My friend Melissa must have known that SimTower was a favorite computer game during my younger years. A big, huge thanks to her for pointing out these great cross section illustrations featured on a website that I can’t believe that I had not heard of before: Retronaut!
My favorites are the theater and the department store. Tiny costume shop! Tiny automat!
It is greatly worth your time to visit the website proper and see these images in their expanded glory. Go, go!
I love neon, Kodachrome, and entertainment architecture. I’m pretty over the moon about this 1960s Las Vegas home movie that popped up on A Continuous Lean. (Although, best listened to without the music on… unless you like sappy indie rock.)
You may, or may not, know that lighter-than-air travel is a low-level, yet consistent interest of mine. I think part of this interest was sparked (ah. no pun intended) by growing up mere miles from the site of the Hindenburg crash. As a child, I would crane my neck in the general direction of the Naval Lakehurst air field any time I found myself at great height, trying to catch a fleeting glimpse of the enormous hangers, built to house zeppelins, blimps, and regular-old airplanes. Actually, I still do this whenever I am home. And when I can spot them, the thrill remains.
But another part of this interest may have come around because, frankly, airships seem really scary. I start to feel very unsettled thinking about standing before such a large craft. There is something about monumentality that is very effective, at least on my delicate sense of proportion. Despite having been around and inside the enormous hangers, the feeling of being so thoroughly dwarfed is a difficult one to swallow.
The other night, in bit of digital staring-into-space, I googled images from the largest of the hangers that I grew up in the shadow in: Hanger 1- famed for housing the Hindenburg (which, I have been told, stuck out at least 6 feet at either end of the building.)
Researching this, I found three pretty neat websites:
Airship Research Lab- great illustrated history.
Faces of the Hindenburg- ambitious blog project to catalog the stories of all 36 passengers and 61 crew members on board the Hindenburg’s final flight.
Stereoscopic Images of Lighter Than Air Flight
My favorite image, the ZR3 Los Angeles standing on her nose during a windstorm in Lakehurst, NJ.
By the time this came, I had almost forgotten that I had donated to this Kickstarter project by Wurlington Press!
View Master reels (the old Adidas shoe box full of them attests to their ranking as a childhood fave) of abandon industrial and vernacular buildings? Yes, please.
If you are liking what you are seeing you can <a href=”http://www.bloglovin.com/blog/2312475/with-care?claim=5gp665fp2y4″>follow my blog with bloglovin</a> now. I’m pretty pro Google Reader, but we’ll see if I can’t become unstuck.
Not right now. But sometimes.
This image, and other favorites, can be found on my WITH CARE tumblr account- recently created to broadcast my “virtual effluvia of my creative processes”.
Two great “old things” adventures in two days. Life is groovy!
First, to the New England Demolition and Salvage in New Bedford, MA.
No photos are allowed, so you never saw these, ya hear? But on the plus side, I bought a sweet, floppy, felt hat (specifically for sun protection! I must be getting old.) and the nice lady who works in the front will let you take free clippings from her large windows full of plants!
“Things organized neatly” is right!
The second adventure was to an abandon mansion up the street from my house.
I will spare you a full history of the Tirocchi Mansion of 514 Broadway, but it is a pretty magical structure. It had been sitting silently for years, an upright piano on its outdoor patio- front rotted away to show all of its strings. If you are into a more straightforward tour, here are some photos my pal Corey took 2 years ago, when things were looking a little more sad. The property has recently been purchased by a local non-profit development corporation and they were nice enough to open it up to curious neighborhood lookiloos for two hours. Naturally, I was on their back doorstep at 4pm-opening time- anxiously fiddling with my camera.
I stepping into this room just in time to miss being rained on by this falling plaster!
I feel like every time I encounter an article or essay on this house and its inhabitants, a picture of this chest of drawers is always featured. Seeing it in person was kind of like meeting a celebrity.
There are even more photos in my Flickr stream, if you are into that sort of thing.
And, in case you were wondering, here is an image of the outside:
It has been so long since I’ve wondered around a good, old house. When I was busy a-schoolin’ last year and the year previous, we had all sorts of opportunities to get up close and nosy with historic properties and it never occurred to me just how much I miss it. Getting the chance to experience a place in his delicate limbo between existing and ceasing to exist is pretty special, certainly in the line of “will never happen again”. I’m lucky to get to see these things. I feel like I take so many pictures when I am in these buildings and when I get home, I never feel like I have taken enough.
Particularly in light of just how unhappy I am at my new archival job (very!), I can’t help but notice just how happy buildings make me. Looking at them, talking (and talking and talking) about them, thinking about them, reading about them. I’ve been set on the idea of eventually going to school for textile conservation, but I might have to admit that, while I like textiles, I love buildings. Expanding consciousness is a troublesome thing.
This post is courtesy of my favorite Livejournal group, Vintage Photographs.
While I cannot internalize and then recite a concise blurb as to the tenants of Theosophy, I can share with you these beautiful postcard views of the Theosophical commune located in Point Loma in San Diego.
Allegedly, it was Lomaland where Theosophists introduced southern CA to the cultivation of the avocado.
For other long-vanished “White Cities” see also the 1893 Columbian Exposition* and Coney Island’s “Dreamland“**.
*Yes. I have read “The Devil in the White City” and thought that it was crap. Puns be damned, historical fiction is the lowest form of literature.
**Yeah. I read that one, too.
