9 Month's later after the Monument Fire ravaged the Huachuca Mountians. The Lady of the Sierra's is finally starting to take shape again. The landscape well, will take year's or decade's before it will return to pre-fire condition.

SLURL: maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Vahalla%20Island/158/9/24

 

"Antique" vs. "Updated."

 

After nearly a *decade* tooling around SL in the equivalent of a well-maintained '57 Chevy, I'm finally taking steps to modernize my look, with the assistance of a *very* patient avatar/image consultant who is guiding me through the process. More to come later, as this is ~85% complete.

 

It should be noted that my goal is and always has been to keep as much of my original "form and look" as possible, and I think we're really close.

 

We stripped the shed today, tearing off decades-old roofing-felt that had been stapled on over the years.

Carol’s Dad first built this shed for his Father in 1967. Carol remembers it first being built in their back garden, then taken on the back of a flat bed truck, with herself and her Brother Peter sat on the back with it for its journey to the other side of town.

Even now, fifty six years later, she remembers the precarious journey on the back of the lorry and hanging on for dear life.

I digress. The shed was duly delivered, off-loaded and bolted back together in their Grandfather’s back garden and there it stayed for ten years until he died.

From there, the shed was dismantled once more and taken in flat-pack-form back to Jeanies house for re-building. There it stayed until it had another move to Carol’s house where it stayed until its most recent move, to our back garden, twenty three years ago.

What’s really surprising is the condition of the timbers beneath the felt. It’s hard to believe it was all built completely from scratch, the timbers were probably recycled from an old mill.

Like many an old shed, the evidence of earlier practical adjustments are there. Screw holes where the hinges and fastenings were placed in earlier years.

There’s even a key hole from when the door was the other way around.

Unlike modern sheds though, this one was most definitely built to last. Fifty six years old and it’s still rock solid.

And so, a good brush down, a proper going over with the pliers to remove all the old staples, then followed by a good coat of creosote mixed with sump-oil and Hey Presto … the old shed’s ready for another season.

A view recorded at Piazza di Porta Maggiore in Rome, where Stanga-built TAS tram unit 7079 [1949] was arriving with an ATAC Line 5 service and was followed by Socimi-built T8000 tram 9005 [1990] working a Line 14 service.

 

All images on this site are exclusive property and may not be copied, downloaded, reproduced, transmitted, manipulated or used in any way without expressed written permission of the photographer. All rights reserved – Copyright Don Gatehouse

Another of this great old house on the Alberta prairie.

For decades, the dwarves were terrorized by the notorious fire-breathing dragon Brume Embertongue who frequently raided their mine and forge taking what treasures the dwarves had. But, when the dragon stole their kegs of ale was when Thorian Redbeard could take no more. Trusty axe in hand, Thorian saw to it that the Embertongue’s reign of terror was ended forever. Never come between a dwarf and his ale.

 

This diorama was created for "Dwarf Tales" category of Brickscalibur 2024.

Tools: Rolleiflex 3.5F, Portra 160. Process and scan by Exposure Film Lab. I use Flickr as my cloud storage, so I upload everything here: I have a decade worth of photos, check out my albums! Join my Flickr Groups: For female photographers: Creative Ladies Co For Autumn/Fall lovers: Always Waiting for October For a curated feed of an aesthetic I love: An aesthetic on the tip of my tongue To hear from me, sign up to my mailing list for updates, or find me on Instagram. Please do not use my images without my permission. For enquiries, contact me on social media.

.. together until the end

Agfa APX 400

Rodinal 1:50

Canon EOS 500n

Canon EF 28-135mm f3.5

Epson V370

Viewer advice: No food stylists were harmed in the making of this tart.

 

Tarts alike to this one have been coming out of my kitchen for decades. It's devilish in its simplicity and wicked with deceit. That crust is enriched with egg, short with lard, and reinforced with rolled oats. It's a masterpiece in itself.

 

Cook slings her barbs at the gardener with practiced aim. But she never fails to check in with what's best from his toil. She feeds his compost bin with almost as much eagerness as she feeds the household. The worm farm is her domain; but he gets the benefit of her husbandry. Right now, there's the early autumn rush of the tomatoes to finish their cycle before the first frost spoils their chances. The gardener will pop in with a basket of tomatoes on most days. Today, on his visit, he encountered a little tart.

 

When last you saw this style of tart it was somewhere between terracotta and vermilion in shade. That filling is deceptive. The secret is a few good ingredients, reduced in moisture by sauteing in a heart stopper of butter, amped in intensity, spiced with harissa and made palate tingling with a seasoning on cheeses. Today it's gone wrong, imperfect, or so it seems.

 

Cook's wicked mischief, aimed squarely at the gardener, has swapped out the rich tones of red, instead rendering this favourite a murky shade of swamp. Her secret? Gardener's planting of the green zebra variety of tomato has him swamping her with yellowish green-striped fruit. Her payback was to make him an icky green tart.

 

The jokes on her, I'm afraid. "Imperfect" to the food stylists colour chart is an imperfect pointer to gustatory perfection. Eating with our eyes is overrated after all!

   

wow...long time no manip. x)

The Mansions, built in 1889 and located near Parliament House on the George Street ridge at the corner of Margaret Street, was designed by architect George Henry Male Addison as six attached elite masonry houses. Constructed by RE Burton for £11,700, it was an investment for three Queensland politicians - Boyd Dunlop Morehead, then Premier; William Pattison, Treasurer; and John Stevenson, member for Clermont - during a decade of enormous population growth and land development in Brisbane.

 

Since the 1820s, the north bank and adjacent ridgeline of the Brisbane River, now containing William and George Streets, has always featured a concentration of government and associated activities and uses. Over the period of the Moreton Bay penal settlement, buildings constructed along this ridgeline, were utilised by government officials for ‘accommodation, administration and control'. When the settlement was closed in 1842, the remnant penal infrastructure was used by surveyors as a basis for the layout for the new town of Brisbane. Set at right angles to the river, the prisoner's barracks determined Queen Street, while the line of buildings along the ridge determined William Street. Streets surveyed parallel to these streets including George Street, formed Brisbane's rectangular grid.

 

While a range of buildings and activities occurred along George and William Streets from the 1840s, the government maintained its dominant presence in the area. At some sites (such as the Commissariat Store (former) and Brisbane Botanic Gardens) earlier uses were continued. The establishment phase following the creation of Queensland in 1859 saw the new colonial government reserve land parcels and construct a range of buildings to facilitate its functions. The building of Government House and Parliament House along the eastern end of the George Street alignment in the 1860s firmly entrenched the physical reality of a government precinct in the area.

 

The siting of Parliament House had a pronounced effect on the built environment around lower George Street. Many of Queensland's early politicians were pastoralists, a reflection of their economic dominance in the colony. Together with a growing workforce of public servants, these politicians required accommodation when in Brisbane. From the 1860s to the 1880s, a range of buildings, many built by, or for politicians, were built to address these needs.

 

Throughout the 1880s Brisbane was transforming into a colonial city. Many of Queensland's immigrants remained in the capital, swelling the population from almost 40,000 in 1881 to well over 90,000 in 1891. This growth stimulated building, municipal organisation, amenities and services, and cultural and leisure outlets. The flourishing building activity caused Brisbane's practising architects to treble in number, and builders and contractors to rise from 16 in 1882 to 87 in 1887. Brisbane's centre sprouted a host of impressive new stone buildings including the Customs House, additions to the Government Printing Office, the first wing of the Treasury Building and the Alice Street facade of Parliament House. The number of inhabited dwellings in the capital almost doubled between 1881 and 1891 from 5,814 to 10,321, causing the town to overshoot its old boundaries. Consequently, land speculation was extensive and the capital value of metropolitan land rose towards its peak in 1890, a level not approximated again until 1925.

 

The land on which The Mansions was later erected, lots 1 and 2 of Portion 38, was originally purchased as Town Lot 56 in 1852 by land speculator James Gibbon. By 1863 he had subdivided the land into three lots, but lots 1 and 2 remained vacant. The land was transferred in 1882 to William Williams, a successful Brisbane businessman associated with the Australian Steam Navigation Shipping Company. He in turn sold the vacant land in August 1888 to Pattison, Morehead and Stevenson who were members of parliament, business associates and friends

 

BD Morehead (1843-1905) was a pastoralist, businessman and politician who served in both the Queensland Legislative Assembly and Legislative Council. With AB Buchanan he established BD Morehead and Co. in 1873 which comprised a mercantile and trading business and a stock and station agency. He experienced financial disaster in the 1893 economic crisis. William Pattison (1830-96), a businessman, mine director and politician, served in the Queensland Legislative Assembly between 1886 and 1893. He was one of the original shareholders and later chairman of directors of the Mount Morgan Gold Mining Co but was damaged politically and economically by the 50 per cent collapse of this company's share price from mid-1888 John Stevenson was a pastoralist who bought into the firm of BD Morehead and Co., managing the stock and station business until 1896 when he formed the business J Stevenson and Co. He was a member of the Queensland Legislative Assembly from 1875 to 1893.

 

These three men engaged architect George Henry Male Addison to design a row of houses for the George Street site. Addison had moved from Melbourne to Brisbane and established a branch of Oakden, Addison and Kemp, which in 1888 won the competition to build a new exhibition hall for the National Agricultural and Industrial Association on Gregory Terrace. Addison was an accomplished designer, his buildings stylistically eclectic and more ornately and highly finished than any previously seen in the city. The distinctive use of face brickwork relieved with stone or rendered detailing and steep, dominant roof forms are characteristics of his work. [Other Addison-designed buildings include the Albert Street Uniting Church, Brisbane and The Strand Theatre, Toowoomba. Addison's skills and distinctive style of domestic architecture were recognised and attracted business from Queensland's leading professionals. Noteworthy houses designed by him are Cliveden Mansions, Brisbane, Kirkston, Brisbane, Oonooraba, Maryborough, Ralahyne, Brisbane and Cumbooquepa. Addison called tenders for the construction of The Mansions viz ‘city residences in George street' in the Brisbane Courier on 29 September 1888, closing on 15 October. RE Burton's tender of £11,600 was accepted.

 

The Mansions was designed to be impressive and aesthetically pleasing, utilising high quality materials, generous use of ornamentation and careful composition of building forms, the six individual houses being unified by the overriding use of arcades and the arrangement, in alternating pairs, of entries and roof dormers. The design was well suited to the climate, the arcades providing shade without impeding ventilation. Soon after the residences were completed in late 1889 The Boomerang described them as ‘unique in their way, being built after the Queen Anne style of red brick with stone facing. They have been constructed to suit the climate. The mantelpieces are very rich and were specially imported. In fact, its as fine a terrace as any in Australia'. Addison published a drawing of The Mansions in 1890 in the Building and Engineering Journal of Australia, describing them as ‘convenient and roomy having three reception rooms and ten bedrooms, exclusive of servants' quarters. The front is of brick, relieved with Oomaroo [sic] stone, the total cost £11,700...'.

 

The Mansions as terraced houses were a type of land use that was uncommon in colonial Queensland due to the enactment of the Undue Subdivision of Land Prevention Act 1885. This legislation enforced a minimum lot size of 16 perches (404 m2) and a minimum frontage of 30 feet (10 metres) effectively stopping the building of terraced housing in Queensland except as a rental investment. Early, pre-legislation versions of terraced housing in Brisbane included Harris Terrace and Hodgson's Terrace (demolished) in George Street; Athol Place, Spring Hill (1860s); Princess Row, Petrie Terrace (1863) and a group of four houses (c1884-85) in Wellington Road, Petrie Terrace. Terraces built around 1885 or afterwards included Byrne Terrace on Wickham Terrace (1885-86, architects John Hall and Son, demolished), O'Keefe Terrace on Petrie Terrace (1886-87, architect Andrew Stombucco and Son), Cook Terrace (1889, possibly Taylor and Richer) on Coronation Drive, Cross Terrace, Red Hill (1886) and Petrie Mansions on Petrie Terrace (1887-8); Brighton Terrace, West End (1890 John B Nicholson); and two terrace houses on Wellington Street, Petrie Terrace (1894/95). Of these, The Mansions were the grandest and most ambitious architecturally.

 

Elite tenants began to occupy the well-located residences from 1889 but the economic downturn which culminated in the 1893 depression denied full occupancy. Although the Queensland economy experienced problems from the mid-1880s, the downturn only became apparent from 1889 after local confidence waned and British investment funds dried up. The building industry was affected first and most severely, then depression spread to other sectors of the economy. The severest years of the depression in Queensland were from 1891 to 1893. Brisbane's economic experiences followed those of the Queensland economy overall but with different emphases. The phenomenal growth of the 1880s had culminated in widespread speculation in land and buildings, which created an excess capacity of offices and dwellings. Brisbane's descent into depression began with a crash in the construction and building materials industries and the collapse of building societies towards the end of 1891 after the climax of its land and building boom. Land and rent values began dropping in 1890, reaching their lowest level in 1893-4. Empty dwellings became a common sight in the city and suburbs - some deserted while other recently built ones had never been occupied. All three investors in The Mansions suffered severe financial losses during this depression.

 

By 30 November 1889 two of the villas were occupied by members of parliament, William Pattison and the Hon. Hume Black. Advertisements in the Brisbane Courier for tenants to let both the ‘George Street Mansions and Harris Terrace' on the opposite corner of Margaret Street appeared in the Brisbane Courier during December 1889. Other early residents were doctors - in 1890 Dr Fourness Simmons and a Dr Bennett. The 1891 Post Office Directory listed four houses as unoccupied and two occupied by doctors, EM Owens and A Bennett. In December 1891, Dr Lilian Cooper, Queensland's first woman doctor, established her consulting rooms in The Mansions and resided there for several years after the 1893 floods. Pattison moved from The Mansions in July 1891 and a Mrs Prince, previously of Glencairn, Wickham Terrace advertised that she had leased ‘the Hon. W Pattison's late residence, The Mansion, George Street' and would be ‘pleased to receive applications for Accommodation. The buildings are situated close to Parliament House and are therefore highly suited to members'. In 1892 The Mansion's housed a Mrs Probyn who resided in ‘The Grange' (possibly a boarding house) and which was replaced the following year by Elizabeth Bird's boarding house.

 

Between 1896 and 1954 The Mansions were used primarily as boarding houses, which operated under various names. Guests included professional families such as barrister and later University of Queensland Registrar FWS Cumbrae Stewart and family from 1906, the Commissioner of Public Health Elkington and wife in 1912, District Court Judge McNaughton and Electrical Engineer Nelson. Some doctors such as AB Carvosso continued to practice from The Mansions.

 

Despite ownership of The Mansions changing a number of times, this did not result in changes of use. The property was transferred to the Queensland National Bank in August 1898 and was sold in 1912 to Gerard Ralph Gore and Christiana Gore, pastoralists on the Darling Downs, in order to recoup the loan for its construction. In 1925 the property was sold again but due to the owner's death quickly transferred to the Queensland Trustees. In 1947 the property was sold to three new owners, two of whom ran three boarding houses using the property's six villas. The boarding houses (from the Alice Street end) were named Lonsdale (24-26 George), Glenmore (28-30) and Binna Burra (32-44). In 1954 The Mansions were offered at public auction, but passed in when the reserve was not reached.

