Fans of Batman and Delirious New York think of famed delineator Hugh Ferriss as the originator of the highly influential “Ayn Rand Paperback Cover” style of architectural illustration. What these people don’t realize is that back in the 1930s this is just how New York City actually looked.
23rd St and West Side Highway, 1975. More.
Paul Sietsema, Painter’s Mussel 4, 2011
Ink on paper in artist’s frame, 72 1/4 x 71 1/2 inches
From Paul Sietsema’s new show at Matthew Marks Gallery that opens this weekend.
Killed Covers, A Selection of Rejected Book Jackets opens in a couple of weeks. Featuring Modcult favorite Peter Mendelsund.
BUSHWICK - Historic & Beautiful Brooklyn published by The Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1946 is one of six booklets that tell the story of the 6 Towns of Kings County. They tell the history supplied with pictures. This is the story of BUSHWICK……
fuck this movie. if i want to get sentimental about a NYC i never knew, and may have never existed, i watch early law and order.
—awl commenter iantenna on ‘Kids’
Paul Rudolph, Perspective rendering of vertical housing elements at the approach to the Williamsburg Bridge, 1970. Brown ink on paper, 29 x 30 inches. Courtesy of the Paul Rudolph Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Too bad I forgot to post this Paul Rudolph: Lower Manhattan Expressway thing at Cooper’s Drawing Center back when it was actually going on.
Its still a cool picture.
A classic from the archives:
Subject: old man in the suit
From: BrookeHave any of you seen the old guy in the suit with white hair and a mustache that frequently is seen standing downstairs between here and the corner at 7th Ave who is usually either smoking, slurring, or drinking out of a paper bag? He looks like he has a normal suit type job, but he also seems like a drunk street guy, so just wondering what his story is.
Hope none of you know him personally; if so, sorry.
From: Jeb
You have to be more specific.
From: Jeb
For maximum NYC street crazy continue to walk west on 30th street. 30th street is like a historical preservation neighborhood of 1985 New York. Even the coffee tastes bad, just like in the real 1980s.
From: Peter
Afaict he is just your typical nyc character. He’s been doing that as long as I can remember. There’s also the dude that hangs outside the corner store on 30th and 7th who looks like he wants to get in fights for the fun of it.
From: Jeb
There’s an old dude that sometimes wears a suit and has white hair and a stache, but I think he also “Works” in one of the stores on 30th street. He also mumbles nonsense a lot. Is that the dude you mean?
From: Brooke
I think that’s the guy. But he drinks booze out of a brown bag midday and really slurs crazy shit. He hangs out with the guys who move boxes around down there. White hair, blackish stache.
From: Jeb
Have you met the dude who works in the basement yet? That guy is straight up realismo magico.
From: Blake
Or how about all the dudes dressed in fur coats by 30th and 7th.
From: Jeb
Those dudes you’ll notice get paid to do that, and some of them revert back to bums on their off days. They are friends with the crazy Hell’s Angels looking guys that clean the windows of that office building on 7th ave.
From: Byron
one of them has definitely been lying to his wife about his “job” in manhattan for like 25 years. I see him buying scratch off lottery tickets and he usually has a paper bag with something in it like socks, or ideas or something.
From: Brooke
I was wrong. Thin white stache and darkish eyebrows. He’s still on the corner. I guess I just don’t understand why someone would dress up to sit on a pipe at the corner everyday.
From: Jeb
One thing I have learned from looking at old photographs is that in olden times “suits” were considered just clothes, not dress up. For example a suit (old english for “suit of clothes”) would be considered appropriate attire for activities like posing for a mug shot, setting up a bunco game, smuggling white lightning into a dry county, shaking down a shopkeeper, losing all your rent money at the dog track, or making it all back in a cutting contest. They were more refined times, before the great coarsening of society that we witness in the modern era. Even the ice cream man (of the eponymous ‘ice cream suit’) insists on working in dungarees + undershirt.
Here is an example. These rapscallions are just out to sell the news of the day. In olden times, people printed out blogs onto paper and sold the copies for a penny a piece. Each of these boys is holding a stack of blogs hot off the “presses” (the heat wasn’t created by lasers as in our familiar laser printers, but by squeezing and/or melting things in a “press”). Mostly wayward youngsters were used for this task, but they still wore suits.
Take the subway to La Guardia! Take the subway to Staten Island! The West 4th Street station is just a few stops away from its counterpart— the South 4th Street station in Brooklyn! When examining the proposed subway map from 1939 an alternate version of New York City in the second half of the 20th century opens up before your eyes.
In Dreaming of the Second System 2nd Ave. Sagas digs into what might have been if the expansion plans of 1929 and 1939 had been executed. More on this subject is discussed in What’s in a name?
More recently, the history of the subway shell at South 4th Street was covered when that never completed station was featured in the New York Times.
