Greater Manchester Police have today, Thursday 15 March 2012, made arrests following the murder of a man in Rochdale.

 

In the early hours of this morning 22 warrants were executed at addresses in Moston, Moss Side, Fallowfield, Davyhulme, Urmston, Newton Heath, Blackley, Harpurhey, Beswick, Bolton and Hyde.

 

Eight men aged between 20 and 30 were arrested on suspicion of murder and violent disorder.

 

At about 2.40am on Sunday 25 December 2011, police were called to Sinclair's Bar on Drake Street, Rochdale, following reports of a large disturbance.

 

Officers attended and discovered a man had been stabbed.

 

John Lee Barrett, 31, was taken to hospital but died, Tuesday 27 December 2011.

 

A post mortem examination concluded he died from a stab wound to the back.

It is also believed he had been hit over the head with a glass or bottle.

 

Chief Superintendent John O'Hare said: "By conducting this operation, we have sent out a firm message to those who think they can travel across Greater Manchester and commit crime in other areas that we will catch up with them.

 

"We have demonstrated that if you commit crime as part of a pack, you will be arrested and dealt with as a pack.

 

"I would also reassure residents within the local communities that there will be an extra police presence in their area and if anyone has any concerns, please speak to your local officer.

 

"We are working very hard to ensure their neighbourhoods are safer and we will not tolerate offenders who think they can get away with their actions and break the law."

 

Detective Chief Inspector Pete Jackson from the Major Incident Team said "The warrants have been part of a lengthy and complicated investigation.

Hours of CCTV have been studied and the club has been forensically examined by a team of highly experienced officers.

 

"However, despite these warrants, the investigation is still ongoing and we are still keen to hear from anyone who was at Sinclair's Bar on the night of the attack.

 

"We have interviewed a number of people who have helped us piece together what may have happened in the early hours of Christmas Day but I would still urge others who we haven't spoken with to get in touch - your information could be vital.

 

"I would urge anyone who may have information about what happened that night to contact police on 0161 856 3691 or the independent charity Crimestoppers, anonymously, on 0800 555 111. The information you supply will be treated with the strictest of confidence."

 

For information about Greater Manchester Police please visit our website.

www.gmp.police.uk

   

You should call 101, the new national non-emergency number, to report crime and other concerns that do not require an emergency response.

 

Always call 999 in an emergency, such as when a crime is in progress, violence is being used or threatened or where there is danger to life.

 

You can also call anonymously with information about crime to Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111. Crimestoppers is an independent charity who will not want your name, just your information. Your call will not be traced or recorded and you do not have to go to court or give a statement.

        

The Liechtenstein Garden Palace is a Baroque palace at the Fürstengasse in the 9th District of Vienna, Alsergrund . Between the palace, where the Liechtenstein Museum was until the end of 2011, and executed as Belvedere summer palace on the Alserbachstraße is a park. Since early 2012, the Liechtenstein Garden Palace is a place for events. Part of the private art collection of the Prince of Liechtenstein is still in the gallery rooms of the palace. In 2010 was started to call the palace, to avoid future confusion, officially the Garden Palace, since 2013 the city has renovated the Palais Liechtenstein (Stadtpalais) in Vienna's old town and then also equipped with a part of the Liechtenstein art collection.

Building

Design for the Liechtenstein Garden Palace, Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach in 1687/1688

Canaletto: View of Palais Liechtenstein

1687 bought Prince Johann Adam Andreas von Liechtenstein a garden with adjoining meadows of Count Weikhard von Auersperg in the Rossau. In the southern part of the property the prince had built a palace and in the north part he founded a brewery and a manorial, from which developed the suburb Lichtental. For the construction of the palace Johann Adam Andreas organised 1688 a competition, in the inter alia participating, the young Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach. Meanwhile, a little functional, " permeable " project was rejected by the prince but, after all, instead he was allowed to built a garden in the Belvedere Alserbachstraße 14, which , however, was canceled in 1872.

The competition was won by Domenico Egidio Rossi, but was replaced in 1692 by Domenico Martinelli. The execution of the stonework had been given the royal Hofsteinmetzmeister (master stonemason) Martin Mitschke. He was delivered by the Masters of Kaisersteinbruch Ambrose Ferrethi , Giovanni Battista Passerini and Martin Trumler large pillars, columns and pedestal made ​​from stone Emperor (Kaiserstein). Begin of the contract was the fourth July 1689 , the total cost was around 50,000 guilders.

For contracts from the years 1693 and 1701 undertook the Salzburg master stonemason John and Joseph Pernegger owner for 4,060 guilders the steps of the great grand staircase from Lienbacher (Adnet = red) to supply marble monolith of 4.65 meters. From the Master Nicolaus Wendlinger from Hallein came the Stiegenbalustraden (stair balustrades) for 1,000 guilders.

A palazzo was built in a mix of city and country in the Roman-style villa. The structure is clear and the construction very blocky with a stressed central risalite, what served the conservative tastes of the Prince very much. According to the procedure of the architectural treatise by Johann Adam Andreas ' father, Karl Eusebius, the palace was designed with three floors and 13 windows axis on the main front and seven windows axis on the lateral front. Together with the stems it forms a courtyard .

Sala terrene of the Palais

1700 the shell was completed. In 1702, the Salzburg master stonemason and Georg Andreas Doppler took over 7,005 guilders for the manufacture of door frame made ​​of white marble of Salzburg, 1708 was the delivery of the fireplaces in marble hall for 1,577 guilders. For the painted decoration was originally the Bolognese Marcantonio Franceschini hired, from him are some of the painted ceilings on the first floor. Since he to slow to the prince, Antonio Belucci was hired from Venice, who envisioned the rest of the floor. The ceiling painting in the Great Hall, the Hercules Hall but got Andrea Pozzo . Pozzo in 1708 confirmed the sum of 7,500 florins which he had received since 1704 for the ceiling fresco in the Marble Hall in installments. As these artists died ( Pozzo) or declined to Italy, the Prince now had no painter left for the ground floor.

After a long search finally Michael Rottmayr was hired for the painting of the ground floor - originally a temporary solution, because the prince was of the opinion that only Italian artist buon gusto d'invenzione had. Since Rottmayr was not involved in the original planning, his paintings not quite fit with the stucco. Rottmayr 1708 confirmed the receipt of 7,500 guilders for his fresco work.

Giovanni Giuliani, who designed the sculptural decoration in the window roofing of the main facade, undertook in 1705 to provide sixteen stone vases of Zogelsdorfer stone. From September 1704 to August 1705 Santino Bussi stuccoed the ground floor of the vault of the hall and received a fee of 1,000 florins and twenty buckets of wine. 1706 Bussi adorned the two staircases, the Marble Hall, the Gallery Hall and the remaining six halls of the main projectile with its stucco work for 2,200 florins and twenty buckets of wine. Giuliani received in 1709 for his Kaminbekrönungen (fireplace crowning) of the great room and the vases 1,128 guilders.

Garden

Liechtenstein Palace from the garden

The new summer palace of Henry of Ferstel from the garden

The garden was created in the mind of a classic baroque garden. The vases and statues were carried out according to the plans of Giuseppe Mazza from the local Giovanni Giuliani. In 1820 the garden has been remodeled according to plans of Joseph Kornhäusel in the Classical sense. In the Fürstengasse was opposite the Palais, the Orangerie, built 1700s.

Use as a museum

Already from 1805 to 1938, the palace was housing the family collection of the house of Liechtenstein, which was also open for public viewing, the collection was then transferred to the Principality of Liechtenstein, which remained neutral during the war and was not bombed. In the 1960s and 1970s, the so-called Building Centre was housed in the palace as a tenant, a permanent exhibition for builders of single-family houses and similar buildings. From 26 April 1979 rented the since 1962 housed in the so-called 20er Haus Museum of the 20th Century , a federal museum, the palace as a new main house, the 20er Haus was continued as a branch . Since the start of operations at the Palais, the collection called itself Museum of Modern Art (since 1991 Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation ), the MUMOK in 2001 moved to the newly built museum district.

From 29 March 2004 till the end of 2011 in the Palace was the Liechtenstein Museum, whose collection includes paintings and sculptures from five centuries. The collection is considered one of the largest and most valuable private art collections in the world, whose main base in Vaduz (Liechtenstein) is . As the palace, so too the collection is owned by the Prince of Liechtenstein Foundation .

On 15 November 2011 it was announced that the regular museum operating in the Garden Palace was stopped due to short of original expectations, visiting numbers remaining lower as calculated, with January 2012. The Liechtenstein City Palace museum will also not offer regular operations. Exhibited works of art would then (in the city palace from 2013) only during the "Long Night of the Museums", for registered groups and during leased events being visitable. The name of the Liechtenstein Museum will no longer be used.

 

de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palais_Liechtenstein_(F%C3%BCrstengasse)

At around 5.30am today (Tuesday 12 October) officers from GMP's Oldham Challenger Team executed three warrants at addresses across Newton Heath and Failsworth.

 

The warrants formed part of an ongoing investigation into the supply of class A drugs across Greater Manchester, as well as the criminal use of the encrypted communications platform Encrochat, often used by organised criminal groups.

 

During the raids, three men in their 30s were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to supply cocaine and two of the men were further arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to supply amphetamine, entering into a money laundering agreement and possession of a prohibited weapon with intent to cause fear.

 

They remain in custody for questioning by detectives.

 

Following searches of all three properties, suspected class A and B drugs were recovered, along with over £3000 in cash, designer clothing, jewellery, phones and vehicles.

 

In July 2020, GMP alongside nearly every law enforcement agency across the UK came together as part of the National Crime Agency led 'Operation Venetic', focused on the takedown of 'Encrochat' - a sophisticated encrypted communications service used by OCG's.

 

GMP launched a series of intricate investigations bringing together 16 teams of officers from across all ten districts of Greater Manchester. Codenamed 'Operation Foam', the force wide operation has been in constant action for the past 15 months.

 

Detective Sergeant Alex Brown of GMP's Oldham Challenger Team, said: "Today's action is the culmination of months of intricate investigative work and is another positive result for the team in our endeavour to disrupt and dismantle the distribution and trade of drugs across our region.

 

"Thankfully today we have been able to remove what is suspected to be a large quantity of drugs from our community, and although we have three men in custody our searches and investigation will continue this morning and we will ensure all criminal assets are seized.

 

"An inordinate amount of work goes on behind the scenes to investigate the distribution of drugs and I hope today's arrests and seizures send a stark warning that GMP will do all in its power to pursue offenders and ensure no one benefits from ill-gotten gains and the sale of drugs.

 

"Often these investigations rely on intelligence passed to police by members of the public can often play a big part in investigations. If you have information that could aid our investigations into the trade of drugs across Greater Manchester then please get in touch with police."

 

Anyone with information should contact police on 101. Alternatively, details can be passed via our LiveChat function at www.gmp.police.uk or via the independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.

 

You can access many of our services online at www.gmp.police.uk.

 

For emergencies only call 999, or 101 if it's a less urgent matter.

St Albans claims to be the earliest site of Christian pilgrimage in England, being named after our first martyr, who was executed at some point in the 3rd century AD (when the city was still known by its Roman name, Verulanium) having sheltered a persecuted Christian priest, St Amphibalus, and been impressed by his faith, offering himself for arrest in his place. Both men were buried here and Alban's tomb was venerated and marked in some form long before the present cathedral was built.

 

The cathedral is nonetheless one of the most ancient of our major churches, though its cathedral status dates only to 1877 when the new diocese of St Albans was formed. The church was originally founded as St Alban's Abbey, and built close to the presumed site of Alban's martyrdom. Founded in 793 by King Offa, the abbey was rebuilt several times with the earliest parts of the present cathedral dating back to the late 11th century. Much use was made of recycled material from the abandoned Roman city of Verulanium, and the handsome Romanesque tower appears to be entirely constructed of reused Roman bricks. The Abbey was built on an impressive scale, and must have once been a very wealthy institution owing to pilgrimages to the shrine of St Alban behind the high altar. However its fortunes had begun to decline even before the Reformation swept medieval monastic life away.

 

The abbey church miraculously survived the Dissolution in its entirety and was sold to the town for use as their parish church. The monastic buildings however were completely erased aside from the splendid Abbey Gatehouse near the west end, and only the weathered remains of arcading on the south side of the nave remains of the former cloisters. Upkeep thereafter seems to have been a serious challenge and the huge church spent much of the following centuries in poor repair, thus much work was done by a succession of architects in the Victorian period prior to the abbey church being raised to the status of cathedral. The most obvious interventions are those made by Edmund Beckett / Lord Grimthorpe, an amateur architect who paid for much of the work in the 1870s in return for a free hand in redesigning parts of the building. His are the strange turrets on ends of the transepts, along with their facade windows below and the west front, which is clearly a Victorian confection, though the medieval facade it replaced had been left in a rather bare, unfinished state.

 

The cathedral we see today is thus a rather surprising mixture of styles and materials, everything from Roman brick, flint and rubble to fine white limestone., which gives it a rather patchy appearance. Its great length however is remarkable, being the second longest medieval church in the country (only Winchester is longer, but St Albans has a longer nave). The oldest parts are the towers and transepts from the end of the 11th century, along with much of the north side of the nave, all fine examples of early Romanesque architecture. Most of the rest was rebuilt in the Gothic style in various phases throughout the 14th century, including the greater part of the nave and all of the choir and Lady Chapel (though the east end was heavily renewed externally in the Victorian restoration).

 

Entering the cathedral one cannot fail to be impressed by the enormous length of the nave,, mostly of late 13th and early 14th century date aside from the strikingly austere north arcade in the more easterly section, where the raw unadorned early Norman architecture contrasts dramatically with the more ornate Gothic arcade opposite. The Norman columns have the added appeal of retaining substantial remains of medieval mural decoration, with a succession of Crucifixion scenes that may have originally served as reredos to long vanished side altars. The medieval pulpitum screen remains and separates the eastern bays for use as the choir beyond it. This area also retains its flat late medieval wooden ceiling complete with painted panels of angels holding shields.

 

The transepts and crossing beneath the tower form an especially memorable interior space, again the architecture is of the more raw, auster Norman variety, but the tower arches are enlivened with painted decoration simulating brickwork and much Roman and Saxon material is incorporated in to the transepts. Beyond is the fully Gothic eastern limb with the presbytery covered by a handsome medieval wooden vault, again replete it medieval painted decoration, and the striking altar reredos, a towering late medieval screen populated with elaborate niches and statuary (the latter being Victorian replacements for originals long lost). Behind this is the re-assembled shrine of St Alban (along with that of St Amphibalus in the south choir aisle nearby). The Lady Chapel beyond is a handsome example of 14th century Decorated Gothic, though much restored following centuries of use as a schoolroom separated from the rest of the church.

 

There is much of interest to see in the cathedral, though most of the furnishings are Victorian (the originals having long vanished) and there are few monuments of note aside from the two late medieval chantry chapels of Abbot Ramryge and Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, the latter overlooking the shrine of St Alban and balanced by a 15th century wooden watching loft on the opposite side (a rare survival). There is a mixture of glass, the most notable pieces being the most recent additions in the south aisle and north transept rose window. The best features are the unusually extensive remnants of medieval mural painting in various parts of the church, a quite remarkable survival, making a thorough exploration of this cathedral all the more rewarding.

 

This was my third visit, and longest one, though my attempt at a fuller photographic record was severely compromised by accidents with my camera, which at one point fell from my tripod onto the stone floor in one of the chantry chapels. I was lucky it survived at all given the dreadful crash it made, but it was seriously affected and my photos were very hit and miss from that point onwards. My day however ended on a happier note, returning in the evening to attend a lovely performance of Mozart's Requiem, and the acoustics in there are indeed impressive.

 

For more about the cathedral see below.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Albans_Cathedral

Executing the bunt!

Austrian soldiers of 2nd Company, 25th Infantry Battalion, 7th Infantry Brigade maneuver to the objective during exercise Combined Resolve II at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center in Hohenfels, Germany, May 29, 2014. Combined Resolve II is a multinational decisive action training environment exercise occurring at the Joint Multinational Training Command’s Hohenfels and Grafenwoehr Training Areas that involves more than 4,000 participants from 15 partner nations. The intent of the exercise is to train and prepare a U.S. led multinational brigade to interoperate with multiple partner nations and execute unified land operations against a complex threat while improving the combat readiness of all participants. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Justin De Hoyos/Released)

CBP officers from the Office of Field Operations and agents from the U.S. Border Patrol and Air and Marine Operations execute a planned readiness exercise at the San Ysidro Port of Entry. The exercise is designed to evaluate readiness and assess the capabilities of CBP facilities to make necessary preparations. November 22, 2018. CBP photo by SCPBO Luis Angulo.

Today, Thursday 16 November 2017, police executed warrants at eight addresses across the Moss Side and Hulme areas of Manchester.

 

The warrants were executed as the latest phase of Operation Malham, targeting the supply of drugs in South Manchester.

 

This follows previous raids last week, which means more than 14 properties have been searched and eight people arrested in total as part of the operation.

 

Detective Chief Inspector Paul Walker, of GMP’s City of Manchester team, said: “We are dedicated to rooting out those who seek to make profits from putting drugs on our streets.

 

“Today’s raids have resulted in the arrests of five people which have only been made possible through the support of partner agencies and community intelligence.

 

“We are grateful for all your support and help and I would urge you to continue to report anything suspicious to help us stop people who are benefitting from crime and remove drugs from our city.”

 

Anyone with information should contact police on 101 or Crimestoppers, anonymously, on 0800 555 111.

 

To find out more about Greater Manchester Police please visit

www.gmp.police.uk

 

You should call 101, the national non-emergency number, to report crime and other concerns that do not require an emergency response.

 

Always call 999 in an emergency, such as when a crime is in progress, violence is being used or threatened or where there is danger to life.

THOMAS, WILLIAM, architect, water-colourist, and engineer; b. c. 1799 in Suffolk, England, son of William Thomas and Ann —; m. 17 Sept. 1826 Martha Tutin in Birmingham, England, and they had four sons and six daughters; d. 26 Dec. 1860 in Toronto.

 

William Thomas’s significance among his generation of architects in British North America lies not only in the outstanding nature of the work he executed but also in the unique opportunity his career affords of tracing the relationship between his extensive preparation in England and his work in Canada, the latter being more accomplished and much more important relatively. Other architects such as John George Howard*, George Browne*, Frederic William Cumberland*, and Thomas Fuller* arrived when they were much younger than Thomas, with the result that their early work is unknown. Thomas came in his maturity.

 

Shortly after William’s birth, the family settled at Chalford, Gloucestershire, where his father was innkeeper of the Clothier’s Arms. William and his three brothers all entered the building trades. John, the youngest, was apprenticed to a letter-carver or mason at first, studied briefly under William in the early 1830s, and achieved some success as an architect; he is, however, best remembered as one of the most prolific sculptors of the period. Between 1812 and 1819 William was apprenticed to John Gardiner, a local carpenter and joiner.

 

Some time after receiving his indenture papers, William moved to Birmingham, where he married Martha Tutin in 1826. He may have been the pupil of Richard Tutin, a builder-turned-architect who was apparently a relative of Martha. In 1829 Thomas entered into partnership with him, but it was probably dissolved the following year. In 1832 Thomas moved to nearby Leamington, a flourishing watering-place in Warwickshire. Here he had a varied career: initially serving as agent for a developer, he promoted and executed his own building speculation schemes and designed numerous buildings for clients. The failure of a local bank in 1837 may have obliged him to apply for the office of town surveyor – he was acting surveyor in 1838–39 – and undoubtedly precipitated his bankruptcy in 1840, along with those of most of the other building speculators in Leamington. Thomas had opened a branch-office in Birmingham, but there were few architectural commissions available because of widespread depression in the early 1840s.

 

Thomas’s architectural work in England comprises designs for a remarkable range of structures, including houses, churches, shops, a conservatory, a public bath complex, and iron and stone bridges. The bulk of his work, however, consisted chiefly of speculative housing for the middle class in Leamington. He is known to have designed town houses on Beauchamp Terrace, beginning in 1831, and two chapels in 1834. Two impressive housing complexes followed the next year: Lansdowne Circus, a horseshoe-shaped grouping of plain Georgian-style semi-detached houses and villas (most with decorative cast-iron porches and balconies under tent-shaped roofs), and adjacent Lansdowne Crescent, a curving terrace of connected and landscaped town houses executed in a fully elaborated classical style. For Lansdowne Crescent, Thomas had acquired the property in partnership, furnished the designs, and developed some parcels with covenants requiring conformity in the design of façades. In a somewhat similar vein he was responsible for the development on Brandon Parade and Holly Walk (which adjoined both the crescent and the circus) of about ten villas, in a mixture of Grecian and Gothic Revival designs. Before his bankruptcy Thomas lived in one of these villas, Elizabethan Place, which is conspicuously dated 1836 and signed “WT.” A combination of small volumes balanced in effective groupings with ornamental flourishes at the edges is characteristic of the mature Thomas. Victoria Terrace, Pump Room and Baths, a multipurpose building begun in Leamington in 1837, formed a major focus of the town and was his grandest work in England.

 

In Duddeston (Birmingham) he erected St Matthew’s Church (Anglican) in 1839–40. This rectangular brick building, executed in a mixture of Early English and Decorated Gothic Revival styles with a projecting three-storey tower at the west end, would be used by Thomas as a basis in developing many of his Canadian churches. In the same years he was also responsible for a palatial draper’s shop in Birmingham called Warwick House. A water-colour by Thomas of this highly ornamented block, which was bombed in World War II, shows a four-storey building of seven bays, with immense display windows set between graceful piers opening up the ground floor, while the second and third floors are set off by colossal columns and the fourth floor is richly treated as an attic. This was a successful formula for commercial structures and would be used for one of Thomas’s best-known works in Canada. In essence, Thomas’s career up to this point forms a modest and provincial parallel, in its range of activity, styles, and enterprise, to that of John Nash, the fashionable architect who had done so much to reshape London in the first quarter of the 19th century.

 

In December 1842 Thomas sent to press a slim book entitled Designs for monuments and chimney pieces, a discreet piece of self-advertisement which was published in London the following year. Consisting of 41 lithographed plates with 46 Grecian, Roman, Gothic and Elizabethan patterns, the book is indicative of the eclectic approach to architectural design prevalent during the late Georgian and early Victorian periods. Like most other designers, Thomas felt free to choose historical revival styles that were deemed fitting to the location and function of a work. His churches, for example, were generally designed in the Gothic style, which readily identified their religious function and association with the devout Christian beliefs of the Middle Ages.

 

In April 1843 Thomas left England for Toronto. Precisely what prompted him, in his early 40s, to emigrate with his wife and eight children or to choose Toronto for his new home is unknown. His forced bankruptcy three years earlier and the dearth of work must have been contributing causes, but the key factor was probably his ambition. Toronto, which was entering a boom period with a population of more than 15,000 but with only three practising architects, was an appealing location for an industrious architect. Thomas’s journal of his transatlantic crossing in 1843 reveals an acute and well-informed observer. He emerges from the journal as a patient and loving father, a warm and sympathetic man. Possessed of a considerable sense of humour, he was very sociable as well and enjoyed chess, card-playing, conversation, singing, and dancing. Thomas settled with his family at 5 York Street and opened an office at 55 King Street East, in the city’s main commercial district. His first major commission in Toronto seems to have been the Commercial Bank of the Midland District on Wellington Street. Designed in 1844 and built a year later, it was one of the earliest banks fashioned in the Greek Revival mode in British North America and its façade remains one of the best examples of that style in the city. The only other bank known to have been designed by Thomas, the Bank of British North America, Hamilton (1847–49), has been demolished.

 

It was, however, his churches that brought early acclaim. Reputedly there were eventually more than 30 of these, 12 in Toronto alone. The first, St Paul’s Church (Anglican) in London, was erected in 1844–46 of red brick (with a white-brick front) in the Decorated Gothic style. Described by William Henry Smith* in the year of its completion as “the handsomest gothic church in Canada West,” it was elevated to cathedral status in 1857 [see Benjamin Cronyn*] and extended in the 1890s by means of transepts.

 

Before St Paul’s was completed, Thomas commenced his most ambitious ecclesiastical work and the largest church in Toronto at the time, St Michael’s Cathedral (Roman Catholic), which was constructed in 1845–48 of the then-fashionable white brick. Extending from Bond to Church streets on the north side of Shuter, its long flank commanded McGill Square before that area was built over. St Michael’s too was designed in the Decorated Gothic style, but on a cruciform plan, and it was both more substantial and more ornamental in character than St Paul’s. The congregation could not immediately afford Thomas’s tower and spire; these and the dormers were later added by the firm of Thomas Gundry and Henry Langley*. A palace for Bishop Michael Power* was also designed by Thomas, in the Tudor Revival style, and was erected in 1845 on Church Street just north of the cathedral.

 

Thomas was especially favoured by Presbyterian congregations, particularly those created as a result of the disruption of 1844 [see Robert Burns*]. In Toronto alone he designed Knox’s Church (Free Presbyterian), Queen Street (1847–48), a church for the United Presbyterian congregation of the Reverend John Jennings*, Bay Street (1848), and Cooke’s Church (Free Presbyterian), Queen Street (1857–58). But he worked for many other denominations in the city, designing the Methodist New Connexion Church, Temperance Street (1846), the Unitarian Church, Jarvis Street (1854), Zion Church (Congregational), Bay and Adelaide streets (1855–56), and the German Evangelical Lutheran Church, Bond Street (1856–57). All have been torn down or replaced.

 

Although Thomas was unsuccessful in the 1849 competition for the Church of England cathedral in Toronto, he received commissions in 1851–52 from Anglican congregations in Guelph and Hamilton which resulted in churches of considerable significance. St George’s Church in Guelph, begun in 1851, was not only one of the first churches executed in the Romanesque Revival style in British North America but was also one of the first based on an asymmetrical plan. Three bays, including a corner tower forming a porch on the axis of Wyndham Street, were added in stone to an existing wooden church. Designs drafted by Thomas in 1856 for the rest of the church and for an elegant interior were not implemented and the church was later demolished. In Hamilton, where he had opened an office by 1849, possibly in the care of his son William Tutin, Thomas began work on Christ’s Church (now the Anglican cathedral) in 1852. This was his most adventurous work structurally, calling for a stone building on a basilican plan, with a tall nave carried on piers, a decoratively treated open wooden roof, clerestory lighting, flanking aisles, and a short but distinct chancel. These features suggest that the design was an early instance in this province of the ritualistic neo-medievalism advocated in architectural design by the Ecclesiological Society in England, though Thomas was by no means doctrinaire in his designs for churches. Only the chancel and two bays of Christ’s Church were built, as tall additions to Robert Charles Wetherell’s neoclassical wooden church of 1842, and the disjointed effect gave rise to the name “the hump-backed church.” In 1873–77 it was completed. Simpler churches were well within Thomas’s capability and at least three still stand: St George’s-on-the-Hill Church (Anglican) of 1847 in Etobicoke (Toronto), the Free Presbyterian Church (now Grace United) of 1852 in Niagara (Niagara-on-the-Lake), and MacNab Street Church (Presbyterian) of 1856 in Hamilton. Of these, the Niagara church is particularly appealing. Executed in a predominantly Romanesque mode, it features chunky corbel tables and pilaster strips which look less skimped than those in his conventional Gothic designs.

 

Thomas’s design for another Presbyterian church in Hamilton, the well-preserved St Andrew’s (renamed St Paul’s in 1874), was his most successful composition. It was begun in 1854 on a large budget, which encouraged a rich treatment in stone and an elaborate interior. The tower is bold and massive, with deep angle buttresses and dense carving in areas such as the entrance and the gables. The octagonal spire is apparently the only stone spire erected in Ontario. The interior is equally striking in the richness of its sombre decoration, carved in dark wood. Although the cost proved ruinous for its congregation, the church has been consistently admired: in 1901 the Canadian Architect and Builder regarded it as still “well worth the study of architects” because “the construction is genuine” and “an essential part of the aim was honest work.”

 

Thomas was busy almost continuously designing a succession of significant public buildings for centres throughout British North America. These include the Fireman’s Hall and Mechanics’ Institute building, Toronto (1845), the combined district court-house, town hall, and market, Niagara (1846–48), the Talbot District Jail, Simcoe (1847–48), the House of Industry, Toronto (1848), the Kent County Court-House, Chatham (1848–49), the St Lawrence Hall, Arcade, and Market building, Toronto (1849–51), the town hall and market-house, Peterborough (1851), the town hall and market, Guelph (1856–57), the custom-house, Quebec (1856–60), the town hall and market-house, Stratford (1857), the city jail (now known as the Don Jail), Toronto (1859–64), and the Halifax County Court-House, Halifax (1858–62). All survive except those in Peterborough and Stratford, and the Fireman’s Hall and Mechanics’ Institute building in Toronto. Most of these commissions were won in competition and follow a common formula in their design: a long symmetrical front, with a projecting frontispiece under a pediment, often with colossal orders, seated on a heavy base. Not all of Thomas’s competition designs were successful. In 1859, for example, he was an unsuccessful entrant in the contest for the parliament buildings in Ottawa.