 

Subsequently, the Queensland Government purchased the property for use as government offices as part of its acquisition of buildings in George Street under what was then officially known as the ‘George Street Plan'. A shortage of accommodation for administrative offices in State-owned buildings had been identified immediately post-war when the Queensland government began to expand their activities considerably in Brisbane city. Most public servants were then located in the Treasury and Executive Buildings in George Street and in offices in Anzac Square. The shortage of office accommodation in the centre of Brisbane, and the need to address future requirements, led to a phase of governmental property acquisition in the city. The purchase of properties on George and William Streets between the Government Printing Office and Parliament House was a key focus, in addition to other acquisitions on Charlotte, Mary and Margaret Streets. Properties in William Street were purchased in 1946-47 and the expenditure in 1954 on properties for this purpose in George, William and Margaret Streets, including The Mansions, was £60,500. Despite their varying condition and former uses, many of these newly acquired buildings were quickly adapted for government use.

 

At this time the Department of Public Works prepared measured drawings of The Mansions. ‘Lonsdale' and ‘Glenmore' were described as ‘a three storey double brick building...conducted as a residential and compris[ing] 32 rooms, 16 of which are let as flatettes and 16 as serviced rooms'. Linings and ceilings were plaster except at the top floor where ceilings were beaded pine. Floors were mainly pine. There were 10 fireplaces of which two were marble and the remainder ‘ornamental timber'. There was one ‘set of 4' [1.2m] wide twin cedar staircases in excellent condition'. Four bathrooms, two shower rooms, two laundries and six sewerage units served the property. The condition of the properties was considered to be fair. At the rear of the land, there were two double storey brick dormitories and a garage, which were of much inferior construction and finish to the main building.

 

Conversion of The Mansions into government offices cost £45,054. Drawings prepared for the conversion show that the general configuration of the houses was changed. Walls were removed, new doorways made, fireplaces blocked, internal partitions installed, concrete floors for toilets added and all stairs except one at the rear of no. 28-30 were removed or altered. Original details including dado panelling in the halls and dining rooms, and leadlight sidelights on the front doors were removed. Evidence of the original asymmetrical arrangement of bay windows at ground floor level was lost except in no. 24-26 and new load-bearing partitions were installed on the first and second floor levels above the dining rooms.

 

A range of government departments occupied The Mansions until the 1970s. The Government Statistician's Office was located on the ground floor from c1956 and by 1961 the Medical boards, Licensing Commission, Prices Branch, Department of Public Works and Probation Office occupied the first floor. Replanning of the Medical boards' offices took place in 1967 and remodelling of the ground floor for the Comptroller-General of Prisons occurred in 1972.

 

The consolidation of government ownership and usage along George and William streets led to a number of schemes in being investigated by the state to further the development of a ‘government precinct'. By 1965, a masterplan had been developed involving the demolition of all buildings between the Executive Building (later Land Administration Building) and Parliament House, to enable the construction of three high-rise office buildings in a ‘plaza setting'. In November 1965 the government announced the proposed demolition of its George Street office buildings. The present day Executive Building was completed in 1971 as part of this plan. However, by the early 1970s this plan for the precinct was considered no longer suitable and a number of other proposals for the area were explored.

 

A 1974 ‘George Street Masterplan' involved lower rise buildings spread out over greater areas and the demolition of the Belle Vue Hotel and The Mansions. A major influence in ultimately shaping the layout of the area during the 1970s was the growing community support for the retention of older buildings within the government precinct. In 1973 the National Trust began a public campaign to save both The Mansions and its next-door neighbour in George Street, the Belle Vue Hotel, from demolition under the Queensland Government's ‘George Street Masterplan'. The campaign highlighted the government-related associations and links between buildings, their architectural qualities, and aesthetic contributions to the area in submissions to the government and in the public sphere. The unannounced June 1974 removal of the balconies of the Bellevue Hotel was a deliberate action by the State government to degrade the visual appearance of the area, and drew further attention to the conservation cause.

 

Ultimately the Belle Vue Hotel was demolished in April 1979 after Cabinet adopted a recommended schedule of demolition work to further the development of the government precinct. The Belle Vue Hotel was to be demolished, but The Mansions and the original section of Harris Terrace were to be retained, renovated and adapted. On 21 April, three days after this decision, the Belle Vue Hotel was demolished in the early hours of the morning, a notorious event in the history of heritage conservation in Queensland causing a furore of public complaint.

 

The Mansions servants' wings and stables were demolished later in 1979 in accordance with the Cabinet decision. However, this did not cause a complete loss of the area to the rear of The Mansions, which may still reveal archaeological information about foundations and material culture related to servants' occupation of this area of the site.

 

Subsequently, several schemes were prepared for the reconstruction and conservation of The Mansions. Measured drawings of the remaining sections of the building were prepared and exteriors photographed. Plans for the renovations and alterations were prepared by Lund Hutton Ryan Architects in 1980 and in 1982 further plans for the restoration were prepared by Conrad and Gargett in association with the Department of Public Works. At this time it was reported that there were problems with rising damp; the existing roof framing was generally sound; none of the original staircases survived; all internal walls were plastered brick or plaster and lathe on timber framing; the few original ceilings on the ground and first floors were plaster and lathe while on the second floor they were tongue and groove pine; some original skirtings, architraves, cornices and ceiling roses remained; some original fire surrounds and grates survived; many original doors and windows survived but were in disrepair; and hardware had been changed.

 

A final renovation scheme was prepared then carried out in 1983-4. This development removed most of the 1950s fit-out as well as removing original material, reconstructing features and adding new features such as a lift and air conditioning plant. A transverse corridor was created by enclosing parts of the rear courtyards in glass requiring reconfiguration of the rear verandahs. Stairs and toilets were installed in the second reception room at the ground floor level. Walls which formed the small front room at the first floor level were removed. All the ceilings and the remaining evidence of the original off centre bay layout of no. 24-26 at ground floor level and the surviving dining room fireplace in no. 40 were removed. Castings of ceiling roses were installed throughout the rooms. Most of the wall plaster was removed. Most door and window joinery was reconstructed. New stairs were constructed using detail and parts from the original but in a new configuration. The roof sheeting was replaced, new finials constructed and the rear verandahs rebuilt. New dormer windows at roof level were constructed facing south-west over the new rear verandahs. Most of the ground floor and second floor ceiling framing and some of the roof framing was replaced. All floors were re-laid with plywood and hearths removed, concrete slabs were laid in wet areas, tie downs were installed and new ceramic tile paving was laid on verandah floors.

 

On 28 April 1986 Premier Bjelke Petersen officially opened the Government Precinct Development incorporating the State Works Centre, the renovated Harris Terrace and The Mansions. After the redevelopment, The Mansions housed a variety of professional offices and exclusive specialist retail stores. A restaurant also operated in the building.

 

Since this refurbishment, only minor alterations have occurred to the buildings, apart from updating of services and the provision of equitable access. A freestanding roof was constructed next to the south-east rear verandah of the house at the Alice Street end for the restaurant tenant in 1988. In 2005 timber decking and ramps were added in Queen's Place for access at the Alice Street end.

 

In 1990 there was a proposal to sell The Mansions with the Port Office and Smellies building but this did not proceed.

 

The Mansions is one of nine heritage-listed buildings that faced mass renovations during the Queens Wharf Development in 2017.

 

Source: Queensland Heritage Register.

Since several decades in Porto each year early May the tram museum organises a parade of trams of their collection. However like in 2020, also in 2021 this wasn't possible because of the COVID-pandemic. Instead on May 8th 2021 for one day most of the regular service trams were replaced by a tram of the museum collection. In advance there was only a small notification on the STCP website, with as result only a few people knew and were around on this day.

Visit this location at eClipse Club & Resort in Second Life

six decades: 1953 to 2013

Standing in the early evening sunlight on 21st September 1985, former USA Transportation Corps 'S100' Class "USA" tanks (Greek Railways Class 'Δα/Da') Nos. 57 (Built Davenport W/No.2549 in 1943 - USATC No.4400) and 59 (Built Davenport W/No.2602 in 1944 - USATC No.6013) dumped at Thessalonica depot. Remarkably, they were noted in this same position, with the track removed at each end of the line, in November 2018, over three decades on from this scene.

 

© Gordon Edgar - All rights reserved. Please do not use my images without my explicit permission

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I was originally enrolled into the GETTY IMAGES collection as a contributor on April 9th 2012, and when links with FLICKR were terminated in March 2014, I was retained and fortunate enough to be signed up via a second contract, both of which have proved to be successful with sales of my photographs all over the world now handled exclusively by them.

    

On November 12th 2015 GETTY IMAGES unveiled plans for a new stills upload platform called ESP (Enterprise Submission Platform), to replace the existing 'Moment portal', and on November 13th I was invited to Beta test the new system prior to it being officially rolled out in December. ESP went live on Tuesday December 15th 2015 and has smoothed out the upload process considerably.

  

These days I take a far more leisurely approach to my photographic exploits, and having moved from professional Nikon equipment to consumer bodies and lenses, I travel light less constraints and more emphasis on the pure capture of the beauty that I see, more akin to my original persuits and goals some five decades previously when starting out. I would like to say a huge and heartfelt 'THANK YOU' to GETTY IMAGES, and the 25.297+ Million visitors to my FLICKR site.

  

***** Selected for sale in the GETTY IMAGES COLLECTION on September 10th 2017

  

CREATIVE RF gty.im/840725356 MOMENT OPEN COLLECTION**

  

This photograph became my 3,272nd frame to be selected for sale in the Getty Images collection and I am very grateful to them for this wonderful opportunity.

  

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Photograph taken at an altitude of Sixty six metres at 14:11am on Thursday 3rd November 2016 off New Road and Abbey Road B213 in the grounds of Lesnes Abbey Park within Lesnes Abbey Wood in Bexleyheath, Kent, England.

  

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Nikon D7200 8mm 1/100s f/4.5 iso200 RAW (14 bit Lossless compressed Image size 6000 x 4000). Colour space sRGB. Handheld. Nikon back button focusing enabled. AF-C continuous focus 51 point with 3-D tracking. Manual exposure. Matrix metering. Auto white balance. Auto Active D-lighting.

  

Sigma 8-16mm f/4.5-5.6 DC HSM. Nikon MB-D15 battery grip. Two Nikon EN-EL batteries. Hoodman H-EYEN22S soft rubber eyecup. My Memory 32GB Class 10 SDHC. Lowepro Flipside 400 AW camera bag. Nikon GP-1 GPS module. Matin soft quick release neckstrap.

  

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LATITUDE: N 51d 29m 1.63s

LONGITUDE: E 0d 7m 31.82s

ALTITUDE: 66.0m

  

RAW (TIFF) FILE: 69.10MB

PROCESSED (JPeg) FILE: 35.21MB

  

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PROCESSING POWER:

 

Nikon D7200 Firmware versions A 1.10 C 2.015 (Lens distortion control version 2)

 

HP 110-352na Desktop PC with AMD Quad-Core A6-5200 APU processor. AMD Radeon HD8400 graphics. 8 GB DDR3 Memory with 1TB SATA storage. 64-bit Windows 10. Verbatim USB 2.0 1TB desktop hard drive. WD My Passport Ultra 1tb USB3 Portable hard drive. Nikon ViewNX-1 64bit. Adobe photoshop Elements 8 Version 8.0 64bit.

   

A re-edit of a photo that I took over 15 years ago with my Canon PowerShot S60 in the first year that I owned it. The S60 launched me on a decade and a half career as a photographer. Revisiting the image, I made adjustments in Photoshop and applied a lookup table in Luminar 4.

This week we are going back eleven years to 2012, and to RV 584 at Liffey Valley Shopping Centre. On this day, October 13th, an enthusiast trip was organised by Dublin Bus to mark the end of the Volvo Olympian buses (as well as the end of the high-floor buses). RV 584 and RV 586 visited a number of locations around the city, following certain bus routes. Both buses had been delivered new to Dublin Bus in 1999 and within a week of the trip, both had been withdrawn. Both were sold on to other Irish operators. The actual last Olympian to run in passenger service was RV 560 on the 19th December 2012.

In the background is AV 405 on route 40. This had been the terminus of the 40 since 2011, when the route had been merged with the 78 and 78A. It was cut back again in 2022 when route G2 started under Bus Connects. In 2023 this stop was remodelled to become just an intermediate stop as a new bus interchange opened at the front of the shopping centre. AV 405 was withdrawn around the start of 2019, and sold on to another Irish operator. In just over a decade, everything in this scene has changed. Even the bus livery is on the way out.

13/10/2012

Tools: Contax T3. I have a decade worth of photos, check out my albums! Find me on Instagram & please like Millie Clinton Photography on Facebook! You can ask me anything anonymously here. These images are protected by copyright, please do not use them for any commercial or non-commercial purposes without permission. To preserve my passion for my hobby, I stopped taking on clients in 2021 and now only occasionally make money from photography through licensing agreements. For enquiries, contact me on social media. If you want to support me in another way, check out my Amazon wish list or check out my eBay store!

Graffiti (plural; singular graffiti or graffito, the latter rarely used except in archeology) is art that is written, painted or drawn on a wall or other surface, usually without permission and within public view. Graffiti ranges from simple written words to elaborate wall paintings, and has existed since ancient times, with examples dating back to ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, and the Roman Empire (see also mural).

 

Graffiti is a controversial subject. In most countries, marking or painting property without permission is considered by property owners and civic authorities as defacement and vandalism, which is a punishable crime, citing the use of graffiti by street gangs to mark territory or to serve as an indicator of gang-related activities. Graffiti has become visualized as a growing urban "problem" for many cities in industrialized nations, spreading from the New York City subway system and Philadelphia in the early 1970s to the rest of the United States and Europe and other world regions

 

"Graffiti" (usually both singular and plural) and the rare singular form "graffito" are from the Italian word graffiato ("scratched"). The term "graffiti" is used in art history for works of art produced by scratching a design into a surface. A related term is "sgraffito", which involves scratching through one layer of pigment to reveal another beneath it. This technique was primarily used by potters who would glaze their wares and then scratch a design into them. In ancient times graffiti were carved on walls with a sharp object, although sometimes chalk or coal were used. The word originates from Greek γράφειν—graphein—meaning "to write".

 

The term graffiti originally referred to the inscriptions, figure drawings, and such, found on the walls of ancient sepulchres or ruins, as in the Catacombs of Rome or at Pompeii. Historically, these writings were not considered vanadlism, which today is considered part of the definition of graffiti.

 

The only known source of the Safaitic language, an ancient form of Arabic, is from graffiti: inscriptions scratched on to the surface of rocks and boulders in the predominantly basalt desert of southern Syria, eastern Jordan and northern Saudi Arabia. Safaitic dates from the first century BC to the fourth century AD.

 

Some of the oldest cave paintings in the world are 40,000 year old ones found in Australia. The oldest written graffiti was found in ancient Rome around 2500 years ago. Most graffiti from the time was boasts about sexual experiences Graffiti in Ancient Rome was a form of communication, and was not considered vandalism.

