Category: Place

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On Signage

Sometimes kitsch. Sometimes haunting. Sometimes enchanting. Sometimes banal. Often evocative of places and spaces familiar to us in our everyday encounters with the urban world. A neon sign in a favorite cafe, a vintage enameled sign sporting the logo of a long defunct motor oil company, an art deco sign with its delicately stylish elements, a hand painted apothecary’s sign from the middle ages or an intricate wrought iron sign with exquisite handmade lattice work: signage comes in a myriad number of designs, shapes and forms.

– Marcus D. Niski

 

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The Intriguing Hidden History of Corridors as Explored by Liminal Narratives

Let us return to the corridor – intrigued and delighted by Rachel Hurdley’s Radio 4 broadcast, The hidden history of the corridor. Poised between public and private; open and closed; movement and stasis; the pragmatic and the eerie, corridors are ‘time and ‘matter out of place” (Hurdley, p.50). From one perspective, opening the door to […]

via Corridor #2 — Liminal Narratives

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The Painter of Modern Life …

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But now it is evening. It is that strange, equivocal hour when the curtains of heaven are drawn and cities light up. The gas-light makes a stain upon the crimson of the sunset. Honest men and rogues, sane men and mad, are all saying to themselves, ‘The end of another day!’ The thoughts of all, whether good men or knaves, turn to pleasure, and each one hastens to the place of his choice to drink the cup of oblivion. Monsieur G. will be the last to linger wherever there can be a glow of light, an echo I of poetry, a quiver of life or a chord of music; wherever a passion can pose before him, wherever natural man and conventional man display themselves in a strange beauty, wherever the sun lights up the swift joys of the depraved animal! ‘A fine way to fill one’s day, to be sure’ …

– Charles Baudelaire, The Artist, Man of the World, Man of the Crowd, and Child in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (1863) , Translated and Edited by Jonathan Myne, Phaidon, 1964, P 11

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A Walk Along Library Way — Finding NYC

Pedestrians traveling 41st Street in Manhattan between Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue may notice special street signs if they pay close attention – that two-block stretch is known as Library Way. Embedded within the sidewalk at regular intervals you will find 96 unique bronze plaques. The plaques were designed by sculptor Gregg LeFevre, and each […]

The fabulous Library Way walking trail I fondly remember following along during a cold New York winter in 2010 as found at:  A Walk Along Library Way — Finding NYC

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Benjamin’s Parisian Passages

I have a distant recollection of walking all the way from the Gare du Nord to lunch in the Café Marly by way of the nineteenth-century arcades so beloved of Walter Benjamin. I tried to reconstruct this journey in reverse, starting in the Galerie Vivienne not far from Adrien Gardère’s office:-

A fabulous piece of flânerie and visual tour of Benjamin’s Passages by Charles Robert Saumarez Smith via Passages — | Charles | Saumarez | Smith |