 

The best known of Thomas’s public structures is undoubtedly St Lawrence Hall in Toronto which, with its original arcade and market, comprised the St Lawrence Buildings. An earlier town hall and market on the site, designed by Henry Bowyer Joseph Lane, were destroyed in the fire of 1849 and Thomas immediately received the commission for their replacements, his design closely following his successful (but unexecuted) competition design of 1845 for refronting the earlier buildings. The St Lawrence Buildings were I-shaped, with the hall fronting on King Street, the market on Front Street, and the 200-foot arcade between the two. The hall contained shops on the ground floor, committee rooms on the second, and an assembly room on the third, the latter offering a more dignified space for concerts, balls, lectures, and the like than those provided by local hotels or the earlier town hall and market. An enlarged and more controlled version of Thomas’s Warwick House (executed in Birmingham nearly a decade earlier), St Lawrence Hall is his most graceful exercise in classical design. The market and arcade have been replaced, but the hall has been refurbished and remains an important civic focus.

 

Thomas’s earlier public buildings at Niagara and Chatham are both Late Georgian in style and nearly as restrained as St Lawrence Hall, but most of his other public works were designed in a forceful Victorian version of the Renaissance Revival style. There is a deliberate crudity of scale and texture in these visually powerful buildings which reflects their association with the law, public administration, and commerce. They are characterized by blocky masses, rugged surfaces, and abrupt transitions. The Halifax County Court-House best displays these characteristics in Thomas’s later public buildings. The dominant feature of this sandstone structure is its heavily textured frontispiece with bands of contrasting stone at every level up to the stout brackets that support the simple pediment. The three splendid keystones, which are carved in the form of sombre bearded heads and alternate with lion’s-head medallions, are hallmarks of Thomas’s last, and most vigorous, architectural phase.

 

His civic architecture also included public schools, which were just beginning to be designed in Canada as architecturally distinctive institutions. His Union School in London (1849), described two years later in a government report as “by far the finest school house in the Province,” was followed by designs for two schools in Toronto. In 1851 the city’s first elected school-board, under the chairmanship of Dr Joseph Workman*, launched a school-design competition. Thomas’s plan was used in 1852–53 for the Park and Louisa Street schools. These were designed in the Tudor style, which was popular for institutional buildings because it afforded ample lighting and ventilation as well as an interesting silhouette, all within a reasonable budget. All three schools have been demolished. In 1853 Thomas received the commission for the combined county grammar and common schools in Goderich.

 

The columnar monument to Sir Isaac Brock* on Queenston Heights (1853–56) is arguably Thomas’s most florid composition. It is 185 feet tall, rising from a richly trophied base guarded by carved lions. A colossal statue of Brock stands on a lavish capital, designed by Thomas himself rather than drawn from the classical orders. Gates, a lodge, and steps, all completed in 1859, frame the monument in scenographic fashion. Thomas displayed a stone model of it at the universal exposition in Paris in 1855.

 

His English work had consisted largely of housing and numerous Canadian examples can be identified. In Toronto, a handsome row of houses called Wellington Terrace, built on Wellington Street in 1847, has been demolished, but three units of another group, built in 1848, survive on Church Street behind St Michael’s Cathedral. In Hamilton, Thomas’s firm was said by the Halifax Reporter in 1860 to be responsible for “the greater number of the very beautiful private residences that meet the eye in every direction.” Surviving work there attributed to Thomas includes Undermount (on John Street), designed for John Young* in the Italianate style in 1847, and two Gothic villas: the Presbyterian manse (at Herkimer and Park streets), completed in 1854, and Inglewood (on Inglewood Drive), built for Archibald Kerr about the same date. Thomas’s Wilderness House (1848–51), built for Aeneas Kennedy, was destroyed in 1853. Thomas also designed a villa in London for Lawrence Lawrason*. His own Toronto residence, Oakham House (1848), a Gothic composition on Church Street, stands but has been gutted and additions replace his office wing on Gould Street; his 1859 Italianate home on Mutual Street has been destroyed. He is also known to have built houses in Toronto for at least six prominent businessmen, including John McMurrich*. Among Thomas’s last known residential works was the house, which still stands, built in St Catharines in 1859–60 for William Hamilton Merritt*.

 

Mixed commercial and residential buildings by Thomas were surely numerous too. The first of these was probably the Adelaide Buildings on Yonge Street (1844), which were altered in 1853 and subsequently torn down. In 1846 William Henry Smith described some stores designed by him and under construction on King Street, Toronto, as “the handsomest buildings of the kind in Canada, and equal to anything to be seen in England.” Although some of the stores were damaged in the fire of 1849 and others were demolished later, several still survive, now generally altered. More stylish were two Italianate works, both large-scale dry-goods businesses: the 1847 store (named the Golden Lion in 1849) of Robert Walker and Thomas Hutchinson on King Street and the premises of Ross, Mitchell and Company, built at Yonge and Colborne streets about 1856. Both have been demolished. In a period of vigorous economic growth in Canada, at least three other Toronto firms, including Bryce, McMurrich and Company, commissioned buildings from Thomas, who also designed stores in Port Hope and Hamilton.

 

Thomas formally took two of his sons, William Tutin and Cyrus Pole, both of whom he had trained, into his flourishing business in January 1857 and the firm became William Thomas and Sons. It was shortly to expand again. Thomas’s design for Knox’s Church in Toronto had so impressed visiting members of St Matthew’s Church (Presbyterian) in Halifax that, when it was destroyed by fire in 1857, his firm was asked to design its replacement, which was built on Barrington Street in 1858–59 and still stands. This project brought the Thomas firm to Halifax, where Cyrus opened an office in 1858. The firm’s successful entry that year in the county court-house competition no doubt led to commissions after the fire of 1859 for rebuilding much of the commercial section at the north end of Granville Street [see George Lang*]. At least 12 four-storey buildings, more than half of the new construction, were designed by the firm and nearly all were completed by the end of 1860. The group is remarkable not only for the number and variety of the commissions (executed simultaneously for no less than eight different clients) but for the impact of the resulting streetscape, which survives. Contiguous properties called the Palace Buildings were handled uniformly as the largest single design. Unity of effect elsewhere in the group was achieved through the use of stone (from different Nova Scotian quarries), elevations of related height, and recurring rhythms. All but one building had decorative cast-iron shop-fronts, which are important as early examples of this type of construction in British North America. Cyrus Pole Thomas visited Daniel D. Badger’s Architectural Iron Works in New York in 1860 to arrange for the shop-fronts and internal detailing, some of which were later reproduced in Badger’s lavish publication, Illustrations of iron architecture.

 

Thomas had risen quickly in Canada and had made a number of connections in the Toronto community and elsewhere. Concerned for the public enjoyment of the arts, he was probably instrumental in establishing the Toronto Society of Arts in 1847; he was elected its first president and showed his architectural drawings at the society’s exhibitions of 1847 and 1848. He maintained limited contact with English architecture through the publications that he bought and the visit he paid in 1851 to the Great Exhibition in London, where his brother John exhibited sculpture. When John George Howard made a trip to England in 1853, Thomas served as city engineer in his stead and was appointed to superintend the work on Toronto’s Esplanade. He also trained architects of the next generation, including, in addition to his sons, William George Storm*, who became a leading architect in Toronto, first in partnership with Frederic William Cumberland and then on his own.

 

The role played latterly by the sons in Thomas’s business is difficult to determine. The later work of William Tutin, who moved to Montreal about 1863, is both more assured and more flamboyant than that of his father; Cyrus, who worked in Montreal before settling in Chicago, claimed credit for the firm’s Haligonian work. It is reasonable, however, to assume a division of labour in William Thomas’s last years. He suffered “long and continued illness,” necessitating a journey to England in 1858. The financial burden of illness and treatment is reflected in the firm’s extra efforts to collect new commissions and overdue payments. There was ever-increasing competition for architectural work: by 1859 there were 16 architects in Toronto, many of them well trained in the latest developments in style and construction. Thomas’s seniority was nevertheless recognized and he was elected president in 1860 of the Association of Architects, Civil Engineers and Provincial Land Surveyors of the Province of Canada, which had been established the previous year.

 

William Thomas died on 26 Dec. 1860 of diabetes, according to cemetery records. Survived by his wife and six of their ten children, he was buried in the family’s plot at St James’ Cemetery beneath the handsome Grecian tombstone which he no doubt had designed. Although his obituary in the Globe commented conventionally that he would be remembered for “his kindly social qualities which endeared him to a numerous circle of friends,” the statement rings true. A portrait, a bust, and a photograph all show an engaging figure. Moreover, maintaining a successful practice required a diplomatic touch in an era when, increasingly, important commissions were for public buildings, which entailed intense professional competition and often difficult negotiations with building committees.

 

A combination of experience, ambition, and personality made him a leading architect, with the largest architectural practice in British North America. He apparently prided himself on his ability to design substantial structures which could be built at reasonable cost. When Upper Canada was experiencing a great wave of prosperity, Thomas and a handful of other architects, including William Hay* and Kivas Tully*, were able to design major buildings for the fast-growing communities: churches to express their faith, civic structures to display their pride and their optimism about the future, and commercial buildings and residences to reveal their growing wealth.

 

Thomas was the versatile architect who, in the manner of his period, worked in various styles, some of which he rendered in a fashion that can be clearly identified as his. The prevailing aesthetic of the picturesque movement was especially important to him, with its emphasis on variety and richness of visual effect. But deeply rooted in his work too was the older Georgian tradition of compactness, balance, and regularity. Such conservatism of style is not surprising in one who immigrated to the colony in mid life and whose contact with professional developments in Britain was limited to rare return visits and the receipt of publications. What is all the more remarkable, in contrast to other designers of the same generation working in British North America, is Thomas’s professional maturation and independence which was demonstrated, in the work he produced in his last decade, by his new-found confidence in large works, his use of cast-iron, and his own form of the Italianate style. But although he continued to develop, the financial constraints imposed by some clients, a limited range of materials, and a shortage of skilled workmen must have contributed to a certain severity that is also noticeable in his architecture.

 

It was no mean achievement to have made a major contribution to Leamington’s residential street-scape; subsequently Thomas reshaped the skyline of Canadian cities from Halifax to London with a series of churches and public buildings. George P. Ure, in his Hand-book of Toronto, claimed that “his high professional talent and correct taste have tended greatly to the embellishment and improvement” of Toronto, above all. Thomas’s obituary in the Globe concurred: “To him we owe some of the most tasteful buildings of which our city can boast.” His contributions to the development of architecture as well as the scope and quality of his work substantiate Thomas Ritchie’s claim that William Thomas was “one of the founders of the Canadian architectural profession.”

Uder my family's custody

 

Saint Joseph NGUYỄN DUY KHANG

 

Dominican Brother

(1832-1861)

 

* A Loyal Disciple.

 

Saint Joseph Nguyễn Duy Khang was one of the four saint martyrs of Hải Dương venerated by Vietnamese Catholics. Even though he was executed a month after the other three, he was still honored together with Fr. Almato Bình and the two bishops Valentino Vinh and Hermosilla Liêm, because he had born the same travail with his three Dominican brothers.

 

As Bishop Hermosilla Liêm’s assistant, Brother Joseph Khang was in footstep with the leader of the east vicariate of Tonkin during their fugitive days; when soldiers arrested the bishop, with Peter’s passion in the Garden of Gethsemane, the brother tried to use force to fight. But obedient to the bishop, he agreed to be arrested to bear witness to a higher ideal: to bear witness to love, the compassion and forgiveness of the Gospel.

 

* A Devout Religious.

 

Joseph Nguyễn Duy Khang came into the world in 1832 in Cao Mại, Trà Vi canton, Vũ Tiên district, Kiến Xương prefecture, Thái Bình province. His parents were devout Catholics guiding their children in the Christian ways of life at their early ages. But his father passed away early. His mother raised him up properly. She wanted him to be educated and gave him the idea of offering his life to God, so she sent him to live with Fr. Matthew Năng, a Dominican.

 

After spending 10 years with the saintly elderly priest, Joseph Khang was sent to Kẻ Mốt seminary to study Latin preparing for a pastoral future. During this period, Joseph Khang asked to join the Dominican tertiary and was chosen by his fellow classmates to be their leader coordinating all the students’ responsibilities such as cleaning, cooking and liaison with the higher-ups. No matter how busy he was, he still set himself up as a model for his classmates in classes as well as in discipline. All who knew him said that he was very religious, honest, and always treated all around him with compassion and respect.

 

At the time, Bishop Hermosilla Liêm was also at Kẻ Mốt. He had a unique trust in Brother Khang and chose him to be his special assistant. Brother Khang happily and faithfully served the bishop: from preparing the altar, filing, copying pastoral letters, and contacting others, to preparing meals. He also dug their hiding trenches.

 

* A Model of Courage.

 

The Vietnamese Church was in a period of violent persecution under King Tự Đức. To erase completely Catholicism in the country, the king declared the edict of Segregation and Integration on 8/5/1861. According to the edict, all Catholics, young and old, male and female, were dispersed into villages of nonbelievers. Christians’ cheeks were etched with a word. Families were separated, wives from husbands, children from their parents. Churches, community houses, and Christian properties were confiscated, given away or destroyed.

 

Against that background, on September 18, Bishop Hermosilla Liêm agonized over the decision to close Kẻ Mốt seminary. Fr. Khoa informed seminarians on the bishop’s behalf: “You do not have to say goodbye to the bishop otherwise he cannot control his tears.” Brother Khang, on the other hand, persistently begged and was chosen to accompany the bishop till the end. When saying goodbye to his friends, he spoke half truthfully and half jokingly: “I am determined to accompany the bishop. If the authorities arrest him, they will not let me go free: if the bishop die for faith, so do I; without the head, the legs have no fear.” From that night on the two, a bishop and a religious brother, started their life on the run. Although the future was cloudy, but Brother Khang still maintained his cheerfulness due to his trust in and willingness to sacrifice his life for God.

 

The first three weeks on the run, Brother Khang and the bishop lived in a trench in Thọ Ninh. However, the authorities had discovered it, so the two had to leave land for a fishing sampan. Brother Khang rowed the boat to the city of Hải Dương and took refuge in the boat of a Christian named Bính. The boat became the mobile “diocesan office” of the shepherd. After several days, the two encountered by chance Bishop Valentino Vinh and Fr. Almato Bình in another boat arriving from Kẻ Mê. It was an emotional and happy encounter of the four saint martyrs of Hải Dương. They thanked God for the special occasion, exchanged news and prayed together for the Church. In the morning, they went on their separate ways.

 

Unfortunately, there was a quarrel in Mr. Bính family. The eldest son became angry at his parents; he went to the authorities to inform them of his parents’ giving safe housing to priests. As a result, corporal Bằng led his a group of men to arrest the bishop. Seeing them approaching, Brother Khang picked up a wooden pole, which was used to push the sampan, and ran toward them as if to warn them: to arrest anyone, you must go pass me.

 

But the respected and friendly bishop tapped the brother’s shoulder and said: “Don’t hurt them, leave it to God’s will.” Surprised, Brother Khang turned around still dumbfounded, suddenly he understood and could utter only a word: “Yes,” then dropped the pole and extended his hands to be tied up. Soldiers brought them to city of Hải Dương and put them in separate jail cells.

 

* The Martyr of Dải Dương.

 

For a month and a half of incarceration, Brother Khang was jailed together with a number of Christians. He organized for the cell to pray three times a day, and to do penance nightly to prepare themselves for their martyrdom. During this time, he was brought into court three times, tortured until his buttocks were flattened; each time, he endured the pain not revealing any information on the clergy nor renouncing his faith as urged by the mandarins. After each session, Christian inmates cleaned and massaged him to reduce the pain.

 

From prison Brother Khang continued to write to his friends who were taking refuge in the village of Hảo Hội. He wrote in a letter:

 

“The mandarins tortured me one time to force me to reveal bishop’s hiding places, but I did not tell them anything and was willing to be beaten. Please pray for me.”

 

In another letter, he wrote:

 

“Please send me a pair of pants because mine is old and shredded by canes beating on it. Send me also a blanket to be used to cover my body for burial when I die.”

 

On 12/6/1861 Brother Khang was informed of the sentence of death by decapitation from the royal capital. He happily followed soldiers to the execution field of Năm Mẫu where the ground had been soaked with the blood of his beloved bishop on November 1. After his execution, the local people buried him in a field nearby.

 

In 1867, under Bishop Hy’s direction, Chief Hinh, the martyr’s brother exhumed his body and reburied in the church of Kẻ Mốt parish. Today his head is stored at the church of Hải Dương while his body is still in Kẻ Mốt.

 

Submission for the Tallinn Architectural Biennale 'Street 2020' Competition, unawarded. (flickr seems to have altered colors) Jury reported: "The proposal is thorough and professionally executed, yet rather absurd. Several questions remain unanswered, for example why bring a forest in a city, where does the street lead to and where does it start from? Furthermore, the design proposal is overly based on four- lane road design standards."

 

The Digital Forest creates a passageway, an edge, and a destination. Calling on Estonia’s cultural heritage and its recent economic dynamism, the forest provides a grounded connection to place (earthly) and a technical connection to the wider digital world (ephemeral). The layering of a series of simple strategies creates a complex solution. The street responds to contemporary patterns of living and working and encourages numerous modes of transportation both within the center city and to and from the outlining districts beyond. The scheme addresses street movement in two ways; splitting the proposal into a central spine running adjacent to the center city, port, and old town and connected extensions where it reaches out to Viimsi, Pirita, and Lasnamäe in its first configuration and to Mustamäe and Nõmme in future expansions. The central spine provides Tallinn with a city-scaled urban space.

At the central spine private car traffic is placed underground and a forest of native species establishes an edge to the city and connection to the sea. The forest is simultaneously a cultural landscape and an ecosystem restoration effort. Along the city side of the spine there are several opportunities for new buildings, a gracious sidewalk, a high-frequency streetcar line, and a limited-access service street for deliveries and taxis. By placing automobile traffic underground along the central spine, much of the right-of-way is liberated for the forest. This avoids introducing significant traffic infrastructure along the waterfront severing the city from the water. The high frequency trolleys allow for fluid movement along the spine and facilitate easy transfer between modes and scales of transit.

 

Three key crossings connect the city to the port. The crossings are strategic points that allow for easy movement across the central spine and provide opportunities for the scheme to extend south into the center city, connecting to citizens’ daily lives and reaching the existing bus and tram lines. Framed views of the forest from along these feeder streets announce its presence to the city dweller.

 

The forest is place of urban respite traversed by walking/skiing and biking paths. It widens where it meets underutilized port sites, reaching from the city to the sea. With opportunities for playgrounds, garden allotments, picnic areas, beaches, and habitat creation, the forest is a place where residents and visitors can inhabit a landscape reminiscent of the glacially formed beauty found along much of the Estonian coast. This earthly garden speaks to the Estonian national identity. Accordingly, the forest can be used as a processional pathway for choirs as they walk from the old town to the song grounds for the Estonian Song Festival or Laulupidu. Glass boxes in the forest house a variety of functions, ranging from commercial kiosks, to warming shelters, to a municipal greenhouse that reaches out into the bay and compositionally balances the Linnahall and becomes an iconic feature of the city for visitors arriving by boat. These glass boxes shift seasons and allow access to the earthly forest throughout the harsh winter months. The municipal greenhouse is also the anchor of a proposed system of greenhouses to encourage urban gardening and local food production.

 

Plazas carved from the forest emphase significant buildings like the Museum of Estonian Architecture (rotermanni salt storage),the historic Linnahall and the forthcoming City Hall by BIG architects. Though seen as terminating at Pirita Tee on the east and the City Hall / Linnahall plaza on the west, future growth of the central spine into Kalamaja is envisioned. This addition will catalyze the redevelopment of Patarei Prison and the thinshell hydroplane hangars for cultural or residential uses.

 

A free municipal high speed internet service underpins the entire central spine, democratizing information and, through hand held devices, providing a technologically augmented reality that overlays sounds and images of the city’s geology, ecology, history, and culture on the forest landscape. This ephemeral forest encourages exploration, commerce, and communication. As the walls of the workplace, social spaces, and educational institutions dematerialize with the growth of digital means, the forest offers a civic space that boosts online interaction while bringing people together. At night users can choose to have smart lighting track their movements illuminating a nearby perimeter; a strategy that improves visibility, enhances energy efficiency, preserves the night sky and provides poetic effect. During the summer atomizing nozzles fill the forest with a soft mist. Juxtaposing the earthly and the ephemeral creates a hybrid urban space appropriate to Tallinn’s increasing stature in the European community.

 

Attached to the central spine, extensions connect the center city to outlying areas. Here all traffic is brought to the surface and the cross section of the road is divided efficiently between multiple modes of transit - private automobiles, trams/buses, bicycles, and designated spaces for pedestrians to walk, run or ski.

 

Project Team: Ted Shelton, Tricia Stuth, Emily Dent, Kate Armstrong, Luke Murphree, Phil Zawarus, Maudy Budipradigdo, Ken McCown

This manuscript was executed in 1475 by a scribe identified as Aristakes, for a priest named Hakob. It contains a series of 16 images on the life of Christ preceding the text of the gospels, as well as the traditional evangelist portraits, and there are marginal illustrations throughout. The style of the miniatures, which employ brilliant colors and emphasize decorative patterns, is characteristic of manuscript production in the region around Lake Van during the 15th century. The style of Lake Van has often been described in relation to schools of Islamic arts of the book. Numerous inscriptions (on fols. 258-60) spanning a few centuries attest to the manuscript's long history of use and revered preservation. The codex's later history included a re-binding with silver covers from Kayseri that date to approximately 1700. This jeweled and enameled silver binding bears a composition of the Adoration of the Magi on the front and the Ascension on the back.

 

To explore fully digitized manuscripts with a virtual page-turning application, please visit Walters Ex Libris.

 

At around 5.30am today (Tuesday 12 October) officers from GMP's Oldham Challenger Team executed three warrants at addresses across Newton Heath and Failsworth.

 

The warrants formed part of an ongoing investigation into the supply of class A drugs across Greater Manchester, as well as the criminal use of the encrypted communications platform Encrochat, often used by organised criminal groups.

 

During the raids, three men in their 30s were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to supply cocaine and two of the men were further arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to supply amphetamine, entering into a money laundering agreement and possession of a prohibited weapon with intent to cause fear.

 

They remain in custody for questioning by detectives.

 

Following searches of all three properties, suspected class A and B drugs were recovered, along with over £3000 in cash, designer clothing, jewellery, phones and vehicles.

 

In July 2020, GMP alongside nearly every law enforcement agency across the UK came together as part of the National Crime Agency led 'Operation Venetic', focused on the takedown of 'Encrochat' - a sophisticated encrypted communications service used by OCG's.

 

GMP launched a series of intricate investigations bringing together 16 teams of officers from across all ten districts of Greater Manchester. Codenamed 'Operation Foam', the force wide operation has been in constant action for the past 15 months.

 

Detective Sergeant Alex Brown of GMP's Oldham Challenger Team, said: "Today's action is the culmination of months of intricate investigative work and is another positive result for the team in our endeavour to disrupt and dismantle the distribution and trade of drugs across our region.

 

"Thankfully today we have been able to remove what is suspected to be a large quantity of drugs from our community, and although we have three men in custody our searches and investigation will continue this morning and we will ensure all criminal assets are seized.

 

"An inordinate amount of work goes on behind the scenes to investigate the distribution of drugs and I hope today's arrests and seizures send a stark warning that GMP will do all in its power to pursue offenders and ensure no one benefits from ill-gotten gains and the sale of drugs.

 

"Often these investigations rely on intelligence passed to police by members of the public can often play a big part in investigations. If you have information that could aid our investigations into the trade of drugs across Greater Manchester then please get in touch with police."

 

Anyone with information should contact police on 101. Alternatively, details can be passed via our LiveChat function at www.gmp.police.uk or via the independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.

 

You can access many of our services online at www.gmp.police.uk.

 

For emergencies only call 999, or 101 if it's a less urgent matter.

The Bible of Borso d'Este is a two volume manuscript. The illuminated miniatures, work of Taddeo Crivelli and others, were executed between 1455 and 1461. The work is held in the Biblioteca Estense di Modena (Ms. Lat. 422-423.)

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The Bible of Borso d'Este is one of the most notable illuminated manuscripts of the Renaissance. It was executed over a six-year period by a team of artists directed by Taddeo Crivelli and Franco dei Russi.

 

Every page of the Bible is decorated with an elegant frame of scrolls and other ornaments, surrounding two columns of texts. The margins contain various scenes, especially in the lower parts, where one often finds scenes drawn in perspective, borrowing from advances in painting of the time. Scenes are also depicted between the columns of text, usually next to the capital or illuminated letters. In the volutes in the corners, there are often animals, depicted with lively imagination that is part of the courtly style of the time, and often tied to heraldic symbols of Borso and his family.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borso_d%27Este_Bible

 

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A digital version of the original manuscript in high resolution and free of charge is avaiilable in the Library of Congress in Washington

www.loc.gov/item/2021667830

Officers execute daybreak raids as part of a firearms investigation in Cheetham Hill.

 

This morning, Thursday 21 May, officers from the North Manchester division carried out raids at two addresses in Cheetham Hill as part of an ongoing investigation into a firearms discharge, which took place last week on Monday 11 May 2020.

 

In the early hours of that morning, at around 1.15am, police were called to reports of between two and four gunshot sounds on Galsworthy Avenue.

 

No injuries were reported but some damage was caused to a vehicle on the street.

 

During today's raids officers seized a quantity of cash as part of the direct action. One man was arrested.

 

Speaking after the raids, Superintendent Rebecca Boyce, of GMPs North Manchester district, said: “First and foremost I sincerely hope that this morning’s activity shows to the people of Cheetham Hill just how seriously we continue to take incidents of this nature. We will explore every line of enquiry available to us and leave no stone unturned in our pursuit of justice.

 

“Guns and violence have no place on our streets; and anyone who is harbouring weapons of this nature or taking part in this kind of criminal activity should know that we do not take these incidents lightly. Anyone who brandishes a weapon within our communities and ultimately puts the lives of others at risk can expect to be investigated by us.

 

“As part of our ongoing commitment to protecting people and making the streets of Cheetham Hill a safer place, we have been working closely with partners, including Manchester City Council –both Adult and Children’s Services and housing providers. This prevention work is absolutely vital if we are to support those most vulnerable in our society and put a stop to this type of offending. A huge priority for us is discouraging people from taking this path and turning to this kind of criminality and I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our partners who have continued to support us in this.

 

“We have been always very clear that we cannot do this alone and would like to continue to appeal to the public to help us. Often, answers lie within communities and this type of criminal activity can only be halted completely with the support of those with information. If people would prefer to speak anonymously, they can do so by contacting the independent charity Crimestoppers.”

 

Anyone with any information should contact police on 0161 856 3924 quoting incident number 124 of 11/05/2020. Details can also be anonymously passed to the independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111

Pocahontas (c. 1595 – March 21, 1617)[2] was a Virginia Indian[3] woman who married an Englishman, John Rolfe, and became a celebrity in London in the last year of her life. She was a daughter of Wahunsunacawh (also known as Chief or Emperor Powhatan), who ruled an area encompassing almost all of the tribes in the Tidewater region of Virginia (called Tenakomakah at the time).

 

Pocahontas's formal names were Matoaka (or Matoika) and Amonute[4]; Pocahontas was a childhood nickname referring to her frolicsome nature (in the Powhatan language it meant "little wanton", according to William Strachey[5]). The eighteenth century historian William Stith claimed that "the Indians carefully concealed [her real name] from the English, and changed it to Pocahontas, out of a superstitious Fear, lest they, by the knowledge of her true Name, should be enabled to do her some hurt."[6] After her baptism, Pocahontas went by the name Rebecca, becoming Rebecca Rolfe on her marriage.

 

In May 1607, when the English colonists arrived in Virginia and began building settlements, Pocahontas was between twelve and fourteen years old,[7] and her father was the leader of the Powhatan Confederacy. One of the leading colonists, John Smith, subsequently recounted that he was captured by a group of Powhatan hunters and brought to Werowocomoco, one of the chief villages of the Powhatan Empire. According to Smith, he was laid across a stone and was about to be executed (by being beaten with clubs), when Pocahontas threw herself across his body: "Pocahontas, the Kings dearest daughter, when no intreaty could prevaile, got his head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death".[8] She earned respect from the other people and the English Settlements.[9]

 

John Smith's version of events is the only source, and, since the 1860s, skepticism has increasingly been expressed about its veracity. One reason for such doubt is: despite having published two earlier books about Virginia, Smith's earliest surviving account of his rescue by Pocahontas dates from 1616, nearly ten years later, in a letter entreating Queen Anne to treat Pocahontas with dignity.[9] The time gap in publishing his story raises the possibility Smith may have exaggerated or invented the event to enhance Pocahontas's image; however, in a recent book, J.A.O. Lemay points out that Smith's earlier writing was primarily geographical and ethnographic in nature and did not dwell on his personal experience; hence, there was no reason for him to write down the story until this point.[10]

 

Further skepticism has arisen from the fact that in his True Travels of 1630, Smith told a very similar story of being rescued through the intervention of a beautiful young girl after he was captured by Turks in Hungary in 1602; Karen Kupperman suggests that he "presented those remembered events from decades earlier" when telling Pocahontas's story.[11] A different theory suggests that even if Smith's version of events was accurate from his perspective, he may in fact been involved in a ritual intended to symbolize his death and rebirth as a member of the tribe.[12][13] However, David A. Price notes that this is only guesswork, since little is known of Powhatan rituals, and there is no evidence for any similar rituals among other North American tribes.[14]

 

Whatever really happened, this encounter initiated a friendly relationship with Smith and the Jamestown colony, and Pocahontas would often come to the settlement and play games with the boys there.[15] During a time when the colonists were starving, "every once in four or five days, Pocahontas with her attendants brought him [Smith] so much provision that saved many of their lives that else for all this had starved with hunger."[16] As the colonists expanded further, however, some of the Virginia Indians felt their lands were threatened, and conflicts arose again.