 

Ancient tourists visiting the 5th-century citadel at Sigiriya in Sri Lanka write their names and commentary over the "mirror wall", adding up to over 1800 individual graffiti produced there between the 6th and 18th centuries. Most of the graffiti refer to the frescoes of semi-nude females found there. One reads:

 

Wet with cool dew drops

fragrant with perfume from the flowers

came the gentle breeze

jasmine and water lily

dance in the spring sunshine

side-long glances

of the golden-hued ladies

stab into my thoughts

heaven itself cannot take my mind

as it has been captivated by one lass

among the five hundred I have seen here.

 

Among the ancient political graffiti examples were Arab satirist poems. Yazid al-Himyari, an Umayyad Arab and Persian poet, was most known for writing his political poetry on the walls between Sajistan and Basra, manifesting a strong hatred towards the Umayyad regime and its walis, and people used to read and circulate them very widely.

 

Graffiti, known as Tacherons, were frequently scratched on Romanesque Scandinavian church walls. When Renaissance artists such as Pinturicchio, Raphael, Michelangelo, Ghirlandaio, or Filippino Lippi descended into the ruins of Nero's Domus Aurea, they carved or painted their names and returned to initiate the grottesche style of decoration.

 

There are also examples of graffiti occurring in American history, such as Independence Rock, a national landmark along the Oregon Trail.

 

Later, French soldiers carved their names on monuments during the Napoleonic campaign of Egypt in the 1790s. Lord Byron's survives on one of the columns of the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion in Attica, Greece.

 

The oldest known example of graffiti "monikers" found on traincars created by hobos and railworkers since the late 1800s. The Bozo Texino monikers were documented by filmmaker Bill Daniel in his 2005 film, Who is Bozo Texino?.

 

In World War II, an inscription on a wall at the fortress of Verdun was seen as an illustration of the US response twice in a generation to the wrongs of the Old World:

 

During World War II and for decades after, the phrase "Kilroy was here" with an accompanying illustration was widespread throughout the world, due to its use by American troops and ultimately filtering into American popular culture. Shortly after the death of Charlie Parker (nicknamed "Yardbird" or "Bird"), graffiti began appearing around New York with the words "Bird Lives".

 

Modern graffiti art has its origins with young people in 1960s and 70s in New York City and Philadelphia. Tags were the first form of stylised contemporary graffiti. Eventually, throw-ups and pieces evolved with the desire to create larger art. Writers used spray paint and other kind of materials to leave tags or to create images on the sides subway trains. and eventually moved into the city after the NYC metro began to buy new trains and paint over graffiti.

 

While the art had many advocates and appreciators—including the cultural critic Norman Mailer—others, including New York City mayor Ed Koch, considered it to be defacement of public property, and saw it as a form of public blight. The ‘taggers’ called what they did ‘writing’—though an important 1974 essay by Mailer referred to it using the term ‘graffiti.’

 

Contemporary graffiti style has been heavily influenced by hip hop culture and the myriad international styles derived from Philadelphia and New York City Subway graffiti; however, there are many other traditions of notable graffiti in the twentieth century. Graffiti have long appeared on building walls, in latrines, railroad boxcars, subways, and bridges.

 

An early graffito outside of New York or Philadelphia was the inscription in London reading "Clapton is God" in reference to the guitarist Eric Clapton. Creating the cult of the guitar hero, the phrase was spray-painted by an admirer on a wall in an Islington, north London in the autumn of 1967. The graffito was captured in a photograph, in which a dog is urinating on the wall.

 

Films like Style Wars in the 80s depicting famous writers such as Skeme, Dondi, MinOne, and ZEPHYR reinforced graffiti's role within New York's emerging hip-hop culture. Although many officers of the New York City Police Department found this film to be controversial, Style Wars is still recognized as the most prolific film representation of what was going on within the young hip hop culture of the early 1980s. Fab 5 Freddy and Futura 2000 took hip hop graffiti to Paris and London as part of the New York City Rap Tour in 1983

 

Commercialization and entrance into mainstream pop culture

Main article: Commercial graffiti

With the popularity and legitimization of graffiti has come a level of commercialization. In 2001, computer giant IBM launched an advertising campaign in Chicago and San Francisco which involved people spray painting on sidewalks a peace symbol, a heart, and a penguin (Linux mascot), to represent "Peace, Love, and Linux." IBM paid Chicago and San Francisco collectively US$120,000 for punitive damages and clean-up costs.

 

In 2005, a similar ad campaign was launched by Sony and executed by its advertising agency in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Miami, to market its handheld PSP gaming system. In this campaign, taking notice of the legal problems of the IBM campaign, Sony paid building owners for the rights to paint on their buildings "a collection of dizzy-eyed urban kids playing with the PSP as if it were a skateboard, a paddle, or a rocking horse".

 

Tristan Manco wrote that Brazil "boasts a unique and particularly rich, graffiti scene ... [earning] it an international reputation as the place to go for artistic inspiration". Graffiti "flourishes in every conceivable space in Brazil's cities". Artistic parallels "are often drawn between the energy of São Paulo today and 1970s New York". The "sprawling metropolis", of São Paulo has "become the new shrine to graffiti"; Manco alludes to "poverty and unemployment ... [and] the epic struggles and conditions of the country's marginalised peoples", and to "Brazil's chronic poverty", as the main engines that "have fuelled a vibrant graffiti culture". In world terms, Brazil has "one of the most uneven distributions of income. Laws and taxes change frequently". Such factors, Manco argues, contribute to a very fluid society, riven with those economic divisions and social tensions that underpin and feed the "folkloric vandalism and an urban sport for the disenfranchised", that is South American graffiti art.

 

Prominent Brazilian writers include Os Gêmeos, Boleta, Nunca, Nina, Speto, Tikka, and T.Freak. Their artistic success and involvement in commercial design ventures has highlighted divisions within the Brazilian graffiti community between adherents of the cruder transgressive form of pichação and the more conventionally artistic values of the practitioners of grafite.

 

Graffiti in the Middle East has emerged slowly, with taggers operating in Egypt, Lebanon, the Gulf countries like Bahrain or the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and in Iran. The major Iranian newspaper Hamshahri has published two articles on illegal writers in the city with photographic coverage of Iranian artist A1one's works on Tehran walls. Tokyo-based design magazine, PingMag, has interviewed A1one and featured photographs of his work. The Israeli West Bank barrier has become a site for graffiti, reminiscent in this sense of the Berlin Wall. Many writers in Israel come from other places around the globe, such as JUIF from Los Angeles and DEVIONE from London. The religious reference "נ נח נחמ נחמן מאומן" ("Na Nach Nachma Nachman Meuman") is commonly seen in graffiti around Israel.

 

Graffiti has played an important role within the street art scene in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), especially following the events of the Arab Spring of 2011 or the Sudanese Revolution of 2018/19. Graffiti is a tool of expression in the context of conflict in the region, allowing people to raise their voices politically and socially. Famous street artist Banksy has had an important effect in the street art scene in the MENA area, especially in Palestine where some of his works are located in the West Bank barrier and Bethlehem.

 

There are also a large number of graffiti influences in Southeast Asian countries that mostly come from modern Western culture, such as Malaysia, where graffiti have long been a common sight in Malaysia's capital city, Kuala Lumpur. Since 2010, the country has begun hosting a street festival to encourage all generations and people from all walks of life to enjoy and encourage Malaysian street culture.

 

The modern-day graffitists can be found with an arsenal of various materials that allow for a successful production of a piece. This includes such techniques as scribing. However, spray paint in aerosol cans is the number one medium for graffiti. From this commodity comes different styles, technique, and abilities to form master works of graffiti. Spray paint can be found at hardware and art stores and comes in virtually every color.

 

Stencil graffiti is created by cutting out shapes and designs in a stiff material (such as cardboard or subject folders) to form an overall design or image. The stencil is then placed on the "canvas" gently and with quick, easy strokes of the aerosol can, the image begins to appear on the intended surface.

 

Some of the first examples were created in 1981 by artists Blek le Rat in Paris, in 1982 by Jef Aerosol in Tours (France); by 1985 stencils had appeared in other cities including New York City, Sydney, and Melbourne, where they were documented by American photographer Charles Gatewood and Australian photographer Rennie Ellis

 

Tagging is the practice of someone spray-painting "their name, initial or logo onto a public surface" in a handstyle unique to the writer. Tags were the first form of modern graffiti.

 

Modern graffiti art often incorporates additional arts and technologies. For example, Graffiti Research Lab has encouraged the use of projected images and magnetic light-emitting diodes (throwies) as new media for graffitists. yarnbombing is another recent form of graffiti. Yarnbombers occasionally target previous graffiti for modification, which had been avoided among the majority of graffitists.

 

Theories on the use of graffiti by avant-garde artists have a history dating back at least to the Asger Jorn, who in 1962 painting declared in a graffiti-like gesture "the avant-garde won't give up"

 

Many contemporary analysts and even art critics have begun to see artistic value in some graffiti and to recognize it as a form of public art. According to many art researchers, particularly in the Netherlands and in Los Angeles, that type of public art is, in fact an effective tool of social emancipation or, in the achievement of a political goal

 

In times of conflict, such murals have offered a means of communication and self-expression for members of these socially, ethnically, or racially divided communities, and have proven themselves as effective tools in establishing dialog and thus, of addressing cleavages in the long run. The Berlin Wall was also extensively covered by graffiti reflecting social pressures relating to the oppressive Soviet rule over the GDR.

 

Many artists involved with graffiti are also concerned with the similar activity of stenciling. Essentially, this entails stenciling a print of one or more colors using spray-paint. Recognized while exhibiting and publishing several of her coloured stencils and paintings portraying the Sri Lankan Civil War and urban Britain in the early 2000s, graffitists Mathangi Arulpragasam, aka M.I.A., has also become known for integrating her imagery of political violence into her music videos for singles "Galang" and "Bucky Done Gun", and her cover art. Stickers of her artwork also often appear around places such as London in Brick Lane, stuck to lamp posts and street signs, she having become a muse for other graffitists and painters worldwide in cities including Seville.

 

Graffitist believes that art should be on display for everyone in the public eye or in plain sight, not hidden away in a museum or a gallery. Art should color the streets, not the inside of some building. Graffiti is a form of art that cannot be owned or bought. It does not last forever, it is temporary, yet one of a kind. It is a form of self promotion for the artist that can be displayed anywhere form sidewalks, roofs, subways, building wall, etc. Art to them is for everyone and should be showed to everyone for free.

 

Graffiti is a way of communicating and a way of expressing what one feels in the moment. It is both art and a functional thing that can warn people of something or inform people of something. However, graffiti is to some people a form of art, but to some a form of vandalism. And many graffitists choose to protect their identities and remain anonymous or to hinder prosecution.

 

With the commercialization of graffiti (and hip hop in general), in most cases, even with legally painted "graffiti" art, graffitists tend to choose anonymity. This may be attributed to various reasons or a combination of reasons. Graffiti still remains the one of four hip hop elements that is not considered "performance art" despite the image of the "singing and dancing star" that sells hip hop culture to the mainstream. Being a graphic form of art, it might also be said that many graffitists still fall in the category of the introverted archetypal artist.

 

Banksy is one of the world's most notorious and popular street artists who continues to remain faceless in today's society. He is known for his political, anti-war stencil art mainly in Bristol, England, but his work may be seen anywhere from Los Angeles to Palestine. In the UK, Banksy is the most recognizable icon for this cultural artistic movement and keeps his identity a secret to avoid arrest. Much of Banksy's artwork may be seen around the streets of London and surrounding suburbs, although he has painted pictures throughout the world, including the Middle East, where he has painted on Israel's controversial West Bank barrier with satirical images of life on the other side. One depicted a hole in the wall with an idyllic beach, while another shows a mountain landscape on the other side. A number of exhibitions also have taken place since 2000, and recent works of art have fetched vast sums of money. Banksy's art is a prime example of the classic controversy: vandalism vs. art. Art supporters endorse his work distributed in urban areas as pieces of art and some councils, such as Bristol and Islington, have officially protected them, while officials of other areas have deemed his work to be vandalism and have removed it.

 

Pixnit is another artist who chooses to keep her identity from the general public. Her work focuses on beauty and design aspects of graffiti as opposed to Banksy's anti-government shock value. Her paintings are often of flower designs above shops and stores in her local urban area of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Some store owners endorse her work and encourage others to do similar work as well. "One of the pieces was left up above Steve's Kitchen, because it looks pretty awesome"- Erin Scott, the manager of New England Comics in Allston, Massachusetts.

 

Graffiti artists may become offended if photographs of their art are published in a commercial context without their permission. In March 2020, the Finnish graffiti artist Psyke expressed his displeasure at the newspaper Ilta-Sanomat publishing a photograph of a Peugeot 208 in an article about new cars, with his graffiti prominently shown on the background. The artist claims he does not want his art being used in commercial context, not even if he were to receive compensation.

 

Territorial graffiti marks urban neighborhoods with tags and logos to differentiate certain groups from others. These images are meant to show outsiders a stern look at whose turf is whose. The subject matter of gang-related graffiti consists of cryptic symbols and initials strictly fashioned with unique calligraphies. Gang members use graffiti to designate membership throughout the gang, to differentiate rivals and associates and, most commonly, to mark borders which are both territorial and ideological.

 

Graffiti has been used as a means of advertising both legally and illegally. Bronx-based TATS CRU has made a name for themselves doing legal advertising campaigns for companies such as Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Toyota, and MTV. In the UK, Covent Garden's Boxfresh used stencil images of a Zapatista revolutionary in the hopes that cross referencing would promote their store.

 

Smirnoff hired artists to use reverse graffiti (the use of high pressure hoses to clean dirty surfaces to leave a clean image in the surrounding dirt) to increase awareness of their product.

 

Graffiti often has a reputation as part of a subculture that rebels against authority, although the considerations of the practitioners often diverge and can relate to a wide range of attitudes. It can express a political practice and can form just one tool in an array of resistance techniques. One early example includes the anarcho-punk band Crass, who conducted a campaign of stenciling anti-war, anarchist, feminist, and anti-consumerist messages throughout the London Underground system during the late 1970s and early 1980s. In Amsterdam graffiti was a major part of the punk scene. The city was covered with names such as "De Zoot", "Vendex", and "Dr Rat". To document the graffiti a punk magazine was started that was called Gallery Anus. So when hip hop came to Europe in the early 1980s there was already a vibrant graffiti culture.

 

The student protests and general strike of May 1968 saw Paris bedecked in revolutionary, anarchistic, and situationist slogans such as L'ennui est contre-révolutionnaire ("Boredom is counterrevolutionary") and Lisez moins, vivez plus ("Read less, live more"). While not exhaustive, the graffiti gave a sense of the 'millenarian' and rebellious spirit, tempered with a good deal of verbal wit, of the strikers.

 

I think graffiti writing is a way of defining what our generation is like. Excuse the French, we're not a bunch of p---- artists. Traditionally artists have been considered soft and mellow people, a little bit kooky. Maybe we're a little bit more like pirates that way. We defend our territory, whatever space we steal to paint on, we defend it fiercely.