Back in November of 1965, some techs set a circuit breaker too low at a power plant in Ontario, and a couple of days later, it blew. The breakers are designed to go off if the load gets too high for the equipment to handle. The power surge that had tripped the breaker was then directed to another part of the grid, which was already heavily loaded.
You can probably guess what happened next: the protective breakers on that segment popped, pushing even more power to the rest of the grid. Segment by segment, the entire Northeastern power grid came down (more or less). It was a classic cascade failure.
At the same time, DJ Dan Ingram was playing Jonathan King’s “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon” on New York’s WABC. Power was still getting to the radio station, but the power grid was heavily overloaded. They call the machines that transduce power from one form (e.g. heat of coal burning) to another (e.g. steam spinning a turbine hooked to a generator) “prime movers” (lol). On large power grids, they use something called “droop speed control” to manage sharing load amongst prime movers. If you take a loose, unpowered generator and hook it up to a power grid, the input side will spin like a motor. A generator is an electric motor working backwards, and if the generator isn’t pushing out electrical power, it’ll soak it up and produce spinning power. On a huge power grid, the generators are set up so that they’ll spin at about 105% of the grid’s actual frequency if they are totally unloaded, and they spin slower when loaded. Generally, the system is designed so that the generators never get loaded enough to drop below the actual target speed. On the high side, none of them is big enough to make a dent in the grid’s speed, and if they drop on the low side, the grid will motor them along. Unless the grid gets super, super loaded. Then, the speed of all the generators drops.
In olden times, like 1965, they didn’t have cheapo crystal oscillators that could generate steady timing signals in circuits, so lots of devices recovered their sense of real-world time from the power grid. You build a motor that runs directly on the 60Hz oscillations of the power grid (3600 RPM), then you use a train of gears to divide down the RPM till you get to something useful for a record player, say ~78, 45, or 33 1/3 RPM.
Unfortunately, if the power grid’s AC frequency drops, the speed the record player or tape machine runs at drops too. With analog media like 78s and magnetic tapes, not only does it run slower, the pitch drops.
Streets full of people
All alone
Roads full of houses
Never home
Church full of singing
Out of tune
Everyone’s gone to the moon
On this tape of the broadcast, whenever Dan Ingram plays something prerecorded, the pitch and time are all slowed down, but he can talk normally. He can hear it, and he keeps pointing it out as the power grid melts down. Over the course of the tape, the load on the power grid grows, and the frequency drops to 56Hz, and finally to 51Hz. Shortly thereafter, it shut down completely.
One of the great things about analog technology is it fucks up correctly: its fuckups are analagous to its problem. In a children’s story, if the power grid was failing in New York City, of course the music on the radio would play slower and at lower pitch. In 1965, that’s what really happened.
I was trying to find out whats bigger the Flatiron Building or the Sphinx (the Egyptian one) and I came across this awesome photo of the Flatiron Building by Edward Steichen, but it was small, so I went to Google Image Search to find a bigger one. Internet, lets try to figure this color shit out next, ok? (Still not sure about the original question.)
maybe you should go take a look at it at the met. it sounds like the color variation is due to different prints of the photograph:
Steichen added color to the platinum print that forms the foundation of this photograph by using layers of pigment suspended in a light-sensitive solution of gum arabic and potassium bichromate. Together with two variant prints in other colors, also in the Museum’s collection, The Flatiron is the quintessential chromatic study of twilight.
We’d like to congratulate the following animals—now prohibited in New York City!
Turtles and tortoises with a carapace length of less than four inches; nutria; pigs, including pot bellied pigs, goats and cattle; predatory marine and freshwater animals and fishes including, but not limited to, sharks and piranhas.
Per article 161 of the health code, here are the animals it is not legal to sell or give to another person, possess, harbor or keep:
All dogs other than domesticated dogs (Canis familiaris), including, but not limited to, wolf, fox, coyote, hyaena, dingo, jackal, dhole, fennec, raccoon dog, zorro, bush dog, aardwolf, cape hunting dog and any hybrid or cross-breed offspring of a wild dog and domesticated dog.
All cats other than domesticated cats (Felis catus), including, but not limited to, lion, tiger, leopard, ocelot, jaguar, puma, panther, mountain lion, cheetah, wild cat, cougar, bobcat, lynx, serval, caracal, jaguarundi, margay and any hybrid or cross-breed offspring of a wild cat and domesticated or other cat.
All bears, including polar, grizzly, brown and black bear.
All fur bearing mammals of the family Mustelidae, including, but not limited to, weasel, marten, mink, badger, ermine, skunk, otter, pole cat, zorille, wolverine, stoat and ferret.
All Procyonidae: All raccoon (eastern, desert, ring-tailed cat), kinkajou, cacomistle, cat-bear, panda and coatimundi.