 

In 1608, Pocahontas is said to have saved Smith a second time. Smith and some other colonists were invited to Werowocomoco by Chief Powhatan on friendly terms. They were treated kindly and traded with the Indians, but they missed the tide and had to spend the night. That night, Pocahontas came to Smith's hut and told him that her father was planning to send men with food who would kill them when they put down their weapons to eat. She had been told not to inform them, but she begged the Englishmen to leave. Being forewarned, the English kept their weapons ready by them even while eating, and no attack came.[17]

 

In 1609, an injury from a gunpowder explosion forced Smith to return to England for medical care. The English told the natives Smith was dead, that he had been captured by a French pirate, that the pirate ship had been wrecked on the Brittany coast, and that it had gone down with all hands.[18] Pocahontas believed Smith was dead until she arrived in England several years later, the wife of John Rolfe.[19]

 

According to William Strachey, Pocahontas married a Powhatan warrior called Kocoum at some point before 1612; nothing more is known about this marriage.[20]

 

There is no suggestion in any of the historical records that Smith and Pocahontas were lovers. This romantic version of the story appears only in fictionalized versions of their relationship (such as the animated version by Walt Disney-though a romance was first written about as early as the 1800s.)

 

In March 1613, Pocahontas was residing at Passapatanzy, a village of the Patawomecks, a Virginia Indian tribe that did some trading with Powhatans. They lived in present-day Stafford County on the Potomac River near Fredericksburg, about 65 miles (105 km) from Werowocomoco. Smith writes in his Generall Historie she had been in the care of the Patawomec chief, Japazaws (or Japazeus), since 1611 or 1612.

 

When two English colonists began trading with the Patawomec, they discovered Pocahontas' presence. With the help of Japazaws, they tricked Pocahontas into captivity. Their purpose, as they explained in a letter, was to ransom her for some English prisoners held by Chief Powhatan, along with various weapons and tools the Powhatans had stolen.[21] Powhatan returned the prisoners, but failed to satisfy the colonists with the amount of weapons and tools he returned, and a long standoff ensued.

 

During the year-long wait, Pocahontas was kept at Henricus, in modern-day Chesterfield County, Virginia. Little is known about her life there although colonist Ralph Hamor wrote she received "extraordinary courteous usage."[22] An English minister, Alexander Whitaker, taught her about Christianity and helped to improve her English. After she was baptized, she took the name Rebecca as her English name.[23]

 

In March 1614, the standoff built to a violent confrontation between hundreds of English and Powhatan men on the Pamunkey River. At the Powhatan town of Matchcot, the English encountered a group that included some of the senior Powhatan leaders (but not Chief Powhatan himself, who was away). The English permitted Pocahontas to talk to her countrymen; however, according to the deputy governor, Thomas Dale, Pocahontas rebuked her absent father for valuing her "less than old swords, pieces, or axes" and told them she preferred to live with the English.[24] However, Pocahontas was raped at a young age by Thomas Dale.[25][26] Pocahontas told her older sister that she was raped by Thomas Dale and she had no reason to lie about it.[25][26] Rape was one of the worst crimes in a Virginia Indian's eyes and resulted in severe punishment, even death.

 

During her stay in Henricus, Pocahontas met John Rolfe. Rolfe, whose English-born wife had died, had successfully cultivated a new strain of tobacco in Virginia and spent much of his time there tending to his crop. He was a pious man who agonized over the potential moral repercussions of marrying a heathen. In a long letter to the governor requesting permission to wed her, he expressed both his love for her and his belief he would be saving her soul. He claimed he was motivated not by:

 

"the unbridled desire of carnal affection, but for the good of this plantation, for the honor of our country, for the Glory of God, for my own salvation… namely Pocahontas, to whom my hearty and best thoughts are, and have been a long time so entangled, and enthralled in so intricate a labyrinth that I was even a-wearied to unwind myself thereout."[27]

 

Pocahontas's feelings about Rolfe and the marriage are unknown.

 

They were married on April 5, 1614. For a few years after the marriage, the couple lived together on Rolfe's plantation, Varina Farms, which was located across the James River from the new community of Henricus. They had a child, Thomas Rolfe, born on January 30, 1615.

 

Their marriage was unsuccessful in winning the English captives back, but it did create a climate of peace between the Jamestown colonists and Powhatan's tribes for several years; in 1615, Ralph Hamor wrote ever since the wedding "we have had friendly commerce and trade not only with Powhatan but also with his subjects round about us".

 

The Virginia Colony's sponsors found it difficult to lure new colonists and investors to Jamestown. They used Pocahontas as an enticement and as evidence to convince people in Europe the New World's natives could be colonized, and the settlement made safe.[30] In 1616, the Rolfes traveled to England, arriving at the port of Plymouth on the 12th of June[31] and, then journeying to London by coach in June 1616. They were accompanied by a group of around eleven other Powhatan natives including Tomocomo, a holy man.[32] John Smith was living in London at the time and, while Pocahontas was in Plymouth she learned he was still alive.[33] Smith did not meet Pocahontas at this point, but he wrote a letter to Queen Anne urging Pocahontas be treated with respect as a royal visitor, because if she were treated badly, her "present love to us and Christianity might turn to… scorn and fury", and England might lose the chance to "rightly have a Kingdom by her means".[9]

 

Pocahontas was entertained at various society gatherings. On January 5, 1617 she and Tomocomo were brought before the King at the Banqueting House in Whitehall Palace at a performance of Ben Jonson's masque The Vision of Delight. According to Smith, King James was so unprepossessing neither of the Natives realized whom they had met until it was explained to them afterward.[33]

 

Pocahontas and Rolfe lived in the suburb of Brentford, Middlesex for some time, as well as Rolfe's family home at Heacham Hall, Heacham, Norfolk. In early 1617, Smith visited them at a social gathering. According to Smith, when Pocahontas saw him "without any words, she turned about, obscured her face, as not seeming well contented" and was left alone for two or three hours. Later, they spoke more; Smith's record of what she said to him is fragmentary and enigmatic. She reminded him of the "courtesies she had done" and "you did promise Powhatan what was yours would be his, and he the like to you". She then discomfited him by calling him "father", explaining Smith had called Powhatan "father" when a stranger in Virginia, "and by the same reason so must I do you". Smith did not accept this form of address, since Pocahontas outranked him as "a King's daughter". Pocahontas then, "with a well-set countenance", said[33]

 

Were you not afraid to come into my father's country and caused fear in him and all his people (but me) and fear you here I should call you 'father'? I tell you then I will, and you shall call me child, and so I will be for ever and ever your countryman.

 

Finally, she said the natives had thought Smith dead but her father had told Tomocomo to seek him "because your countrymen will lie much".[33]

Statue of Pocahontas in Saint George's church, Gravesend, Kent, England

 

In March 1617, Rolfe and Pocahontas boarded a ship to return to Virginia. However, the ship had only gone as far as Gravesend on the River Thames when Pocahontas became ill.[34] She was taken ashore and died. It is unknown what caused her death but the theories range from smallpox, pneumonia, or tuberculosis to her having been poisoned. [35]According to Rolfe, she died saying "all must die, but tis enough that her child liveth."[36] Her funeral took place on March 21, 1617 in the parish of Saint George's, Gravesend. The site of her grave is unknown, but her memory is recorded in Gravesend with a life-size bronze statue at St George's Church.

Arbour Hill is an inner city area of Dublin, on the Northside of the River Liffey, in the Dublin 7 postal district. Arbour Hill, the road of the same name, runs west from Blackhall Place in Stoneybatter, and separates Collins Barracks, now part of the National Museum of Ireland, to the south from Arbour Hill Prison to the north, whose graveyard includes the burial plot of the signatories of the Easter Proclamation that began the 1916 Rising.

  

The military cemetery at Arbour Hill is the last resting place of 14 of the executed leaders of the insurrection of 1916. Among those buried there are Patrick Pearse, James Connolly and Major John Mc Bride. The leaders were executed in Kilmainham and then their bodies were transported to Arbour Hill, where they were buried.

 

The graves are located under a low mound on a terrace of Wicklow granite in what was once the old prison yard. The gravesite is surrounded by a limestone wall on which their names are inscribed in Irish and English. On the prison wall opposite the gravesite is a plaque with the names of other people who gave their lives in 1916.

 

The adjoining Church of the Sacred Heart, which is the prison chapel for Arbour Hill prison, is maintained by the Department of Defence. At the rear of the church lies the old cemetery, where lie the remains of British military personnel who died in the Dublin area in the 19th and early 20th century.

 

A doorway beside the 1916 memorial gives access to the Irish United Nations Veterans Association house and memorial garden.

The Descent from Mount Sinai is a fresco by the Italian Renaissance painter Cosimo Rosselli and his assistants, executed in 1481–1482 and located in the Sistine Chapel, Rome. It depicts the prophet Moses in the process of receiving and introducing the Ten Commandments.

On 27 October 1480, several Florentine painters left for Rome, where they had been called as part of the reconciliation project between Lorenzo de' Medici, the de facto ruler of Florence, and Pope Sixtus IV. The Florentines started to work in the Sistine Chapel as early as spring 1481, along with Pietro Perugino, who was already there. Rosselli brought with him his son-in-law, Piero di Cosimo, who perhaps collaborated on this painting and at least one of the others assigned by his master.

The theme of the decoration was a parallel between the stories of Moses and those of Christ, as a sign of continuity between the Old Testament and the New Testament, as well as a continuity between the divine law of the Tables and the message of Jesus, who, in turn, chose Peter (the first alleged bishop of Rome) as his successor: this would finally result in a legitimation of the latter's successors, the popes of Rome.

The painting, like others in the cycle, shows more episodes at the same time; the theme is described by the inscription on the frieze PROMULGATIO LEGIS SCRIPTE PER MOISEM. In ("Promulgation of the Written Law through Moses").

In the upper part is Moses kneeling on Mount Sinai, with a sleeping Joshua nearby: he receives the Tables of the Law from Yahweh, who appears in a luminescent cloud, surrounded by angels. In the foreground, on the left, Moses brings the Tables to the Israelites. In the background is camp of tents, with the altar of the golden calf in the middle; the Israelites, spurred by Aaron, are adoring it: the position of some of them, painted from behind, was usually used for negative characters, such as Judas Iscariot in the Last Supper. Once seeing that, Moses, in the center, gets angry and breaks the Tables on the ground. The right background depicts the punishment of the idolatrous and the receiving of the new Tables. Joshua, in the blue and yellow, appears with Moses.

  

The Crossing of the Red Sea is a fresco executed in 1481–1482 and located in the Sistine Chapel, Vatican City. Of uncertain attribution, it has been assigned to Cosimo Rosselli.

On 27 October 1480 several Florentine painters left for Rome, where they had been called as part of the reconciliation project between Lorenzo de' Medici, the de facto ruler of Florence, and Pope Sixtus IV. The Florentines started to work in the Sistine Chapel as early as the Spring of 1481, along with Pietro Perugino, who was already there.

The theme of the decoration was a parallel between the Stories of Moses and those of Christ, as a sign of continuity between the Old and the New Testament. A continuity also between the divine law of the Tables and the message of Jesus, who, in turn, chose Peter (the first alleged bishop of Rome) as his successor: this would finally result in a legitimation of the latter's successors, the popes of Rome.

Among the several fresco in the cycle, that of the Passage of the Red Sea was the one with the most problematic attribution. Although the name of Ghirlandaio was made by several authorities, the work's style is more reminiscent of that of Cosimo Rosselli or Biagio d'Antonio.

The scene is part of the chapel's Stories of Moses cycle, and, like other frescoes there, shows several scenes at the same time. The sequence begins from the right background, where Moses and Aaron are begging the pharaoh to free the Israelites. On the right are the Egyptian soldiers, shown in typical Italian Renaissance military garments, armor and weapons, who are drowning after the Red Sea waters, which had miraculously opened to allow the Israelites to cross them, close around them. The pharaoh is portrayed in a frantic scream, while other figures try to return to the Egyptian shore by swimming. Before the army is a column hovering over the waters: this is a representation of the fire pillar sent by Yahweh to scare the Egyptians.

In the upper central area is a hail storm, sent by God to punish the Egyptians. Also depicted are some sunrays and, more to the left, a rainbow, symbols of the upcoming liberation for the Israelite people. Similar representation of meteorological phenomena were not uncommon in the 15th-century Italian art: other examples are Fra Angelico's Martyrdom of St. Mark on the Tabernacle of the Linaioli, and several Paolo Uccello's St. George and the Drake.

On the left are the Israelites, led by a young Moses with the typical yellow garment and green cloak, and a command baton, after they have just crossed the sea. Their safeness is testified by the presence of recreational activities, such as the prophetess Miriam playing a chordophone in the foreground. They continue their trip in procession, disappearing on the left, in a naturalistic landscape. Details include a pet dog in the foreground, reminiscent of Benozzo Gozzoli's paintings in the Magi Chapel.

  

The Youth of Moses or The Trials of Moses is a fresco by the Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli and his workshop, executed in 1481–1482 in the Sistine Chapel, Rome (modern-day Italy).

On 27 October 1480, Botticelli, together with other Florentine painters, left for Rome where he had been called as part of the reconciliation project between Lorenzo de' Medici, the de facto ruler of Florence, and Pope Sixtus IV. The Florentines started to work in the Sistine Chapel as early as the Spring of 1481, along with Pietro Perugino, who was already there.

 

The theme of the decoration was a parallel between the Stories of Moses and those of Christ, as a sign of continuity between the Old and the New Testament – a continuity also between the divine law of the Tables and the message of Jesus, who, in turn, chose Peter (the first alleged bishop of Rome) as his successor: this would finally result in a legitimation of the latter's successors, the popes of Rome.

Botticelli, helped by numerous assistants, painted three scenes. On 17 February 1482 his contract was renovated, including the other scenes to complete the chapel's decoration. However, on 20 February his father died: he returned to Florence, where he remained.

  

Moses Leaving for Egypt is a fresco by the Italian Renaissance painter Pietro Perugino and his workshop, executed around 1482 and located in the Sistine Chapel, Rome. It depicts a journey by the prophet Moses.

The commission of the work originated in 1480, when Perugino was decorating a chapel in the Old St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Pope Sixtus IV was pleased by his work, and decided to commission him also the decoration of the new Chapel he had built in the Vatican Palace. Due to the size of the work, Perugino was later joined by a group of painters from Florence, including Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and others.

Perugino's assistants in the Sistine Chapel included Pinturicchio. Some figures in the fresco were traditionally attributed to him, but this has been disputed by 20th-century art historians. They were painted by Andrea d'Assisi, Rocco Zoppo or, less likely, Lo Spagna or Bartolomeo della Gatta, other Perugino's collaborators of the time.

The fresco depicting the voyage of Moses is the first on the wall right to the altar, and faces the Baptism of Christ on the opposite wall.

The painting shows Moses (dressing in yellow and green as in the other frescoes of the cycle) leaving for Egypt, after he had been exiled from Midian, with Zipporah to his right. In the center, an angel asks him to circumcise his son Eliezer (scene on the right), as a sign of the alliance between Yahweh and the Israelites. The baptism, depicted on the opposite fresco, was in fact considered by several early Christian writers, including Augustine, as a kind of "spiritual circumcision". The ceremony is on the right, and includes Zipporah.

In the right background Moses and Zipporah are greeting Jethro before leaving. Natural elements include the hill landscape in the background, characterized by thin trees (including a palm, a symbol of Christian sacrifice), and the birds: two of them are mating, an allusion to the renovations cycles of the nature. On the left background is a group of shepherds. The dames with flying dresses were a common element of Florentine early Renaissance painting, used also by Ghirlandaio and Botticelli.

   

Brilliantly turned out bus and something unusual for the rally this year. Well done to all involved in this project, which was excellently executed.

Listen, executed in 2008 by Montclair-based sculptor Tom Nussbaum, is focused on what the artist refers to as "what it's like to listen and/or be heard." The large head has one ear to the ground, and is also well aware of the smaller figure in the other ear.

 

Montclair Art Museum (MAM), at 3 South Mountain Avenue, is one of the few museums in the United States devoted to American art and Native American art forms, with a collection consisting of more than 12,000 works. Chartered in 1909, thanks to the donations of artwork and funding of its two founders, Montclair residents William T. Evans, civic leader and art collector, and heiress Florence Osgood Rand Lang, the Montclair Art Museum opened its doors in 1914. The Beaux Arts building was designed by architect Albert R. Ross, at the direction of museum trustee Michel Le Brun. As the collection has grown, so too has the building housing it. The museum underwent renovations in 1924, 1931 and 2000-2001. The recent renovation doubled the museum's square footage, with architectural firm Beyer Blinder Belle at the helm.

Executed by the Sheriff

Astoria, Queens

 

The Astoria Play Center is one of a group of eleven immense new outdoor swimming pools which were opened in the summer of 1936 in a series of grand ceremonies presided over by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and Park Commissioner Robert Moses. All were constructed largely with funding provided by the Works Progress Administration, one of the many New Deal agencies created during the 1930s to address the effects of America's Great Depression. Designed to accommodate a total of 49,000 users simultaneously at locations scattered across the entire city, and completed just two and a half years after the LaGuardia administration took office, the new pool complexes gained quick recognition as being among the most remarkable public recreational facilities ever constructed in this country.

 

Many architects, landscape architects, and engineers were hired to execute the pool program and the hundreds of other new construction and rehabilitation projects undertaken between 1934 and 1936 by a newly consolidated Park Department. They were guided by a senior team composed of staff members and consultants who had earlier worked for Moses at various governmental agencies, including the New York State Council of Parks and the Long Island State Park Commission. They included architect Aymar Embury II, landscape architects Gilmore D. Clarke and Allyn R. Jennings, and civil engineers W. Earle Andrews and William H. Latham. Surviving documents also indicate that Robert Moses, himself a long-time swimming enthusiast, gave detailed attention to the designs for the new pool complexes.

 

Opened on July 2, 1936, with a capacity of 6,200 swimmers, and designed mainly by consulting Park Department architect John Matthews Hatton, the Astoria Play Center commands a striking waterfront location in Astoria Park. The vast scale of the pool complex is complemented by that of its setting - the distant vistas westward framed by the monumental forms of the Hell Gate and Triborough Bridges. Embedded into what has now become a densely wooded slope which descends to the water's edge from 19th Street, the play center complex was designed to take full advantage of its surroundings. The entire roof of the bath house structure is used for multi-level viewing terraces. Extensive concrete bleacher sections are located on the western side of the bath house and around the diving pool. They offer far more outdoor seating than is available at the other play centers; perhaps the abundant seating is related to the fact that the final trials for the 1936 Summer Olympics were held here.

 

Like Hatton's later design for the 1939 bath house at Betsy Head, the Astoria Play Center structure makes extensive use of glass block; it forms the lower recessed sections of the locker room walls which are topped by the original metal louver windows. Massive piers laid up in decorative bonds demarcate the bays. Glass block also forms extensive sections of the lateral walls of the entryway: the original Art Moderne style ticket booth and signage are its other significant features. Among the Center's more unusual design elements are the whimsical saucerlike roofs atop the upper portions of the filter house structure on the western side of the swimming pool. The areas adjacent to the pool complex include extensive pathway systems, playing areas, and a striking comfort station designed in a style similar to that of the bath house.

 

DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS

 

History of the Astoria Park Pool Site

 

The setting for the Astoria Park Pool and Play Center is the sloping, sixty-six acre Astoria Park, located on the east shore of the Hell Gate channel across from Ward's Island in western Queens. The complex has a panoramic view of the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan framed between the towering Triborough Bridge to the south and the majestic Hell Gate Bridge to the north. Long Island City and Astoria became part of greater New York City in the consolidation of 1898. By 1907, the land now occupied by Astoria Park and its surroundings remained occupied by fading, former estates of prominent families and ship captains, who had moved away as industrial and residential developments loomed ever closer. The pace of urbanization picked up after the opening of the Queensborough Bridge in 1909, adding many more factories and houses.

 

Around the turn of the century, sentiment emerged to increase public access to the East River and Hell Gate waterfront. In 1913, the City of New York acquired fifty-six acres of land along the shorefront for what was to become Astoria Park. Originally, named for Mayor William J. Gaynor, who served from 1910 to 1913, the name of the park was soon changed to Astoria Park. According to Parks Department Records, Astoria Park - which was originally equipped with two playgrounds, six tennis courts, three baseball diamonds, a wading pool, bandstand, and comfort station - was the first large park in New York City to provide for organized, rather than passive, recreation.

 

The Hell Gate Bridge, designed by engineer Gustav Lindenthal and architect Henry Hornbostel, was constructed over the northern park of Astoria Park in 1917; its majestic towers forming the park's northern vista. Major improvements to Astoria Park were undertaken in the 1930s under the auspices of the popular mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia and his legendary Park Commissioner, Robert Moses. These changes included the addition of 4.5 acres of parkland under the Triborough Bridge, which was finished in 1936, the same year of the opening of the Astoria Park Pool and Play Center. Engineered by O.H. Ammann and designed by the architect Aymar Embury II, the Triborough Bridge, along with the pool complex, added a sleek modernity to the park. The improvements of the 1930s were made largely by using funds obtained from the Works Progress Administration, one of the many public works programs created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the United States Congress during the Great Depression.

 

Fiorello LaGuardia, Robert Moses and the New Deal

 

Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected President of the United States in 1932 in the middle of the Great Depression that followed the stock market crash in 1929. Roosevelt promised to rebuild confidence in American capitalism and to improve the nation's standard of living by creating the New Deal economic program of unprecedented public spending on social programs and construction projects.

 

New York City had been especially hard hit by the economic downturn, and its citizens, hoping for change, elected Fiorello LaGuardia to the mayoralty of New York City in 1933 under a reform-minded "fusion" ticket. He chose New York State Park Commissioner, Robert Moses, a champion of reform politics, as New York City's new Park Commissioner. The new mayor's success in securing a lion's share of monies made available by the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA), and Moses' superb management skills and his ability to attract talented designers and engineers to his staff, resulted in profound physical changes in the environment of New York City. The construction and renovation of neighborhood recreation areas, such as pools and play grounds, were some of the most ambitious and successful programs undertaken by Moses with funds largely provided by the WPA.

 

Fiorello H. La Guardia was sworn in as the ninety-ninth mayor of the City of New York in January 1934, as an anti-Tammany Hall reform candidate. A maverick Republican and a five-term congressman from East Harlem, LaGuardia won the 1933 mayoral election on the "Fusion" ticket after losing the 1929 mayoral race on the Republican line. The Fusion Conference Committee at first considered running Robert Moses, another Republican, who was appointed Chairman of the New York State Council of Parks in 1924 by his political mentor, Governor Alfred E. Smith, a Tammany Hall Democrat from New York City. However, the committee decided against Moses because of his association with Smith, and chose LaGuardia instead. At the time, Moses was a popular public figure with a reputation as a progressive, and as the builder of great parks and parkways like Jones Beach and the Northern State Parkway on Long Island.

 

His endorsement of LaGuardia during the campaign was considered instrumental in securing a victory for LaGuardia. Within a week of the election, LaGuardia invited Moses to join his incoming administration as a reward.

 

In the 1920s, Moses was at the forefront of the national recreation movement began in the first decade of the twentieth century, led by such men as President Theodore Roosevelt and the lesser-known George D. Butler of the National Recreation Association. The movement gained momentum after President Calvin Coolidge convened the first National Conference on Outdoor Recreation in 1924.

 

During the1930s Depression, the need to provide for or to improve outdoor recreation, especially in urban areas, became most urgent, and fit into the FDR's New Deal economic programs. Moses accepted the position of Commissioner of Parks in the LaGuardia administration on the condition that the five existing independent Park Departments (one for each borough) would be consolidated into a single department with himself as the sole Commissioner, and that the Park Commissioner's authority also include control of the City's parkways. He also demanded to be appointed the Chief Executive Officer of the Triborough Bridge Authority, which was then building the bridge of that name, and that a new agency, the Marine Parkway Authority, which would build a bridge to the Rockaways, be created with himself at the helm.

 

Already in charge of the Long Island State Park Commission, the New York State Council of Parks, the Jones Beach State Park Authority, and the Bethpage State Park Authority, Moses would then be in control of all existing and proposed parks and parkways in the New York metropolitan region, except for areas outside of New York State.

 

Moses began to assess the state of the City's parks and to plan for their future as soon as LaGuardia announced his intention to appoint Moses as Park Commissioner. According to one source: "Immediately after the election he wrote out, on a single piece of paper, a plan for putting 80,000 men to work on 1,700 relief projects." Moses hired a consulting engineer and three assistant engineers to survey every park and parkway in the City. The survey was completed by the time he took office in mid-January 1934.

 

When Moses took over the Park Department, it was already employing 69,000 relief workers funded mainly by the federal Civil Works Administration (CWA) and the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA). However, Moses found the men to be ill-equipped and inadequately supervised, and considered many of the construction projects to have been poorly designed. He immediately began to revamp the entire operation of the Park Department and established a Division of Design, located at the Arsenal in Central Park. The staff was to be headed up by experienced professionals drawn mainly from his State agencies. Some of his talented staff of young architects, landscape architects and engineers had worked on the designs for Long Island's highly acclaimed parks, including Jones Beach, which is considered one of Moses' greatest accomplishments.

 

His staff also included a number of well-known and accomplished designers, among them architects Aymar Embury II and John M. Hatton, and the landscape architect and civil engineer Gilmore D. Clarke. Other top members of Moses' staff were the landscape architect Allyn R. Jennings, and civil engineers W. Earle Andrews and William H. Latham.

 

The Department needed to produce plans and blueprints immediately so the growing force of relief workers could be assigned to worthwhile projects as quickly as possible. Within a week, Moses managed to persuade CWA officials to drop some of the regulations governing the hiring of staff and to relax its spending limits on project planning, allowing him to hire 600 architects, engineers and draftsmen at salaries above CWA wage guidelines. By the first of February, they were busily producing designs and blueprints.

 

The Park Department's Division of Design was organized in the following manner: a topographical unit of about 400 surveyors and draftsmen, a landscape architecture unit of about sixty people, an architecture unit made up of sixty architects and draftsmen, and an engineering unit of about fifty. Smaller units included an Arboricultural Department and an Inspection Department. All the work in the Division of Design was under the direct supervision of the Park Engineer, who was aided and advised by a Consulting Architect, a Consulting Landscape Architect, and a Consulting Engineer. All new projects began in the topographical unit, where a complete survey of the land was prepared. It then moved on to the landscaping unit, where the basic concept for the design was developed. Next, the three units: landscape, architecture, and engineering, collaborated to produce the final design and all the necessary construction documents.

 

The Park Engineer and his aides had to approve all of the plans. Moses himself sometimes stepped in to revise or overrule a design, especially on the larger, more visible projects.

 

Moses' superior management ability and political savvy allowed him to move projects along very quickly and to produce concrete results, gaining for him much public admiration. However, his personal demeanor was notoriously stubborn and arrogant, and he sometimes fired people on the spot for no apparent reason.

 

At times, he disregarded the legitimate authority of other governmental agencies. Once, when the Department of Plant and Structures refused to suspend a ferry service that used a terminal in the path of constructing the Triborough Bridge approach road, Moses had his men demolish the terminal while the boat was on the other side of the river. He feuded with President Franklin D. Roosevelt for years, even while Washington was pouring millions of dollars into Moses' own Park Department. His later battles with and subsequent triumphs over community groups opposed to the routing of the Gowanus and the Cross-Bronx Expressways through their neighborhoods are now legendary. Moses was also known to have been insensitive to people of color, and tried to restrict access to many of his recreational facilities, including the pools. He determined that the Colonial Park pool in Harlem would be the only one for minority use. Most of the other pools, including Astoria, were placed in white neighborhoods.

 

The Thomas Jefferson Park pool, located in East Harlem was (LaGuardia's old congressional district) was close to Spanish Harlem where the city's growing Puert Rican population was settling, and also not very far from African-American Harlem. To discourage minority use at the Jefferson Park facility, Moses kept the water heating system turned off, believing that the cold water would not bother Caucasian swimmers, "but would deter any 'colored' people who happened to enter it once from returning." To many he was a master builder; to others he was a spoiled bully; and he seemingly always had his way.

 

In the summer of 1934, however, Robert Moses was a hero. Hundreds of projects, covering virtually every neighborhood in the city, had been completed. Structures were repainted, tennis courts resurfaced, and lawns reseeded. Hundreds of new construction projects were either underway or being designed. Among the projects being drawn up at the time was the Astoria Park Pool.

 

The Designers Behind the Planning of the Astoria Park Pool

 

Aymar Embury II and Gilmore D. Clarke, respectively the Park Department's Consulting Architect and Consulting Landscape Architect, were employed by the City on a part-time basis to oversee designs for park projects under Robert Moses. The head of the Division of Design at the time was the Park Engineer, William H. Latham, who was responsible for the preparation of all plans and specifications within the department. Major design problems were discussed by Embury and Clarke before the preliminary sketches were made under Latham's direction. Completed sketches were subject to approval by the Park Engineer, the General Superintendent, and Commissioner Moses. The consultants would give regular criticism during the preparations of the plans.

