Whenever I pass old buildings with bricked up windows, I shake my head. Of all the architectural sins of the modern world, it’s the sealing of ingress and egress that bugs me the most. I can put up with glass boxes and weird shapes and wild uses of steel. Sometimes that’s part of the profession’s feeling its way towards new heights. Novel beauties can emerge from such attempts, badly executed as they may be.

Instead, it’s the thwarting of the original plan of an old idea that I object to. The irritation is because it seems metaphoric for something else, some larger transgression with which it shares a commonality.

In this case, an existential use—and in my view, the most wonderful in the architectural mandate—is being confounded. For something was meant to be seen from that window; some view which can still be traced long after the opening was blocked. Better yet, light was meant to pour in from the other side. People could be spotted at the casement from the street, and the street could be spotted by the people.

I hate bricked up doors just as much, if not more. I imagine all of the folks who once came and went by that way, and whose sprits seem forever locked out now; forever locked in. There is almost an inhospitality to the business, a discourtesy towards a kindly gesture made.

I know, I know; the original purpose had to be foregone in these cases. The space that bore the window, that allowed the door, was in all likelihood needed for an office with a solid wall. So the window or door had to be bricked up.

But better to plaster over the whole thing than to leave them that way, like an eye that’s been sewn shut, like a mouth stitched closed, as though the building must strain forever to open them again.

Blocked off roads—ones that you can see past the barrier to, with grass growing up between the cracks—are a similar aggravation. People were meant to go by that route, to drive in that direction and look out either to the right or to the left.

I know, I know; the road had to be blocked off because traffic needed diverting; maybe it had become dangerous somehow. But better to bulldoze it up and let the grass take over again than to leave it there like a forlorn path leading to a forbidden place.

But the worst of these structural ingratitudes—and probably why the others annoy me in some reminiscent way, hearkening back to it—is the empty niche.

All around “Little Rome,” as they call the area where I work, there are a lot of nineteenth century buildings from the days when this part of D.C. was a center for Catholic thought and religious training.

While the facades and infrastructures have been long since completed, every once in a while you’ll cross an empty niche, a hollow concave that has never sheltered saint or Savior. St. Dominic, St. Catherine, and others stand watch in various places, firmly rooted inside their portals, but they are too rare.

Instead of an army of holy folks housed about the buildings, guarding it as they look down, the ones you do see look more like lonely commuters standing in subway shelters. One whole stretch of a colonnade is adorned with empty pedestals—a long span of absence. At some point in history, the original plan that the donor of the building made—that of having others come behind him and fill the niches with their own contributions of statuary—fell out of fashion.

With the window and the door, it is the frustration of a beautiful objective: to allow entrance, exit, light, air, and things coming past and being seen; in the road, it is the frustration of a passage, however short, a lane moving and coursing through life as it blusters by on either side in its hearty, blood-and- bone way.

But the empty niche stands for a loss not due to a redirected purpose, but to a lack of care—an invitation for future generosity that went unaccepted.

I know; I know; people give money in other ways now. They donate gardens and brick walks and benches. They donate meditation zones. They donate Bradford Pears. They don’t donate statuary much anymore—no saints and martyrs; they donate things to be admired in passing or to be brooded upon while sitting.

Statuary on the whole is rather rare these day; how seldom are heroes memorialized in that way. And that’s a shame. It seems the time has passed for such public objects of veneration; modern pieties don’t permit. But better to fill them in than to leave them there like that, vacant and moss-grown, a cavity for a creed outworn.

Shakespeare mourned England’s monastic ruins in his famous sonnet, the fragments of empty clerestories in tumbling stone walls. But that destruction came by force.

There is something worse to the desertion of intended kindnesses—the frustration of a good that the human spirit once proposed, but that it somewhere along the way lost the desire or energy to provide for.