BANKING AND FINANCE IN PUERTO RICO - 1898 TO PRESENT
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These are the highrises (Cityhaus II) of DZ Bank in Frankfurt on Platz der Republik (between Friedrich-Ebert-Anlage and Mainzer Landstraße)
The old Commercial Finance Company building along Liberty Street in downtown Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
The International Finance Centre (abbr. IFC, branded as "ifc") is a skyscraper and an integrated commercial development on the waterfront of Hong Kong's Central District.
On Explorer 30 August 2007, #19
Nikon D200 + Tokina 12-24mm f/4
Skyscrapers in Central, Hong Kong.
Clockwise from top left: Cheung Kong Centre, Citigroup, ICBC, and Bank of China.
The corner of Rue Saint-Pierre and Rue Saint-Jaques (St. James Street) was once the heart of Old Montreal's financial district and home to its earliest skyscrapers. On the left is the 1873 Merchant's Bank building and on the right the elegant Canada Life Building from 1895 was the city's first to use a steel structure. Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
La esquina de Rue Saint-Pierre y Rue Saint-Jaques (St. James Street) fue una vez el centro del distrito financiero de la Vieja Montreal y el lugar de sus primeros rascacielos. A la izquierda está el edificio del Merchant's Bank de 1873 y a la derecha el elegante edificio Canada Life de 1895 cual fue el primero de la ciudad en utilizar una estructura de acero. Montreal, Quebec, Canadá.
Miami (/maɪˈæmi/; Spanish pronunciation: [miˈami]) is a seaport city at the southeastern corner of the U.S. state of Florida and its Atlantic coast. As the seat of Miami-Dade County, the municipality is the principal, central, and the most populous city of the Miami metropolitan area and part of the second-most populous metropolis in the southeastern United States.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Miami's metro area is the eighth-most populous and fourth-largest urban area in the U.S., with a population of around 5.5 million.
Miami is a major center, and a leader in finance, commerce, culture, media, entertainment, the arts, and international trade. In 2012, Miami was classified as an Alpha−World City in the World Cities Study Group's inventory. In 2010, Miami ranked seventh in the United States in terms of finance, commerce, culture, entertainment, fashion, education, and other sectors. It ranked 33rd among global cities. In 2008, Forbes magazine ranked Miami "America's Cleanest City", for its year-round good air quality, vast green spaces, clean drinking water, clean streets, and citywide recycling programs.
According to a 2009 UBS study of 73 world cities, Miami was ranked as the richest city in the United States, and the world's fifth-richest city in terms of purchasing power. Miami is nicknamed the "Capital of Latin America" and is the largest city with a Cuban-American plurality.
Miami has the third tallest skyline in the U.S. with over 300 high-rises. Downtown Miami is home to the largest concentration of international banks in the United States, and many large national and international companies. The Civic Center is a major center for hospitals, research institutes, medical centers, and biotechnology industries.
For more than two decades, the Port of Miami, known as the "Cruise Capital of the World", has been the number one cruise passenger port in the world. It accommodates some of the world's largest cruise ships and operations, and is the busiest port in both passenger traffic and cruise lines.
Metropolitan Miami is the major tourism hub in the American South, number two in the U.S. after New York City and number 13 in the world, including the popular destination of Miami Beach.
Credit for the data above is given to the following website:
www.barrett-jackson.com/scottsdale-2025/docket/vehicle/19...
Finished in black paint with brightwork and oxblood leather interior, this 1941 Packard Custom Super Eight 180 Convertible Victoria is a testament to the Darrin and Packard partnership. An accomplished show winner, it is No. 9 of 35 Victorias built for the model year. This Darrin is one of only three known with running boards. Additionally, it features a "K" multi-spoke steering wheel. It was sold new on May 27, 1941, by Ed Lee Packard in Pensacola, FL. Believed to have been originally restored by Gray Hills Auto Restoration in New Jersey, the car was recently refreshed by Robert Escalante's Custom Auto Service, in Santa Ana, CA, where it received new carpeting, top, wiring harness and brightwork. Offered with a shop manual and service records, this Darrin is well known in Packard circles. This automobile, a proven concours contender, has received two invitations to the incomparable Pebble Beach Concours D'Elegance, and has gathered awards at numerous shows in the West. **TITLED AS 1941 PACK VICTORIA** **TITLE BRANDED EXCEEDS MECHANICAL LIMITS**
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"Barrett-Jackson delivered many magical experiences for everyone who joined us in Scottsdale," said Steve Davis, president of Barrett-Jackson. "From the excitement of the auction block to the thrill rides, exhibits, STEM Fest and live music, there was truly something that everyone in the family could enjoy. We filled our docket with so much diversity that collectors from every walk of life found something they loved. We stay on top of the trends and consign the vehicles that people want, proving once again that the car collector hobby is thriving. Those trends include the growing popularity of Resto-Mods, SUVs and trucks, which are gaining momentum because they appeal to such a broad cross section
Special Car
Barrett Jackson 2025
The International Finance Centre, abbreviated as IFC (branded as "ifc") is a skyscraper and an integrated commercial development on the waterfront of Hong Kong's Central District.