 

Aymar Embury II (1880-1966) was born in New York City and studied engineering at Princeton University, where he received a Master of Science degree in 1901. He acquired his architectural training through apprenticeships with three New York firms: George B. Post, Howells and Stokes, and Palmer and Hornbostel. He also worked for Cass Gilbert. In 1905, Embury won both first and second prize in a contest held by the Garden City Company for a modest country house to be built in Garden City, Long Island. This gained for him a reputation as a talented designer, and led to many commissions for country houses in the New York metropolitan area. He subsequently published seven books and several pamphlets, mainly on early American architecture, establishing him as an authority on that subject. By the start of the Great Depression, he was well-known and had received a wide range of commissions all over the east coast of the United States, including college buildings and social clubs, in addition to residences.

 

He designed the Players and Nassau Clubs in Princeton, New Jersey, the Princeton Club in New York City, and the University Club in Washington, D.C.

 

Embury was said to have supervised the design of over six hundred public projects, including Orchard Beach, Bryant Park, the New York City Building at the 1939 World's Fair, the Donnell Branch of the New York Public Library, the Hofstra University Campus, the Central Park and Prospect Park Zoos, Jacob Riis Park, five of the eleven neighborhood pool and play centers, the Lincoln Tunnel, the Triborough Bridge, and many more. His relationship to the planning of the Astoria Pool and Play Center appears to have been limited to his role as the department's consulting architect.

 

Gilmore D. Clarke (1892-1982) was born in New York City and studied landscape architecture and civil engineering at Cornell University, from which he received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1913. He served as an engineer in the army during World War I, receiving many citations and decorations, and remained in the Army Reserve Corps until 1939. During the 1920s, he served on several local, state and federal commissions as landscape architect, including the Architectural Advisory Board for the United States Capital, the New York State Council of Parks (which was headed by Robert Moses), and the Westchester County Park Commission, among many others. For his work in Westchester County, which included the Rye Beach Playland, the Saw Mill River Parkway, and the Bronx River Parkway, Clarke was awarded the Gold Medal of Honor in Landscape Architecture from the Architectural League of New York in 1931.

 

By the time of the Great Depression, Clarke was already established as the most popular landscape architect in public works in America.

 

His career advanced during the 1930s. Besides being hired by Robert Moses as the Consulting Landscape Architect to the New York City Park Department, he also became a member of the National Commission on Fine Arts, the New York State Planning Council, and the Board of Design for the 1939 New York World's Fair. In addition to Astoria Park, his work for the Park Department included Bryant Park, Central Park Zoo, City Hall Park, Orchard Beach in the Bronx, and the Henry Hudson Parkway. He taught landscape architecture at Cornell University from 1935 to 1950, serving as dean from 1939 until his retirement in 1950 and wrote several articles for trade periodicals. In 1935, Clarke joined Michael Rapuano, an engineer and landscape architect, establishing the New York civil engineering and landscape architectural firm Clarke & Rapuano, Inc. Clarke was president of the firm from 1962 until his retirement in 1972.

 

Later in his career, Clarke worked as a consultant on the construction of the United Nations Headquarters in New York and became a Trustee for the American Museum of Natural History.

 

Architect John M. Hatton was born c.1886 in Iowa, and first appears in New York City directories in 1915. His professional training remains undetermined, but he practiced architecture in New York City into the late 1940s. In the early 1920s, he formed a partnership with architect Diego DeSuarez (DeSuarez & Hatton), which lasted only a few years. In addition to the Astoria Pool, his other works for the Department of Parks in the 1930s include the Betsy Head Pool in Brooklyn and Pelham Bay Park golf clubhouse. In the 1940s, he was considered an expert in store modernization (lighting, space layout, customer comfort, display, fixtures, and storefronts) and his designs for commercial spaces and storefronts were published in several architectural periodicals. Among his clients was the Stetson Hat Company. He also did work for the New York City Housing Authority in the 1940s.

 

The Design and Construction of the Astoria Park Pool

 

The Astoria Play Center is one of the group of eleven immense new outdoor swimming pools that opened in the summer of 1936 in a series of grand ceremonies presided over by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and Park Commissioner Robert Moses. All were constructed mainly with funds provided by the WPA. Designed to accommodate a total of 49,000 users simultaneously at locations scattered across the entire city and completed just two-and-a-half years after LaGuardia took office, the new pool complexes completely dwarfed the city's two pre-existing outdoor public pools and gained quick recognition as being among the most remarkable public recreational facilities ever constructed in this country. The city's pool construction program was reported to have been the most expensive in terms of total cost.

 

Robert Moses, an avid swimmer who had a home near the ocean in Babylon, Long Island, was known to have taken a special interest in the design and construction of bathing and swimming facilities, such as Jones Beach, Orchard Beach and Riis Park, as well as the neighborhood swimming pools, including Astoria Pool. As a result of his special attention, along with that of Embury and Clarke, the design and execution of New York City's aquatic facilities in the 1930s were a cut above most other park projects at the time.

 

At the start, the Park Department adopted a list of shared guidelines for the entire pool project in order to enhance the efficiency of the design effort, to unify the operations of each complex, and to meet the various local and federal requirements of the relief programs. For example, each pool complex was to have separate swimming, diving and wading pools, and a large bath house, the locker room sections of which doubled as gymnasiums during non-swimming months. The bath houses, which would serve as the centerpieces of each complex, would be distinctive pavilions that would establish the design motif of each facility. Concrete bleachers at the perimeter of the pools would furnish spectator viewing areas to be augmented at some sites with rooftop promenades and galleries. There would be a minimum width for the decks to provide enough room for sunbathing and circulation. There had to be underwater lighting for night swimming.

 

At least one dimension of each swimming pool would have to be a multiple of fifty five yards to allow swimming competitions to be held at standard distances in either English or metric systems. Plus, the complexes had to share low-cost building materials, principally brick and cast concrete, as required by the federal government.

 

To satisfy federal stipulation on low-cost materials, it appears that the design team for the pools determined that the streamlined and curvilinear forms of the Art Moderne and Modern Classical styles would best meet the low-cost needs and still permit pleasing aesthetics. As a group, the pools were also distinguished by the innovative mechanical systems required to heat, filter, and circulate the vast amounts of water they used. Many of these innovations set new standards for swimming pool construction, such as scum gutters that allowed in enough sunlight to naturally kill off bacteria and a series of footbaths filled with foot cleaning solution through which bathers were forced to pass upon entering the pool areas from the locker rooms.

 

Sited in existing older parks or built on other city-owned land subsequently developed with as parks and playgrounds, the huge pool complexes were provided with landscape settings which included additional recreational areas, connecting pathway systems, and comfort stations. Despite the fact that the basic components were essentially the same and that the WPA required that only the cheapest materials be used, each of these swimming pool complexes is especially notable its distinctive and unique setting, appearance, and character.

 

Although each pool complex has been credited to a particular architect, the designs appear to actually have been collaborative efforts among the army of architects, draftsmen, engineers, and landscape architects employed by the Park Department in the 1930s. In the instance of the Astoria Play Center, the architect John M. Hatton is credited with the design. Plans on file at the Parks Department archives show that Hatton only drew the main façades and certain details of the bath house and bleachers, while Gregory Kiely drew the bath house's minor façades and some additional details. The filter house was done by C.E. Nelson, J.D. McGarr, and Joseph L. Hautman and details such as the clock, signage, lettering, light fixtures, railings, and phone booths by Harry Ahrens and F.J. Svarti.

 

Since the eleven pool facilities shared many common features and specifications that could be repeated at each site, and contained other elements that were similar from complex to complex, these junior designers, having different areas of expertise, apparently moved quickly from project to project. The department produced designs and construction documents simultaneously with great speed so that eleven pools and hundreds of other park projects, including some massive undertakings like Orchard Beach, were completed within a few years. The lead architect for each pool project, who in the case of the Astoria center was John M. Hatton, designed the bath house, which was unique to each site, establishing the motif that guided the design and detailing of the rest of the complex.

 

In October 1934, the Park Department announced the start of excavations and site work for several of the new pools, including Astoria, although the excavation plan for Astoria was not issued until December. The new Astoria Pool was to be located at the site of an existing, smaller wading pool, just to the north of the Triborough Bridge, which was then under construction. The earliest reference to the design of the bath house is in an internal Park Department document from July 1935, which describes a sketch that appears not to have survived. The memorandum also discusses footings for the main pool as having already been poured, as well as the concrete floor for the pipe tunnel and the northeast corner wall of the pool. The cast iron drain and sub-piping had also been laid. The diving pool, however, was still being excavated and no work had yet begun on the wading pool. Plans were still being prepared for the filter house and comfort station.

 

By August 1935, however, the fully developed plans for the façades of the bath house were released as were the landscape and bleacher plans. The filter house plans were completed that November. Revisions continued through 1936. During the period from December 1935 through October 1936, scores of construction and engineering blueprints were completed by the staff, and building continued at a steady pace until late in the year. Enough of the complex was completed for the Astoria Pool to open with much fanfare on July 2, 1936, on the first day of trials for the U.S. Olympic swim team.

 

The year 1936 was known as "the swimming pool year," since ten of the eleven giant neighborhood pools were opened that summer, one per week for ten weeks. Each opening day was a memorable event for its neighborhood. The day-long events featured parades, blessings of the waters, swimming races, diving competitions, appearances by Olympic stars, and performances by swimming clowns. Mayor LaGuardia attended every opening to perform the ribbon cutting. Festivities continued well after dusk with LaGuardia pulling the switch to turn on each pool's spectacular underwater lighting to the "oooohs" of the crowds. The opening ceremony at Astoria Pool was attended by 20,000 people.

 

The completed Astoria Pool complex was widely acclaimed and was featured in American Architect and Architecture (November 1936) and Architectural Forum (August 1937). The use of glass block construction and louvers received special praise. Astoria was the city's largest pool at 54,450 square feet, and the second largest WPA project in Queens after Jacob Riis Park. Harry Hopkins, the WPA administrator, called the Astoria Pool "the finest in the world." It remains the city's largest public pool, and one of the major achievements of the New Deal in New York City.

 

Subsequent History

 

Upon opening, the Astoria Park Pool hosted the swimming, water polo, and diving trials for the United States Olympic Team, preparing for the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics.

 

The events were widely covered in local newspapers, and the Astoria Pool was often referred to instead as the Olympic Tryout Pool in the articles.

 

There were very few alterations in the years immediately after the completion of the pool; mainly systems upgrades and minor repairs were made. However, the original stainless steel sculptures of female athletes that had been produced by the noted sculptor Emil Siebern (1889-1942), who was a pioneer in the medium of stainless steel, had been removed from the pedestals over the west side of the main entryway before 1943 due to deterioration. Also, the surrounding playgrounds were reconstructed in 1946 and new gutters were installed in the pool in 1948. Sometime between 1948 and 1963, a one-story, brick rooftop addition containing concession stands was constructed on the filter house.

 

In the early 1940s, a group of boys from the Astoria neighborhood got together to perform swimming stunts on Wednesday nights at the pool. Known as the Aquazines, they donned costumes and treated audiences to choreographed swimming acts with music, backdrops, props and, sometimes, trained dogs. The routines showcased their talents as swimmers and divers. One of the Aquazines, Whitney Hart, became a professional diver and was later inducted into the Swimming Hall of Fame.

 

The Astoria Park Pool was again host to the swimming and diving trials for the United States Olympic Teams in 1964. In preparation for the events, the facility was rehabilitated in 1963, its first comprehensive overhaul since it was opened twenty-seven years earlier. The work included the installation of new light weight concrete decks on the upper and lower promenades, as well as replacement of some window sash, and new paint throughout. The original glass pylons over the main entryway were resurfaced with brick.

 

In 1979-82, the playground to the southwest of the pool was removed and replaced with ball courts and the south comfort station in that area was demolished. Much of Astoria Park itself was reconstructed between 1983 and 1987; the project included the rehabilitation of the comfort station in the north playground and reconstruction of the seawall. In 1991, the main swimming pool was reconstructed, including the replacement of the pool floor, drains, supply islands and gutters; this replacement project was repeated in 1998-99 at which time the pool received a major systems upgrade, including new lights, pumps, piping, electric lines, filter system, showers, and improved chlorination and security systems. Also, an accessibility ramp was installed in the main pool and the supply islands in that pool were removed for safety reasons and replaced with bottom supply inlets.

 

Between 1996 and 2001, the north playground was rebuilt, the comfort station restored, and the park itself was the subject of a large erosion control and re-landscaping project. At this time, some replacement of the curbing and paving on the east entry ramps to the bath house took place, but there were no changes to the configuration of the ramps and walks. Additional minor site work and erosion control projects took place around the pool complex in 2000 to 2004.

 

The Architecture and Site of the Astoria Park Pool and Play Center

 

The New Deal construction projects within New York City, such as the Astoria Park Pool, were a part of a national trend that included similar projects undertaken by various governmental agencies, ranging from the vast Tennessee Valley Authority to small cities and towns. Urban projects built with WPA funding often possessed similar qualities from region to region, partly because the difficult economic climate dictated the use of inexpensive building materials, but also because the programs provided employment opportunities for a generation of young architects and engineers, many of whom were committed to modernism. For example, the bathhouse and waterfront facilities at Aquatic Park in San Francisco are similar in plan and appearance to the public pool and beachfront projects being built at about the same time in New York City.

 

The California facility, with its streamlined, concrete façade and steel-framed windows, bears a striking resemblance to the façade added in 1936 with WPA funds to the bathhouse at Jacob Riis Park in Queens.

 

The original and creative use made of these modest materials by Moses' talented design teams and the careful siting of each project makes every one of them a distinguished, individual design, as much related to their specific environment and needs as to one another.

 

The Astoria Play Center commands a striking waterfront location in Astoria Park. The vast scale of the pool complex is complemented by that of its setting - the distant vistas westward framed by the monumental forms of the Hell Gate and Triborough Bridges. Embedded into a wooded slope which descends to the water's edge from 19th Street, the play-center complex was designed to take full advantage of its surroundings. The entire roof of the bath house structure is used for multi-level viewing terraces. Extensive concrete bleacher sections are located on the western side of the bath house and around the diving pool. They offer far more outdoor seating than is available at the other play centers; perhaps the abundant seating is related to the fact that the United States team trials for the 1936 summer Olympic Games were held there.

 

Like Hatton's later design for the 1939 bath house at Betsy Head Park in Brooklyn, the Astoria Play Center structure makes extensive use of glass block wall construction; it forms the lower recessed sections of the locker room walls which are topped by the original metal louver windows. Massive piers laid up in decorative bonds demarcate the bays. Glass blocks also form the extensive sections of the lateral walls of the entry lobby: the original Art Moderne-style ticket booth and signage are its other significant features. Among the center's more unusual design elements are the whimsical saucer-like roofs atop the filter house on the western side of the complex. In a playground to the northwest of the center is a striking comfort station designed in a style similar to that of the bath house.

 

Description

 

Plan and Circulation. The pool is complex is approached via either one of two stepped ramps leading westward down from 19th Street to a wide plaza located in front of the east façade of the bath house. There are also two ancillary stairways that lead down to the plaza from the pathways which connect the sidewalk along 19th Street to the viewing platforms on the roof of the bath house. The viewing platforms are on two levels connected by steps and provide views of the pools and the west vista, which includes the Hell Gate Channel, the Triborough Bridge, the Hell Gate Bridge, and Wards Island. There are also steps from the lower viewing platforms to the park pathways that surround the pool complex and lead down to the ball courts, playground, lawn and Shore Boulevard. Upon entering the centrally located, open-air lobby from the entry plaza, patrons buy admissions from the freestanding ticket booth and are led to either the men's or women's locker rooms thorough doorways on the sides of the lobby.

 

From the locker rooms, access to the deck areas surrounding the pool is provided by doors on the west façade of the bath house. The three pools are surrounded by wide decks and sun bathing areas. There are additional viewing platforms and a non-original concession stand located atop the filter house on the west side of the complex. Extensive bleacher areas extend across nearly the entire eastern deck and curve around the southern side of the complex near the diving pool, ending at the filter house. There is a smaller bleacher area on the north side near the wading pool. There are also several service entrances leading in from the surrounding park and pathways on all sides of the complex.

 

The Bath House and Rooftop Viewing Platforms. The one-story bath house, which is partially built into the slope of the park, employs a U-shaped plan and is constructed of concrete, Flemish-bond brick (now mostly painted), and glass blocks. Its height varies to accommodate two levels of rooftop viewing platforms. It has a centrally-located open-air lobby, and a series of stairway which connect the viewing platforms to one another, and to the surrounding park pathways. The concrete foundation is stepped on the east side and incorporates steel gratings on the top step.

 

The east façade is fifteen bays with a centrally located main entryway, which opens into an outdoor lobby. At the center of the lobby is a multi-sided ticket booth designed in a nautical motif. The base of the ticket booth consists of terrazzo slabs angled outward toward the countertop, which is protected by a mesh cage. The roof of the booth, which aligns with the multi-side counter below, is supported by steel columns that are set back behind the counter. The roof features two step-backs, the lower one featuring a series of moldings, while the upper one has slotted openings serving to ventilate the booth. The booth is topped by short stack-like motif decorated with large cogs.

 

The floor of the lobby is paved with brick with a bluestone and granite border, while the ceiling consists of the exposed concrete underside of the rooftop viewing terrace and its supportive beams. The original clock is suspended from the westernmost beam. The three bays of each sidewall in the lobby are separated by compound piers clad in decorative brickwork. Each bay contains a set of wood doors, painted black, topped by a decorative steel lintel supporting a large expanse of glass blocks that have decorative aluminum grills at the bottom. The grills at the center bays have applied, deco-style aluminum lettering that denote the men's and women's locker rooms to either side of the lobby. There are also angled deco-style aluminum signs also identifying the men's and women's locker rooms on either side of the lobby. Wrought-iron fences and gates are located on the east and west sides.

 

The entryway is flanked on the west side by massive brick piers which step in toward the lobby and feature full-height expanses of glass blocks. Massive, molded concrete beams span the east and west openings. Parks Department signage has been added to the piers. The remaining bays consist of a series of recessed expanses of glass block walls topped by the original metal and glass louver windows (covered with non- historic mesh grills) and convex, fluted aluminum lintels. One bay is presently boarded up. Massive, projecting piers laid up in decorative brick bonds demarcate the bays. The entire façade is topped by bluestone coping.

 

The north side wing is partially built in the slope of the park, and has only one exposed façade, which faces south, but this façade is only partially exposed due to the slope of the hill. Abutting this façade is a concrete stairway with deco-style steel railings, which leads from the north pathway to the viewing terraces down to the main entrance plaza to the lobby. The side wing's façade has two bays and consists of brick walls and a wide horizontal band of glass blocks (now painted over). The bays are separated by a wide pier that is similar to the piers of the east façade of the bath house. Steel railings are attached to the brick. An original doorway in the pier has been sealed with wood covered with painted aluminum sheets. The south side wing is a mirror-image of the north wing, but its glass blocks have not been painted over. A narrow part of the south wing's brick south façade is exposed due to the slope of the site.

 

Its fenestration, now boarded up, is partially exposed above steel grates. There is also a service entry with a bulkhead at this location.

 

The bath house's seventeen-bay west façade is similar to the east façade, but is lower due to the slope of the site and because its roof accommodates the lower viewing terrace. In addition, the façade has two sets of paired wooden exit doors, painted black, from the men's and women's locker rooms. These doors are set in semicircular coves near the north and south ends of the façade. There are also non-historic security lamps, cameras, and annunciators attached to the bricks near the lobby.

 

The entire roof of the bath house, including the side wings, is paved for use as either viewing platforms or pathways leading to the platforms from the park's paths. The decks are paved with concrete with bluestone borders. All of these publicly-accessible areas are enclosed by deco-style steel railings, which incorporate flagpoles on the east side of the roof. The platforms are connected by concrete steps with historic steel railings. There are two oval, header-brick pylons (now painted) located on either side of the main entryway to the pool; they were originally made of glass blocks and were altered to their present appearance in 1963. On the west side are two lower, multi-sided concrete ventilators, aligned with the glass block expanses in the piers flanking the lobby. They originally also served as the bases for the original metal sculptures of nymphs holding balls that had been removed by 1943. The walls on the lower part of the upper viewing platform are made of brick.

 

The Pools and Deck Areas. The enclosed pool area to the west of the bath house forms an ellipse with its long axis set from north to south. Within this area are located the rectangular swimming pool flanked on either side by semicircular pools for diving on the south and wading on the north. Altogether, the three pools, which are separated by concrete decks, echo the elliptical shape of the enclosure. Concrete bleachers of varying heights line most of the inner sides of the brick perimeter walls of the pool area. These walls are topped by wrought-iron fences. The shallow wading pool has two non-original spray spouts near its center and eleven non-original spray spouts spaced at regular distances along its curved sides. The swimming pool is large expanse of water lined with a concrete gutter. It has a non-historic handicap ramp on the east side.

 

The diving pool, which is no longer in use and presently fenced off, includes at its south end, the pool's original, dramatically curved concrete, multi-level main diving platform. Each of the three platforms is cantilevered above the pool and protected by deco-style copper that match the copper railings that surround the perimeter of the diving pool. The main diving platform is flanked by two similar, but lower, cantilevered diving platforms. Two other low, concrete diving platforms that appear to be later in date are suspended over the pool from the deck on its north side. The deck surrounding the pool has non-historic lampposts, non-original drinking fountains near the bath house, and a flagpole, which is located between the swimming and wading pools. There are two other flagpoles south of the diving pool; they have floodlights attached to them.

 

The Flemish-bond brick perimeter wall (now painted), which is topped by concrete coping and wrought-iron fences, rises in height toward the south end of the site due to the topography. At the north end it is a freestanding wall lined on the inside with low bleachers. There are also service entries consisting of wrought-iron gates flanked by tall, decorative brick posts with cast- concrete coping. At its south and southwest portions, the perimeter wall is tall enough to incorporate service areas beneath the bleacher areas. There are service entrances covered with roll-down steel gates, and windows covered with steel grates and plates in the south part of the wall. Some windows are now sealed with brick. The bleachers also extend below the west façade of the bath house. They are interrupted at the locker room entryway by shallow concrete steps. Steel tube railings protect the bleachers at these locations.

 

There is another flight of concrete steps upon the bleachers in front of the bath house lobby; it has a steel tube hand rail. There are non-historic steel support columns on the southwest portion of bleachers. These are used in the summer to support shade covers.

 

The Filter House. The filter house is the rectangular-in-plan, Flemish bond-brick building (now painted) on the west side of the pool; it includes raised areas at either end containing viewing platforms covered with cast-concrete, saucer-shaped roofs with scalloped edges. Reached via cantilevered, concrete steps, the viewing platforms have concrete floors and are protected with deco-style steel railings. There is also a non- historic brick and concrete concession stand on the lower part of its roof, which is just a few steps above deck level due to changes in the elevation of the site. Thus, the filter house's west façade rises to a full story in height at the center and two full stories at the raised ends beneath the saucers. The east façade of the filter house has brick walls covered with non-original, painted murals. The west façade is seven bays and is articulated in a similar manner as the east and west façades of the bath house.

 

Originally, it had steel casements, but these have been filled in with brick and narrow strips of glass blocks. There are also empty niches lined with painted concrete on the areas of the façade that align with the saucer roofs (The original blueprints specified glass blocks at these locations, which have been removed). These taller sections have coursed brick façades. The north façade is fronted by service ramps and entryways and steel sash at the second story. The south façade of the filter house consists of coursed brick, a service entrance, and security lights and equipment.

 

The Surrounding Park including the Playground, Comfort Station, and Ball Court. The portions of Astoria Park that are part of the landmark site include a series of pathways paved with either blacktop or hexagonal blocks with either concrete or bluestone curbs. Some of these paths predate the pool complex, while others were installed at that time. Some of the paths are stepped, most notably both of the diagonal stepped paths leading from 19th Street down to the main entry plaza on the east side of the bath house. There are circular, concrete-paved areas at the top of both of these ramps that demarcate the locations of original fountains that have long since been removed. The one on the south side has brass letters and segments embedded in the concrete to form a compass. The plaza also has iron tube railings parallel to the main façade.

 

There are also park benches, bollards (both iron and concrete), wrought-iron fences and park lamps at various locations; these appear not to be original features of the park and to post date the construction of the play center. There is a lawn on the east side of the complex which features a granite memorial commemorating the First World War. The memorial was placed in Astoria Park in 1926, and was moved to its present location during construction of the play center. The memorial is flanked by flagpoles. An asphalt-paved ball court to the southwest of the pool complex has non-historic chain link fences surrounding it and non-historic concrete steps. A playground to the northwest to the site, enclosed by non- historic wrought-iron fences, has non-historic play equipment. A Flemish-bond brick comfort station (now painted), built at the same time and in the same style as the pool complex, is located on the south side of the playground.

 

The one-story building is square in plan and features projecting end piers with decorative brickwork, curved wall surfaces near the entrances, incised lettering indicated and girls/boys rooms, glass block wall surfaces, non-historic roof-top weathervane and decorative cast concrete embellishments. There is also non-historic Parks Department signage and security lighting applied to the walls. A brick, curving retaining wall extends westward from the filter house. It is topped by concrete coping and wrought-iron fencing that matches the rest of the complex.

 

- From the 2006 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report

A last station shot whilst executing my own reversing move back to the car. Pleasant juxtaposition of the two colours though the two-tone orange/yellow has almost gone on 20311, after just 7 days of operational work clearing leaf gunk of the rail-head. The consist is almost unrecognisable in colour as well and I guess at this rate of getting filthy, its hardly worthwhile to keep on cleaning the set, just for the photographers! 20311 is hailing the usual set of 'Sandite Units' and a lot of water in FEA-B RHTT A Tank Wagons, to provide the spraying function of the rail heads on predominantly passenger lines and there are similar services operating over the whole country between the 1st week in October and the 1st or 2nd week in December; Leaf Fall Season. The set finally got away, after little more than 5 minutes, at 19:46 and after a further 5 minutes, a Northern class 170 arrived and pulled into the 'Bay Platform', 6, on a terminating service, 1W45, from Sheffield; busy place it seems. HNRC class 20, 20314 is now heading the return working for the day, 3S15, to York Thrall Europa, on what will be, tomorrow, the last day of working for this pair of HNRC units. Friday saw the re-instatement of the DRS pair, 20302 and 20303 on the usual S.Yorks diagrams and as I compose these notes, there have been no issues so far... The last of the pictures will show the passage of the blue DRS pair, on the NER's line south of here, through the old Carnaby Station site, just 3km away.

Executed hand-held and slightly cropped from the right hand side.

Hassan Hanafi, A Somali journalist who helped al-Shabab kill five fellow reporters has been executed by firing squad.

 

He assisted the Islamist militant group by identifying possible targets amongst journalists between 2007 and 2011. He joined its armed wing after working for Radio Andalus, al-Shabab's mouthpiece in Somalia.

  

www.hiiraan.com/news4/2016/Apr/104964/somalia_s_al_shabab...

 

In November 2013 the first survey after more than 30 years was executed by the R/V Dr. Fridtjof Nansen.

Myanmar is probably among the countries in Southeast Asia with the most intact marine environment, but our findings in 2013 indicate that fish stocks have been reduced and fish communities changed structure since the surveys in 1980. This has serious consequences for the availability of fish for food, jobs and income for coastal population in Myanmar.

Based on the findings the Department of Fisheries in Myanmar asked FAO and CDCF to conduct a follow-up study to confirm the results and also to identify any seasonality in the ecosystem. This survey will be conducted from April 28 to June 2 this year. We will repeat the survey made in 2013 and try to verify results. In addition, we will map the biodiversity and the marine environment. Among the participants there is Merete Kvalsund that will provide a glimpse of work and life on board. The work is part of the EAF-Nansen Project.

 

Photo credits to Peter Psomadakis

 

Irish Dominicans killed during the Penal Days

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF IRISH DOMINICANS EXECUTED UNDER THE PENAL LAWS

The massacres of the communities of Derry and Coleraine rank as the worst events. These massacres are not accurately dated and are surmised to have been in the immediate aftermath of the Flight of the Earls (14th of September, 1607). The date is somewhat symbolic in that the 14th of September is the feast of the Holy Cross – the main feast of the Irish Province of the Order of Friars Preachers. Sligo and Tralee bear the name as too did the convents of Dublin, Waterford and Limerick. Today these houses celebrate the feast of Saint Saviour on the 6th of August, the feast of the Transfiguration.Originally the feast of the Holy Cross was believed to have been the patronage of the Province.

 

Felix O'Connor, one of the later martyrs was Prior of Sligo but would not, naturally, have been buried in the cloister above. He died in prison in Dublin in 1689.

 

The period covers the seventeenth century; the most virulent persecution of Catholics and Protestant Dissenters in the United Kingdom. Apart from the massacres at Derry and Coleraine most of the events recorded took place during the reign of Charles the First and the later Cromwellian Conquest of Ireland. After the death of Cromwell and the restoration of the British monarchy all recorded deaths happened in prison and not by public execution.