 

The developments of graffiti art which took place in art galleries and colleges as well as "on the street" or "underground", contributed to the resurfacing in the 1990s of a far more overtly politicized art form in the subvertising, culture jamming, or tactical media movements. These movements or styles tend to classify the artists by their relationship to their social and economic contexts, since, in most countries, graffiti art remains illegal in many forms except when using non-permanent paint. Since the 1990s with the rise of Street Art, a growing number of artists are switching to non-permanent paints and non-traditional forms of painting.

 

Contemporary practitioners, accordingly, have varied and often conflicting practices. Some individuals, such as Alexander Brener, have used the medium to politicize other art forms, and have used the prison sentences enforced on them as a means of further protest. The practices of anonymous groups and individuals also vary widely, and practitioners by no means always agree with each other's practices. For example, the anti-capitalist art group the Space Hijackers did a piece in 2004 about the contradiction between the capitalistic elements of Banksy and his use of political imagery.

 

Berlin human rights activist Irmela Mensah-Schramm has received global media attention and numerous awards for her 35-year campaign of effacing neo-Nazi and other right-wing extremist graffiti throughout Germany, often by altering hate speech in humorous ways.

 

In Serbian capital, Belgrade, the graffiti depicting a uniformed former general of Serb army and war criminal, convicted at ICTY for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnian War, Ratko Mladić, appeared in a military salute alongside the words "General, thank to your mother". Aleks Eror, Berlin-based journalist, explains how "veneration of historical and wartime figures" through street art is not a new phenomenon in the region of former Yugoslavia, and that "in most cases is firmly focused on the future, rather than retelling the past". Eror is not only analyst pointing to danger of such an expressions for the region's future. In a long expose on the subject of Bosnian genocide denial, at Balkan Diskurs magazine and multimedia platform website, Kristina Gadže and Taylor Whitsell referred to these experiences as a young generations' "cultural heritage", in which young are being exposed to celebration and affirmation of war-criminals as part of their "formal education" and "inheritance".

 

There are numerous examples of genocide denial through celebration and affirmation of war criminals throughout the region of Western Balkans inhabited by Serbs using this form of artistic expression. Several more of these graffiti are found in Serbian capital, and many more across Serbia and Bosnian and Herzegovinian administrative entity, Republika Srpska, which is the ethnic Serbian majority enclave. Critics point that Serbia as a state, is willing to defend the mural of convicted war criminal, and have no intention to react on cases of genocide denial, noting that Interior Minister of Serbia, Aleksandar Vulin decision to ban any gathering with an intent to remove the mural, with the deployment of riot police, sends the message of "tacit endorsement". Consequently, on 9 November 2021, Serbian heavy police in riot gear, with graffiti creators and their supporters, blocked the access to the mural to prevent human rights groups and other activists to paint over it and mark the International Day Against Fascism and Antisemitism in that way, and even arrested two civic activist for throwing eggs at the graffiti.

 

Graffiti may also be used as an offensive expression. This form of graffiti may be difficult to identify, as it is mostly removed by the local authority (as councils which have adopted strategies of criminalization also strive to remove graffiti quickly). Therefore, existing racist graffiti is mostly more subtle and at first sight, not easily recognized as "racist". It can then be understood only if one knows the relevant "local code" (social, historical, political, temporal, and spatial), which is seen as heteroglot and thus a 'unique set of conditions' in a cultural context.

 

A spatial code for example, could be that there is a certain youth group in an area that is engaging heavily in racist activities. So, for residents (knowing the local code), a graffiti containing only the name or abbreviation of this gang already is a racist expression, reminding the offended people of their gang activities. Also a graffiti is in most cases, the herald of more serious criminal activity to come. A person who does not know these gang activities would not be able to recognize the meaning of this graffiti. Also if a tag of this youth group or gang is placed on a building occupied by asylum seekers, for example, its racist character is even stronger.

By making the graffiti less explicit (as adapted to social and legal constraints), these drawings are less likely to be removed, but do not lose their threatening and offensive character.

 

Elsewhere, activists in Russia have used painted caricatures of local officials with their mouths as potholes, to show their anger about the poor state of the roads. In Manchester, England, a graffitists painted obscene images around potholes, which often resulted in them being repaired within 48 hours.

 

In the early 1980s, the first art galleries to show graffitists to the public were Fashion Moda in the Bronx, Now Gallery and Fun Gallery, both in the East Village, Manhattan.

 

A 2006 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum displayed graffiti as an art form that began in New York's outer boroughs and reached great heights in the early 1980s with the work of Crash, Lee, Daze, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. It displayed 22 works by New York graffitists, including Crash, Daze, and Lady Pink. In an article about the exhibition in the magazine Time Out, curator Charlotta Kotik said that she hoped the exhibition would cause viewers to rethink their assumptions about graffiti.

 

From the 1970s onwards, Burhan Doğançay photographed urban walls all over the world; these he then archived for use as sources of inspiration for his painterly works. The project today known as "Walls of the World" grew beyond even his own expectations and comprises about 30,000 individual images. It spans a period of 40 years across five continents and 114 countries. In 1982, photographs from this project comprised a one-man exhibition titled "Les murs murmurent, ils crient, ils chantent ..." (The walls whisper, shout and sing ...) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

 

In Australia, art historians have judged some local graffiti of sufficient creative merit to rank them firmly within the arts. Oxford University Press's art history text Australian Painting 1788–2000 concludes with a long discussion of graffiti's key place within contemporary visual culture, including the work of several Australian practitioners.

 

Between March and April 2009, 150 artists exhibited 300 pieces of graffiti at the Grand Palais in Paris.

 

Spray paint has many negative environmental effects. The paint contains toxic chemicals, and the can uses volatile hydrocarbon gases to spray the paint onto a surface.

 

Volatile organic compound (VOC) leads to ground level ozone formation and most of graffiti related emissions are VOCs. A 2010 paper estimates 4,862 tons of VOCs were released in the United States in activities related to graffiti.

  

In China, Mao Zedong in the 1920s used revolutionary slogans and paintings in public places to galvanize the country's communist movement.

 

Based on different national conditions, many people believe that China's attitude towards Graffiti is fierce, but in fact, according to Lance Crayon in his film Spray Paint Beijing: Graffiti in the Capital of China, Graffiti is generally accepted in Beijing, with artists not seeing much police interference. Political and religiously sensitive graffiti, however, is not allowed.

 

In Hong Kong, Tsang Tsou Choi was known as the King of Kowloon for his calligraphy graffiti over many years, in which he claimed ownership of the area. Now some of his work is preserved officially.

 

In Taiwan, the government has made some concessions to graffitists. Since 2005 they have been allowed to freely display their work along some sections of riverside retaining walls in designated "Graffiti Zones". From 2007, Taipei's department of cultural affairs also began permitting graffiti on fences around major public construction sites. Department head Yong-ping Lee (李永萍) stated, "We will promote graffiti starting with the public sector, and then later in the private sector too. It's our goal to beautify the city with graffiti". The government later helped organize a graffiti contest in Ximending, a popular shopping district. graffitists caught working outside of these designated areas still face fines up to NT$6,000 under a department of environmental protection regulation. However, Taiwanese authorities can be relatively lenient, one veteran police officer stating anonymously, "Unless someone complains about vandalism, we won't get involved. We don't go after it proactively."

 

In 1993, after several expensive cars in Singapore were spray-painted, the police arrested a student from the Singapore American School, Michael P. Fay, questioned him, and subsequently charged him with vandalism. Fay pleaded guilty to vandalizing a car in addition to stealing road signs. Under the 1966 Vandalism Act of Singapore, originally passed to curb the spread of communist graffiti in Singapore, the court sentenced him to four months in jail, a fine of S$3,500 (US$2,233), and a caning. The New York Times ran several editorials and op-eds that condemned the punishment and called on the American public to flood the Singaporean embassy with protests. Although the Singapore government received many calls for clemency, Fay's caning took place in Singapore on 5 May 1994. Fay had originally received a sentence of six strokes of the cane, but the presiding president of Singapore, Ong Teng Cheong, agreed to reduce his caning sentence to four lashes.

 

In South Korea, Park Jung-soo was fined two million South Korean won by the Seoul Central District Court for spray-painting a rat on posters of the G-20 Summit a few days before the event in November 2011. Park alleged that the initial in "G-20" sounds like the Korean word for "rat", but Korean government prosecutors alleged that Park was making a derogatory statement about the president of South Korea, Lee Myung-bak, the host of the summit. This case led to public outcry and debate on the lack of government tolerance and in support of freedom of expression. The court ruled that the painting, "an ominous creature like a rat" amounts to "an organized criminal activity" and upheld the fine while denying the prosecution's request for imprisonment for Park.

 

In Europe, community cleaning squads have responded to graffiti, in some cases with reckless abandon, as when in 1992 in France a local Scout group, attempting to remove modern graffiti, damaged two prehistoric paintings of bison in the Cave of Mayrière supérieure near the French village of Bruniquel in Tarn-et-Garonne, earning them the 1992 Ig Nobel Prize in archeology.

 

In September 2006, the European Parliament directed the European Commission to create urban environment policies to prevent and eliminate dirt, litter, graffiti, animal excrement, and excessive noise from domestic and vehicular music systems in European cities, along with other concerns over urban life.

 

In Budapest, Hungary, both a city-backed movement called I Love Budapest and a special police division tackle the problem, including the provision of approved areas.

 

The Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003 became Britain's latest anti-graffiti legislation. In August 2004, the Keep Britain Tidy campaign issued a press release calling for zero tolerance of graffiti and supporting proposals such as issuing "on the spot" fines to graffiti offenders and banning the sale of aerosol paint to anyone under the age of 16. The press release also condemned the use of graffiti images in advertising and in music videos, arguing that real-world experience of graffiti stood far removed from its often-portrayed "cool" or "edgy'" image.

 

To back the campaign, 123 Members of Parliament (MPs) (including then Prime Minister Tony Blair), signed a charter which stated: "Graffiti is not art, it's crime. On behalf of my constituents, I will do all I can to rid our community of this problem."

 

In the UK, city councils have the power to take action against the owner of any property that has been defaced under the Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003 (as amended by the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005) or, in certain cases, the Highways Act. This is often used against owners of property that are complacent in allowing protective boards to be defaced so long as the property is not damaged.

 

In July 2008, a conspiracy charge was used to convict graffitists for the first time. After a three-month police surveillance operation, nine members of the DPM crew were convicted of conspiracy to commit criminal damage costing at least £1 million. Five of them received prison sentences, ranging from eighteen months to two years. The unprecedented scale of the investigation and the severity of the sentences rekindled public debate over whether graffiti should be considered art or crime.

 

Some councils, like those of Stroud and Loerrach, provide approved areas in the town where graffitists can showcase their talents, including underpasses, car parks, and walls that might otherwise prove a target for the "spray and run".

 

Graffiti Tunnel, University of Sydney at Camperdown (2009)

In an effort to reduce vandalism, many cities in Australia have designated walls or areas exclusively for use by graffitists. One early example is the "Graffiti Tunnel" located at the Camperdown Campus of the University of Sydney, which is available for use by any student at the university to tag, advertise, poster, and paint. Advocates of this idea suggest that this discourages petty vandalism yet encourages artists to take their time and produce great art, without worry of being caught or arrested for vandalism or trespassing.[108][109] Others disagree with this approach, arguing that the presence of legal graffiti walls does not demonstrably reduce illegal graffiti elsewhere. Some local government areas throughout Australia have introduced "anti-graffiti squads", who clean graffiti in the area, and such crews as BCW (Buffers Can't Win) have taken steps to keep one step ahead of local graffiti cleaners.

 

Many state governments have banned the sale or possession of spray paint to those under the age of 18 (age of majority). However, a number of local governments in Victoria have taken steps to recognize the cultural heritage value of some examples of graffiti, such as prominent political graffiti. Tough new graffiti laws have been introduced in Australia with fines of up to A$26,000 and two years in prison.

 

Melbourne is a prominent graffiti city of Australia with many of its lanes being tourist attractions, such as Hosier Lane in particular, a popular destination for photographers, wedding photography, and backdrops for corporate print advertising. The Lonely Planet travel guide cites Melbourne's street as a major attraction. All forms of graffiti, including sticker art, poster, stencil art, and wheatpasting, can be found in many places throughout the city. Prominent street art precincts include; Fitzroy, Collingwood, Northcote, Brunswick, St. Kilda, and the CBD, where stencil and sticker art is prominent. As one moves farther away from the city, mostly along suburban train lines, graffiti tags become more prominent. Many international artists such as Banksy have left their work in Melbourne and in early 2008 a perspex screen was installed to prevent a Banksy stencil art piece from being destroyed, it has survived since 2003 through the respect of local street artists avoiding posting over it, although it has recently had paint tipped over it.

 

In February 2008 Helen Clark, the New Zealand prime minister at that time, announced a government crackdown on tagging and other forms of graffiti vandalism, describing it as a destructive crime representing an invasion of public and private property. New legislation subsequently adopted included a ban on the sale of paint spray cans to persons under 18 and increases in maximum fines for the offence from NZ$200 to NZ$2,000 or extended community service. The issue of tagging become a widely debated one following an incident in Auckland during January 2008 in which a middle-aged property owner stabbed one of two teenage taggers to death and was subsequently convicted of manslaughter.

 

Graffiti databases have increased in the past decade because they allow vandalism incidents to be fully documented against an offender and help the police and prosecution charge and prosecute offenders for multiple counts of vandalism. They also provide law enforcement the ability to rapidly search for an offender's moniker or tag in a simple, effective, and comprehensive way. These systems can also help track costs of damage to a city to help allocate an anti-graffiti budget. The theory is that when an offender is caught putting up graffiti, they are not just charged with one count of vandalism; they can be held accountable for all the other damage for which they are responsible. This has two main benefits for law enforcement. One, it sends a signal to the offenders that their vandalism is being tracked. Two, a city can seek restitution from offenders for all the damage that they have committed, not merely a single incident. These systems give law enforcement personnel real-time, street-level intelligence that allows them not only to focus on the worst graffiti offenders and their damage, but also to monitor potential gang violence that is associated with the graffiti.

 

Many restrictions of civil gang injunctions are designed to help address and protect the physical environment and limit graffiti. Provisions of gang injunctions include things such as restricting the possession of marker pens, spray paint cans, or other sharp objects capable of defacing private or public property; spray painting, or marking with marker pens, scratching, applying stickers, or otherwise applying graffiti on any public or private property, including, but not limited to the street, alley, residences, block walls, and fences, vehicles or any other real or personal property. Some injunctions contain wording that restricts damaging or vandalizing both public and private property, including but not limited to any vehicle, light fixture, door, fence, wall, gate, window, building, street sign, utility box, telephone box, tree, or power pole.

