—in the park they are king. The very idea of a dog run in a Prague park is absurd: in Stromovka, apartment-penned mutts—part Lab, part beagle, part German shepherd, part wolf—frolic unfettered by fences or leashes. Exuberant butt-sniffing and vestigial pack-forming ensue, but Prague’s dog owners shoo their rollicking charges from the park’s decaying playground, where young children waddle about in thick pants and coats, only their soft, pink faces exposed to the crisp, coal-tainted air.
Stromovka’s playground hasn’t been refurbished since its Soviet construction. The surfaces beneath its swings and monkey bars aren’t cushiony rubber or even soft grass or sand, but hard-packed dirt. The playground’s dubious centerpiece is a model Sputnik large enough to hold three toddlers in its hollow center. It is accessed by a metal ladder and exited via a concrete slide, which emerges from Sputnik’s far window like a stream of frozen factory sludge. Early March is, perhaps, the ideal time to enjoy the slide’s rough, pock-marked surface, for children are still wearing enough layers to descend without decimating their backsides.
To the west of the playground, an abandoned building appears alongside a path without preamble, a seventeenth-century exoskeleton lying discarded like the molted carapace of a baronial beetle. It is distinctly not an urban building—it’s too long. Buildings like this weren’t designed for city blocks; they were created to reign over open tracts of land. Three stories tall, with a grandly arched ground floor arcade and a recessed second floor circumnavigated by a stone balcony, the edifice resembles something that would be more at home in the French countryside, the moldering estate of a viscount gone to seed. It’s the park’s decaying equivalent of Výstavišt’s exhibition hall, an anomalous fragment of the past projecting itself stubbornly into the present.
The building is the cause célèbre of the Šlechtovy Culture Club. The club’s name is hand-painted in red on a piece of scrap wood affixed above the entrance to a makeshift beer garden that neighbors the perimeter fence. The ground here still bears the hallmark of recent flood—the bare earth is not pocked or gullied but is instead almost perfectly smooth, attesting to its recent incarnation as riverbed. Though the flood is months past, here it feels more recent. The Šlechtovy Culture Club feels assembled, spontaneously and triumphantly, from salvaged parts. Inside the dirt compound, a wooden shack sells beer, hot wine, tea, potato chips, and kielbasa. There are a few rough wooden benches and tables, the remains of a spiral staircase, and a gazebo that has seen better days. Šlechtovy’s patrons are unfazed when a small pack of dogs rushes into the compound barking loudly, running beneath and around tables and knocking over trash cans. A few loose dogs are nothing compared to a flood, photos of which are attached to the compound’s inside fence. One shows the gazebo flooded to its roof. Another shows the compound’s seventeenth-century neighbor surrounded by still waters, the ground-floor arcade half-submerged. It is a fairy-tale image, the entire building seemingly rising as if by magic from the center of a peaceful lake.
In a gesture of