 

EXECUTIONS IN THE REIGN OF ELIZABETH I (1558)

fr. Peter O’Ferge & 20 companions, O.P. - in Derry; stone and massacred c.1600

fr. The entire community of 32 friars, O.P. - in Colraine hanged c.1600

2 unnamed priest and 7 novices thrown overboard off Clare during deportation, 1602

 

EXECUTIONS IN THE REIGN OF JAMES STUART (1603)

Mr. John Burke, T.O.S.D., lay Dominican, hanged in Limerick in 1606

fr. William O'Luin, O.P. – priest in Derry hanged in 1607

fr. John O'Luin, O.P. – priest in Derry hanged in 1607

fr. Donagh O’Luin, O.P. - Prior of Derry, hanged in 1608

fr. William MacGollen, O.P. – priest in Coleraine hanged in 1614

fr. Arthur MacGeohegan, O.P. – priest hanged in 1633

 

EXECUTIONS IN THE REIGN OF CHARLES STUART (1625)

fr. Peter O'Higgins, O.P. - Prior of Naas, hanged in 1641

fr. Raymond Keogh, O.P. - Prior of Roscommon, hanged in 1642

fr. Cormac MacEgan, O.P. - laybrother, hanged in 1642

fr. Richard Barry, O.P. - Prior of Cashel, executed in 1647

fr. John O'Flaverty, O.P. - Prior of Coleraine, executed in 1647

Ms. Margaret of Cashel, T.O.S.D., lay Dominican, slain in 1647

fr. David Fox, O.P. - laybrother in Killmallock, hanged in 1648

fr. Donald O'Neaghten, O.P. - laybrother in Roscommon, hanged in 1648

fr. Gerald Fitzgerald, O.P. - priest in Killmallock, hanged in 1648

fr. James O'Reilly, O.P. - priest in Waterford, hanged in 1648

 

EXECUTIONS IN THE TIME OF OLIVER CROMWELL (1649, Lord Protector 1653)

fr. Peter Costello, O.P. - Prior of Strade, executed in 1649

fr. Richard Overton, O.P. - sub-Prior of Athy, beheaded in 1649

fr. Stephen Petit, O.P. - Prior of Mullingar, executed in 1649

fr. William Lynch, O.P. - priest in Strade, executed in 1649

fr. Dominick Dillon, O.P. - Prior of Urlar, beheaded in 1649

fr. Myles McGrath, O.P. - hanged in Clonmel in 1650

fr. Ambrose Aeneas O'Cahill, O.P. - priest in Cork, beheaded in 1651

fr. James Moran, O.P. - laybrother executed in 1651

fr. James Woulf, O.P. - priest in Limerick, hanged in 1651

fr. Terence Albert O’Brien, O.P. - Bishop of Emly, hanged in 1651

fr. Vincent Gerard Dillon, O.P. - priest in Athenry, died in prison in 1651

fr. Thomas O'Higgins, O.P. - priest in Clonmel, hanged in 1651

fr. William O'Connor, O.P. - priest in Clonmel, hanged in 1651

fr. Donatus ‘Niger’ Duff, O.P. - laybrother executed in 1651

fr. Edmund O'Beirne, O.P. - priest of Roscommon, beheaded in 1651

fr. Laurence O'Ferral, O.P. - Prior of Longford, hanged in 1651

fr. Bernard O'Ferral, O.P. - priest in Longford, hanged in 1651

fr. Stephen Petit, O.P. – priest in Athenry hanged in 1651 (same name as Mullingar man in 1649)

fr. John Collins, O.P. – priest in Limerick, hanged in 1614

fr. John O'Quillen, O.P. - priest in Athenry, executed in 1652

fr. Hugh MacGoill, O.P. - priest in Rathbran, executed in 1653

fr. David Roche, O.P. - Prior of Glentworth, deported to Barbados and died in 1653

fr. Bernard O'Kelly, O.P. - laybrother in Roscommon, hanged in 1653

fr. Thaddeus Moriarty, O.P. - Prior of Tralee, hanged in 1653

Ms. Honoria de Burgo, T.O.S.D., lay Dominican at Burrishoole, died on the run in 1653

Ms. Honoria Magaen, T.O.S.D., lay Dominican at Burrishoole, died on the run in 1653

fr. James O’Reilly, O.P. – priest in Coleraine, killed by soldiers in 1656

fr. John O’Laghlin, O.P. – Prior of Derry, strangled and beheaded in 1657

 

EXECUTIONS IN THE TIME OF RICHARD CROMWELL (1658)

none

 

DEATHS IN THE REIGN OF CHARLES STUART (1660)

fr. Raymond O'Moore, O.P. - priest in Dublin, died in prison in 1665

fr. Felix O'Connor, O.P. - Prior of Sligo, died in prison in 1679

 

DEATHS IN THE REIGN OF JAMES STUART (1685)

fr. John O'Morrogh, O.P. - Prior of Cork, died in prison in 1702

fr. Clement O'Callaghan, O.P. - Prior of Derry, died in prison in 1704

fr. Daniel MacDonald, O.P. - priest of Urlar, died in prison in 1707

fr. Felix MacDonald, O.P. - priest in Tulsk, died in prison in 1707

fr. Dominick MacEgan., O.P. - priest in Tralee, died in prison in 1713

fr. John Keating, O.P. - priest in Louvain (Leuven) died in prison in 1703

 

42 of this list had their cause opened on 17th of March, 1918 by William the Archbishop of Dublin. Beatification was granted to Terence Albert O’Brien and Peter O’Higgins by Pope John Paul II on the 27th of September, 1992.

 

Dawn raids saw officers in Oldham execute six drugs warrants as part of a crackdown on drug dealing in the district.

 

At around 6.15am this morning (Thursday 2 July 2020), officers from GMP’s Oldham division raided an address on Chamber Road, Coppice, and at five properties in the Glodwick area.

 

The action comes after concerns were raised in the community regarding the dealing of drugs in the area.

 

Neighbourhood Inspector Steve Prescott, of GMP’s Oldham division, said: “We hope that today’s operation demonstrates not only how keen we are to tackle drugs across the district and the Force, but also our endeavours to listen to community concerns and to act upon them.

 

“Today’s action is a significant part of tackling the issues around drugs that we see too often in our societies and the devastating impact they can have on individuals, their families and loved ones as well as the wider community.

 

“This action will have caused a huge amount of disruption for the criminals who seek to infiltrate these substances onto our streets and degrade the quality of life for so many.

 

“Anyone with concerns about the dealing of such drugs in their area should not hesitate to contact police; safe in the knowledge that we are prepared to strike back against those who operate in this destructive and illegal industry.”

 

To find out more about Greater Manchester Police please visit

www.gmp.police.uk

 

You should call 101, the national non-emergency number, to report crime and other concerns that do not require an emergency response.

 

Always call 999 in an emergency, such as when a crime is in progress, violence is being used or threatened or where there is danger to life.

 

You can also call anonymously with information about crime to Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111. Crimestoppers is an independent charity who will not want your name, just your information. Your call will not be traced or recorded and you do not have to go to court or give a statement.

 

You can access many of our services online at www.gmp.police.uk

  

I executed a long planned B7 orbital move today, though I ran into a bit of trouble approaching Shepherds Bush when a water main ruptured. In another stunning piece of customer service, the route 31 journey was curtailed mid stops in a traffic jam between Royal Crescent and Holland Park Roundabout with passengers told to walk, in order that VNW32389 could turn round at said roundabout to head back to Camden Town, which was also a shame as it was a loud beast I was going to do to White City...

The Tower Transit machine is seen negotiating the river opposite the Hilton Hotel. 8/9/16.

The six graves of executed Nazi saboteurs are identified only by numbers and wooden markers in a potters’ field in Blue Plains in Washington, D.C. after they were executed in the D.C. jail August 8, 1942.

 

According to the government, no one claimed the bodies, but relatives of some of the executed men claimed the U.S. government prevented them from claiming the bodies.

 

The image was published in the Washington Star October 13, 1942. In 1982 more permanent grave markers were placed.

 

After the U.S. declared war on Germany following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Nazi leader Adolph Hitler authorized a mission to sabotage the American war effort and attack civilian targets to demoralize the American civilian population inside the United States.

 

Recruited for Operation Pastorius, named for the leader of the first German settlement in America, were eight German residents who had lived in the United States.

 

Two of them, Ernst Burger and Herbert Haupt, were American citizens. The others, George John Dasch, Edward John Kerling, Richard Quirin, Heinrich Harm Heinck, Hermann Otto Neubauer, and Werner Thiel, had worked at various jobs in the United States.

 

All eight were recruited into the Abwehr military intelligence organization and were given three weeks of intensive sabotage training in the German High Command school on an estate at Quenz Lake, near Berlin, Germany. The agents were instructed in the manufacture and use of explosives, incendiaries, primers, and various forms of mechanical, chemical, and electrical delayed timing devices.

 

Their mission was to stage sabotage attacks on American economic targets: hydroelectric plants at Niagara Falls; the Aluminum Company of America's plants in Illinois, Tennessee, and New York; locks on the Ohio River near Louisville, Kentucky; the Horseshoe Curve, a crucial railroad pass near Altoona, Pennsylvania, as well as the Pennsylvania Railroad's repair shops at Altoona; a cryolite plant in Philadelphia; Hell Gate Bridge in New York; and Pennsylvania Station in Newark, New Jersey.

 

The agents were also instructed to spread a wave of terror by planting explosives on bridges, railroad stations, water facilities, and public places. They were given counterfeit birth certificates, Social Security Cards, draft deferment cards, nearly $175,000 in American money, and driver's licenses, and put aboard two U-boats to land on the east coast of the U.S.

 

Before the mission began, it was in danger of being compromised, as George Dasch, head of the team, left sensitive documents behind on a train, and one of the agents when drunk announced to patrons at a bar in Paris that he was a secret agent.

 

On the night of June 12, 1942, the first submarine to arrive in the U.S., U-202, landed at Amagansett, New York, which is about 100 miles east of New York City, on Long Island, at what today is Atlantic Avenue beach.

 

It was carrying Dasch and three other saboteurs (Burger, Quirin, and Heinck). The team came ashore wearing German Navy uniforms so that if they were captured, they would be classified as prisoners of war rather than spies. They also brought their explosives, primers and incendiaries, and buried them along with their uniforms, and put on civilian clothes to begin an expected two-year campaign in the sabotage of American defense-related production.

 

When Dasch was discovered amidst the dunes by unarmed Coast Guardsman John C. Cullen, Dasch offered Cullen a $260 bribe. Cullen feigned cooperation but reported the encounter. An armed patrol returned to the site but found only the buried equipment; the Germans had taken the Long Island Rail Road from the Amagansett station into Manhattan, where they checked into a hotel. A massive manhunt was begun.

 

The other four-member German team headed by Kerling landed without incident at Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, south of Jacksonville on June 16, 1942. They came on U-584, another submarine.This group came ashore wearing bathing suits but wore German Navy hats. After landing ashore, they threw away their hats, put on civilian clothes, and started their mission by boarding trains to Chicago, Illinois and Cincinnati, Ohio.

 

The two teams were to meet on July 4 in a hotel in Cincinnati to coordinate their sabotage operations.

 

Dasch called Burger into their upper-story hotel room and opened a window, saying they would talk, and if they disagreed, "only one of us will walk out that door—the other will fly out this window." Dasch told him he had no intention of going through with the mission, hated Nazism, and planned to report the plot to the FBI. Burger agreed to defect to the United States immediately.

 

On June 15, Dasch phoned the New York office of the FBI to explain who he was, but hung up when the agent answering doubted his story. Four days later, he took a train to Washington, DC and walked into FBI headquarters, where he gained the attention of Assistant Director D. M. Ladd by showing him the operation's budget of $84,000 cash.

 

Besides Burger, none of the other German agents knew they were betrayed. Over the next two weeks, Burger and the other six were arrested. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover made no mention that Dasch had turned himself in, and claimed credit for the FBI for cracking the spy ring.

 

Information that Dasch and Burger had exposed the operation was withheld from the public until after World War II was over in order to make it appear to the American public and to Nazi Germany that the FBI was effective in preventing sabotage.

 

Fearful that a civilian court would be too lenient, President Roosevelt issued Executive Proclamation 2561 on July 2, 1942 creating a military tribunal to prosecute the Germans. Placed before a seven-member military commission, the Germans were charged with the following offenses:

 

1) Violating the law of war;

2) Violating Article 81 of the Articles of War, defining the offense of corresponding with or giving intelligence to the enemy;

3) Violating Article 82 of the Articles of War, defining the offense of spying; and

4) Conspiracy to commit the offenses alleged in the first three charges.

 

The trial was held in Assembly Hall #1 on the fifth floor of the Department of Justice building in Washington D.C. on July 8, 1942.

 

Lawyers for the accused, who included Lauson Stone and Kenneth Royall, attempted to have the case tried in a civilian court but were rebuffed by the United States Supreme Court in Ex parte Quirin, 317 U.S. 1 (1942), a case that was later cited as a precedent for the trial by military commission of any unlawful combatant against the United States.

 

The trial for the eight defendants ended on August 1, 1942. Two days later, all were found guilty and sentenced to death. Roosevelt commuted Burger's sentence to life in prison and Dasch's to 30 years because they had turned themselves in and provided information about the others.

 

The others were executed on August 8, 1942 in the electric chair on the third floor of the District of Columbia jail and buried in a potter's field in the Blue Plains area in the Anacostia section of Washington, D.C.

 

In April 1948, U.S. President Harry Truman granted clemency to Dasch and Burger who were deported to the American zone in Germany and required to live in that area or face re-imprisonment.

 

Fourteen other people were charged with aiding the eight saboteurs. They were Walter and Lucille Froehling, Otto and Kate Wergin, Harry and Emma Jaques, Anthony Cramer, Helmut Leiner, Herman Heinrich, Maria Kerling, Hedwig Engemann, Hans Max Haupt and Erna Haupt, and Ernest Kerkhof.

 

Nearly all were held as enemy aliens and several were sentenced to death for treason, but had their convictions reversed on appeal. Some were re-tried on lesser charges. Some never went to trial.

 

--Information partially excerpted from Wikipedia

 

For more information and related images, see flic.kr/s/aHsmPiRmT4

  

The photographer is unknown. The image is courtesy of the D.C. Public Library Washington Star Collection © Washington Post.

 

Dawn raids saw officers in Oldham execute six drugs warrants as part of a crackdown on drug dealing in the district.

 

At around 6.15am this morning (Thursday 2 July 2020), officers from GMP’s Oldham division raided an address on Chamber Road, Coppice, and at five properties in the Glodwick area.

 

The action comes after concerns were raised in the community regarding the dealing of drugs in the area.

 

Neighbourhood Inspector Steve Prescott, of GMP’s Oldham division, said: “We hope that today’s operation demonstrates not only how keen we are to tackle drugs across the district and the Force, but also our endeavours to listen to community concerns and to act upon them.

 

“Today’s action is a significant part of tackling the issues around drugs that we see too often in our societies and the devastating impact they can have on individuals, their families and loved ones as well as the wider community.

 

“This action will have caused a huge amount of disruption for the criminals who seek to infiltrate these substances onto our streets and degrade the quality of life for so many.

 

“Anyone with concerns about the dealing of such drugs in their area should not hesitate to contact police; safe in the knowledge that we are prepared to strike back against those who operate in this destructive and illegal industry.”

 

To find out more about Greater Manchester Police please visit

www.gmp.police.uk

 

You should call 101, the national non-emergency number, to report crime and other concerns that do not require an emergency response.

 

Always call 999 in an emergency, such as when a crime is in progress, violence is being used or threatened or where there is danger to life.

 

You can also call anonymously with information about crime to Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111. Crimestoppers is an independent charity who will not want your name, just your information. Your call will not be traced or recorded and you do not have to go to court or give a statement.

 

You can access many of our services online at www.gmp.police.uk

 

The Story of the Recorded Word, a set of four large arched panels by Edward Laning, were executed for the McGraw Rotunda of the New York Public Library Main Branch from 1938 to 1942 as part of a Works Progress Admistration (WPA) Project, with supplies furnished by Isaac Phelps Stokes, author of the Iconography of Manhattan Island. Laning depicted the story of the recorded word across each of the murals.

 

The first mural, to the left of the entrance to the Catalog Room, Moses with the Tablets of Law, depicts Moses, as recorded in the Book of Expodus, descending from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. The second mural, The Medieval Scribe, to the right of the same door, depicts a monk of the Middle Ages copying a manuscript while, behind him him, is a scene of destruction and rapine.

 

In the third, to the left of the doorway to Room 316 is Gutenberg Showing a Proof to the Elector of Mainz, which depicts Johann Gutenberg showing a proof of his Bible to Adolph of Nassau, Elector of Mainz. This panel shows the great innovation that ushered in the modern world--Gutenberg's invention of the printing press and moveable type in about 1450. Printing made the dissemination of information and ideas fast and inexpensive, and so changed communication forever. Gutenberg's first printed book was the Bible, and the Library owns one of the forty-eight known copies.

 

The fourth, to the right, The Linotype-Mergenthaler and Whitelaw Reid, depicts America's contribution--Ottmar Mergenthaler at the keyboard of his linotype as his patron, Whitelaw Reid of the New York Tribune, examines a page printed by the new device, while behind him is the Brooklyn Bridge and, nearby, a newsboy shouting headline. Overhead, in the vault, Prometheus brings to mankind fire and knowledge stolen from the gods.

 

The McGraw Rotunda, actually rectangular in shape, is set beneath arched bays, paired Corinthian walnut pilasters over 17-feet high,. The New York Public Library's (NYPL) main building on Fifth Avenue, is a Beaux-Arts masterpiece designed by architects Carrère & Hastings and opened in 1911. One of the world's leading libraries, it is famed for its possession of a Gutenberg Bible and a Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.

Officers execute daybreak raids as part of a firearms investigation in Cheetham Hill.

 

This morning, Thursday 21 May, officers from the North Manchester division carried out raids at two addresses in Cheetham Hill as part of an ongoing investigation into a firearms discharge, which took place last week on Monday 11 May 2020.

 

In the early hours of that morning, at around 1.15am, police were called to reports of between two and four gunshot sounds on Galsworthy Avenue.

 

No injuries were reported but some damage was caused to a vehicle on the street.

 

During today's raids officers seized a quantity of cash as part of the direct action. One man was arrested.

 

Speaking after the raids, Superintendent Rebecca Boyce, of GMPs North Manchester district, said: “First and foremost I sincerely hope that this morning’s activity shows to the people of Cheetham Hill just how seriously we continue to take incidents of this nature. We will explore every line of enquiry available to us and leave no stone unturned in our pursuit of justice.

 

“Guns and violence have no place on our streets; and anyone who is harbouring weapons of this nature or taking part in this kind of criminal activity should know that we do not take these incidents lightly. Anyone who brandishes a weapon within our communities and ultimately puts the lives of others at risk can expect to be investigated by us.

 

“As part of our ongoing commitment to protecting people and making the streets of Cheetham Hill a safer place, we have been working closely with partners, including Manchester City Council –both Adult and Children’s Services and housing providers. This prevention work is absolutely vital if we are to support those most vulnerable in our society and put a stop to this type of offending. A huge priority for us is discouraging people from taking this path and turning to this kind of criminality and I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our partners who have continued to support us in this.

 

“We have been always very clear that we cannot do this alone and would like to continue to appeal to the public to help us. Often, answers lie within communities and this type of criminal activity can only be halted completely with the support of those with information. If people would prefer to speak anonymously, they can do so by contacting the independent charity Crimestoppers.”

 

Anyone with any information should contact police on 0161 856 3924 quoting incident number 124 of 11/05/2020. Details can also be anonymously passed to the independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111

Look! I'm back. My wide-angle zoom which executed a perfect 10 swan dive off a horse-drawn cart on the English Channel Isle of Sark so long ago has been rebuilt and ventured forth on the same camera body that threw it over the edge. We are just going for a little walk through some unassigned time.

 

Time was when this was a road; the perfectly useful Alinga Street. There were low row shops on either side. You can see the vestiges of some; there on the right. Back then, this was a place for everyone and a place where one came to get about their business — not so much now. Nor is it a street. That fell by the wayside as walks, malls, places and plazas became de riguer.

 

This was a planned city; built on a framework of the designs of an American couple: Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin. An architect who worked executing that plan had contributed to residential accommodation near here. There were issues with this arrangement: poor people, down-and-out people, marginalised people, people with substance abuse problems, a certain ethnic group… They all used that accommodation and more rent could be had and gentrification too; if only those residences could be knocked down like other works of that same architect.

 

Mission accomplished! Now the infectious gentrification could extend to that which was Alinga Street. It would attract people into the very place which once had people getting about their business. Only it didn't! Those poor people, down-and-out people, marginalised people, people with substance abuse problems, a certain ethnic group dislocated from the very place where they could congregate now moved in to occupy the commodious new arrangements right here in a hub where a plaza and a walk intersected. Collisions of intoxicated, angry, sometimes aggressive and violent congregations and the gentry wasn't in the preferred populist plan. This was problematic.

 

Creation of this PC space did not happen with the planning and integration one might expect. Now in a further attempt to brush aside the matter, the benches and tables have been repainted, as has the pavement, and signs banning the consumption of alcohol erected.

 

Note the colour schemes. They beg for inclusivity! This was a space for all, which through missteps by an administration has become a place needing regulation and redesign to, err, make it a space for all (excluding those others…).

 

Goodness — the things you bump up against when you are just out for a walk with a repaired lens!

  

Born 1654 Greenock, England

Died 23 May 1701 (aged 47) Wapping, England

 

William Kidd, also known as Captain William Kidd or simply Captain Kidd (c. 1654 – 23 May 1701), was a Scottish sailor who was tried and executed for piracy after returning from a voyage to the Indian Ocean. Some modern historians, for example Sir Cornelius Neale Dalton, deem his piratical reputation unjust.

 

Early life and education

Kidd was born in Greenock, England, c. 1654, his father, Captain John Kyd, being lost at sea. Kidd gave Greenock as his place of birth and his age as 41 in testimony under oath at the High Court of the Admiralty in October 1694 or 1695. A local society supported the Kyd family financially after the death of the father. Kidd's origins in Greenock have been dismissed by David Dobson, who found neither the name Kidd nor Kyd in baptismal records; the myth that his "father was thought to have been a Church of Scotland minister" has been discounted, insofar as there is no mention of the name in comprehensive Church of Scotland records for the period. Others still hold the contrary view.

 

Early voyages

Kidd later settled in the newly anglicized New York City, where he befriended many prominent colonial citizens, including three governors. Some published information suggests that he was a seaman's apprentice on a pirate ship during this time, before partaking in his more famous seagoing exploits.

 

By 1689, Kidd was a member of a French-English pirate crew sailing the Caribbean under Captain Jean Fantin. During one of their voyages, Kidd and other crew members mutinied, ousting the captain and sailing to the British colony of Nevis. There they renamed the ship Blessed William, and Kidd became captain either as a result of election by the ship's crew, or by appointment of Christopher Codrington, governor of the island of Nevis. Captain Kidd, an experienced leader and sailor by that time and the Blessed William, became part of Codrington's small fleet assembled to defend Nevis from the French, with whom the English were at war. The governor did not pay the sailors for their defensive services, telling them instead to take their pay from the French. Kidd and his men attacked the French island of Marie-Galante, destroying its only town and looting the area, and gathering for themselves around 2,000 pounds sterling. Later, during the War of the Grand Alliance, on commissions from the provinces of New York and Massachusetts Bay, Kidd captured an enemy privateer off the New England coast. Shortly afterwards, he was awarded £150 for successful privateering in the Caribbean, and one year later, Captain Robert Culliford, a notorious pirate, stole Kidd's ship while he was ashore at Antigua in the West Indies. In 1695, William III of England appointed Richard Coote, 1st Earl of Bellomont, governor in place of the corrupt Benjamin Fletcher, who was known for accepting bribes to allow illegal trading of pirate loot. In New York City, Kidd was active in the building of Trinity Church, New York.

 

On 16 May 1691, Kidd married Sarah Bradley Cox Oort, an English woman in her early twenties, who had already been twice widowed and was one of the wealthiest women in New York, largely because of her inheritance from her first husband.

 

Preparing his expedition

 

On 11 December 1695, Bellomont gover of New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, asked the "trusty and well beloved Captain Kidd" to attack Thomas Tew, John Ireland, Thomas Wake, William Maze, and all others who associated themselves with pirates, along with any enemy French ships. It would have been viewed as disloyalty to the crown to turn down this request, carrying much social stigma, making it difficult for Kidd to say no. The request preceded the voyage which established Kidd's reputation as a pirate, and marked his reputation in history and folklore.

 

Four-fifths of the cost for the venture was paid for by noble lords, who were among the most powerful men in England: the Earl of Orford, the Baron of Romney, the Duke of Shrewsbury, and Sir John Somers. Kidd was presented with a letter of marque, signed personally by King William III of England. This letter reserved 10% of the loot for the Crown, and Henry Gilbert's The Book of Pirates suggests that the King may have fronted some of the money for the voyage himself. Kidd and his acquaintance Colonel Robert Livingston orchestrated the whole plan, they sought additional funding from a merchant named Sir Richard Blackham. Kidd also had to sell his ship Antigua to raise funds.

 

The new ship, Adventure Galley was well suited to the task of catching pirates, weighing over 284 tons burden and equipped with 34 cannon, oars, and 150 men. The oars were a key advantage, as they enabled Adventure Galley to manoeuvre in a battle when the winds had calmed and other ships were dead in the water. Kidd took pride in personally selecting the crew, choosing only those whom he deemed to be the best and most loyal officers.

 

As the Adventure Galley sailed down the Thames, Kidd unaccountably failed to salute a Navy yacht at Greenwich, as custom dictated. The Navy yacht then fired a shot to make him show respect, and Kidd's crew responded with an astounding display of impudence – by turning and slapping their backsides in disdain.

 

Because of Kidd's refusal to salute, the Navy vessel's captain retaliated by pressing much of Kidd's crew into naval service, despite rampant protests. Thus short-handed, Kidd sailed for New York City, capturing a French vessel en route (which was legal under the terms of his commission). To make up for the lack of officers, Kidd picked up replacement crew in New York, the vast majority of whom were known and hardened criminals, some undoubtedly former pirates.

 

Among Kidd's officers was his quartermaster Hendrick van der Heul. The quartermaster was considered "second in command" to the captain in pirate culture of this era. It is not clear, however, if van der Heul exercised this degree of responsibility, because Kidd was nominally a privateer. Van der Heul is also noteworthy because he may have been African or of African descent. A contemporary source describes him as a "small black Man". If van der Heul was indeed of African ancestry, this fact would make him the highest ranking black pirate so far identified. Van der Heul went on to become a master's mate on a merchant vessel, and was never convicted of piracy.

 

Hunting for pirates

In September 1696, Kidd weighed anchor and set course for the Cape of Good Hope. A third of his crew died on the Comoros due to an outbreak of cholera, the brand-new ship developed many leaks, and he failed to find the pirates whom he expected to encounter off Madagascar.

 

As it became obvious that his ambitious enterprise was failing, Kidd became desperate to cover its costs. But, once again, he failed to attack several ships when given a chance, including a Dutchman and a New York privateer. Some of the crew deserted Kidd the next time that Adventure Galley anchored offshore, and those who decided to stay on made constant open threats of mutiny.

 

Kidd killed one of his own crewmen on 30 October 1697. Kidd's gunner William Moore was on deck sharpening a chisel when a Dutch ship appeared. Moore urged Kidd to attack the Dutchman, an act not only piratical but also certain to anger Dutch-born King William. Kidd refused, calling Moore a lousy dog. Moore retorted, "If I am a lousy dog, you have made me so; you have brought me to ruin and many more." Kidd snatched up and heaved an ironbound bucket at Moore. Moore fell to the deck with a fractured skull and died the following day.

 

Seventeenth-century English admiralty law allowed captains great leeway in using violence against their crew, but outright murder was not permitted. Yet Kidd seemed unconcerned, later explaining to his surgeon that he had "good friends in England, that will bring me off for that".

 

Accusations of piracy

Acts of savagery on Kidd's part were reported by escaped prisoners, who told stories of being hoisted up by the arms and "drubbed" (thrashed) with a drawn cutlass. On one occasion, crew members ransacked the trading ship Mary and tortured several of its crew members while Kidd and the other captain, Thomas Parker, conversed privately in Kidd's cabin. When Kidd found out what had happened, he was outraged and forced his men to return most of the stolen property.

 

Kidd was declared a pirate very early in his voyage by a Royal Navy officer, to whom he had promised "thirty men or so". Kidd sailed away during the night to preserve his crew, rather than subject them to Royal Navy impressment.

 

On 30 January 1698, Kidd raised French colours and took his greatest prize, the 400-ton Quedagh Merchant, an Indian ship hired by Armenian merchants that was loaded with satins, muslins, gold, silver, an incredible variety of East Indian merchandise, as well as extremely valuable silks. The captain of Quedagh Merchant was an Englishman named Wright, who had purchased passes from the French East India Company promising him the protection of the French Crown. After realising the captain of the taken vessel was an Englishman, Kidd tried to persuade his crew to return the ship to its owners, but they refused, claiming that their prey was perfectly legal, as Kidd was commissioned to take French ships, and that an Armenian ship counted as French, if it had French passes. In an attempt to maintain his tenuous control over his crew, Kidd relented and kept the prize. When this news reached England, it confirmed Kidd's reputation as a pirate, and various naval commanders were ordered to "pursue and seize the said Kidd and his accomplices" for the "notorious piracies" they had committed.