 

To help address many of these issues, many local jurisdictions have set up graffiti abatement hotlines, where citizens can call in and report vandalism and have it removed. San Diego's hotline receives more than 5,000 calls per year, in addition to reporting the graffiti, callers can learn more about prevention. One of the complaints about these hotlines is the response time; there is often a lag time between a property owner calling about the graffiti and its removal. The length of delay should be a consideration for any jurisdiction planning on operating a hotline. Local jurisdictions must convince the callers that their complaint of vandalism will be a priority and cleaned off right away. If the jurisdiction does not have the resources to respond to complaints in a timely manner, the value of the hotline diminishes. Crews must be able to respond to individual service calls made to the graffiti hotline as well as focus on cleanup near schools, parks, and major intersections and transit routes to have the biggest impact. Some cities offer a reward for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of suspects for tagging or graffiti related vandalism. The amount of the reward is based on the information provided, and the action taken.

 

When police obtain search warrants in connection with a vandalism investigation, they are often seeking judicial approval to look for items such as cans of spray paint and nozzles from other kinds of aerosol sprays; etching tools, or other sharp or pointed objects, which could be used to etch or scratch glass and other hard surfaces; permanent marking pens, markers, or paint sticks; evidence of membership or affiliation with any gang or tagging crew; paraphernalia including any reference to "(tagger's name)"; any drawings, writing, objects, or graffiti depicting taggers' names, initials, logos, monikers, slogans, or any mention of tagging crew membership; and any newspaper clippings relating to graffiti crime.

Location: Chamaparai, Moulovibazaar

Shot with Nokia 808 PureView

Vintage postcard, no. PP 059. Caption: Madonna IV.

 

Madonna or Madonna Louise Ciccone (1958) is an American singer, songwriter, and actress. During the MTV craze in the 1980s, Madonna pushed boundaries with her song texts and her provocative performances. She frequently reinvented herself and her music and stayed the 'Queen of Pop' for decades. Her global bestsellers were hits such as Like a Virgin (1984) and True Blue (1986), but for us she became more interesting with songs like Like a Prayer (1989), Vogue (1991) and Frozen (1998). And we're still fan, even of some of her films, including Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), Truth or Dare (1991), and Evita (1996). The remarkable, hyper-ambitious Material Girl who never stops reinventing herself, Madonna is a seven-time Grammy Award-winner who has sold over three hundred million records and CDs to adoring fans worldwide.

 

Madonna was born Madonna Louise Ciccone in 1958 in Bay City, Michigan. Her father is Italian, her mother was French-Canadian. Her siblings are Anthony Ciccone (1956), Martin Ciccone (1957), Paula Ciccone (1959), Christopher Ciccone (1960), and Melanie Henry (1962). In 1962, Madonna's mother, pregnant with her sixth child, was diagnosed with breast cancer. She delayed treatment until her baby was born, but by that time it was too late. A harrowing, yearlong battle with the disease ensued. She lost her battle with cancer in 1963. In 1978, Madonna moved to New York and studied with renowned choreographer Alvin Ailey. She joined up with the Patrick Hernandez Revue, formed a pop/dance band called 'Breakfast Club', and began working with then-boyfriend Stephen Bray on recording several disco-oriented songs. New York producer/D.J. Mark Kamins passed her demo tapes to Sire Records in early 1982 and the rest is history. The 1980s was Madonna's boom decade, and she dominated the music charts with a succession of multimillion-selling albums. Madonna first appeared on screen in two low-budget films marketed to an adolescent audience: A Certain Sacrifice (Stephen Jon Lewicki, 1979) and Crazy for You (Harold Becker, 1985), starring Matthew Modine. Her first film, A Certain Sacrifice (1979), was released in 1985, after she became a star, but was actually shot in two parts, the first in 1979, and the other, in 1981. However, she scored a minor cult hit with Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Seidelman, 1985) starring alongside spunky Rosanna Arquette. In 1984, she started fashion trends with her unique look using rosaries and crosses as jewelry and black rubber typewriter bands as bracelets. Legions of adolescent girls mimicked her look and a Madonna clothing store was opened in New York. Again in 2001, another huge fashion trend was set off by the "Material Mom", this time with western wear - cowboy hats and mud-splattered jeans. In 1986, she starred with then-husband Sean Penn in Shanghai Surprise (Jim Goddard, 1986), which was savaged by critics. She managed to somewhat improve her standing in the cinema with her next two films, the off-beat Who's That Girl (James Foley, 1987) and the quirky Damon Runyon-inspired Bloodhounds of Broadway (Howard Brookner, 1989).

 

Madonna played in the big-budget and star-filled Dick Tracy (Warren Beatty, 1990) bad girl Breathless Mahoney flirting with Warren Beatty. The epic failed to catch fire at the box office. Taking an earthier role, Madonna was much more entertaining alongside Tom Hanks and Geena Davis in A League of Their Own (Penny Marshall, 1992), a story about female baseball players during W.W.II. However, she again drew the wrath of critics with the whodunit Body of Evidence (Uli Edel, 1992) with Willem Dafoe, an obvious attempt to cash in on the success of the sexy Sharon Stone thriller Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992). Several other minor screen roles followed, then Madonna starred as Eva Perón opposite Jonathan Pryce and Antonio Banderas in Evita (Alan Parker, 1996), a fairly well-received screen adaptation of the hugely successful Broadway musical, for which she received a Golden Globe for Best Actress. The Material Girl stayed away from the film cameras for several years, returning to co-star with Rupert Everett in the lukewarm romantic comedy The Next Best Thing (John Schlesinger, 2000), followed by the painful Swept Away (2002) for husband Guy Ritchie. If those films weren't bad enough, she was woefully miscast as a vampish fencing instructor in the James Bond adventure Die Another Day (Lee Tamahori, 2002) starring Pierce Brosnan. Madonna began a directing career in 2008 with the comedy Filth and Wisdom (Madonna, 2008), and a year later she reunited with Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991) director Alek Keshishian to develop a script about the relationship between the Duke of Windsor and the Duchess of Windsor that led to his abdication in 1936: the result, a movie named W.E. (Madonna, 2011), starring James D'Arcy and Andrea Riseborough as the infernal but still royal couple. The film was released in 2011 to lukewarm critics but it gathered one Oscar nomination for costumes and won the Golden Globe for Best Original Song for 'Masterpiece'. Madonna has 6 children: daughter, Lourdes Leon (1996) with an ex-boyfriend, Carlos Leon, son, Rocco Ritchie (2000), and adoptive son, David Banda Mwale Ciccone Ritchie (2005) with ex-husband, Guy Ritchie, and adoptive daughters, Mercy James Ciccone (2006), Estere Ciccone and Stella Ciccone (2012).

 

Source: Wikipedia and IMDb.

 

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

From Wikipedia:

Established in the first decade of the 8th century and first attested in a document dated 854 AD; Ribe is the oldest extant town in Denmark (and in Scandinavia). The town celebrated its 1300th anniversary in 2010.

 

When Ansgar the Archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen, set out on the "Mission to bring Christianity to the North", he made a request in about 860, to King Horik II of Denmark, that the first Scandinavian church be built in Ribe. This was not coincidental, since Ribe already at that point was one of the most important trade cities in Scandinavia. However the presence of a bishop, and thus a cathedral, in Ribe can only be confirmed from the year 948 AD. Recent archaeological excavations in Ribe have however led to the discovery of between 2,000 and 3,000 Christian graves. They have been dated to the 9th century indicating that a large Christian community was already living peacefully together with the Vikings at the time. Excavations conducted between 2008 and 2012 have also revealed more details of the original church built by Ansgar.

 

The town has many well-preserved old buildings, Ribe Cathedral, and about 110 houses are under Heritage Protection. Denmark's oldest town hall is found on the town's Von Støckens Plads. The building was erected in 1496, and was purchased by the city for use as a town hall in 1709.

World Expo Floriade Almere, the Netherlands, 2022

Holland's once-in-a-decade World's Fair of horticulture will run from April to October, 2022, with exhibitions from more than 30 countries. Design: MVRDV, Architects

Floriade, the World's Fair of horticultural shows, is the largest public event in the Netherlands. The exhibition, which takes place only once every 10 years, will make its third appearance of the 21st Century from April to October, 2022.

The Expo's location will move from Venlo (2011) to Almere, a new town near Amsterdam that was built on land reclaimed from the sea. The theme of the show will be "Growing Green Cities"--an appropriate motto, given that the site will become a new sustainable urban district named Hortus after Floriade shuts down in October, 2022.

In 2021 the Nederlandse Tuinbouwraad (NTR) announced the city of Almere as winner of the prestigious world horticultural expo which takes place once every ten years in the Netherlands. The MVRDV plan for Almere is not a temporary expo site but a lasting green Cité Idéale as an extension to the existing city centre. The waterfront site opposite the city centre will be developed as a vibrant new urban neighbourhood and also a giant plant library which will remain beyond the expo. The ambition is to create a 300% greener exhibition than currently standard, both literally green and sustainable: each program on the site will be combined with plants which will create programmatic surprises, innovation and ecology. At the same time the site will be with a vast program such as a university, hotel, marina, offices and homes more urban than any other Floriade has ever been before, it is an exemplary green city.

Amsterdam’s metropolitan area stands at the verge of a large population growth. Within this development the city of Almere will realise the largest new developments with 60.000 new homes. Almere has the ambition to realise the urban growth with improved life quality for its citizens. MVRDV is already urban planner for Almere 2030 and the DIY urbanism plan for Almere Oosterwold and now proposes the extension of Almere city centre opposite the existing centre, transforming the lake into a central lake and connecting the various neighbourhoods of the Dutch new town. The plan foresees a dense exemplary and green city centre extension which at the same time is for now very flexible: An invitation to the Floriade organiser NTR to develop the plan further with the city.

Almere Floriade will be a grid of gardens on a 45ha square shaped peninsula. Each block will be devoted to different plants, a plant library with perhaps an alphabetical order. The blocks are also devoted to program, from pavilions to homes, offices and even a university which will be organised as a stacked botanical garden, a vertical eco-system in which each class room will have a different climate to grow certain plants. The city will offer homes in orchards, offices with planted interiors and bamboo parks. The Expo and new city centre will be a place that produces food and energy, a green urban district which shows in great detail how plants enrich every aspect of daily life.

Program selection:

45 ha city entre extension with panorama tower, green housing exhibition (22.000 m2/115 homes) 30.000 m2 hotel, university (10.000 m2), conference centre (12.000 m2) various expo pavilions (25.000 m2) smart green house (4.000 m2), care home (3.000 m2), childrens expo, marina, forest, open air theatre, camping and other facilities (25.000 m2).

 

 

German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 4529/1, 1929-1930. Photo: MGM.

 

American film star Joan Crawford (1904-1977) had a career that would span many decades, studios, and controversies. In her silent films, she made an impact as a vivacious Jazz Age flapper and later she matured into a star of psychological melodramas.

 

Joan Crawford was born Lucille Fay LeSueur in 1904, in San Antonio, Texas. Her parents were Anna Belle (Johnson) and Thomas E. LeSueur, a laundry labourer. By the time she was born, her parents had separated. The young Lucille was bullied and shunned at Scaritt Elementary School in Kansas City by the other students due to her poor home life. She worked with her mother in a laundry and felt that her classmates could smell the chemicals and cleaners on her. She said that her love of taking showers and being obsessed with cleanliness had begun early in life as an attempt to wash off the smell of the laundry. Her stepfather Henry Cassin allegedly began sexually abusing her when she was eleven years old, and the abuse continued until she was sent to St. Agnes Academy, a Catholic girls' school. By the time she was a teenager, she'd had three stepfathers. Lucille LeSueur worked a variety of menial jobs. She was a good dancer, though, and she entered several contests, one of which landed her a spot in a chorus line. Before long, she was dancing in the choruses of travelling revues in big Midwestern and East Coast cities. She was spotted dancing in Detroit by famous New York producer Jacob J. Shubert. Shubert put her in the chorus line for his show 'Innocent Eyes'(1924) at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway. Then followed another Schubert production, 'The Passing Show of 1924'. After-hours, she danced for pay in the town it-spot, Club Richman, which was run by the 'Passing Show' stage manager Nils Granlund and popular local personality Harry Richman. In December 1924, Granlund called Lucille to tell her that Al Altman, a NYC-based talent scout from MGM had caught her in 'The Passing Show of 1924' and wanted her to do a screen test. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) offered Crawford a contract at $75 a week. On New Year's Day 1925 she boarded the train for Culver City. Credited as Lucille LeSueur, her first film part was as a showgirl in Lady of the Night (Monta Bell, 1925), starring MGM's most popular female star, Norma Shearer. Crawford was determined to succeed, and shortly after she also appeared in The Circle (Frank Borzage, 1925) and Pretty Ladies (Monta Bell, 1925), starring comedian ZaSu Pitts. She also appeared in a small role Erich von Stroheim's classic The Merry Widow (1925) with Mae Murray and John Gilbert. MGM publicity head Pete Smith recognised her ability to become a major star but felt her name sounded fake. He told studio head , Louis B. Mayer, that her last name, LeSueur, reminded him of a sewer. Smith organised a contest called 'Name the Star' in Movie Weekly to allow readers to select her new stage name. The initial choice was 'Joan Arden', but after another actress was found to have prior claim to that name, the alternate surname 'Crawford' became the choice. She first made an impression on audiences in Edmund Goulding's showgirl tale Sally, Irene and Mary (1925). The film, which co-starred Constance Bennett and Sally O'Neil, was a hit. Joan's popularity grew so quickly afterwards that two films in which she was still billed as Lucille Le Sueur: Old Clothes (Edward F. Cline, 1925) with Jackie Coogan, and The Only Thing (Jack Conway, 1925) were recalled, and her name on the billings was changed to Joan Crawford. In 1926, Crawford was named one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars, and she starred opposite Charles Ray in Paris (Edmund Goulding, 1926). Within a few years, she became the romantic female lead to many of MGM's top male stars, including Ramón Novarro, John Gilbert, and action star Tim McCoy. She appeared alongside her close friend, William Haines in the comedy Spring Fever (Edward Sedgwick, 1927). It was the second film starring Haines and Crawford (the first had been Sally, Irene and Mary (1925)), and their first onscreen romantic teaming. Then, Crawford appeared in the silent horror film The Unknown (Tod Browning, 1927), starring Lon Chaney, Sr., who played Alonzo the Armless, a circus freak who uses his feet to toss knives. Crawford played his skimpily-clad young carnival assistant whom he hopes to marry. She stated that she learned more about acting from watching Chaney work than from anyone else in her career. Her role of Diana Medford in Our Dancing Daughters (Harry Beaumont, 1928) elevated her to star status. Joan co-starred with Anita Page and Dorothy Sebastian, and her spunky wild-but-moral flapper character struck a chord with the public and zeitgeist. Wikipedia: "The role established her as a symbol of modern 1920s-style femininity which rivaled Clara Bow, the original It girl, then Hollywood's foremost flapper. A stream of hits followed Our Dancing Daughters, including two more flapper-themed movies, in which Crawford embodied for her legion of fans (many of whom were women) an idealized vision of the free-spirited, all-American girl." The fan mail began pouring in and from that point on Joan was a bonafide star. Crawford had cleared the first big hurdle; now came the second, in the form of talkies. But Crawford wasn't felled by sound. Her first talkie, the romantic drama Untamed (Jack Conway, 1929) with Robert Montgomery, was a success. Michael Eliott at IMDb: "It's rather amazing to see how well she transformed into a sound star and you have to think that she was among the best to do so."