All carnivorous mammals of the family Viverridae, including, but not limited to, civet, mongoose, genet, binturong, fossa, linsang and suricate.
All bats (Chiroptera).
All non-human primates, including, but not limited to, monkey, ape, chimpanzee, gorilla and lemur.
All squirrels (Sciuridae).
Reptiles (Reptilia). All Helodermatidae (gila monster and Mexican beaded lizard); all front- fanged venomous snakes, even if devenomized, including, but not limited to, all Viperidae (viper, pit viper), all Elapidae (cobra, mamba, krait, coral snake), all Atractaspididae (African burrowing asp), all Hydrophiidae (sea snake), all Laticaudidae (sea krait); all venomous, mid-or rear-fanged, Duvernoy-glanded members of the family Colubridae, even if devenomized; any member, or hybrid offspring of the family Boidae, including, but not limited to, the common or green anaconda and yellow anaconda; any member of the family Pythonidae, including, but not limited to, the African rock python, Indian or Burmese python, Amethystine or scrub python; any member of the family Varanidae, including the white throated monitor, Bosc’s or African savannah monitor, Komodo monitor or dragon, Nile monitor, crocodile monitor, water monitor, Bornean earless monitor; any member of the family Iguanidae, including the green or common iguana; any member of the family teiidae, including, but not limited to, the golden, common, or black and white tegu; all members of the family Chelydridae, including snapping turtle and alligator snapping turtle; all turtles and tortoises with a carapace length of less than four (4) inches; and all members of the order Crocodylia, including, but not limited to, alligator, caiman and crocodile.
Birds and Fowl (Aves): All predatory or large birds, including, but not limited to, eagle, hawk, falcon, owl, vulture, condor, emu, rhea and ostrich; roosters, geese, ducks and turkeys.
All venomous insects, including, but not limited to, bees other than non-aggressive honey bees (Apis mellifera), hornet and wasp.
Arachnida and Chilopoda: All venomous spiders, including, but not limited to, tarantula, black widow and solifugid; scorpion; all venomous arthropods including, but not limited to, centipede.
All large rodents (Rodentia), including, but not limited to, gopher, muskrat, nutria, paca, woodchuck, marmot, beaver, prairie dog, capybara, sewellel, viscacha, porcupine and hutia.
All even-toed ungulates (Artiodactyla) including, but not limited to, deer, antelope, sheep, pigs, including pot bellied pigs, goats, cattle, giraffe and hippopotamus.
All odd-toed ungulates (Perissodactyla) other than domesticated horses (Equus caballus), including, but not limited to, zebra, rhinoceros and tapir.
All marsupials, including, but not limited to, Tasmanian devil, dasyure, bandicoot, kangaroo, wallaby, opossum, wombat, koala bear, cuscus, numbat and pigmy, sugar and greater glider.
Sea mammals (Cetacea, Pinnipedia and Sirenia), including, but not limited to, dolphin, whale, seal, sea lion and walrus, and any other predatory marine and freshwater animals and fishes including, but not limited to, sharks and piranhas.
All elephants (Proboscides).
All hyrax (Hydracoidea).
All pangolin (Pholidota).
All sloth and armadillo (Edentata).
Insectivorous mammals (Insectivora): All aardvark (Tubildentata), anteater, shrew, otter shrew, gymnure, desman, tenrec, mole and hedge hog.
Gliding lemur (Dermoptera).
I think I may have already posted this, but you know why they only ban small turtles? Its because kids put them in their mouth and get diseases.
The Broadway pneumatic underground railway—view of car in motion.
Published Date: [187-?]
Item Physical Description: 1 print : b&w ; 11 x 13 cm. (4 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.)
Original Source: From New York & its institutions, 1609-1873. [s.n.] [187-?]) Richmond, J. F. (John Francis), Author.
Awesome
I’m glad this guy either left out that hein yellow sign or painted this before it was up.
NYCTaper has a recording of Kurt Vile opening for Dinosaur Jr. at the Bowery Ballroom from last week available for download in MP3 and FLAC formats. The set only consists of tunes from his newest LP, Childish Prodigy.
You can email for access to the Dino Jr. set from that night.
Daniel Higgs’ show, The Hieroglyphic Ideal is up at Mountain Fold in New York through this weekend.
Cover of The Necks’ latest release, Silverwater.
Surely to make it onto my (yet to be compiled) best of 2009 list, Silverwater finds the Australian krautjazz trio in a darker mode, traveling from tightly wound skittery slithering to a doom-laden shuffle to some a sort of minimal organ pulse in the course of one hour-long track.
Attention Modcult East and readers in select cities, The Necks are doing several American shows this month. They don’t get over to the USA much, so pay attention and hope that your venue has comfortable chairs:
