This week’s photos were taken Chris Arnade in Brooklyn. He writes:
I have known Eshete, the “cat man” of Columbia St. for over three years, walking by almost daily, and look forward to our chats. Despite having some serious issues, he has always been super sweet and nice to me. He is obsessed with his cats, riding his bike from upper Manhattan every day to spend afternoons with them.
I don’t know his full history, I am polite enough not to pry. I do know that he’s had a rough life. He was the only member of his family to survive the Ethiopian civil war and spent many years after as a refugee in Northern Sudan.
A geography nut, every one of his cats is named after a place: Congo, Damascus, Venice, Rico (Puerto that is), etc.
I went to the waterfront to see how Eshete was doing as [Hurricane Irene] approached. Not surprisingly, despite being in an evacuation zone, he was there taking care of the cats. I asked him if he needed anything, he said no, and then we chatted about cats.
“The cats are like lions, very intelligent. Mysterious creatures, the Pharaohs buried them. Independent, but if they need you they come. Cats are beautiful intelligent comedians.”
Maya Barkai’s crowdsourced art installation has brought pedestrian crossing symbols from around the world to New York’s streets
Only a block north from the construction barriers surrounding the former site of the World Trade Center, which brim with boastful renderings of progress on the nearly-complete September 11th Memorial, another, less conspicuous hole opens up in Lower Manhattan’s lapidary landscape. Compared to the blocks bordering Ground Zero, it’s a stretch of Church Street that’s relatively empty. Maybe that’s part of why the netting surrounding this construction site was passed up as glossy adspace showcasing the real estate to come and instead given over to art — currently, Israeli artist Maya Barkai’s installation “Walking Men,” which juxtaposes images of pedestrian walk signs from around the world.
In North America, it’s easy not to devote much thought to the design of “walking men”. While the pictograms are relatively new to the US — until recently, it was still not uncommon to come across a spelled-out “WALK” sign on the streets of New York — bright-white walk symbols are now not only fairly uniform across dense American cities, they’re also uniformly ignored by jaywalkers, who normally treat the signals as well-meaning but unnecessary suggestions.
Elsewhere, though, walk signals are much more diverse — and sometimes more meaningful. In Germany, pedestrians who cross against the light aren’t really braving traffic as much as the reproachful glances of those dutifully remaining at the opposite corner. From Munich to Münster, old women wait at otherwise empty street crossings for the signal to change — on principle. Ordnung — the organizing principle of German civilization — begins at the intersection.
This week’s photos were taken in Glasgow by Stephen Cosh and in New York by Camille Beckles.
Cosh writes: This guy always plays in Buchanan Street. His guitar playing is first rate but his singing is pretty poor. He saw me taking his picture and nodded towards his guitar bag, hinting at me to donate to his cause, so I gave my son a couple of pounds and he ran up and threw it in. Then my boy whipped out his camera and fired one off right in his face! He’ll make a great street shooter one day!
Beckles writes: Took shelter under construction scaffolding. The rain kept stopping and starting, so that when you thought the coast was clear and ventured out under the open sky, it started downpouring again and you had duck in somewhere else to let it pass. Took 20 minutes to walk three blocks.
All of this week’s photos of kids cooling off with a fire hydrant were taken by Charles Le Brigand last Saturday in the Bronx, New York. See more of his photos here.
The original, ca. 1800 Mangin-Goerck Plan (top) and part of the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, as engraved by William Bridges
Last month, New York celebrated the bicentennial of one of its most iconic works of engineering and urban design — Manhattan’s grid. The 1811 street layout was officially known as the Commissioners’ Plan, but its execution is really owed to John Randel, Jr., the plan’s chief surveyor and engineer, who endured — and persevered through — endless legal and physical challenges to imprinting his vision on what was, north of the burgeoning city, a wild, hilly, watery island.
Randel’s difficult (and often amusing) travails have been widely recounted elsewhere: he was, among other things, pelted with vegetables and even arrested for trespass in the course of carrying out the Commissioners’ scheme, which involved seizing property and, in the course of leveling hillsides, leaving some houses stranded on bluffs along his new avenues. The New York Times has a colorful story about him as part of a larger feature celebrating the grid — which, the paper proclaimed, had easily stood the test of time.
But what if Randel had encountered more propertyholders like Henry Brevoot? His obstinant refusal to part with his estate means that, to this day, you can’t walk the length of 11th Street uninterrupted — it doesn’t run between Broadway and Fourth Ave. Or what if the considerable engineering challenges his project faced — eight million cubic yards of dirt had to be moved from the future west side to fill in the valleys of the future east — simply couldn’t be overcome, either physically or financially?
There’s been plenty of aimless speculation over centuries as to what Manhattan would look like sans grid. Among the more tongue-in-cheek illustrations were Charles-Antoine Perrault and Alex Wallach’s views of what the island would look like if crisscrossed not by its grid, but by Paris’ medieval streets and strident boulevards. Cutting and pasting the Left Bank from one Google Earth grid to another didn’t exactly make for a perfect fit, but the idea that a gridless Manhattan may have developed in a similarly piecemeal, haphazard fashion — as it had, with farmers subdividing their land into individual, poorly meshing grids, until 1811 — makes sense.
But there was at least one serious master plan for Manhattan that predated the Commissioners’. Surviving in only a few rare maps (themselves mostly reproductions), it demonstrates that, had the Commissioners’ Plan not prevailed, New York could have been a considerably different place today.
We’ve got Twitter, a Facebook page and now — the latest addition to our relentlessly-expanding social media empire — a Flickr group.
Actually, the Flickr group has been around for a long time, but in recent years it has fallen into a kind of decrepitude. We’ve decided to revive it. Every Monday, we will post an outstanding photo added to the group in the preceding seven days.