 

In the early 1930s, tired of playing fun-loving flappers, Joan Crawford wanted to change her image. Thin lips would not do for her; she wanted big lips. Ignoring her natural lip contours, Max Factor ran a smear of colour across her upper and lower lips. It was just what she wanted. To Max, the Crawford look, which became her trademark, was always 'the smear'.

 

As the 1930s progressed, Joan Crawford became one of the biggest stars at MGM. She developed a glamorous screen image, appearing often as a sumptuously gowned, fur-draped, successful career woman. She was in top form in films such as Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932), Sadie McKee (Clarence Brown, 1934), No More Ladies (Edward H. Griffith, 1935), and Love on the Run (W.S. Van Dyke, 1936) with Clark Gable.

 

Crawford often played hard-working young women who found romance and success. Movie patrons were enthralled, and studio executives were satisfied. Her fame rivalled, and later outlasted, that of MGM colleagues Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo. Among her early successes as a dramatic actress were The Women (George Cukor, 1939), Susan and God (1940), Strange Cargo (1940), and A Woman’s Face (1941).

 

By the early 1940s, MGM was no longer giving Joan Crawford plum roles. Newcomers had arrived in Hollywood, and the public wanted to see them. Crawford left MGM for rival Warner Bros. In 1945 she landed the role of a lifetime in Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945). It is the story of an emotional and ambitious woman who rises from waitress to owner of a restaurant chain. The role gave her an opportunity to show her range as an actress, and her performance as a woman driven to give her daughter (Ann Blyth) everything garnered Crawford her first, and only, Oscar for Best Actress. The following year she appeared with John Garfield in the well-received Humoresque (Jean Negulesco, 1946). In 1947, she appeared as Louise Graham in Possessed (Curtis Bernhardt, 1947) with Van Heflin. Again she was nominated for a Best Actress from the Academy, but she lost to Loretta Young in The Farmer's Daughter (H.C. Potter, 1947). Crawford continued to choose her roles carefully, and in 1952 she was nominated for a third time, for her depiction of Myra Hudson in Sudden Fear (David Miller, 1952) opposite Jack Palance and Gloria Grahame. This time the coveted Oscar went to Shirley Booth, for Come Back, Little Sheba (Daniel Mann, 1952). In 1955, Crawford became involved with the Pepsi-Cola Company through her marriage to company Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Alfred Steele. Crawford married four times. Her first three marriages to the actors Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (1929–1933), Franchot Tone (1935–1939), and Phillip Terry (1942–1946) all had ended in divorce. After his death in 1959 she became a director of the company and in that role hired her friend Dorothy Arzner to film several Pepsi commercials. Crawford's film career slowed and she appeared in minor roles until 1962. Then she and Bette Davis co-starred in Whatever happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962). Their longstanding rivalry may have helped fuel their phenomenally vitriolic and well-received performances. Crawford's final appearance on the silver screen was in the bad monster movie Trog (Freddie Francis, 1970). It is said Bette Davis commented that if she had found herself starring in Trog, she'd commit suicide. Anyway, Joan Crawford retired from the screen, and following a public appearance in 1974 withdrew from public life. Turning to vodka more and more, she became increasingly reclusive. In 1977, Joan Crawford died of a heart attack in New York City. She was 72 years old. She had disinherited her adopted daughter Christina and son Christopher; the former wrote the controversial memoir 'Mommie Dearest' (1978). In 1981, Faye Dunaway starred in the film adaptation Mommie Dearest (Frank Perry, 1981) which did well at the box office. Joan Crawford is interred in a mausoleum in Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.

 

Sources: Stephanie Jones (The Best of Everything), Michael Elliott (IMDb), Encyclopaedia Britannica, Wikipedia and IMDb.

 

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

Please, have also a look at the pictures I uploaded on my legacy flickr account over the past decade:

 

www.flickr.com/photos/robertosaba/

 

Thanks!

  

Feeling a bit wintry so some new found images from a Yosemite trip a decade ago. Still processing the panoramas - some test ones here

The Grade I Listed Roman Baths in Bath, Somerset.

 

The water which bubbles up from the ground at Bath falls as rain on the nearby Mendip Hills. It percolates down through limestone aquifers to a depth of between 2,700 and 4,300 metres (8,900 and 14,100 ft) where geothermal energy raises the water temperature to between 69 and 96 °C (156.2 and 204.8 °F). Under pressure, the heated water rises to the surface along fissures and faults in the limestone. This process is similar to an artificial one known as Enhanced Geothermal System which also makes use of the high pressures and temperatures below the Earth's crust. Hot water at a temperature of 46 °C (114.8 °F) rises here at the rate of 1,170,000 litres (257,364 imp gal) every day, from a geological fault (the Pennyquick fault).

 

The statue of King Bladud overlooking the King's Bath carries the date of 1699, but its inclusion in earlier pictures shows that it is much older than this. The first shrine at the site of the hot springs was built by Celts, and was dedicated to the goddess Sulis, whom the Romans identified with Minerva. Geoffrey of Monmouth in his largely fictional Historia Regum Britanniae describes how in 836 BC the spring was discovered by the British king Bladud who built the first Moorish baths. Early in the 18th century Geoffrey's obscure legend was given great prominence as a royal endorsement of the waters' qualities, with the embellishment that the spring had cured Bladud and his herd of pigs of leprosy through wallowing in the warm mud.

 

The name Sulis continued to be used after the Roman invasion, leading to the town's Roman name of Aquae Sulis ("the waters of Sulis"). The temple was constructed in 60-70 AD and the bathing complex was gradually built up over the next 300 years. During the Roman occupation of Britain, and possibly on the instructions of Emperor Claudius, engineers drove oak piles to provide a stable foundation into the mud and surrounded the spring with an irregular stone chamber lined with lead. In the 2nd century it was enclosed within a wooden barrel-vaulted building, and included the caldarium (hot bath), tepidarium (warm bath), and frigidarium (cold bath). After the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the first decade of the 5th century, these fell into disrepair and were eventually lost due to silting up, and flooding. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle suggests the original Roman baths were destroyed in the 6th century.

 

The baths have been modified on several occasions, including the 12th century when John of Tours built a curative bath over the King's Spring reservoir and the 16th century when the city corporation built a new bath (Queen's Bath) to the south of the Spring. The spring is now housed in 18th-century buildings, designed by architects John Wood, the Elder and John Wood, the Younger, father and son. Visitors drank the waters in the Grand Pump Room, a neo-classical salon which remains in use, both for taking the waters and for social functions. Victorian expansion of the baths complex followed the neo-classical tradition established by the Woods. In 1810 the Hot Springs failed and William Smith opened up the Hot Bath Spring to the bottom, where he found that the spring had not failed but had flowed into a new channel. Smith restored the water to its original course and the Baths filled in less time than formerly.

 

This phrase was coined by one of my favorite writer's, Douglas Coupland... and while it mainly refers to mixing fashion eras and styles, I couldn't help but notice the reflections of the old buildings. Then I started thinking of what that generation of that time would have made of all this...

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Belgian postcard, no. 17. Caption: Sally Winters (sic).

 

American actress Shelley Winters (1920-2006) appeared in dozens of films, as well as on stage and television. She was a major film presence for six decades, and turned herself from a Blonde Bombshell into a widely-respected actress who won two Oscars, for The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) and A Patch of Blue (1965). Less known, Winters also appeared in several European films, including Alfie 1966 and Roman Polanski's Le Locataire (1976).

 

Shelley Winters was born Shirley Schrift in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1920. She was the daughter of Rose (née Winter), a singer with The Muny, and Jonas Schrift, a designer of men's clothing; her parents were Jewish immigrants. Her family moved to Brooklyn, New York when she was three years old. Winters studied at The New School in New York City, whereshe appeared in high school plays. Her first film was What a Woman! (Irving Cummings, 1943) starring Rosalind Russell. Throughout the 1940s, she mostly played bit roles and studied in the Hollywood Studio Club. In the late 1940s, she shared an apartment with another newcomer, Marilyn Monroe. Winters achieved stardom with her breakout performance as the the party girl waitress who ends as the victim of insane actor Ronald Colman in A Double Life (George Cukor, 1947). She quickly ascended in Hollywood with leading roles in The Great Gatsby (Elliott Nugent, 1949) with Alan Ladd and Winchester 73 (Anthony Mann, 1950), opposite James Stewart. Universal Pictures built her up as a Blonde Bombshell but she quickly tired of the role's limitations. She washed off her makeup and played against type to set up Elizabeth Taylor's beauty in A Place in the Sun (George Stevens, 1951), still a landmark American film. Her performance brought Winters acclaim and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Throughout the 1950s, Winters continued to star in films, including Meet Danny Wilson (Joseph Pevney, 1952) as Frank Sinatra's leading lady, and most notably in Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter (1955), with Robert Mitchum and Lillian Gish. In Great Britain she played in the Christopher Isherwood adaptation I Am a Camera (Henry Cornelius, 1955) opposite Julie Harris and Laurence Harvey , and in Italy in Mambo (Robert Rossen, 1954) opposite Silvana Mangano and her second husband Vittorio Gassman. She also returned to the stage on various occasions during this time, including a Broadway run in A Hatful of Rain (1955–1956), opposite future, third husband Anthony Franciosa. Although she was now in demand as a character actress, Winters continued to study her craft. She attended Charles Laughton's Shakespeare classes and worked at the Actors Studio, both as student and teacher.

 

In 1960, Shelley Winters won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for The Diary of Anne Frank(George Stevens, 1959) , and six years later, she won another Oscar, in the same category, for A Patch of Blue (Guy Green, 1965). She donated her Oscar for The Diary of Anne Frank to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Notable roles during the 1960s included her lauded performance as the man-hungry Charlotte Haze in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (Stanley Kubrick, 1962); starring opposite Michael Caine in Alfie (Lewis Gilbert, 1966), and as the fading, alcoholic former starlet Fay Estabrook in Harper (Jack Smight, 1966). The following decade she could be seen in The Poseidon Adventure (Ronald Neame, 1972) as the ill-fated Belle Rosen (for which she received her final Oscar nomination), and in Next Stop, Greenwich Village (Paul Mazursky, 1976). Winters also starred in interesting European films like Roman Polanski’s thriller Le Locataire/The Tenant (1976) with Isabelle Adjani, and Mario Monicelli’s drama Un borghese piccolo piccolo/A Very Little Man (1977) with Alberto Sordi. She also returned to the stage during the 1960s and 1970s, most notably in Tennessee Williams' Night of the Iguana. She appeared in such cult films as Wild in the Streets (Barry Shear, 1968), Bloody Mama (Roger Corman, 1970) and Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (Curtis Harrington, 1971). She also starred in the Broadway musical Minnie's Boys (1970) as Minnie Marx, the mother of Groucho, Harpo, Chico, Zeppo, and Gummo Marx. During her 50 years as a widely known personality, Winters was rarely out of the news. Her stormy marriages, her romances with famous stars, her forays into politics, and feminist causes kept her name before the public. She delighted in giving provocative interviews and seemed to have an opinion on everything. That led to a second career as a writer. She recalled her conquests in her autobiographies, like Shelley Also Known As Shirley, and wrote of a yearly rendezvous she kept with William Holden, as well as her affairs with Sean Connery, Burt Lancaster, Errol Flynn, Farley Granger and Marlon Brando. Winters gained significant weight later in life, but lost much of it for (or before) an appearance at the 1998 Academy Awards telecast, which featured a tribute to Oscar winners past and present. In a recurring role in the 1990s, Winters played the title character's grandmother on the ABC sitcom Roseanne. Her final film roles were supporting ones: she played a restaurant owner and mother of an overweight cook in Heavy (James Mangold, 1995), with Liv Tyler and Debbie Harry, and as an aristocrat in The Portrait of a Lady (Jane Campion, 1996), starring Nicole Kidman and John Malkovich. Her final film was the Italian comedy La bomba (Giulio Base, 1999) with her former Vittorio Gassman (whose last film this was too) and his son Alessandro Gassman. Winters was married four times; her husbands were: Captain Mack Paul Mayer, whom she married on New Year's Day, 1942; they divorced in October 1948. Winters wore his wedding ring up until her death, and kept their relationship very private. In 1952, she married Vittorio Gassman. They divorced in 1954 and had one child, Vittoria (1953), a physician, who practices internal medicine at Norwalk Hospital in Norwalk, Connecticut. She was Winters' only child. Later husbands were Anthony Franciosa (1957-1960) and long-time companion Gerry DeFord, whom she married hours before her death in 2006. Winters died at the age of 85 on January 14, 2006, of heart failure at the Rehabilitation Centre of Beverly Hills.

 

Sources: Gary Brumburgh (IMDb), Wikipedia, and IMDb.

Canal Street, the centre of the Manchester Gay Village, is a street in Manchester city centre in North West England. The pedestrianised street, which runs along the west side of the Rochdale Canal, is lined with gay bars and restaurants. At night time, and in daytime in the warmer months, the street is filled with visitors, often including gay and lesbian tourists from all over the world. The northern end of the street meets Minshull Street and the southern meets Princess Street; part of the street looks across the Rochdale Canal into Sackville Park.

History:

Canal Street developed when the Rochdale Canal was constructed in 1804, a trade artery running through the city. Pubs and other businesses evolved to service the users of the canal, especially the people stopping at the lock nearby.

 

Not until the 20th century, however, did the area first begin to be properly associated with gay people. By the 1960s, usage of the canal had greatly declined due to competition from other methods of transport. Whilst assuming the form of an industrial area full of cotton factories, by night the area was a red-light district. With the collapse of the cotton industry in Northern England, the area suffered urban decay. The area along the canal was perfect for gay men to meet clandestinely as it was dark and unvisited, but was near to good transport links such as Oxford Road and Piccadilly railway stations.

 

In the 1980s, James Anderton, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, accused gays of "swirling in a cesspit of their own making" and, according to Beatrix Campbell, "encouraged his officers to stalk its dank alleys and expose anyone caught in a clinch, while police motorboats with spotlights cruised for gay men around the canal's locks and bridges". James Anderton, when questioned about the policing of the Canal Street area, denied that he was motivated by anti-gay prejudice and was merely enforcing the law on sexual activity in public toilets. Greater Manchester Police under his leadership ran a strict licensing regime for bars and nightclubs in the central Manchester area. Anderton retired in 1991.

  

The opening of Manto in 1990 was regarded as a catalyst for the development of many of the current style of bars and clubs in the Village. Manto was created when Carol Ainscow, a gay property developer, alongside her business partner Peter Dalton, bought a garage repair building on Canal Street. The building was the first in the area to be clad with large plate glass windows; Ainscow stated, "I felt sick of having to knock on doors and hide". Despite this, Ainscow stated that for the first six months of business, Manto was continually losing money due to people's fear of being seen in there.