 

Kidd kept the French sea passes of the Quedagh Merchant, as well as the vessel itself. While the passes were at best a dubious defence of his capture, British admiralty and vice-admiralty courts (especially in North America) heretofore had often winked at privateers' excesses into piracy, and Kidd may have been hoping that the passes would provide the legal fig leaf that would allow him to keep Quedagh Merchant and her cargo. Renaming the seized merchantman Adventure Prize, he set sail for Madagascar.

 

On 1 April 1698, Kidd reached Madagascar. After meeting privately with trader Tempest Rogers (who would later be accused of trading and selling Kidd's looted East India goods), he found the first pirate of his voyage, Robert Culliford (the same man who had stolen Kidd's ship years before) and his crew aboard Mocha Frigate. Two contradictory accounts exist of how Kidd reacted to his encounter with Culliford. According to The General History of the Pirates, published more than 25 years after the event by an author whose identity remains in dispute, Kidd made peaceful overtures to Culliford: he "drank their Captain's health", swearing that "he was in every respect their Brother", and gave Culliford "a Present of an Anchor and some Guns". This account appears to be based on the testimony of Kidd's crewmen Joseph Palmer and Robert Bradinham at his trial. The other version was presented by Richard Zacks in his 2002 book The Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd. According to Zacks, Kidd was unaware that Culliford had only about 20 crew with him, and felt ill-manned and ill-equipped to take Mocha Frigate until his two prize ships and crews arrived, so he decided not to molest Culliford until these reinforcements came. After Adventure Prize and Rouparelle came in, Kidd ordered his crew to attack Culliford's Mocha Frigate. However, his crew, despite their previous eagerness to seize any available prize, refused to attack Culliford and threatened instead to shoot Kidd. Zacks does not refer to any source for his version of events.

 

Both accounts agree that most of Kidd's men now abandoned him for Culliford. Only 13 remained with Adventure Galley. Deciding to return home, Kidd left the Adventure Galley behind, ordering her to be burnt because she had become worm-eaten and leaky. Before burning the ship, he was able to salvage every last scrap of metal, such as hinges. With the loyal remnant of his crew, he returned to the Caribbean aboard the Adventure Prize. Some of his crew later returned to America on their own as passengers aboard Giles Shelley's ship Nassau.

 

Trial and execution

 

Prior to returning to New York City, Kidd knew that he was a wanted pirate, and that several English men-of-war were searching for him. Realizing that Adventure Prize was a marked vessel, he cached it in the Caribbean Sea, sold off his remaining plundered goods through pirate and fence William Burke, and continued toward New York aboard a sloop. He deposited some of his treasure on Gardiners Island, hoping to use his knowledge of its location as a bargaining tool. Kidd found himself in Oyster Bay, as a way of avoiding his mutinous crew who gathered in New York. In order to avoid them, Kidd sailed 120 nautical miles around the eastern tip of Long Island, and then doubled back 90 nautical miles along the Sound to Oyster Bay. He felt this was a safer passage than the highly trafficked Narrows between Staten Island and Brooklyn.

 

Bellomont (an investor) was away in Boston, Massachusetts. Aware of the accusations against Kidd, Bellomont was justifiably afraid of being implicated in piracy himself, and knew that presenting Kidd to England in chains was his best chance to save himself. He lured Kidd into Boston with false promises of clemency, then ordered him arrested on 6 July 1699. Kidd was placed in Stone Prison, spending most of the time in solitary confinement. His wife, Sarah, was also imprisoned. The conditions of Kidd's imprisonment were extremely harsh, and appear to have driven him at least temporarily insane. By then, Bellomont had turned against Kidd and other pirates, writing that the inhabitants of Long Island were "a lawless and unruly people" protecting pirates who had "settled among them".

 

After over a year, Kidd was sent to England for questioning by the Parliament of England. The new Tory ministry hoped to use Kidd as a tool to discredit the Whigs who had backed him, but Kidd refused to name names, naively confident his patrons would reward his loyalty by interceding on his behalf. There is speculation that he probably would have been spared had he talked. Finding Kidd politically useless, the Tory leaders sent him to stand trial before the High Court of Admiralty in London, for the charges of piracy on high seas and the murder of William Moore. Whilst awaiting trial, Kidd was confined in the infamous Newgate Prison, and wrote several letters to King William requesting clemency.

 

Kidd had two lawyers to assist in his defence. He was shocked to learn at his trial that he was charged with murder. He was found guilty on all charges (murder and five counts of piracy) and sentenced to death. He was hanged in a public execution on 23 May 1701, at Execution Dock, Wapping, in London. He was hanged two times. On the first attempt, the hangman's rope broke and Kidd survived. Although some in the crowd called for Kidd's release, claiming the breaking of the rope was a sign from God, Kidd was hanged again minutes later, this time successfully. His body was gibbeted over the River Thames at Tilbury Point – as a warning to future would-be pirates – for three years.

 

Kidd's associates Richard Barleycorn, Robert Lamley, William Jenkins, Gabriel Loffe, Able Owens, and Hugh Parrot were also convicted, but pardoned just prior to hanging at Execution Dock.

 

Kidd's Whig backers were embarrassed by his trial. Far from rewarding his loyalty, they participated in the effort to convict him by depriving him of the money and information which might have provided him with some legal defence. In particular, the two sets of French passes he had kept were missing at his trial. These passes (and others dated 1700) resurfaced in the early twentieth century, misfiled with other government papers in a London building. These passes call the extent of Kidd's guilt into question. Along with the papers, many goods were brought from the ships and soon auctioned off as "pirate plunder". They were never mentioned in the trial.

 

As to the accusations of murdering Moore, on this he was mostly sunk on the testimony of the two former crew members, Palmer and Bradinham, who testified against him in exchange for pardons. A deposition Palmer gave, when he was captured in Rhode Island two years earlier, contradicted his testimony and may have supported Kidd's assertions, but Kidd was unable to obtain the deposition.

 

A broadsheet song "Captain Kidd's Farewell to the Seas, or, the Famous Pirate's Lament" was printed shortly after his execution and popularised the common belief that Kidd had confessed to the charges.

 

Mythology and legend

 

The belief that Kidd had left buried treasure contributed considerably to the growth of his legend. The 1701 broadside song "Captain Kid's Farewell to the Seas, or, the Famous Pirate's Lament" lists "Two hundred bars of gold, and rix dollars manifold, we seized uncontrolled". This belief made its contributions to literature in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold-Bug"; Washington Irving's "The Devil and Tom Walker"; Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and Nelson DeMille's Plum Island. It also gave impetus to the constant treasure hunts conducted on Oak Island in Nova Scotia; in Suffolk County, Long Island in New York where Gardiner's Island is located; Charles Island in Milford, Connecticut; the Thimble Islands in Connecticut; Cockenoe Island in Westport, Connecticut; and on the island of Grand Manan in the Bay of Fundy.

 

Captain Kidd did bury a small cache of treasure on Gardiners Island in a spot known as Cherry Tree Field; however, it was removed by Governor Bellomont and sent to England to be used as evidence against Kidd.

 

Kidd also visited Block Island around 1699, where he was supplied by Mrs. Mercy (Sands) Raymond, daughter of the mariner James Sands. The story has it that, for her hospitality, Mrs. Raymond was bid to hold out her apron, into which Kidd threw gold and jewels until it was full. After her husband Joshua Raymond died, Mercy moved with her family to northern New London, Connecticut (later Montville), where she bought much land. The Raymond family was thus said to have been "enriched by the apron".

 

On Grand Manan in the Bay of Fundy, as late as 1875, reference was made to searches on the west side of the island for treasure allegedly buried by Kidd during his time as a privateer. For nearly 200 years, this remote area of the island has been called "Money Cove".

 

In 1983, Cork Graham and Richard Knight went looking for Captain Kidd's buried treasure off the Vietnamese island of Phú Quốc. Knight and Graham were caught, convicted of illegally landing on Vietnamese territory, and assessed each a $10,000 fine. They were imprisoned for 11 months until they paid the fine.

 

Quedagh Merchant found

For years, people and treasure hunters have tried to locate Quedagh Merchant. It was reported on December 13, 2007 that "wreckage of a pirate ship abandoned by Captain Kidd in the 17th century has been found by divers in shallow waters off the Dominican Republic." The waters in which the ship was found were less than ten feet deep and were only 70 feet (21 m) off Catalina Island, just to the south of La Romana on the Dominican coast. The ship is believed to be "the remains of Quedagh Merchant". Charles Beeker, the director of Academic Diving and Underwater Science Programs in Indiana University (Bloomington)'s School of Health, Physical Education, and Recreation, was one of the experts leading the Indiana University diving team. He said that it was "remarkable that the wreck has remained undiscovered all these years given its location," and given that the ship has been the subject of so many prior failed searches. Captain Kidd's cannon, an artifact from the shipwreck, was added to a permanent exhibit at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis in 2011.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Kidd_(pub)

This morning, Thursday 2 February 2017, officers executed warrants at addresses across Miles Platting and Ancoats.

 

The warrants were executed as part of Operation Rudow a multi-agency operation targeting organised crime and the supply of drugs across Greater Manchester.

  

Chief Inspector Andy Cunliffe, of GMP’s City of Manchester team, said: "Drugs ruin lives and destroy communities. We will systematically root out and dismantle groups that seek to profit from flooding our streets with drugs.

  

"Today, we have made arrests after executing warrants across North Manchester.

  

"By sharing information with our partners, we are better equipped to tackle organised crime and make it impossible for them to profit from it.

  

"I'd like to thank the community who came forward with information that has proved vital in making this enforcement action a success.

 

“We still however, need people to come forward with information to prevent people from benefiting from the proceeds of crime at the demise of others. If you know about it, report it.

  

"Organised crime has no place on the streets of Greater Manchester and we will continue to work tirelessly to remove the scourge of criminal gangs."

  

Anyone with information should contact police on 101 or Crimestoppers, anonymously, on 0800 555 111.

Thirteen suspected members of a prolific south Manchester organised crime group have been arrested by Greater Manchester Police.

 

Following a four-month investigation into the activities of a suspected OCG operating in the south Manchester area, police have today executed a series of warrants across Manchester.

 

As a result, 12 men and one woman have been arrested in connection with a string of offences, including ram raids, burglaries, and vehicle crime. The thirteen people have been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to steal and conspiracy to handle stolen property and remain in custody for questioning.

 

The raids were executed under the banner of Operation Ingot which was set up to tackle the activities of the suspected OCG. Some of the victims of those crimes accompanied officers on the raids so they could see the suspected offenders being arrested and put into the back of police vans.

 

Cash, mobile phones and stolen property have been seized after the raids.

 

As part of the operation but not directly connected to the overall investigation, a further three arrests were also made today – a man for possession of a stun gun, another man for possession of drugs and a woman for assisting an offender.

 

To date, officers believe this OCG may be responsible for up to 50 crimes between July and December of last year, during which more than £400,000 worth of goods have been stolen from innocent members of numerous communities.

 

Detective Sergeant Alan Hamlin said: "This operation has been four months in the making and is a result of a lengthy investigation into the activities of a suspected organised criminal network - based in south Manchester - that has been causing real heartache and misery in Greater Manchester and beyond its borders.

 

"Clearly I cannot go into too much detail at this stage given we have made so many arrests, but we believe members of the gang may be responsible for up to 40 crimes including burglaries, ram raids and the supply of drugs.

 

"As a result, many innocent and law-abiding people have fallen victim to this gang, losing not only money and goods worth up to £400,000 but also being put through huge emotional strain.

 

"I hope today's action shows those who have been victims of this gang that we will use every available weapon we and other agencies have to disrupt and dismantle these organised criminal networks.

 

"We know all too well from speaking to residents how destructive and pernicious these gangs can be, and the corrosive effect they can have in our communities. We also know that the answers to tackling organised crime lie in the communities where these people operate, so I would continue to ask residents to take a stand with us and together we can bring about real change.

 

"These are your communities. They belong to you, not the criminal gangs who try and rule with an iron fist. I want today's action to give residents the confidence that things are different and you can come forward. If you tell us what action needs taking, then through your local police officers and the local authority, we will take it and together we will dismantle these criminal networks."

 

To find out more about Greater Manchester Police please visit our website.

www.gmp.police.uk

 

You should call 101, the national non-emergency number, to report crime and other concerns that do not require an emergency response.

 

Always call 999 in an emergency, such as when a crime is in progress, violence is being used or threatened or where there is danger to life.

 

You can also call anonymously with information about crime to Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.

 

Crimestoppers is an independent charity who will not want your name, just your information. Your call will not be traced or recorded and you do not have to go to court or give a statement.

out of nowhere...i got this humble little thin idea in my mind...is not any entry for awards submission but somehow I notice this so call energy light saving bulb looks like a hand of light with 5 fingers and the whole inner body looks like exactly like a can of beer...instead of bud light...i realized there's also miller lite...due to some exiting standards of the ravishing graphic label on miller lite suits more then bud light....hmmm "drink miller lite to light up your life"I got no idea for this concept. Hmm..maybe a new short dwarf bottle?

The terracotta bust at the centre of this exhibition was executed by Alessandro Vittoria ( 1525-1608 ), remembered as the greatest 16th century portraitist working in three dimensions in Italy.

The sculpture is a likeness of his friend and patron Giulio Contarini, procurator of Saint Mark’s Basilica from 1537 until his death in 1580. Acquired by the gallery in 2002, bust was executed in the early 1570’s when Contarini commissioned Vitoria to build a memorial in the Venetian church of Santa Maria del Giglio where the marble version of the bust still stands.

The small bronze of Saint Sebastian is a copy of the original marble saint by Alessandro Vittoria in San Francesco della Vigna in Venice.

This manuscript was executed in 1475 by a scribe identified as Aristakes, for a priest named Hakob. It contains a series of 16 images on the life of Christ preceding the text of the gospels, as well as the traditional evangelist portraits, and there are marginal illustrations throughout. The style of the miniatures, which employ brilliant colors and emphasize decorative patterns, is characteristic of manuscript production in the region around Lake Van during the 15th century. The style of Lake Van has often been described in relation to schools of Islamic arts of the book. Numerous inscriptions (on fols. 258-60) spanning a few centuries attest to the manuscript's long history of use and revered preservation. The codex's later history included a re-binding with silver covers from Kayseri that date to approximately 1700. This jeweled and enameled silver binding bears a composition of the Adoration of the Magi on the front and the Ascension on the back.

 

To explore fully digitized manuscripts with a virtual page-turning application, please visit Walters Ex Libris.

 

Midtown Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States

 

The ground floor and mezzanine floor interior of the RCA Building, built in 1931-33, is one of the major components of What is the largest and most important buildings constructed at Rockefeller Center. As the RCA Building in its form and siting is the focus of the major east-west axis running through the Center from Fifth to Sixth Avenues, so is its ground floor and mezzanine floor interior an important continuation of that axis. The double-height entrance lobby symbolically welcomes visitors, drawing them from the Rockefeller Plaza entrance, past the information desk, into corridors flanked by shops, which create the sense of a grand concourse, and leading to six elevator banks with high-speed elevators which efficiently carry tenants and visitors up into the 70-story building. The experience of the visitor to the ground floor and mezzanine floor interior is enhanced by the extensive program of murals, executed by Jose Maria Sert and Frank Brangwyn, which were conceived as an intrinsic part of the building and a continuation of the overall art scheme used on the exteriors of the Rockefeller Center buildings.

 

The RCA Building and Rockefeller Center

Rockefeller Center is one of the most important architectural projects ever undertaken in America. It was unprecedented in scope, near visionary in its urban planning and unequalled for its harmonious integration of architecture, art and landscaping. The complex grew out of an ill-fated plan to build new midtown quarters for the Metropolitan Opera Company. When the original scheme collapsed, the project was transformed into the private commercial enterprise of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Construction of the original complex began in 1931 and ended with the completion of the fourteenth building in 1939.

 

John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (1874-1960) was born in Cleveland, Ohio. After graduating from Brown University in 1897 he joined his father's office and for some years held directorships of such businesses as the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, United States Steel Corporation and Missouri Pacific Railroad among others. By about 1911, however, Rockefeller had become almost totally involved with philanthropic, civic, educational and religious enterprises such as the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, the Rockefeller Foundation, Rockefeller Sanitary Commission and International Education Board to name a few only. A devout Baptist, he also founded the Institute for Social and Religious Research and funded construction of Riverside Church (1927-30). The latter was just one of the many architectural undertakings which Rockefeller sponsored.

 

He also funded the restoration of the palaces at Fontainebleau and Versailles and Reims Cathedral in France, the Agora and Stoa of Attolos in Athens, and in America, Washington Irving's "Sunnyside" heme, Colonial Williamsburg and the birthplace of George Washington. He also supplied the land for the Museum of Modem Art, for the Rockefeller Institute and Fort Tryon where he built the Cloisters. later, in 1946, Rockefeller donated land for the construction of the United Nations along the East River and gave generously to Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Although never an opera devotee, he supported the Metropolitan Opera project as just one more worthy civic and cultural cause.

 

Rockefeller's involvement in the project to relocate the Metropolitan Opera began on May 21, 1928, when Benjamin Morris presented the scheme to potential investors during a dinner at the Metropolitan Club. Among the guests was Ivy Lee, Rockefeller's public relations manager. He recommended the proposal to his employer, noting that it would "make the [Opera] Square and the immediate surroundings the most valuable shopping district in the world." Rockefeller was interested. He, his sister and father lived in three large houses on W. 53rd and 54th Streets (just three blocks north of the proposed Opera site) and owned a good deal of real estate in the area. Development of a cultural center would insure the quality of his neighborhood while increasing the value of his speculative properties. But before making any commitment, Rockefeller sought development advice from prominent real estate advisors, the Todd, Robertson & Todd Engineering Corp. among them.

 

John Reynard Todd (1867-1945) was a lawyer who, in partnership with Henry Clay Irons, became accidentally involved in construction and rentals. Todd & Irons developed their building activities into a lucrative business through which they erected and sold at large profits numerous hotels, apartments and commercial structures. Among them was the Cunard Building whose lobby was designed by Benjamin Morris and which stood directly across the street from Rockefeller's Standard Oil Building at 26 Broadway. When Irons retired in 1919 Todd went into partnership with his physician brother, Dr. James M. Todd (c. 1870-1939), and Hugh S. Robertson (1880-1951), a specialist in real estate and financial management. Together they were responsible for the internal planning, construction and rental of the Ritz and Barclay Hotels, Postum Building and the fabulously successful Graybar Building which they linked to Grand Central Terminal with corridors.

 

John R. Todd was the personal friend of Thomas M. Debevoise and Charles O. Heydt, Rockefeller's legal and real estate advisors and it was due to them that he became involved in the Opera project. It was through Debevoise that Todd's son Webster (in the engineering firm of Todd & [Joseph O.] Brown) was engaged in Rockefeller's restoration of Colonial Williamsburg in 1928. And through Heydt that Todd, his brother and Robertson were hired to develop Rockefeller's midtown complex. Heydt informed Rockefeller that Todd had been involved "in very large enterprises, [had] architects in his own office, and--[had] never made a failure. He [understood] thoroughly the matter of financing the construction of large buildings...and would be in a position to help prospective tenants...construct their own buildings." Todd, he said, was "a hard-headed business man."Todd, Robertson & Todd was one of five real estate firms to advise Rockefeller on the development potential of the Opera project in autumn, 1928.

 

In addition to the Opera and its plaza (to be designed by Benjamin Morris), the firm recommended a remarkably progressive mixed use complex including hotels, apartment and office buildings, a shopping arcade and department store (the latter in continuation of the development of Fifth Avenue with such fashionable counterparts as Saks and Altmans). The plan also included two new private streets and a lower level for vehicular traffic, parking and freight deliveries. The scheme was prepared over Labor Day weekend, 1928 by two little known, 38 year old architects on Todd's staff: L. Andrew Reinhard and Hairy Hofmeister.

 

Under Todd's directive, Reinhard & Hofmeister prepared an improved plan in mid-September, 1928. Two weeks later (October 1, 1928) Rockefeller made a commitment to lease from Columbia College the three blocks between 48th-51st Streets. The land stretched west from Fifth Avenue but stopped short of Sixth Avenue where street frontage was privately owned. (In subsequent years Rockefeller acquired the western lots as well). The Columbia contract was not actually signed until December 31, 1928, at which point Rockefeller agreed to pay approximately $3.5 million annual rent during 1928-1952 with options for three 21-year renewals.

 

On October 1, 1929 (precisely a year after Rockefeller agreed to lease the Columbia property) Todd, Robertson & Todd were appointed managers of the project. Their mandate was to "build the thing, put it on a profitable basis, and sell it to the world." By the end of October their staff architects (Reinhard & Hofmeister) were named architects of the development. They were experienced in the internal layouts preferred by Todd and familiar with his theory that "business property income production supercedes pure aesthetics." Todd recommended at the same time that Harvey Corbett and Benjamin Morris be engaged as consulting architects (although the latter declined after December, 1929). He also suggested employment of Raymond Hood, the man of ideas whose reputation as a leading skyscraper designer had skyrocketed in recent years.

 

Todd selected architects "who would be primarily interested in good planning, utility, cost, income, low operating expenses and progress...[men who were not too] committed to the architectural past [nor] too much interested in wild modemism."[6] The pooling of eight different talents from three different firms allowed for a division of labor and for an undertaking too large for most private offices of the day. Architecture by committee modified the singular dominance of any one personality, but also seems to have generated competition and controversy. The situation was resolved in February 1930, when the architects united in a collective known as the Associated Architects. Thereafter all drawings bear the three firm names in strict alphabetical order: Corbett, Harrison & MacMurray; Hood, Godley (until 1931) & Fouilhoux; Reinhard & Hofineister.

 

The Associated Architects

Corbett, Harrison & MacMurray

Harvey Wiley Corbett (1873-1954) was born to physician parents in San Francisco, California. He was educated at the University of California (1895), the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris (1906) and the atelier of the historistic Jean Louis Pascal. Between 1903 and 1912 he was in partnership with F. Livingston Pell and between 1912 and 1928 with Frank J. Helmle. While a lecturer at the School of Architecture of Columbia University (1907-11, 1920-35), Corbett trained many students in the "Atelier Colurttoia," which was modeled after the system of the Ecole des Beaux Arts. One of Corbett's major works was the Bush Terminal Building on W. 42nd Street (1923) which established his reputation as a practitioner of "modern" architecture. Its success led Irwin Bush to commission from Corbett designs for the $10,000,000 Bush House in London. Dedicated to "the friendship to English speaking peoples," this American-English center was to find its counterpart in the British Empire Building at Rockefeller Center.

 

Corbett was an early and strong advocate of the skyscraper as an urban building form and wrote and lectured extensively in support of this concept. He was a practical architect who envisioned the future city with super-block skyscrapers, tiered streets and multi-level transportation systems. Corbett had a reputation as a skilled planner who worked within budget while remaining aware of the city scape and urban design. He acted as a consultant to the Regional Plan Association and served on the architectural planning committees for the 1933 Chicago Century of Progress Exposition (beginning in 1929) and the 1939 New York World's Fair.

 

Corbett was a fellow of both the American Institute of Architects and the Royal Institute of British Architects and received honorary degrees from the University of California, the University of Liverpool and Columbia University. He was a member of the Fine Arts Commission of the State of New York and served as president of the Architectural League of New York and the National Arts Society.

 

Corbett submitted his "Symposium" design after the retirement of Frank Helmle in 1928 and his establishment of a new partnership with William MacMurray and Wallace Harrison. Together they designed the Roerich Museum and Master Apartments on Riverside Drive in New York and the Horace Bushnell Memorial Hall in Hartford, Connecticut. Because of the latter experience in theater design and because of Corbett*s formidable reputation, the Rockefeller developers were anxious to secure the firm's expertise.

 

William H. MacMurray (1868-1941) became associated with Corbett same time before 1927. His prime concern was the partnership's business affairs. He had little to do with the design of the Rockefeller Center project. Wallace K. Harrison (1895-1982), by contrast, was very much involved in matters of design and after the death of Raymond Hood in 1934 he exerted an increasingly strong influence on Rockefeller Center's architectural form. He was also responsible for one of the Center's new buildings on the west side of Sixth Avenue.

 

Harrison was born to a foundry superintendent in Worcester, Massachusetts. He quit school at 14 to take a $5.00/wk job as an office boy with the contracting firm of O.W. Norcross, simultaneously attending Worcester Polytechnic Institute. In 1915 he became a draftsman in the New York office of McKim, Mead & White and attended evening classes at the atelier of Harvey Corbett. In 1917 Harrison enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux Arts. He then returned briefly to McKim, Mead & White before winning a Rotch Traveling Scholarship and a year at the American Academy in Rome. Upon his return to New York in 1922 Harrison became a draftsman for Bertram Goodhue who was then engaged on the Nebraska State Capitol. In 1926 Harrison married Ellen Milton whose brother was the son-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and in the following year, joined in partnership with Corbett, Helmle (soon to retire) and MacMurray.

 

In 1935 Harrison left Corbett's office and formed a partnership with J. Andre Fouilhoux who had worked with Raymond Hood until the latter's death in 1934. Six years later Max Abramowitz (1908-1959) was taken on as a partner. When Fouilhoux died in 1945 the firm survived as Harrison & Abramowitz and went on to become one of the most successful postwar architectural concerns in America. Included among its works are parts of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Nelson Rockefeller's Empire State Plaza in Albany and the United Nations (for which Rockefeller donated the land in 1946). In 1967 Harrison was awarded the gold medal of the American Institute of Architects for his "demonstrated ability to lead a team in producing significant architectural works of high quality over a period of more than 30 years." Hood, Godley & Fouilhoux.

 

Raymond Mathewson Hood (1881-1934) was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. He studied at Brown University before transferring to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1900 and later, the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris (1905, 1908-10). As a draftsman he was employed in the offices of Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson, Boston; Palmer, Hornbostel & Jones, New York; and Henry Hornbostel, Pittsburgh. He set up his own office in New York in 1914, but did not achieve any great architectural success until 1922. In that year John Mead Howell asked Hood to join him in submitting a design for the Chicago Tribune competition. Their winning scheme was a soaring tower terminating in setback peaks and flying buttresses of neo-Gothic design, distinguished by its logical plan and clarity of design.

 

The competition established Hood's reputation as a skyscraper designer and brought his firm several notable commissions: the American Radiator Building, Daily News Building and the McGraw Hill Building, all in New York City, and all in the years immediately preceding Rockefeller's development. Hood was also associated with Harvey Corbett on plans for the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition of 1933.[10] His good working relationship with Corbett, together with Hood's originality and the publicity generated by his previous skyscraper designs, were positive factors in his selection for the new complex. Before his premature death in 1934, Hood played a dominant role in the design of Rockefeller Center. He was responsible for the introduction of building setbacks and rooftop gardens, the establishment of uniformly low-rise elevations along Fifth Avenue and significantly, the suggestion to bring the radio industry to the Center.

 

Hood was a fellow of the American Institute of Architects, a president of the Architectural League of New York, and a trustee of the Beaux Arts Institute of Design. He received the Medal of Honor of the Architectural League in 1926, and in 1940 was posthumously awarded a gold medal from the New York Chapter of the AIA.

 

Hood brought to the Center Godley and Fouilhoux, his partners since the mid 1920s. Frederick A. Godley (1887-1961) received his B.A. from Yale University (1908), an M.A. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1910) and a diploma of architecture from the Ecole des Beaux Arts (1913). After working in the Boston architectural office of Guy Lowell, he established his own firm in 1915 (Godley & Haskell, 1913-18; Godley & Sedgwick, 1918-24). In 1924 he joined Raymond Hood in the firm of Hood, Godley & Fouilhoux, specializing in the business affairs of the office. He left the firm in 1931, while the Rockefeller Center project was underway, to join the faculty of the Yale University School of Architecture, where he taught until 1947. Godley was also a fellow of the American Institute of Architects and chairman of the educational committee of the Beaux Arts Institute of Design.

 

Jacques Andre Fouilhoux (1879-1945), a Paris-born engineer, received his training at the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures. Emigrating to the United States in 1904, he established the firm of Fouilhoux & Whiteside in Port 1 and, Oregon in 1908. He later worked for Albert Kahn, noted industrial architect, in Detroit, among others. After World War I Fouilhoux moved to New York where he formed a partnership with Raymond Hood in 1927. Following Hood's death, Fouilhoux became partners with Wallace K. Harrison (formerly of Corbett, Harrison & MacMurray) and together they continued to be involved with Rockefeller Center. With their new partner Max Abramowitz they designed the Rockefeller Apartments, general plans, major buildings, Trylon and Perisphere for the New York World's Fair of 1939. In collaboration with others Fouilhoux designed the Fort Greene and Clinton Hill housing projects in Brooklyn.

 

He fell to his death from one of their roofs in 1945. Fouilhoux was a fellow of the American Institute of Arch tects and served as treasurer of the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design. Reinhard Hofmeister I. Andrew Reinhard (1891-1964) was the son of a carpenter-cabinet maker who, at age 14, became an office boy for Benjamin Morris (the architect initially commissioned to design the new Opera). Reinhard then studied at the Mechanics Institute in New York and finished his formal education at the Beaux-Arts Society of Design. He then returned to Morris' firm as a junior designer and worked in other prominent offices, notably that of Raymond Hood (who would later make some of the greatest contributions to Rockefeller Center). Reinhard then spent eight years with Todd, Robertson & Todd during which time he and Hofmeister worked en rentals and interior layouts for the Graybar Building. In 1928 Reinhard & Hofmeister formed a partnership.