This week’s photo was taken in Midtown Manhattan by Flickr user sabotai.
You’ve probably heard the term “voodoo economics” before. Famously used by George H.W. Bush to denounce Ronald Reagan’s theory of trickle-down wealth when the two were vying head-to-head for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination, they never again escaped the elder Bush’s lips after he became Reagan’s running mate in that year’s general election. The former’s subsequent silence and the latter’s historic victory ensured that voodoo economics would reign unchallenged throughout the 80s, fueling a period remembered for overall prosperity — but an alarmingly huge income gap.
It’s no coincidence that the 80s were also the period when the word “gentrification” began to play a major role in US public discourse. So did “yuppies”, who became the subject of routine social satire during the decade. Less well documented, though, are the earlier, murkier beginnings of postwar gentrification, well before the tipping point that brought the concept into mass consciousness. In the late 1960s and 1970s, as white flight continued hollowing out American city centers, the first gentrifiers were also taking their initial, cautious steps into what is now some of the most coveted real estate in the country.
Director Hal Ashby’s first film, a 1970 comedy called The Landlord, marks the period well. The protagonist is Elgar Enders, a dandy-suited suburban WASP who lives off his parents’ money — the original trust fund kid. His plan to buy a ghetto tenement, evict its tenants, and transform it into into his new mansion seems rebellious and eccentric, though it’s no less whimsical than the change of tastes that brought mass gentrification to similar Brooklyn neighborhoods (the movie was filmed in a now unrecognizably destitute Park Slope) in the 80s and 90s. In fact, Enders’ scheme might have been prophetic — in the last decade, the mansionization of New York apartment buildings has become a small trend.
“Everyone’s talking about the weather,” runs a loose translation of an old German political poster, “except us.” The slogan was used to parody a period railroad ad that trumpeted the Deutsche Bahn’s storm-resistant resilience, but it also attempted a deeper point: that meaningful politics is serious business, above the fray of such trivial, provincial preoccupations as the latest shower, hail, or frost.
In a recent essay at 3 Quarks Daily, Alyssa Pelish takes the other side of the argument. At first, she wonders whether talking about the three-day forecast might really be a sort of code obscuring some underlying purpose — functioning as a form of empathy, for example. Ultimately, she sees an even greater significance in sharing news about the weather: it provides one of the few “universally shared narratives” available to everyone.
It’s true that everyone experiences weather, full stop. But the way we do seems like it might be more effective at fostering individual communities rather than any single, universal one. Think, for example, of a snowstorm, when the collective, Herculean task of removing tons and tons of heavy, disruptive white stuff requires a city’s residents to work together — and, together, to interact with their government — at the most intimate, personal level.
Three years ago, people were still complaining that photo-sharing websites like Flickr were home mostly to “thousands of pieces of shit” — few good photos, endless amounts of clichéd snapshots that nobody really wants to see.
Since then, of course, Flickr has proven its worth by attracting plenty of good, serious photographers, and inspiring many more to improve their work and learn more about photography. It has also become something unexpected: a window into the past. Recently, a number of organizations, including Library of Congress, NASA and the Ville de Montréal, have put portions of their photo archives on the website, taking advantage of its user-friendly format and ready-made connection to social networks.
Private individuals have followed their lead, giving old film photos new life. One such photographer is Nick DeWolf, a American engineer who lived in Philadelphia, Boston and later Colorado, and who never left home without a camera. For decades, starting in the 1950s, he documented almost everywhere he went. After DeWolf’s death in 2006, his son-in-law began putting his photos online.
There are now more than 43,000 images in DeWolf’s Flickr photostream, with 20 more added each day. Among these are scenes of everyday 1950s, 60s and 70s life in cities like New York, Boston and Hong Kong, shot with the passion, curiosity and loose focus of an amateur.
Bill Brand’s “Masstransiscipe” installation in New York’s subway
I first noticed subway tunnel wall animations in Boston, where the long gaps between stations on the MBTA Red Line provides a captive audience. The animation, composed of dozens of stills that simulated movement as the train zoomed by, was an ad. The message: visit Vermont and its great outdoors, which certainly must have resonated with more than a few claustrophobes riding the crowded rush hour rails.
Animated ads in subway tunnels are expensive, both to design and install, which helps explain why the Vermont ad’s successor, a campaign for a movie “coming to theatres” last February, was only removed recently — with no ready replacement. But the medium is a popular one, if only because it’s relatively novel and rare. Examples from Budapest, Hong Kong, Kiev, L.A., Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. have been enthusiastically documented for upload to YouTube. And given that cash-strapped transit agencies have allowed almost every other subway surface to be colonized by ad space, including seats and whole exteriors of rolling stock, it was almost a logical next step.
Much of the credit for introducing these flipbook or zoetrope-like ads goes to two independent innovators: New York astrophysics student Joshua Spodek and Winnipeg animator Bradley Caruk. Spodek’s ads debuted in Atlanta in 2001; his company, Sub Media, continues to produce similar ads today. In 2006, Caruk won a Manning Innovation Award for his concept, which his partner, Rob Walker, first thought up while staring at the blank walls of Paris’ Metro. The company they co-founded, SideTrack Technologies, set up its first system in Kuala Lumpur and has since opened others across the United States — and beyond, to London, Rio de Janeiro, and cities in Mexico.
Caruk’s system, which relies on motion-sensitive LEDs, made subway advertising widespread and profitable. The MBTA raked in $1.5 million in SideTrack’s first two years of operation in Boston, and one ad alone brought the L.A. Metro the equivalent of 192,000 new riders in revenue. But he was hardly the first person to experiment with subway animation.
urban blog of the day: favelissues, discussing favelas (and other types of informal settlements) worldwide http://t.co/5dQ9I6Xyabout 11 hours agofrom web