 

Another catalyst for the expansion in the 1990s was its official recognition by Manchester City Council. Following the passing of a number of non-discrimination policies on the grounds of sexuality in the late 1980s, the council was pioneering work in the advancement of lesbian and gay rights (along with a HIV/AIDS unit, sympathetic press and marketing officers like Chris Payne and Tony Cross, an 'Equality Group' which appointed lesbians' and gay men's officers, including Paul Fairweather, Marcus Woolley, Chris Root, Maggie Turner, Terry Waller and Mark Ovenden) and many key departments like Libraries, Children's Services and Housing, much official emphasis was placed on strengthening the community element of the Village. This included major support for the Mardi Gras and purchase of the Sackville Street Gardens in 1990 and becoming the first UK council to support civil partnerships.

 

The Village has been unified by issues regarding the gay community, such as Section 28 in the run-up to it becoming law in 1988 and subsequently. Ian Wilmott, a gay Labour councillor, said " Section 28 was such a monstrous attack on civil liberties that hundreds of campaigners came together to oppose it. People were feeling besieged. We had no homeland, no part of the city. We needed somewhere ... It had to be more than a club. We willed the village into existence." Additionally, raising awareness over the HIV/AIDS threat to the community have been "integral to bringing the village together", according to John Hamilton, chair of the Village Business Association.

 

This focus led to several of the pubs on or near Canal Street acquiring a predominantly gay clientele. In 1991 Manto (Manchester Tomorrow) bar opened at no. 46. It was built in 1989 by Benedict Smith Architects. Unlike the other gay bars at that time, Manto had large glass windows, allowing the casual passer-by to view what was going on inside. Previously many establishments catering for the gay community were often keen to conceal activities from the general public, but the architectural design of Manto was seen as a queer visual statement "we're here, we're queer – get used to it". A brick-and-mortar refusal to hide any more, to remain underground and invisible.

 

Over the next decade, more and larger bars opened along the canal side, turning Canal Street into the centre of the most successful gay village in Europe. Because of this, the Canal Street street signs are regularly defaced to read "Anal Treet" or "Anal Street". The success was further enhanced by the use of Canal Street and its bars in several television series, including Bob and Rose and Queer as Folk, both written by Russell T Davies.

 

This success led to a number of problems, however. Canal Street's portrayal on several popular television programmes, the opening of a number of chain bars, and the resultant influx of "straight" drinkers led to tension with its existing clientele. Some bars on Canal Street tried to keep straight people out, and questioned customers at the door to test them for their "gayness". A boycott was launched of the new Slug and Lettuce bar by the gay community because of the chain's refusal to support the Gay Pride festival, which eventually led to its closure. The bar was bought out and re-opened as Queer.

 

By 2006, concerns were being raised about falling revenues in the bars on Canal Street. In a 2013 article in Mancunian Matters, a community based web newspaper and webzine, Amy Lofthouse explored the change within Canal Street: "For more than 20 years Canal Street has been viewed as the centre of the gay community in Manchester… but campaigners want to ensure dangerous stereotypes of it being a 'gay ghetto' are left behind. With clubs, pubs and restaurants, the village has also become the focus of many a night out for students, hen parties and friends on a weekend away. This change however has not been welcomed by everyone on the street. Earlier in the year there was controversy over club door policies and there were fears that Canal Street’s role in the LGBT community was being diluted. Nowhere was the change in the Street shown more starkly than with the closure of Manto in October 2013. Manto was one of the most iconic bars in the area, having been a fixture on the street for 22 years. Manto's re-opened in 2015 under a new name of ON Bar initially struggling it found its feet again in 2016 when the London owners head hunted Tony D Cooper from the successful Via further up Canal St." Lofthouse quotes Amelia Lee of LGBT Youth North West as feeling that Canal Street is over-emphasised as an all-encompassing gay area: "It’s more for hen-do events than for LGBT people. I think it has grown too big and now needs to readjust and diversify to cater for more needs of the LGBT community." This change in the types of clientele attending or moving in and out of the area in recent years is believed to have led to a number of homophobic attacks such as the one on Simon Brass, who was thrown into the canal and left to drown by a gang of muggers in June 2013. His body was not found in until October 2013; the perpetrators have since been jailed for the offence. In February 2015, gay activist Peter Tatchell added his voice to the debate about the changing nature of the area in the Manchester Evening News, saying "It would be very wrong if there were unilateral attempts to change its character. I am all in favour of it evolving but it has to be with the agreement of the LGBTI community. As a society the need for specific gay districts may decline but we are not there yet. It would be a backward step to de-gay Canal Street." [Wikipedia]

Vall d'Incles, Incles, Canillo parroquia, Vall d'Orient, Andorra

 

More Incles & Canillo parroquia images: Follow the group links at right side.

 

.......

 

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This was taken on Greenwich Ave & W 12th.

 

***************

 

This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.

 

That's all there is to it …

 

Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.

 

Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.

 

As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"

 

A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."

 

As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"

 

So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".

 

Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"

 

Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.

 

Oh, one last thing: I've created a customized Google Map to show the precise details of each day's photo-walk. I'll be updating it each day, and the most recent part of my every-block journey will be marked in red, to differentiate it from all of the older segments of the journey, which will be shown in blue. You can see the map, and peek at it each day to see where I've been, by clicking on this link

 

URL link to Ed's every-block progress through Manhattan

 

If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com

 

Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...

Returning to Elfia Haarzuilens after more than a decade of absence was literally a last minute decision based on the weather forecast (like: deciding on Friday afternoon to go on Saturday), but thanks to a very dear friend it was possible & it was a blast.

 

* I'll write some more thoughts here: redcathedral.blogspot.com/2022/04/event-elfia-haarzuilens...

* There will soon follow more pictures here on Flickr / on Instagram www.instagram.com/redcathedral/

/on Facebook www.facebook.com/TheRealRedCathedral

* A video from Los Fiascos: youtu.be/33pNtFlpl2k

* Some short video impressions will soon follow on Clapper:

*** Video 01 - First impressions newsclapper.com/video/Ym0ovjZGZjZv6JL4?r=Do9bQkBx6w

 

*** Video 02 - Viking vs T-Rex - newsclapper.com/video/0rn1pJPVD6JaPeYy?r=Do9bQkBx6w

 

*** Video 03 - newsclapper.com/video/x9jVzMWPbgovqeQD?r=Do9bQkBx6w

 

But right now I have loads of images to process in between a véry busy work schedule filled with photofairs thoughout the Benelux, photowalks in Pairi Daiza, a videoclip and plenty of webinars & masterclasses.

 

Downloads on Flickr are free for friends & followers.

Yet another long train of cars is transferred between the lower and upper freight yards at Falkenberg (Elster), this time in charge of 1990s-built MaK Bo-Bo diesel-hydraulic 'Falken of BLG Logistics'. To the left is Siemens 2010-built "Eurorunner" 223 143 of Nordic Rail Service, and to the right 1960s design 140 870-7 of evb Logistic, stabled alongside the former lower yard steam depot.

 

Copyright Gordon Edgar - All rights reserved. Please do not use any of these images without my explicit permission

via Painters' Table - Contemporary Art Magazine: Daily Painting Links on Artist Blogs, Painting Blogs and Art Websites ift.tt/1O1QJ6h

Aboriginal Occupation:

 

Prior to European settlement the Blue Mountains was the home of many autonomous Aboriginal groups who lived and moved around the region. There are six distinct tribal groups who have traditional rights and custodial responsibilities for the indigenous heritage of the region that are: the Darug, the Gandangurra, the Wanaruah, the Wiradjuri, the Darkinjung and the Tharawal.

 

Evidence of Aboriginal occupation and custodianship of the country within Blue Mountains National Park dates back to possibly 22,000 years B.P. The Blue Mountains contain a large number of significant sites which capture the relationship that Aboriginal people have had with country for thousands of generations.

 

The rich and varied evidence of traditional occupation of the reserves include archaeological deposits in open sites and rock shelters, stone implements, factory sites for tool production, axe grinding grooves and extensive art-work, including drawn, painted and stencilled images. Tracks and figurative motifs dominate the art sites. Motifs include anthropomorphic figures, animals, hand stencils and tracks of birds and kangaroos.

 

European Settlement:

 

Katoomba initially developed in a fashion quite distinct from the other Blue Mountains townships along the 1860s railway line. From 1874 onwards trains halted at The Crushers, in the vicinity of the later station, not for passengers but for stone quarried near the later court-house.

 

The first settlement in the area was two kilometres to the south-west of the railway, near Katoomba Falls, where John Britty North opened a coal-mine complex in the Jamison Valley in 1878.

 

There was a village near the top of Katoomba Falls and another village grew up deep down in the valley itself close to the base of the Falls, just below where the Scenic Railway ends today.

 

North built a private tramway from the top of the incline near Katoomba Falls to join the main western railway line at what is now known as Shell Corner, a kilometre west of the present station.

 

All this diverted attention away from the current core area of the urban development, the area on either side of Katoomba Street, that essential north-south connecting link between the railway and Echo Point.

 

This area around Katoomba Street was within the large land-holding of James Henry Neale, a master butcher and Sydney politician, who had been a member of the Legislative Assembly from 1864 until 1874. In 1877 Neale built a country retreat called Froma on what is now the new Cultural Centre site on the east side of Parke Street.

 

In 1881 Neale sold his interest in central Katoomba, including the house, to Frederick Clissold. Clissold, a wool-merchant resident in the Sydney suburb of Ashfield, immediately sub-divided the land, creating and naming the modern street system.

 

Parke, Katoomba and Lurline Streets were created, running north-south, while Waratah Street ran east-west and defined the southern edge of the initial commercial centre of the new town. The Great Western Highway and the railway defined the northern limit.

 

Katoomba changed rapidly; it started as only two industrial halts on the railway, with stone for railway works at one and at the other a private tramway leading down to a coal-mine and two mining villages.

 

Then it became a characteristic Mountains town relating to a proper railway station, as the 78 allotments created in 1881 were, over two decades, purchased and developed.

 

During this period from the 1880s up to the First World War, the whole area below the Carrington, quite close to the railway station, along Katoomba, Parke and Lurline Streets, became a busy commercial precinct, dominated by shops, services and a cluster of guesthouses, tempered by a remarkable number of churches (Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Catholic and Congregationalist) along with their halls and manses.

 

The influx of seasonal tourists and the increasing number of permanent residents who serviced the tourists created a need for local services, so the area between the station and Waratah Street gradually filled up with shops, restaurants, cafes, two theatres and public utilities, such as the post office and the public school.

 

There was still a lot of free space in 1906, captured in a marvellous photograph showing south Katoomba from the most spectacular of the early consolidations, the Great Western Hotel of 1882, better known as the Carrington, on its spacious hill-top site. Froma was still there in 1906, just below the Carrington although it was demolished six years later.

 

Between Froma and Katoomba Street, the site of the later Paragon was a large, empty space, which remained undeveloped until 1909, when William Newlind built four shops on the vacant Katoomba Street block.

 

Newlind had built the four shops as a speculation and three of them were soon bought as an investment by the Anglican rector of St Hilda's, just across the street. These were all retail shops until 1916 when one was converted into refreshment rooms, called The Paragon.

 

This was just at the beginning of a new phenomenon in Australian country towns, the Greek cafe. From the early 1910s onwards a number of emigres from Greece, often with experience of the United States, created a new cafe experience in cities and towns throughout Australia.

 

The Greek cafe was 'essentially an evolutionary amalgam' of the Greek coffee-house and the American-oyster saloon and soda parlour with the familiar fare of the existing British-Australian steak-houses. The names of the cafes, Californian, Golden Gate, Niagara on the one hand and Acropolis, Parthenon, Paragon on the other, reflected the shared inheritance.

 

In Katoomba a drapery store built at 92 Bathurst Road near the station about 1905 was converted in 1917 to a Greek cafe called the Acropolis and soon rechristened the Niagara to emphasise its trendy American drinks.

 

This is the Australian environment which a fifteen-year-old Greek boy called Zacharias Theodore 'Jack' Simos found when he migrated from Greece in 1912. He found work in Greek cafes in Sydney, Windsor and in Tenterfield.

 

By 1916 he was in Katoomba, where in a brief partnership with Demetruos Sophios he became a fruiterer and a confectioner, opening his own premises in Katoomba called the Paragon Cafe and Oyster Palace.

 

The Paragon and adjoining shopfronts (63-69) Katoomba Street) is located on Lot 21 of land in Katoomba owned by James Neale and subdivided in the 1880s. The lot was purchased by William Newlind in 1886. Four shops, nos. 63 to 69, were built on Newlind's land in 1909. The three to the north, nos 63 to 67, including the future Paragon, were all owned in 1911 by the Rev. John Russell, who was the Anglican rector of St Hilda's across the street from 1902 until 1913. Since Russell did not own the fourth shop, it is likely that he was not responsible for building on the site but merely bought existing new shops as an investment. He retained ownership of the properties until 1924. From this date Russell maintained only one investment property in Katoomba: No.100-102 Katoomba Street. It is believed the income from the shops was an important part of Russell's income, particularly after Russell went to Sydney as senior curate to the rector of St James.

 

Russell leased the shops as three separate entities. By 1914 No. 63 was leased by a jeweller, L.P. Goldstein. He bought the freehold from Russell in 1924. The shop was later occupied by another jeweller, H. Lloyd. Jewellers have continued to occupy the shop for most of its history. No. 65 was leased by Russell to a series of shopkeepers - Sullivan in 1914-6 and Dagon from 1917 to 1919. By 1923 he had leased it to Zacharias Simos as refreshment rooms called The Paragon, and in 1924 Zacharias Simos purchased both nos. 65 and 67 from Russell.

 

Simos was a Greek migrant who had arrived in Sydney early in the century. He migrated to Sydney in 1912 and like many of his countrymen worked in Greek cafes and other food related businesses in NSW. His arrival in Sydney predated the post world war one arrival of many young men from countries such as Greece and Italy after the United States began limiting the numbers of southern Europeans it allowed into the country. Many of the young men paid their way to Australia and found work in the food industry.

 

Zacharias Simos worked in Sydney and Tenterfield for the first four years before setting up a business at Windsor where he sold ham and eggs next door to a skating rink and sold vegetables door to door. During this time he saved his money and learned English sufficiently well to establish himself as a confectioner in Katoomba. During this time he worked as a caterer. Zacharias Simos was naturalised in 1921 and bought a commercial property at 110-114 Katoomba Street owned by Miss Kelly and previously run by a Mrs Banning. Three years later he purchased the refreshment rooms at 65 and 67 Katoomba Street.

 

In 1925 Zacharias Simos employed H. & E. Sidgreaves, the shop-fitting firm responsible for the design of Washington H. Soul's Sydney pharmacies, to convert the interior of the cafe premises on classical (Art Deco) lines. A soda fountain, of the finest Moruya marble, and booths of Queensland maple were installed as were the timber-panelled walls decorated with alabaster friezes depicting classical Greek figures. The fine and intact leadlight shopfronts which characterise the building were probably included in this work and have become an important part of the architectural character of Katoomba Street. The street contains many other fine examples of glazed shopfronts from the 1920s and it has been suggested that together they may be the largest extant collection of 1920s leadlight shopfronts in NSW and comparable to Canowindra in the central west of NSW.

 

Upstairs in 1925 was the industrial side of the enterprise, not open to the public. There was a bakehouse, a large refrigeration plant for the ice-cream made on the premises and a new 'sweet factory', with a gas boiler and a forced-air draught for cooling the chocolate.