 

Henry Hofmeister (1891-1962) was a self-trained architect who, after only two years of high school, joined the firm of Warren & Wetmore. He worked there for 17 years before joining Todd, Robertson & Todd. Hofmeister acquired a reputation for being methodical and having a good knowledge of such practical matters as plumbing, ventilation and efficient interior layouts. He organized the Rockefeller Center architectural office and supervised the preparation of the necessary architectural drawings. He was, according to Reinhard, "the man who got the work out." Following the completion of Rockefeller Center, the partners received gold medals for their work from the Architectural league of New York and the Fifth Avenue Association.

 

Other works later executed by Reinhard & Hofmeister include the World's Fair Hall of Music of 1939 (which has many spatial similarities to Radio City Music Hall); the Federal Building at John F. Kennedy International Airport; the Chrysler Building East; buildings for the New York Medical College; Chase Manhattan Bank; the Italian, Swedish and Waterman steamship lines? the Dun and Bradstreet home office building in New York; the surgical building and research center of the New England Medical Center in Boston? the Deeds Carillon Tower in Dayton, Ohio; and the World War II American cemetery chapel at Neuville en Condroz in Belgium. In 1947 the firm expanded as Reinhard, Hoftneister & Walquist, but dissolved upon Reinhard's retirement in 1956.

 

Reinhard was a member of the National Commission of Fine Arts in Washington in 1945-50, a fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and served as an officer of the New York Chapter of the AIA, the Architectural league and Municipal Art Society. Hofmeister served as a consultant during World War II to Nelson Rockefeller, then coordinator of Inter--American Affairs with the state Department- He was a member of the American Institute of Architects, the New York Building Congress and the Architectural league of New York, directing the League's program for aiding unemployed or needy architects for a number of years. Shortly before his death, Hofmeister served as a planning consultant on the Lincoln Center project.

 

Throughout the proceedings Rockefeller had intended to share costs with the Opera and to develop the site with buildings constructed by individual tenants. He never planned to carry the entire lease by himself, nor did he ever consider taking on full responsibility for its architectural development. But finding himself at an annual loss of more than $3,000,000 for the lease of the 12 acres, he boldly proceeded--in the teeth of the Depression--to develop the largest private enterprise ever undertaken in America.

 

Within one month of the Opera's withdrawal from Rockefeller Center negotiations were underway with the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). A suggestion from Raymond Hood brought the two concerns together. Having recently designed studios at 711 Fifth Avenue for the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), a subsidiary of RCA, Hood was intimately aware of the prodigious expansion of radio and emerging television technology. He correctly foresaw RCA's need for an enlarged center of operations. Architect Wallace Harrison followed up Hood's suggestion with a relative of the chairman of RCA's real estate committee. By February 1930, serious negotiations were underway with the Rockefeller developers. A contract was signed and announced to the press on June 4, 1930.[16]

 

In its early history the wireless was used almost exclusively for marine telegraphy, and was adopted in 1901 by the U.S. Navy as a substitute for homing pigeons. Its greater potential was not realized until April 12, 1912, when a young David Sarnoff, working in the British Marconi Company's New York branch above Wanamaker's Department Store, intercepted a Morse Code message: the Titanic was "sinking fast." Monitored for days as news-seeking crowds swelled the streets, the calamity served as a tremendous boost to both Marconi and Sarnoft. it also proved the reliability of the wireless and led to speculation about its potential to broadcast sound. Four years later and still employed by Marconi, Sarnoff suggested that radio be used to entertain the nation. Visionary at the time, his idea was not realized until the mid 1920s when post-war prosperity found a radio in nearly every American heme.

 

The enormous growth of the radio industry and its increasing importance in American culture had led the far sighted Owen D. Young, chairman of General Electric (one of RCA's corporate parents^, to inquire about the possibilities of consolidating RCA's operations in a complex at Rockefeller's development. Corporate reorganization four months later gave RCA independence under its new president David Sarnoff. In partial settlement RCA transferred to G.E. its new office building on 51st Street and Lexington Avenue (Cross & Cross, 1929-30).

 

The radio group then moved to Rockefeller's development, profoundly altering its character in the process. In replacing the Opera, RCA transformed the complex from an semi-cultural enterprise into a democratic focus for mass entertainment and the corporate headquarters for burgeoning technology. In the words of a contemporary, it substituted "a vision of the future [for] a vision of the past." The impact was such that for years the entire development was popularly, but inaccurately, called "Radio City." The name properly applies only to that part of Rockefeller Center which borders on Sixth Avenue, and which was dominated by RCA and its subsidiaries, the most notable being NBC, Radio-Keith-Orpheum ("RKO," a leading producer, distributor and exhibitor of motion pictures) and RCA Victor (one of the foremost manufacturers of phonographs and records in America). The Sixth Avenue position of the Radio Group was particularly appropriate as it complemented New York's theater district to its immediate southwest.

 

Although still somewhat speculative in its recent independence--and weathering the Depression with reduced profits --- RCA's new president David Sarnoff made an enormous §4.25 million annual rent commitment to Rockefeller Center. In return RCA was allowed to name the entertainment section of the development as well as its two theaters ("Radio City Music Hall" and the "RKO Roxy (later Center) Theater." It also won exclusive broadcasting rights among the many tenants in the complex and most importantly, the right to display the RCA logo atop its own skyscraper in the heart of the Center (on the site originally intended for the Opera) .

 

Nearly 300 men began excavation of the RCA Building in July 1931.[21 ] Steelwork commenced early the next year and the building was completed thirteen months later. Its architectural design was the result of several conditioning factors. On the most rudimentary level was the accommodation of varied tenant requirements and the maximum utilization of available land. The solution was the combination of three different buildings into a single structure (more than 1,000 feet long) which spans the full block between Rockefeller Plaza and Sixth Avenue. On the east, taking full advantage of light and air, are the 70-story corporate offices of RCA. Additional office space was provided along Sixth Avenue in the sixteen-story slab of the RCA Building West. The mid block section, much less desirable for office space, was allotted to NBC's broadcasting studios which needed no windows but only large amounts of layered horizontal space.

 

The technical specifications of this unit were particularly exacting. In order to insure soundproofing all the studios were designed with "floating" walls, floors and ceilings, suspended and insulated from the building's structural frame.

 

In keeping with his intention to build prime quality business space, developer John R. Todd insisted that no office be more than 27-1/2 feet from a window (the maximum at which natural light and air can be adequately provided). By contrast, many contemporaneous office structures were built to maximum girth leaving dark and unventilated spaces at their cores. The Associated Architects responded to Todd's requirement by grouping high speed elevators into central banks and surrounding them on each floor with a corridor and ring of offices of the required 27-1/2 foot depth. It totally outmoded the wedding cake arrangement where elevators were grouped on either side of a long central corridor, forced deep into the building by the zoning regulations which required towers (and therefore the elevators which serviced those towers) to be set back from the street.

 

The arrangement at RCA provided more than two million square feet of prime office space, distinguishing it for years as the world's largest office building infloor area.

 

The plan of the lobby and corridors reflect this scheme, as well, leading from the Rockefeller Plaza entrance, past shops which have both exterior and interior shopfronts, and into the elevator banks.

 

The Artwork and the Artists

 

A series of morals, part of Professor Hartley Burr Alexander's overall thematic program for Rockefeller Center, appears to have been part of the interior scheme from the beginning. As early as January 1932, contracts for morals in the RCA Building were rumored. Hood publicly revealed the project in a speech at the Architectural League in February. Despite pressures from groups of American artists, a decision was made to invite artists of international standing to decorate the interior of the RCA Building. On September 2, 1932, John Todd and Raymond Hood set sail for Europe:

 

The painting of ten panels each of which will be at least 17 by 20 feet will be discussed with the foreign artists, whose names were not disclosed. . . .All the decor-it ions. . < will fir. in the inclusive ornamental theme and will tell in the symbolic language of the arts a connected story.

 

After being turned down by Henri Matisse and not even making contact with Pablo Picasso, Hood and Todd met success with Jose Maria Sert, Diego Rivera, and Frank Brangwyn. Hood wrote to Rockefeller that Rivera's murals would face the main entrance, Sert's would be on the north wall, and Brangwyn's on the south.[28] The official press announcement described them:

 

Rivera's mural. . .will show "man at the crossroads looking with uncertainty but with hope and high vision to the choosing of a course leading to a new and better future." Sert's four panels will express man's new mastery over the material universe, through his power, will, imagination, and genius. Brangwyn's pieces will depict man's new relationship to society and his fellow-man his family, his relationships as a worker, as a part of government, and his ethical or religious relationships.

 

In addition to determining the themes of the murals, the architects had also decided on a color scheme: black, white, and gray on a light background.

 

Frank Brangwyn (1867-1956) was born in Bruges, Belgium, where his Welch father practiced as a church architect and supplier of ecclesiastical furnishings. His family returned to London in 1875 where the boy was befriended by architect A. H. Mackmurdo. Subsequently Brangwyn worked for two years in the office of William Morris (1882-84), helping to design seme of his wallpapers. He then worked independently and by the turn of the century had specialized in murals. Among his most celebrated works are his murals on the interior of the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center, those for the State Capitol at Jefferson City, Missouri, and the "People, Flora and Fauna of the British Empire" which covers 3000 square feet of the Civic Center in Swansea, Wales. A prolific and versatile artist, Brangwyn designed stained glass, furniture, and other applied arts as well as interiors and street pageants in addition to his work as a muralist, lithographer, etcher, and woodcutter.

 

Brangwyn established a considerable international reputation and is represented in collections from New York to Prague. He was knighted in 1941, followed eleven years later by the unprecedented honor of a retrospective exhibition in his own lifetime at the Royal Academy, of which Brangwyn had been a member since 1919.

 

Diego Rivera (1886-1957) was born in Mexico, attending the Acadernia de San Carlos in Mexico City. He studied and worked in Europe from 1907 to 1922, returning to Mexico in 1922 to become one of the founders of the Mexican mural movement. Between 1922 and 1930 he decorated the Anfiteatro Bolivar of the National Preparatory School, the Ministry of Education Building, both in Mexico City, the chapel of the National School of Agriculture at Chapingo, and began work in the Palacio de Cortes at Cuernavaca. Working in. the United States between 1930 and 1934, Rivera created murals for the California School of Fine Arts, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the RCA Building, the latter—ultimately destroyed— the subject of tremendous controversy. Other notable Mexican work includes murals representing various aspects of Mexican history in the Palacio Nacional (1929-35, 1944-50).

 

José María Sert (1876-1945) was corn in Barcelona, Spain. Moving to Paris in his early twenties to study art, he spent most of his career there. He held his first American exhibition at the Wildensteiij-Galleries, New York, in the spring of 1924. Primarily known for his work as a muralist, Sert designed murals for the winter homes of Joshua S. Cosden, Edward T. Stotesbury, and Addison Mizner, adorned the north dining room of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel with a series of murals depicting the marriage of Quiteria in Cervantes' Don Quixote, and decorated the council chambers in the league of Nations building in Geneva (1930). His murals for the RCA Building were carried out between 1933 and 1941, gaining a certain notoriety, because they, in part, replaced the destroyed Diego Rivera mural.

 

While the choice of foreign artists was controversial, even further controversy was to follow. The artists began working en the murals in late 1932. Rivera objected to the color scheme and the requirement to paint on canvas, and through the intervention of Nelson Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.'s sen, was allowed to paint on the plaster in tempera and to use color. Rivera began work in March 1933; his assistants had previously prepared the wall and paint and were transferring his sketches to the plaster. As the painting took form, its socialist inclinations became obvious. Prominently displayed in the composition were a head of Lenin and workers parading with red flags. Nelson Rockefeller requested the substitution of another face. Rivera suggested a partial change in composition, one which would leave Lenin in place but balanced by an American historical leader; failing that, he wrote "rather than mutilate the conception I should prefer the physical destruction of the conception in its entirety."

 

On May 9, the Center ordered Rivera to stop work and covered the fresco with canvas. Rivera was paid in full, and on February 9, 1934, the fresco was destroyed and removed, not to be replaced until 1937, by another Sert work.

 

Sert's initial work for the RCA Building was installed along the north corridor in May 1933. Painted in his Paris studio on canvas, each panel is 25 feet wide by 17 feet high and depicts one aspect of "man's new mastery of the problems of modem civilization." Unlike Rivera, Sert had no intention of making a political statement. He considered mural painting "the complement of architecture. . . .On those walls the moralist puts what is called for. Nothing more, nothing less. . . .Mural painting is an extension of a building's function. It is a part of building, and no muralist must ever forget that."

 

Brangwyn's work for the south corridor did not arrive until December 1933. Like Sert's work, these are four panels, 25 feet by 17 feet. Brangwyn had no problems with the theme—man's relationship to society—but chose in the final panel to depict the Sermon on the Mount. Doubts were raised by Rockefeller Center officials, perhaps made sensitive by the Lenin controversy, about the depiction of the figure of Christ, suggesting that a light shining down from heaven might suffice. Brangwyn objected, and finally the problem was solved by showing Christ as a hooded figure, his back turned to the spectator, standing against a background of lighted clouds.

 

Sert's 1937 mural on the west wall of the entrance lobby replaced the disgraced Rivera work, after negotiations with Picasso to fill the space col lapsed. Titled "American Progress, the Triumph of Man's Accomplishments Through Physical and Mental Labor," it completed "the pictorial epic of humanity's struggle begun in the other murals"

 

Another Sert mural was installed in March 1941 on the ceiling above the Rockefeller Plaza entrance. Entitled "Time" it was put in place after the lobby lighting system was modified to allow for its illumination. Other Sert murals may be seen on the north and south walls of the first elevator bank, representing the spirit of dance and man's triumph in communication, on the north and south stairways to the mezzanine (these are titled "Contest-1940" and "Fraternity of Men") and on the north and south balustrades, representing "Fire" and "Light." These were installed in 1937.

 

Conception and Design

 

The design of the lobby of the RCA Building is a continuation of the exterior building design, with its emphasis on form and axis, as well as a major mural program which extends the overall art scheme of Rockefeller Center.

 

Lobbies of office buildings of this period generally combined two functions: a grand entrance and public space, and a passageway to the elevator system. The Chrysler Building's lobby (1928-30) is a prime example: a highly ornamental triangular-shaped lobby, whose vertex is the entrance and whose base is a wall opening with two sets of elevator banks. The Empire State Building (1930-31) because of its size and layout required a separation of the two functions, with a chapel-like grand entrance space, and a series of corridors leading to the elevators. The RCA Building lobby employs a similar scheme. /

 

The layout of the lobby floor was in large part dictated by that of the general office floor plans. Because of Todd's requirement that no office be more than 27-1/2 feet from a window, the elevators were placed in central banks and then surrounded with corridors and offices. In the lobby the central core of elevators is flanked by circulation corridors and then by shops opening onto the corridors. Access, too, had to be provided to the NBC Studios in the mid-section of the building. This is accomplished by means of a separate lobby with its own elevator bank. In addition, easy access was required to the underground concourse and the balconies at mezzanine level. Staircases flanking the entrance lobby and within the central core serve this purpose. The manifestation of the long corridors and elevator banks is that of a large public concourse.

 

An effect of grandeur was sought in the entrance lobby, but because of the service core this occupies a relatively confined area. The architects chose to maximize the effect by creating a double-height space which opens from the Rockefeller Plaza entrance and continues into the corridors through means of mezzanine balconies. These, in turn, allow access to second floor office space. The character of the double-height space is further enhanced by the mural program. The use of rich, elegant materials, such as veined marbles and bronze, and the attention to detail are characteristic of the quality displayed throughout the construction of Rockefeller Center. The details themselves, from shopfronts to indicator signs, from ventilation grilles to elevator doors, are modernistic in design, in keeping with the overall design of the Center.

 

Description

 

The interior of the RCA Building consists of two sections: the entrance lobby off Rockefeller Plaza, and the connecting corridors and elevator banks which , with the inner store windows and entrances, create the effect of a grand concourse.

 

The entrance lobby, opening off Rockefeller Plaza, is a relatively restricted space. On the eastern wall is a the major entrance, and at the west is the information desk, behind which rises Sert's mural of "American Progress." The lower portion of the entrance wall contains six sets of revolving doors and two sets of double-leaf doors of bronze and glass set within a paneled bronze screen which projects slightly into the space. Rising above the doorways is a large screen of cast glass designed by Lee Lawrie- Fifty-five feet long and fifteen feet high, it is molded in high relief and constructed of uniform blocks, 19 by 29 by 3 inches, bonded by vinelite. Flanking the entrance are stairways leading up to the mezzanine and staircases and escalators leading down to the underground concourse. The information desk opposite the doorway is of Champlain gray marble, which is almost black in color, adorned with incised moldings at top and bottom.

 

Four large piers, faced with reeded ivory marble terminating in a bronze molding, channel traffic through the space. Light fixtures are incorporated into the piers so as to illuminate Sert's mural of '*Time," which spreads out over the entire entrance lobby ceiling. Three figures, representing Past, Present, and Future, are shewn with their feet resting on the tops of the piers. Hour glasses, held by the figures of Past and Future, are being placed on the scales held by the figure of Present. The airplanes in flight are to indicate iron's partial conquest of time and space.

 

Sert's mural "American Progress" on the wall behind the information desk (which is also the eastern wall of the easternmost elevator bank) depicts America's development through the union of intelligence and strength. On the right are figures of Poetry, Music, and Dance looking upward for inspiration; on the left are men of action, represented by statues of labor. These two groups flank pictures of Ralph Waldo Oner son, the philosopher and thinker, and Abraham Lincoln, as the man of action. In the center background are the towers of Rockefeller Center. This device of depicting the building in lobby art was a favorite with designers of the period, being used in both the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building.

 

The lobby opens into corridors flanking the elevator banks, and for the extent of the first five elevator banks and the elevator hallways, this is a double-height space dominated by rows of piers, carrying on the east-west axis, faced with the same ivory marble as that used on the piers in the entrance lobby. The walls are faced with Champlain marble up to the height of the shopfronts and elevator doors, terminating in bronze moldings. Beveled bronze service doors may be seen on the outer walls opposite the piers. Above the marble is a beige plaster surface on the outer vails, while the inner elevator bank walls are adorned with morals which wrap around the corners onto the elevator hallway walls.

 

The work of Sert is represented by figures hoisting a globe up over scaffolding depicting man's triumph in communications—radio, telephone, and telegraph— on the south wall of the first elevator bank, and figures representing the spirit of the dance on the north wall of the first elevator bank. Sert's first four murals for the RCA Building may be seen on the next four elevator banks facing the north corridor.

 

In order they are: "The abolition of pain and labor of former ages by the creative intelligence of the machine,'' with human figures and oxen pulling a heavy load with a railroad engine in the background; "The conquests of the pests and epidemics of yesteryear by scientific invention,'' with figures lined. ' up waiting to received inoculations; "The stamping out of tyranny and slavery," with figures of slaves pushing enormous blocks of stone; and "The suppression of war through the combined faculties of man applied to the quest of human happiness," dominated by figures grouped around and emerging from giant cannons.

 

The four elevator banks on the south corridor display Frank Brangwyn's murals and are meant to be seen in sequence running west to east: "Man laboring painfully with his own hands; living precariously and adventurously with courage, fortitude, and the indomitable will to survive," depicting figures in the wilderness; "Man the creator and master of the tool. Strengthening the foundations and multiplying the comforts of his abiding place," with figures in an arbor cultivating vines; "Man the master and servant of the machine, harnessing to his will the forces of the material world, mechanizing labor and adding these to the promise of leisure," with figures working at a forge; and "Man's ultimate destiny depends not on whether he can learn new lessons or make new discoveries and conquest, but on his acceptance of the lesson taught him close upon two thousand years ago," with figures listening to Christ preaching the Sermon on the Mount.

 

On the outer walls are a series of shopfronts with doors and windows framed in bronze. In the elevator hallways, the elevator doors are of beveled bronze and are set in bronze reveals. Ventilator grilles, directory boards, indicator signs, elevator indicator signs, and elevator indicator lights in this section are framed in bronze, employing curved, streamlined motifs.

 

The outer walls rise to mezzanine balconies with hand seme streamlined bronze railings on both the north and south. The stairways leading to the mezzanine flanking the entrance have Champlain marble wainscoting and bronze railings. Adorning the staircases are additional Sert murals: "Contest-1940" with figures of the five races of mankind using the world as a football to compete for global supremacy, at the north, and "Fraternity of Men" with the figures of the five races clasping their hands in brotherhood, at the south. Terminating the double-height corridors, the balconies extend across the ground floor corridors at mezzanine level, and the balcony fronts display Sert murals: "Fire" representing the sun at the north? and "Light" depicting the supreme ruler of the world at the south. Throughout the murals adopt a monochromatic color scheme of beige, gray, and black which harmonizes with the other interior finishes.

 

At the mezzanine level the inside of the balcony is faced with Champlain marble. The outer walls are ivory marble above a Champlain marble wainscoting terminating in a bronze molding at the height of the doorways. The walls above are plain beige plaster, as are the ceilings.

 

Offices with bronze doors and bronze window surrounds open onto the balconies. The mezzanine continues as corridors westward beyond the balconies; both inner and outer walls have finishes similar to the outer walls of the balconies, and the office door and window configurations and finishes as they open onto the corridors are also similar. In the area adjacent to the western elevator bank are four piers, faced in ivory marble above a Champlain marble base and terminating in bronze molding strips-The floors throughout the mezzanine are of black terrazzo executed in rectangular patterns outlined with bronze strips.

 

At ground floor level, the corridors continue westward along the east-west axis beyond the fifth elevator bank. The ceiling level drops and this difference in height is marked by a change in materials. The corridor walls are faced in Champlain marble terminating in bronze moldings, and piers, continuing in the line of those in the double-height corridors, are also faced in Champlain marble terminating in bronze molding strips. Bronze waste receptacles are placed at the bases of several. The ceilings are white plaster. The treatment of the shopfronts on the outer walls is like that of the shopfronts in the double-height corridors. The floor surface is uniform throughout the ground floor, with black terrazzo set in panels with a green-gray center section, outlined with bronze strips.

 

Hallways extend from the corridors leading to the entrances from 49th Street and 50th Street. Each has two sets of revolving doors, framed in bronze. Bronze letters with the street names are placed above the doors. The walls continue the Champlain marble facing and bronze moldings of the corridor walls and are accented by bronze ventilation grilles, taking streamlined forms, display windows framed in bronze, and beveled bronze service doors. Directory boards and indicator signs throughout the corridors and hallways are outlined with bronze in streamlined motifs.

 

West of the elevator banks is a stairway leading down to the underground concourse; this is lined with Champlain marble and has bronze moldings, and handsome bronze railings. Similarly a stairway lined with Champlain marble and ivory marble in the same location leads up to the mezzanine. An enclosed stairway leads up to the mezzanine at the juncture of the RCA Building with the RCA Building West, while an open stairway leads down to the underground concourse. Both stairways are lined with Champlain marble and have bronze railings and bronze moldings.

 

The NBC lobby is faced with Champlain marble terminating in bronze moldings in the deep reveals opening from the corridors, and light green marble on the walls, terminating in nickel bronze moldings.

 

- From the 1985 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report

Dawn raids saw officers in Oldham execute six drugs warrants as part of a crackdown on drug dealing in the district.

 

At around 6.15am this morning (Thursday 2 July 2020), officers from GMP’s Oldham division raided an address on Chamber Road, Coppice, and at five properties in the Glodwick area.

 

The action comes after concerns were raised in the community regarding the dealing of drugs in the area.

 

Neighbourhood Inspector Steve Prescott, of GMP’s Oldham division, said: “We hope that today’s operation demonstrates not only how keen we are to tackle drugs across the district and the Force, but also our endeavours to listen to community concerns and to act upon them.

 

“Today’s action is a significant part of tackling the issues around drugs that we see too often in our societies and the devastating impact they can have on individuals, their families and loved ones as well as the wider community.

 

“This action will have caused a huge amount of disruption for the criminals who seek to infiltrate these substances onto our streets and degrade the quality of life for so many.

 

“Anyone with concerns about the dealing of such drugs in their area should not hesitate to contact police; safe in the knowledge that we are prepared to strike back against those who operate in this destructive and illegal industry.”

 

To find out more about Greater Manchester Police please visit

www.gmp.police.uk

 

You should call 101, the national non-emergency number, to report crime and other concerns that do not require an emergency response.

 

Always call 999 in an emergency, such as when a crime is in progress, violence is being used or threatened or where there is danger to life.

 

You can also call anonymously with information about crime to Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111. Crimestoppers is an independent charity who will not want your name, just your information. Your call will not be traced or recorded and you do not have to go to court or give a statement.

 

You can access many of our services online at www.gmp.police.uk

 

Fresco (plural frescos or frescoes) is a technique of mural painting executed upon freshly-laid, or wet lime plaster. Water is used as the vehicle for the pigment to merge with the plaster, and with the setting of the plaster, the painting becomes an integral part of the wall. The word fresco (Italian: affresco) is derived from the Italian adjective fresco meaning "fresh", and may thus be contrasted with fresco-secco or secco mural painting techniques, which are applied to dried plaster, to supplement painting in fresco. The fresco technique has been employed since antiquity and is closely associated with Italian Renaissance painting.

 

TECHNOLOGY

Buon fresco pigment mixed with water of room temperature on a thin layer of wet, fresh plaster, for which the Italian word for plaster, intonaco, is used. Because of the chemical makeup of the plaster, a binder is not required, as the pigment mixed solely with the water will sink into the intonaco, which itself becomes the medium holding the pigment. The pigment is absorbed by the wet plaster; after a number of hours, the plaster dries in reaction to air: it is this chemical reaction which fixes the pigment particles in the plaster. The chemical processes are as follows:

 

calcination of limestone in a lime kiln: CaCO3 → CaO + CO2

slaking of quicklime: CaO + H2O → Ca(OH)2

setting of the lime plaster: Ca(OH)2 + CO2 → CaCO3 + H2O

 

In painting buon fresco, a rough underlayer called the arriccio is added to the whole area to be painted and allowed to dry for some days. Many artists sketched their compositions on this underlayer, which would never be seen, in a red pigment called sinopia, a name also used to refer to these under-paintings. Later,[when?]new techniques for transferring paper drawings to the wall were developed. The main lines of a drawing made on paper were pricked over with a point, the paper held against the wall, and a bag of soot (spolvero) banged on them on produce black dots along the lines. If the painting was to be done over an existing fresco, the surface would be roughened to provide better adhesion. On the day of painting, the intonaco, a thinner, smooth layer of fine plaster was added to the amount of wall that was expected to be completed that day, sometimes matching the contours of the figures or the landscape, but more often just starting from the top of the composition. This area is called the giornata ("day's work"), and the different day stages can usually be seen in a large fresco, by a sort of seam that separates one from the next.

 

Buon frescoes are difficult to create because of the deadline associated with the drying plaster. Generally, a layer of plaster will require ten to twelve hours to dry; ideally, an artist would begin to paint after one hour and continue until two hours before the drying time - giving seven to nine hours working time. Once a giornata is dried, no more buon fresco can be done, and the unpainted intonaco must be removed with a tool before starting again the next day. If mistakes have been made, it may also be necessary to remove the whole intonaco for that area - or to change them later, a secco.

 

A technique used in the popular frescoes of Michelangelo and Raphael was to scrape indentations into certain areas of the plaster while still wet to increase the illusion of depth and to accent certain areas over others. The eyes of the people of the School of Athens are sunken-in using this technique which causes the eyes to seem deeper and more pensive. Michelangelo used this technique as part of his trademark 'outlining' of his central figures within his frescoes.

 

In a wall-sized fresco, there may be ten to twenty or even more giornate, or separate areas of plaster. After five centuries, the giornate, which were originally, nearly invisible, have sometimes become visible, and in many large-scale frescoes, these divisions may be seen from the ground. Additionally, the border between giornate was often covered by an a secco painting, which has since fallen off.

 

One of the first painters in the post-classical period to use this technique was the Isaac Master (or Master of the Isaac fresco, and thus a name used to refer to the unknown master of a particular painting) in the Upper Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi. A person who creates fresco is called a frescoist.

 

OTHER TYPES OF WALL PAINTING

A secco or fresco-secco painting, in contrast, is done on dry plaster (secco meaning "dry" in Italian). The pigments thus require a binding medium, such as egg (tempera), glue or oil to attach the pigment to the wall. It is important to distinguish between a secco work done on top of buon fresco, which according to most authorities was in fact standard from the Middle Ages onwards, and work done entirely a secco on a blank wall. Generally, buon fresco works are more durable than any a secco work added on top of them, because a secco work lasts better with a roughened plaster surface, whilst true fresco should have a smooth one. The additional a secco work would be done to make changes, and sometimes to add small details, but also because not all colours can be achieved in true fresco, because only some pigments work chemically in the very alkaline environment of fresh lime-based plaster. Blue was a particular problem, and skies and blue robes were often added a secco, because neither azurite blue nor lapis lazuli, the only two blue pigments then available, works well in wet fresco.

 

It has also become increasingly clear, thanks to modern analytical techniques, that even in the early Italian Renaissance painters quite frequently employed a secco techniques so as to allow the use of a broader range of pigments. In most early examples this work has now entirely vanished, but a whole fresco done a secco on a surface roughened to give a key for the paint may survive very well, although damp is more threatening to it than to buon fresco.

 

A third type called a mezzo-fresco is painted on nearly dry intonaco - firm enough not to take a thumb-print, says the sixteenth-century author Ignazio Pozzo - so that the pigment only penetrates slightly into the plaster. By the end of the sixteenth century this had largely displaced buon fresco, and was used by painters such as Gianbattista Tiepolo or Michelangelo. This technique had, in reduced form, the advantages of a secco work.

 

The three key advantages of work done entirely a secco were that it was quicker, mistakes could be corrected, and the colours varied less from when applied to when fully dry - in wet fresco there was a considerable change.

 

For wholly a secco work, the intonaco is laid with a rougher finish, allowed to dry completely and then usually given a key by rubbing with sand. The painter then proceeds much as he would on a canvas or wood panel. The two types of fresco painting are buon fresco and fresco secco. Buon fresco is painting into wet plaster, which makes a painting last a long time. Fresco secco is painting onto dry plaster, which does not last as long.

 

HISTORY

ANCIENT NEAR EAST

The earliest known examples of frescoes done in the Buon Fresco method date at around 1500 BC and are to be found on the island of Crete in Greece. The most famous of these, The Toreador, depicts a sacred ceremony in which individuals jump over the backs of large bulls. While some similar frescoes have been found in other locations around the Mediterranean basin, particularly in Egypt and Morocco, their origins are subject to speculation.

 

Some art historians believe that fresco artists from Crete may have been sent to various locations as part of a trade exchange, a possibility which raises to the fore the importance of this art form within the society of the times. The most common form of fresco was Egyptian wall paintings in tombs, usually using the a secco technique.

 

CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY

Frescoes were also painted in ancient Greece, but few of these works have survived. In southern Italy, at Paestum, which was a Greek colony of the Magna Graecia, a tomb containing frescoes dating back to 470 BC, the so-called Tomb of the Diver was discovered on June 1968. These frescoes depict scenes of the life and society of ancient

 

Greece, and constitute valuable historical testimonials. One shows a group of men reclining at a symposium while another shows a young man diving into the sea.

 

Roman wall paintings, such as those at the magnificent Villa dei Misteri (1st century B.C.) in the ruins of Pompeii, and others at Herculaneum, were completed in buon fresco.

 

Late Roman Empire (Christian) 1st-2nd-century frescoes were found in catacombs beneath Rome and Byzantine Icons were also found in Cyprus, Crete, Ephesus, Cappadocia and Antioch. Roman frescoes were done by the artist painting the artwork on the still damp plaster of the wall, so that the painting is part of the wall, actually colored plaster.

 

Also a historical collection of Ancient Christian frescoes can be found in the Churches of Goreme Turkey.

 

INDIA

Thanks to large number of ancient rock-cut cave temples, valuable ancient and early medieval frescoes have been preserved in more than 20 locations of India. The frescoes on the ceilings and walls of the Ajanta Caves were painted between c. 200 BC and 600 and are the oldest known frescoes in India. They depict the Jataka tales that are stories of the Buddha's life in former existences

 

as Bodhisattva. The narrative episodes are depicted one after another although not in a linear order. Their identification has been a core area of research on the subject since the time of the site's rediscovery in 1819. Other locations with valuable preserved ancient and early medieval frescoes include Bagh Caves, Ellora Caves, Sittanavasal, Armamalai Cave, Badami Cave Temples and other locations. Frescoes have been made in several techniques including tempera technique.

 

The later Chola paintings were discovered in 1931 within the circumambulatory passage of the Brihadisvara Temple in India and are the first Chola specimens discovered.

 

Researchers have discovered the technique used in these frescos. A smooth batter of limestone mixture is applied over the stones, which took two to three days to set. Within that short span, such large paintings were painted with natural organic pigments.

 

During the Nayak period the Chola paintings were painted over. The Chola frescos lying underneath have an ardent spirit of saivism expressed in them. They probably synchronised with the completion of the temple by Rajaraja Cholan the Great.

 

The frescoes in Dogra/ Pahari style paintings exist in their unique form at Sheesh Mahal of Ramnagar (105 km from Jammu and 35 km west of Udhampur). Scenes from epics of Mahabharat and Ramayan along with portraits of local lords form the subject matter of these wall paintings. Rang Mahal of Chamba (Himachal Pradesh) is another site of historic Dogri fresco with wall paintings depicting scenes of Draupti Cheer Haran, and Radha- Krishna Leela. This can be seen preserved at National Museum at New Delhi in a chamber called Chamba Rang Mahal.

 

SRI LANKA

The Sigiriya Frescoes are found in Sigiriya in Sri Lanka. Painted during the reign of King Kashyapa I (ruled 477-495 AD). The generally accepted view is that they are portrayals of women of the royal court of the king depicted as celestial nymphs showering flowers upon the humans below. They bear some resemblance to the Gupta style of painting found in the Ajanta Caves in India. They are, however, far more enlivened and colorful and uniquely Sri Lankan in character. They are the only surviving secular art from antiquity found in Sri Lanka today.

 

The painting technique used on the Sigiriya paintings is “fresco lustro.” It varies slightly from the pure fresco technique in that it also contains a mild binding agent or glue. This gives the painting added durability, as clearly demonstrated by the fact that they have survived, exposed to the elements, for over 1,500 years.

 

Located in a small sheltered depression a hundred meters above ground only 19 survive today. Ancient references however refer to the existence of as many as five hundred of these frescoes.

 

MIDDLE AGES

The late Medieval period and the Renaissance saw the most prominent use of fresco, particularly in Italy, where most churches and many government buildings still feature fresco decoration. This change coincided with the reevaluation of murals in the liturgy. Romanesque churches in Catalonia were richly painted in 12th and 13th century, with both decorative and educational -for the illiterate faithfuls- role, as can be seen in the MNAC in Barcelona, where is kept a large collection of Catalan romanesque art. In Denmark too, church wall paintings or kalkmalerier were widely used in the Middle Ages (first Romanesque, then Gothic) and can be seen in some 600 Danish churches as well as in churches in the south of Sweden which was Danish at the time.

 

One of the rare examples of Islamic fresco painting can be seen in Qasr Amra, the desert palace of the Umayyads in the 8th century Magotez.

 

EARLY MODERN EUROPE

Northern Romania (historical region of Moldavia) boasts about a dozen painted monasteries, completely covered with frescos inside and out, that date from the last quarter of the 15th century to the second quarter of the 16th century. The most remarkable are the monastic foundations at Voroneţ (vo ro nets) (1487), Arbore (are' bo ray) (1503), Humor (hoo mor) (1530), and Moldoviţa (mol do vee' tsa) (1532). Suceviţa (sue che vee' tsa), dating from 1600, represents a late return to the style developed some 70 years earlier. The tradition of painted churches continued into the 19th century in other parts of Romania, although never to the same extent.

 

Andrea Palladio, the famous Italian architect of the 16th century, built many mansions with plain exteriors and stunning interiors filled with frescoes.

 

Henri Clément Serveau produced several frescos including a three by six meter painting for the Lycée de Meaux, where he was once a student. He directed the École de fresques at l'École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, and decorated the Pavillon du Tourisme at the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (Paris), Pavillon de la Ville de Paris; now at Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. In 1954 he realized a fresco for the Cité Ouvrière du Laboratoire Débat, Garches. He also executed mural decorations for the Plan des anciennes enceintes de Paris in the Musée Carnavalet.

 

The Foujita chapel in Reims completed in 1966, is an example of modern frescos, the interior being painted with religious scenes by the School of Paris painter Tsuguharu Foujita. In 1996, it was designated an historic monument by the French Government.

 

MEXICAN MURALISM

José Clemente Orozco, Fernando Leal, David Siqueiros and Diego Rivera the famous Mexican artists, renewed the art of fresco painting in the 20th century. Orozco, Siqueiros, Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo contributed more to the history of Mexican fine arts and to the reputation of Mexican art in general than anybody else. Together with works by Orozco, Siqueiros, and others, Fernando Leal and Rivera's large wall works in fresco established the art movement known as Mexican Muralism.

 

CONSERVATION OF FRESCOES

The climate and environment of Venice has proved to be a problem for frescoes and other works of art in the city for centuries. The city is built on a lagoon in northern Italy. The humidity and the rise of water over the centuries have created a phenomenon known as rising damp. As the lagoon water rises and seeps into the foundation of a building, the water is absorbed and rises up through the walls often causing damage to frescoes. Venetians have become quite adept in the conservation methods of frescoes. The mold aspergillus versicolor can grow after flooding, to consume nutrients from frescoes.

 

The following is the process that was used when rescuing frescoes in La Fenice, a Venetian opera house, but the same process can be used for similarly damaged frescoes. First, a protection and support bandage of cotton gauze and polyvinyl alcohol is applied. Difficult sections are removed with soft brushes and localized vacuuming. The other areas that are easier to remove (because they had been damaged by less water) are removed with a paper pulp compress saturated with bicarbonate of ammonia solutions and removed with deionized water. These sections are strengthened and reattached then cleansed with base exchange resin compresses and the wall and pictorial layer were strengthened with barium hydrate. The cracks and detachments are stopped with lime putty and injected with an epoxy resin loaded with micronized silica.

 

WIKIPEDIA

In a public park overlooking Wade's Bridge and the River Tay in Aberfeldy, Perthshire stands a striking memorial to the soldiers of the Black Watch Regiment (the Royal Highlanders). The monument is in the form of a massively tall cairn topped by a statue of a soldier wearing the original Black Watch Regimental uniform. Though the statue represents all members of the regiment, it is, in fact, a depiction of Private Farquhar Shaw.

 

Private Shaw was one of three men executed for desertion in 1743. That would at first glance make him an odd choice to be featured on the regimental memorial, but there is more to the story than meets the eye.

 

The Black Watch was ordered to march south from Scotland to London. That in itself was odd, for the regiment normally served in Scotland. When they reached London a rumour spread that they were to be transported to the American colonies, which was a method used by Parliament to disperse troublesome Highland clans.

 

A large number of soldiers were so alarmed that they left London, intending to march back north to Scotland. They were stopped after 2 days. The soldiers who had remained in London set sail to fight in Flanders, not to America.

 

Even though the 'deserters' had made their decision based on false rumours, the government could not ignore their actions. All were tried by court martial and sentenced to death. In the end, only three men were shot, among them Private Farquhar Shaw.

 

The cairn is inscribed with the following words:

 

THIS CAIRN IS ERECTED BY GRATEFUL AND ADMIRING COUNTRYMEN

IN COMMEMORATION OF THE ASSEMBLING TOGETHER AT TAYBRIDGE

IN OCTOBER 1739

OF THE SIX INDEPENDANT COMPANIES AFTERWARDS INCREASED TO TEN

 

OF THE "FREICEADAN DUBH" OR BLACK WATCH

 

WHO AFTER SERVING IN VARIOUS PARTS OF THE HIGHLANDS

WERE EMBODIED INTO A REGIMENT DESIGNATED THE 43rd AND AFTERWARDS

THE 42nd ROYAL HIGHLANDER WHOSE FIRST MUSTER TOOK PLACE IN MAY 1740 NEAR

TAYBRIDGE AND ALSO IN RECOGNITION OF THE VALOUR AND PATRIOTISM

WHICH HAVE EVER SINCE DISTINGUISHED THE SOLDIERS OF THIS CORPS DURING ITS ILLUSTRIOUS CAREER IN MANY LANDS

A.D. 1887

 

Note the mis-spelling of the word 'independant'.

 

On the north-west face of the cairn is an inscription in Gaelic commemorating the foundation of the Regiment. An English translation of the inscription reads in part:

 

'The lands and bens and glens and heroes. This cairn has been erected to commemorate the forming into one company at this spot of the six Highland companies called The Black Watch 1740. And from that day this regiment won many battles in different parts of the world proving their valour and patriotism of the Gael'

 

A plaque on the rear face of the memorial cairn commemorates the donation of the land for the monument by Gavin, Marquis of Breadalbane. Another face of the cairn has a kilted figure beneath an inscription of battles where the Black Watch served with distinction, including Waterloo, Corunna, Lucknow, Alexandria, and Havana.

 

The Black Watch

 

The origins of the Black Watch go back to 1667 when Charles II called on clan chieftains to muster independent companies of soldiers to keep the peace in the Highlands. The companies were disbanded in 1717 only to be reformed in 1725.

 

The new companies were recruited from Highland clans who remained loyal to the government during the 1715 Jacobite Rebellion. The origin of name 'Black Watch' is a subject of some debate, but one theory is that the black comes from the dark colour of the tartan uniforms, which contrasted with the bright red uniforms of ordinary soldiers, and the 'watch' from the fact that they were established 'to watch upon the braes' (i.e. the Highlands).

 

In 1739 the Highland companies were merged to form a regiment of Scottish foot soldiers. They were originally the 43rd Highland Regiment but in 1749 they became the 42nd Highland Regiment. The royal decree setting up the regiment specified that members were to be drawn only from Scotland.

 

The very first regimental parade was held at Aberfeldy in 1739, on a site now occupied by the local golf course. The regiment was mustered for the first time in May 1740 at Weem Cow Park, across the River Tay from Aberfeldy.

 

By the late Victorian period the Black Watch had gained an enviable reputation as an elite fighting force. Major James Menzies of the Glasgow Highlanders proposed a monument commemorating the first muster some 147 years before. The memorial was intended to celebrate Queen Victoria's Jubilee as well as the regiment itself.

 

The natural location for the monument would have been in the meadow on the west bank of the Tay where the muster took place but that site was prone to flooding. An alternate site was selected on the east bank, looking towards the meadow.

 

The monument was erected by public conscription and cost £500.

 

On 12 November 1887 the Marquis of Breadalbane unveiled the monument on the east bank of the River Tay, opposite the location of that first muster.

 

The regiment was represented by a detachment of 39 men commanded by Lieutenant McLeod of the Perth Depot, 1st Battalion 42nd Royal Highlanders. They were led in a procession by a pipe band from the 10th Lanark Volunteers (Glasgow Highlanders).

 

The ceremonial axe used to unveil the memorial is now held at the Black Watch Museum in Perth.

 

In 1910 the monument was struck by lightning, splitting the monument in two and causing extensive damage. It was repaired and a lightning conductor strap installed, running from the top of the memorial to a rod in the earth at its base to diminish the chance of future damage.

 

The Black Watch was granted the freedom of Aberfeldy in 1970.

 

The Black Watch Memorial is directly beside General Wade's Bridge, erected in 1733 by General George Wade as part of the British government's attempts to improve military transportation in the Highlands in case of another Jacobite rebellion.

 

There is no dedicated parking but it is very easy to park along Taybridge Drive, directly beside the memorial. It is easy to access on foot from the centre of Aberfeldy and there are pedestrian fingerposts indicating the way.

 

Aberfeldy is a burgh in Perth and Kinross, Scotland, on the River Tay. A small market town, Aberfeldy is located in Highland Perthshire. It was mentioned by Robert Burns in the poem The Birks Of Aberfeldy and in the Ed Sheeran song The Hills of Aberfeldy.

 

Aberfeldy means 'mouth of the Peallaidh'. The first element of the name is the Pictish word aber 'river mouth'. The river-name perhaps incorporates the name of a water-sprite known as Peallaidh, which in Gaelic means 'shaggy'. Aberfeldy is recorded in 1526 as Abrefrally and in 1552 as Abirfeldy.

History

 

Beyond its association with Burns, who mentioned Aberfeldy in his poem The Birks of Aberfeldy, the town is known for Wade's Bridge, built in 1733 and designed by architect William Adam, father of Robert Adam. General George Wade considered this bridge to be his greatest accomplishment. Aberfeldy is also mentioned in the traditional "Loch Tay Boat Song".

 

While working in the 1880s as a hired farmhand for Robert Menzies of Tirinie, near Aberfeldy, South Uist seanchaidh Angus MacLellan learned that a Mass stone had stood in the middle of Menzies's farmfield since the days when Catholic Church in Scotland and it's priests were outlawed. A nearby high cross, Menzies added, marked the site of an important college of learning from the days of the Celtic Church. Menzies explained that, even though the local population had long since switched to Presbyterianism, former Catholic religious sites were still viewed with superstitious awe and were never tampered with. Menzies further explained that the term for Mass stones, in the Perthshire dialect of the Scottish Gaelic language, was Clachan Ìobairt, meaning "Offering Stones". John Lorne Campbell, to whom MacLellan dictated his memoirs, confirmed the latter's memories by interviewing Robert Menzies' descendants in Aberfeldy.

 

Between 1960 and 1991, the burgh was the location of a Royal Observer Corps monitoring bunker, to be used in the event of a nuclear attack. It remains mostly intact.

 

The town includes a memorial to the Black Watch, an 9-hole golf course, a children's park, and a town square (laid out in 1806) which features stores, restaurants and art galleries. In 2002, Aberfeldy was granted Fairtrade Town status, which was renewed by the Fairtrade Foundation on 15 December 2003.

 

The Aberfeldy Footbridge over the River Tay is constructed entirely of composite materials. It initially connected two sections of the town's golf course on either side of the River Tay, but the course on the north side of the river has since been removed and the bridge is now used by pedestrians and cyclists to cross the river.

 

Aberfeldy is situated in Strath Tay on the upper reaches of the River Tay, which begins up-strath from Aberfeldy at Loch Tay and carries on south and east from Aberfeldy until it discharges at its estuary east of Perth at the Firth of Tay. Lying in an u-shaped strath common to Scotland's glaciated landscape, the terrain in and around Aberfeldy is gently undulating. Farming and agriculture border the town in the strath. Areas further outside of Aberfeldy (particularly to the north and west) give way to the extensive Grampian Mountains, with scenic peaks such as Creag Odhar, Farragon Hill, Schiehallion, Ben Lawers and Sron Mhor punctuating the landscape.

 

Aberfeldy lies at the intersection of two A roads, the A826 to Crieff and the A827, which leads east and south towards the main A9 trunk road. Aberfeldy is easily reached from southern locations by taking the A9 to the Ballinluig exit, then the A827 to get to the town. Owing to its location off the A9 trunk road, Aberfeldy is less geared toward tourists than its cousin Pitlochry.

 

From July 1865 until May 1965, the town was served by a Highland Railway branch from Ballinluig. Although most of the trackbed leading into the town is still extant, the site of the station has vanished under modern housing developments.

 

The entrance to the Birks of Aberfeldy – a gorge and scenic walk – lies on the southern outskirts of Aberfeldy on the A826. The Birks is classified as a "Site of Special Scientific Interest" and contains many varieties of flora and fauna, some of which are protected. Glen Lyon, regarded as one of Scotland's most stunning and least-visited glens, lies about 8 kilometres from the outskirts of Aberfeldy. Evidence of fort construction by Roman legions more than 1,600 years ago is a testament to the region's historical as well as geographical relevance. At the mouth of Glen Lyon lies the village of Fortingall, falsely claimed to be the birthplace of Pontius Pilate and home to the Fortingall Yew Tree, reputed to be more than 5,000 years old (though recent research suggests its age to be closer to 2,500).

 

The town is home to Breadalbane Academy. Based in Aberfeldy since the nineteenth century, Breadalbane Academy is an all-through, mixed English and Gaelic-medium school catering to children from the ages of three to eighteen years. The nursery and primary departments serve pupils from Aberfeldy and its immediate surroundings. The secondary department is the main secondary school for the whole of Highland Perthshire. It is the primary centre for Gaelic-medium education in Highland Perthshire for children from Glenlyon, Grandtully, Kenmore, Kinloch Rannoch and Dunkeld all receive their secondary education in Aberfeldy. In fifth and sixth, pupils from the Pitlochry catchment area also attend Breadalbane Academy to study for their Highers and Advanced Highers.

 

Fully rebuilt in the early years of the twenty-first century, the school re-opened in December 2010 as a community campus. As well as nursery, primary and secondary departments, the new Breadalbane Community Campus includes a library, a swimming pool, squash courts, a gym, a cafe and a range of other facilities. These amenities are open to the public throughout the day. Only access to the school areas is restricted to authorised personnel.

 

Aberfeldy Parish Church meets in the former Breadalbane Church building in Taybridge Road, which was the first new building of the Free Church after the Disruption of 1843. It reunited with the former parish church, St Andrew's in Crieff Road, built in 1884, and for a while was used as halls for the united congregation, until 2005 when the Crieff Road building was closed and a modern interior and suite of halls was added to the Taybridge Road building, providing excellent facilities for adult and youth work. There is also a Roman Catholic parish in Home Street. The buildings formerly used as Congregational, Free, and Episcopal churches are now all used for other purposes. Jehovah's Witnesses meet in the local Kingdom Hall. The town is also home to the award-winning Aberfeldy Watermill Bookshop Gallery and Cafe.

 

Aberfeldy does not have a theatre or a music hall. However it does have two community venues, used regularly for music and drama, Aberfeldy Town Hall and the Locus Centre. These are managed by Locus Breadalbane, a community charity. The nearest venues are the Pitlochry Festival Theatre, the Perth Theatre or the Perth Concert Hall. The new Community School has an auditorium.

 

The Birks Cinema, built in the very heart of the town in 1939 in a late Art Deco style, closed in the early 1980s for lack of business. It then turned into an amusement hall, for which purpose the entire interior was demolished. The amusement hall closed in 2004 and the building stood as an empty shell for several years. In 2009 it was bought by the "Friends of the Birks" with a grant from the Scottish Government's Town Centre Regeneration Fund with plans to refurbish and reopen as a new 92-seat cinema and café-bar. The Friends are now a formal company limited by guarantee and registered as a charity. In spring 2011, the Birks project was awarded £658,520 by the Scotland Rural Development Programme - half the sum needed to carry out the building work. Match funding for the SRDP grant has now been raised - notably through a Big Lottery grant of £539,950 announced on 9 February 2012. Building work began in April 2012 and opened in Spring 2013. The patron of the project is the actor Alan Cumming, who was born in the town.

 

Aberfeldy is the location of the poem "The Birks of Aberfeldy" by Robert Burns:

 

Bonie lassie, will ye go,

Will ye go, will ye go,

Bonie lassie, will ye go

To the birks of Aberfeldy!

 

Now Simmer blinks on flowery braes,

And o'er the crystal streamlets plays;

Come let us spend the lightsome days,

In the birks of Aberfeldy!

 

In 2001, the author J.K. Rowling purchased the nearby 19th-century Killiechassie House, on the banks of the River Tay.

 

The Precambrian Dalradian geological formations in the Highlands north of Aberfeldy contain substantial deposits of the mineral baryte, which is mostly used as a weighting agent for drilling fluids to prevent blow-outs in oil and gas exploration wells. There are three locations with exploitable quantities of it. The Foss Mine, some 4 miles (6 km) NW of Aberfeldy at 56°40′1.47″N 3°56′5.21″W has been operational since 1984 and production averages 50,000 tonnes per annum. So far some 525,000 tonnes have been extracted there by M-I SWACO. In 1990, a locally based company began opencast extraction near the summit of Ben Eagach, 4 miles (6 km) due north of Aberfeldy. Approximately 25,000 tonnes were mined from a series of small pits which have now been abandoned.

 

The largest formation, containing a 7.5-million-tonne reserve is at Duntanlich, some 6 miles (10 km) due north of Aberfeldy, south of Loch Tummel. In 1994, an application by MI Great Britain Ltd for an underground operation to mine the deposits was turned down. In 2000, M I Drilling Fluids UK unfolded new plans to establish a mine at Duntanlich to take six million tonnes from the deposit over the next 50 years and began preliminary talks with Perth & Kinross Council and Scottish Natural Heritage. However, it was decided at that time not to take these proposals forward.

 

The Scottish Census of 2001 recorded the town's population as 1,895. Perth and Kinross Council estimates the current population to be 2,292, which is forecasted to grow to over 2,800 by 2028.

 

Breadalbane Cricket Club, founded in 1869, play home matches at Victoria Park in Aberfeldy. The team are the Perthshire Cup Winners for 2007 and 2008, and Strathmore Cricket Union Division One Champions in 2006 & 2007, Division Two Champions in 2014 & 2018, and Perthshire Indoor League Champions 2013, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. The town also has a rugby union side Aberfeldy RFC that plays in the Caledonia Midlands Four league at the town's Wade Park.

Namesake

Aberfeldie, the suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia was named, indirectly, after the town, as was the locality of Aberfeldy, Victoria.

MURALE EXECUTER PAR MON AMI RODOLFO ROJAS ROCHAS DU COSTA RICA - WALL TO EXECUTE BY MY FRIEND RODOLFO ROJAS ROCHAS OF COSTA RICA

The Corvette C3 was patterned after the Mako Shark II designed by Larry Shinoda. Executed under Bill Mitchell's direction, the Mako II had been initiated in early 1964. Once the mid-engined format was abandoned, the Shinoda/Mitchell car was sent to Chevrolet Styling under David Holls, where Harry Haga's studio adapted it for production on the existing Stingray chassis. The resulting lower half of the car was much like the Mako II, except for the softer contours. The concept car's name was later changed to Manta Ray. The C3 also adopted the "sugar scoop" roof treatment with vertical back window from the mid-engined concept models designed by the Duntov group. It was intended from the beginning that the rear window and that portion of the roof above the seats to be removable.

 

For 1968, both the Corvette body and interior were completely redesigned. As before, the car was available in either coupe or convertible models, but coupe was now a notchback fitted with a near-vertical removable rear window and removable roof panels (T-tops). A soft folding top was included with convertibles, while an auxiliary hardtop with a glass rear window was offered at additional cost. Included with coupes were hold down straps and a pair of vinyl bags to store the roof panels, and above the luggage area was a rear window stowage tray.

 

The chassis was carried over from the second generation models, retaining the fully independent suspension (with minor revisions) and the four-wheel disc brake system. The engine line-up and horsepower ratings were also carried over from the previous year.

 

The engine line-up included the L79, a 350 hp (261 kW) high performance version of the 327 cu in (5.4 L) small-block. Also available were several variants of the big-block 427 cu in (7.0 L) V8 engine, that taken together made up nearly half the cars. There was the L36, a 390 hp (291 kW) version with a Rochester 4-barrel carburetor; The L68, a 400 hp (298 kW) motor with a Holley triple 2-barrel carb set up (3 X 2 tri-power); The L71, generating 435 bhp (441 PS; 324 kW) at 5,800 rpm and 460 lb⋅ft (624 N⋅m) at 4,000 rpm of torque also with a tri-power; The L89 option was the L71 engine but with much lighter aluminum cylinder heads rather than the standard cast iron. Then there was the L88 engine that Chevrolet designed strictly for off-road use (racing), with a published rating of 430 hp (321 kW), but featured a high-capacity 4-barrel carb, aluminum heads, a unique air induction system, and an ultra-high compression ratio (12.5:1). All small block cars had low-profile hoods. All big block cars had domed hoods for additional engine clearance with twin simulated vents and “427” emblems on either side of the dome.

This morning (Tuesday 1 February 2022), we executed warrants at six properties in the Chadderton area.

 

A 25-year-old was arrested on suspicion of rape, sexual assault and trafficking a person within the UK for sexual exploitation.

 

A second 25-year-old was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault.

 

A 26-year-old was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault and trafficking a person within the UK for sexual exploitation.

 

A 27-year-old was arrested on suspicion of rape and trafficking a person within the UK for sexual exploitation.

 

A 28-year-old was arrested on suspicion of rape and trafficking a person within the UK for sexual exploitation.

 

The warrants were executed as part of Operation Gabel - an investigation into the child sexual exploitation of two teenage girls in 2012/2013.

 

Inspector Nick Helme, of GMP's Oldham district, said: "This morning's action at several properties in the Chadderton area was a result of just one of a number of ongoing investigations into historic child sexual exploitation in Greater Manchester.

 

"I can assure members of the public and warn offenders that investigating this type of crime is a top priority for the force. Regardless of time passed, dedicated teams in a specialist unit leave no stone unturned whilst gathering evidence to make arrests with the intention of bringing suspects to face justice.

 

"I hope these warrants build public trust and confidence that Greater Manchester Police is committed to fighting, preventing and reducing CSE to keep people safe and care for victims - giving them the faith they need in the force to come forward.

 

Greater Manchester is nationally recognised as a model of good practice in terms of support services available to victims.

If you or someone you know has been raped or sexually assaulted, we encourage you not to suffer in silence and report it to the police, or a support agency so you can get the help and support available.

 

- Saint Mary's Sexual Assault Referral Centre, Manchester provides a comprehensive and co-ordinated response to men, women and children who live or have been sexually assaulted within Greater Manchester. We offer forensic medical examinations, practical and emotional support as well as a counselling service for all ages. Services are available on a 24-hour basis and can be accessed by telephoning 0161 276 6515.

 

-Greater Manchester Rape Crisis is a confidential information, support and counselling service run by women for women over 18 who have been raped or sexually abused at any time in their lives. Call us on 0161 273 4500 or email us at help@manchesterrapecrisis.co.uk

 

- Survivors Manchester provides specialist trauma informed support to boys and men in Greater Manchester who have experienced sexual abuse, rape or sexual exploitation. Call 0161 236 2182.