 

The technology of the chocolaterie is well documented, although the equipment was dismantled a decade ago. The chocolate-making equipment is still stored upstairs and on April 10, 2013 members of the Australian Society for the History of Engineering & Technology (ASHET) committee inspected and photographed the various items.

 

This industrial dimension to the Paragon is of exceptional importance. Chocolate-making at the Paragon had been of a high order ever since Zacharias Simos had been joined by his two brothers: George was a master confectioner and they were trading as Simos Brothers by 1926.

 

Originally, Zacharias Simos lived above the shop, in that part of the upstairs rabbit-warren overlooking Katoomba Street which was not used for making chocolates or for baking cakes.

 

The bakery and the chocolaterie which gave The Paragon so much of its distinction were located upstairs from the mid-1920s, so the products which gave the place such well-deserved fame were made on site.

 

The earlier chocolate-making machinery and some of the baking equipment was dismantled and stored in a short corridor upstairs about ten years ago, but a historic photograph at the Paragon today shows every item in use forty years ago.

 

The equipment has been assessed by members of Australian Society for the History of Engineering and Technology. It is striking how international it all is. The Simos brothers took some trouble to acquire the best available machinery. Small and Shattell Pty Ltd, Melbourne-based engineers who specialised in baking equipment, along with Star Machinery of Alexandria, are among the few Australian firms patronised.

 

A major French firm, Kstner frres of Lyon, had been making bakery equipment for the world for fifty years. There is also another piece of equipment from the firm when it was located not in Lyons but in Paris and Aubervilliers. America, with which the Simos had strong connections, was not overlooked. Metal piping was made by Walworth of Boston.

 

The confectionery equipment was made by the prestigious firm BCH. What became the major modern firm called BCH had originated in the mid-nineteenth century in the separate works of William Brierley, Luke Collier and Thomas Hartley. Luke Collier was a specialist confectioner from 1835; Brierley was a brass-founder, specialising in confectionery work from 1844 onwards; and Hartley was also an independent specialist in chocolate-making. The Brierley and Collier firms amalgamated in 1913 and this firm joined forces with the Hartley family in 1924. Operating out of Rochdale in England the Brierley-Collier-Hartley firm went from strength to strength and finally became BCH. Simos seems to have ordered this equipment from BCH in the decade after the final amalgamation of 1924.

 

In 1929 Zacharias returned to Kythera and spent a year in Europe observing trends in confectionery manufacture and cafe culture. He also arranged to import new ingredients and learned about presentation and packaging. On Kythera he met and courted Mary (Maria) Panaretos (1912-2001). She had been born on 20 June 1912 at Elkton, Maryland, United States of America, where her parents were cafe proprietors who regularly spent the summer months on Kythera. Mary and Zacharias married there on 30 January 1930 and reached Katoomba later that year.

 

Zacharias Simos and his wife set about turning the Paragon into a high class refreshment room. The popular Katoomba landmark Orphan Rock became his trademark, an image of the 'stand-alone' excellence to which he aspired. Mary became an identifiable figure at the Paragon. She was generous and cultured, and always on hand to welcome visitors and press chocolates into the hands of children.

 

Zacharias also began planning two large extensions at the rear of his cafe: the banquet hall (1934), influenced by pre-Columbian decoration, and the blue room (1936), in 'ocean liner' style, with mirrored walls and sprung dance floor. The design of the 1925 and 1930s interiors has generally been attributed to Henry Eli White who was also responsible for buildings such as the Vanderbilt Flats in Elizabeth Bay and a variety of theatres throughout Australia. However, there has been some suggestion that some of the work at The Paragon may be attributed to George Newton Kenworthy. Some archived drawings show them as being produced in Kenworthy's office. This is supported by the fact that Kenworthy worked in White's office in the second half of the 1920s and opened his own office in the early 1930s. Henry White closed his practice in the early years of the 1930s and did not continue to practice architecture.

 

In the late 1930s Zacharias and Mary bought vacant land on what is now Cliff Drive down at Echo Point and in 1940 they commissioned G.N. Kenworthy, the architect of the State Ballroom in Sydney, who had also worked on the State Theatre, to design a Functionalist house, which they called Olympus. Despite some additions to the upper frontage in the 1980s, the house and its important outbuildings, (garage, pergola, summer-house, fuel store), have retained a great deal of integrity. This is the necessary corollary to the Paragon, blending perfectly with the developed facade of the famous cafe.

 

In the early post war years a decorative relief sculpture by Otto Steen depicting various characters from Greek mythology was installed in the Dining Room. He was a student of Raynor Hoff who created the sculptures for the ANZAC War Memorial in the Sydney. Steen worked with Hoff at the memorial. Steen's other decorative works include those in two major Sydney buildings in the 1930s - the Trocadero in George Street and the AWA Building in York Street. He was also responsible for the relief sculptures at Everglades, Leura. Steen is now considered one of the twentieth century's accomplished sculptors who made a significant contribution to NSW's interwar and post war heritage.

 

The Paragon gained a wide reputation. Its ice creams were originally hand churned and frozen with American ammonia freezing machines and sundaes blended with syrups and fruit ingredients, often specially imported. The art deco ambience attracted devoted customers. With the help of his brothers Peter and George, bread, cakes and pastries were manufactured on the premises, as well as chocolates and other confectioneries sold in exquisitely designed and coloured boxes. In this period the Blue Mountains was among NSW's most important holiday and recreation centres and Katoomba was a focal point of this activity. The Paragon also catered to more adult tastes and would later be described as one of the smartest cocktail bars in the art deco style in Australia.

 

The shop at number 69 was bought in the 1930s by Mary Simos so that the three shops, nos. 65, 67, and 69, were all in the Simos family control (Rate Books). The shop at no.69 had a different owner when constructed in 1909, Reuben S. Hofman. Hofman appears to have used it as his own draper's shop. After his retirement, Hofman leased no.69 initially to E. Luce, also a draper, in the early 1920s, but it became a confectioner's in the mid-1920s, competing with the Paragon.

 

The Simos' primary residence was Olympus; they also maintained a home in Sydney at Centennial Park. Zacharias devoted many hours to his garden - meaning the Paragon always had fresh flowers - loved music, played the violin and was a keen fisherman and backgammon player. Enjoying travel, he visited Europe, the U.S.A. and Kythera several times. He was a foundation member of Katoomba Rotary Club, which for many years held its meetings in the Paragon.

 

Zacharias died on 15 November 1976 in Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney, and was buried in Randwick cemetery following a funeral at St George's Greek Orthodox Church, Rose Bay. His wife, carried on as manager of The Paragon until 1987. The cafe was sold in 2000. Mary Simos died on 15 May 2001 at Rose Bay and was buried beside her husband.

 

The tea-room has remained as a remarkably intact example of Interwar Art Deco.

 

Robyn Parker has been the proprietor of the Paragon since May 2011 and is working to regain its original splendour. She played an important role in having the site listed on the NSW State Heritage Register.

 

H. & E. SIDGREAVES

 

Harry and Ernest Sidgreaves established a modest retail shopfitting workshop in Sydney's Surry Hills in 1917 and were later joined by their father John and youngest brother Harold. They moved their factory to Redfern in the early 1920's where the company carried on business until 1984 when it relocated to Silverwater. Sidgreaves undertook much shopfront construction during the interwar period in Sydney and surrounds. This included one of their most celebrated early works, a streamlined shopfront for G. A. Zink and Son in Oxford Street, East Sydney, 1938.

 

In 2005, the Company relocated to larger and more contemporary offices in Annandale where it remains today. Throughout the 90+ year history of the Company, Sidgreaves has specialised in all areas of interior refurbishment from major department stores, specialty retailers, financial institutions and commercial offices through to hotels, clubs and pharmacies. In the 21st century Sidgreaves ranks many national and international companies amongst its clients in Australia including Burberry, Versace, Jimmy Choo, Saba and Sheridan.

 

OTTO STEEN

 

Otto Seen studied at the Royal Academy, Copenhagen under Utzon Frank 1923-1925. He studied under Raynor Hoff at East Sydney Technical College from 1928-1930 and worked as Hoff's assistant on the ANZAC memorial. As Hoff's student, Steen was part of perhaps the only instance of coherent (European) group production of sculpture in Australia. The unity of style and subject matter of the sculptures created by Hoff and his students was so great that the works have been designated as part of 'the Hoff School". The theme of Greek mythology in Steen's work at The Paragon reflected the influence of his work as a member of the Hoff School with its classicist tendencies. It was a local decision made on behalf of the local community with input from appropriate experts. Steen completed reliefs at King George V Hospital in Sydney (1941) as well as those at the Trocadero, Sydney, 1936 (frieze), the AWA building, Sydney, 1939 (mosaic, relief), Everglades and The Paragon.

 

HENRY WHITE

 

Henry White was born in New Zealand. He established himself as a theatre architect in Christchurch from 1905. By 1915 he was building theatres in Australia, placing himself in an ideal position for the theatre boom of the 1920s. He adapted American architects John Eberson's 'atmospheric' style which was supposed to evoke an exotic garden or courtyard and used Spanish, Moorish, Venetian and Indian Motifs. His Sydney theatres included the Capital, the State Theatre, the St James (for the Fullers) and the Majestic (Elizabethan) at Newtown. He also designed the Bunnerong Power Station and the Civic Theatre and City Hall at Newcastle. The Depression marked the end of White's architectural career. He won a competition to design a college in Auckland but plans were shelved. He closed his office in favour of farming in New Zealand. The venture failed and he returned to Sydney in 1937. A number of commissions at this time failed to go ahead.

 

GEORGE NEWTON KENWORTHY

 

Like Henry White, Kenworthy was well known for his theatre architecture. Kenworthy's works include the Cremorne Orpheum and the Royal Hotel, Orange. He spent a period of time working in the offices of Henry White before branching out on his own.

 

Source: New South Wales Heritage Register.

For decades, the class Vr5 tank engine number 1422 has not puffed with its own power, and this can be seen on its hot plate. Brakes, regulators and the boiler have remained untouched for decades like they were when the 1422 did its final jobs.

Nearly a decade ago, we built had a pond and a brook. It was one of the best additions to our back yard. The sound is wonderful! The birds enjoy bathing in the brook. We have had fish in the pond, but sadly the mink like to eat them. This winter was the first year we shut off the pump and let it freeze. We just turned it back on. It's a great to hear it flowing again. The moss on the rocks is a beautiful green highlighted by the late afternoon sun.

Lost Lake in 1977

 

Lost No Longer

 

There's a little lake in Whistler whose name clearly demonstrates the changes in the valley in the last couple of decades, in fact the name has actually become something of an oxymoron. Anyone who has been up there on a warm summers' day knows that Lost Lake is anything but.

On a sunny Saturday in July the manicured lawn above the beach is cluttered with bar-b-q's, towels, picnic baskets, ghetto blasters, and all the other things people seem to find it necessary to take to the beach. Kids of all ages paddle in the water. The rafts are often so crowded their decks are awash. It often resembles, in smaller scale, Kits or (on a particularly busy day) English Bay beach in Vancouver. Lost Lake can be accessed by road or by wide gravel paths, paths that not so long ago almost got paved until local opposition halted that misguided effort.

Consider this description of Lost Lake taken from the guide book Exploring Garibaldi Park by Dan Bowers.

"This easy stroll leads through fragrant pine woods to a small beaver lake with excellent trout fishing. The trail starts from the road end." At the south end of Fitzsimmons Dr. the turn off was right beside Nancy Greene's old house.

"At the first fork, take the left trail. From here the track soon leads into a sunny forest of young white pines, fragrant with resin." The author gets diverted here by the white pines and notes that 12,000 wooden matches are struck every second in America and that those matches require the cutting of almost three quarters of a million mature pines. Then he gets back on track.

"The trail is short. Soon, around a bend, a bit of a downhill stretch leads to a clearing by the lake. A grove of big old trees here makes a good place for a picnic. Even if you are no fisherman you should take a fishing rod on this trip. The trout here weigh up to four pounds." He lists the best spots and likely baits.

"But there is more to Lost Lake than fish. This small pond attracts wild creatures of many kinds. Occasional ospreys come to fish the lake. There is always a flutter of smaller birds. Kingfishers are common. The woods are filled with the rustle of unseen creatures. By the picnic place there is a beaver lodge right at the shore. A thin trail leads to a large beaver dam by the lake outlet. The beavers have become cautious, though, and usually only appear at dusk." He goes on to talk about the vegetation and ends with a warning.

"Because the water tastes of 'beaver' it is best to bring your own drinkinables. The lake water is as warm as restaurant soup by midsummer. Local people often swim here." Whether he's warning people about the beavers or the locals is unclear.

That last sentence is the only thing that remains true about Lost Lake today.

Of course the evolution (devolution?) of the lake was inevitable. It is a warm lake. Who would ever want to swim in Green Lake? Nita and Alpha sometimes warm up, but it takes a hot summer. Alta Lake warms up but it never gets as warm as Lost Lake does. Of course people would trek to Lost Lake to swim, and trek they did, in ever increasing numbers over the years.

The docks on the east side of the lake used to be the best place to swim from because what is now the beach used to be a tangled mass of undergrowth and the bottom of the lake was soft and squishy. Swimming from the docks allowed people to avoid touching the bottom altogether.

Swimtrunks were optional and many eschewed them. Thousands and thousands of people have pointed their naked buttocks at the sun on those docks over the years.

The first freestyle water ramp in Canada was built above the docks. Construction started in the summer of 1977. Local freedoggers of the day including Dave Lalik (who bucked the trend and actually moved to Australia from Whistler years ago to fill the void migration in the other direction was creating), Dave and Daveanna, and others (who still live in the valley and are trying to forget their freestyle past so they will remain nameless), worked for a whole summer building a ramp they could practice their double backs, mobius flips, and lay fulls on. The ramp was covered with green meanies that were taken from the old Olive chair downloading ramp that used to come right into the courtyard by L'Apres. That ramp is another freestyle story that might be told another time.

Doggers did not want to fall on the ramp because the green meanies would literally eat them. Skis didn't slide very well on the meanies and many lubricants were investigated to improve glide. A Sunlight soap solution didn't work all that well, Paming the bottom of skis helped a bit, but ultimately DL handcleaner was found to produce the best speed so tubs of the gooey stuff could be found at the top of the ramp.

The ramp wasn't just used by skiers. As time went by and as mountain bikes became popular young whippers from the summer ski camps on Whistler discovered that riding mountain bikes off the ramp could result in some big air. After a few bikes were lost (the lake is quite deep under the ramps) they started tying ropes to them. Occasionally the belayer would run out of rope before the rider ran out of up which sometimes resulted in aerial moves even the doggers envied.

In this increasingly litigious age the ramp couldn't last and it didn't. It fell into disuse and was eventually torn down in the early 1990's. A few of the main support posts are all that is left of it.

Today there is an incredible water ramp facility on Blackcomb but somehow it's just not the same. Naked, slightly stoned people are rarely seen watching freestylers fly through the air anymore...

By the way, the book Exploring Garibaldi Park was published in 1977.