A prominent landmark on Hong Kong Island, IFC consists of two skyscrapers, the IFC Mall, and the 55-storey Four Seasons Hotel Hong Kong. Tower 2 is the second tallest building in Hong Kong at a height of 415 m, behind the International Commerce Centre in West Kowloon, and the 31st-tallest building in the world. It is the fourth-tallest building in the Greater China region and the eighth-tallest office building in the world, based on structural heights; It is of similar height to the former World Trade Center. The Airport Express Hong Kong Station is directly beneath it, with subway lines to Hong Kong International Airport.
The Louvre, is the world's most-visited museum, and a historic landmark in Paris, France. It is the home of some of the best-known works of art, including the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo. A central landmark of the city, it is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the city's 1st arrondissement (district or ward). Approximately 38,000 objects from prehistory to the 21st century are exhibited over an area of 72,735 square meters. , Attendance in 2021 was 2.8 million, the lowest since 1986, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The museum was closed for 150 days in 2020, and attendance plunged by 72 percent to 2.7 million. Nonetheless, the Louvre still topped the list of most-visited art museums in the world in 2020.
The museum is housed in the Louvre Palace, originally built in the late 12th to 13th century under Philip II. Remnants of the Medieval Louvre fortress are visible in the basement of the museum. Due to urban expansion, the fortress eventually lost its defensive function, and in 1546 Francis I converted it into the primary residence of the French Kings. The building was extended many times to form the present Louvre Palace. In 1682, Louis XIV chose the Palace of Versailles for his household, leaving the Louvre primarily as a place to display the royal collection, including, from 1692, a collection of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture. In 1692, the building was occupied by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, which in 1699 held the first of a series of salons. The Académie remained at the Louvre for 100 years. During the French Revolution, the National Assembly decreed that the Louvre should be used as a museum to display the nation's masterpieces.
The museum opened on 10 August 1793 with an exhibition of 537 paintings, the majority of the works being royal and confiscated church property. Because of structural problems with the building, the museum was closed in 1796 until 1801. The collection was increased under Napoleon and the museum was renamed Musée Napoléon, but after Napoleon's abdication, many works seized by his armies were returned to their original owners. The collection was further increased during the reigns of Louis XVIII and Charles X, and during the Second French Empire the museum gained 20,000 pieces. Holdings have grown steadily through donations and bequests since the Third Republic. The collection is divided among eight curatorial departments: Egyptian Antiquities; Near Eastern Antiquities; Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Antiquities; Islamic Art; Sculpture; Decorative Arts; Paintings; Prints and Drawings.
The Musée du Louvre contains more than 380,000 objects and displays 35,000 works of art in eight curatorial departments with more than 60,600 square metres dedicated to the permanent collection. The Louvre exhibits sculptures, objets d'art, paintings, drawings, and archaeological finds.
The Louvre Palace, which houses the museum, was begun by King Philip II in the late 12th century to protect the city from the attack from the West, as the Kingdom of England still held Normandy at the time. Remnants of the Medieval Louvre are still visible in the crypt. Whether this was the first building on that spot is not known, and it is possible that Philip modified an existing tower.
The origins of the name "Louvre" are somewhat disputed. According to the authoritative Grand Larousse encyclopédique, the name derives from an association with wolf hunting den (via Latin: lupus, lower Empire: lupara). In the 7th century, Burgundofara (also known as Saint Fare), abbess in Meaux, is said to have gifted part of her "Villa called Luvra situated in the region of Paris" to a monastery, even though it is doubtful that this land corresponded exactly to the present site of the Louvre.
The Louvre Palace changed a lot over the centuries. In the 14th century, Charles V converted the building from its military role into a residence. In 1546, Francis I started its rebuilding in French Renaissance style. After Louis XIV chose Versailles as his residence in 1682, construction works slowed to a halt. The royal move away from Paris resulted in the Louvre being used as a residence for artists, under Royal patronage.
Meanwhile, the collections of the Louvre originated in the acquisitions of paintings and other artworks by the monarchs of the House of France. Francis acquired what would become the nucleus of the Louvre's holdings, his acquisitions including Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. At the Palace of Fontainebleau, Francis collected art that would later be part of the Louvre's art collections, including Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa.
The Cabinet du Roi consisted of seven rooms west of the Galerie d'Apollon on the upper floor of the remodeled Petite Galerie. Many of the king's paintings were placed in these rooms in 1673, when it became an art gallery, accessible to certain art lovers as a kind of museum. In 1681, after the court moved to Versailles, 26 of the paintings were transferred there, somewhat diminishing the collection, but it is mentioned in Paris guide books from 1684 on, and was shown to ambassadors from Siam in 1686.
By the mid-18th century there were an increasing number of proposals to create a public gallery in the Louvre. Art critic Étienne La Font de Saint-Yenne in 1747 published a call for a display of the royal collection. On 14 October 1750, Louis XV decided on a display of 96 pieces from the royal collection, mounted in the Galerie royale de peinture of the Luxembourg Palace. A hall was opened by Le Normant de Tournehem and the Marquis de Marigny for public viewing of the "king's paintings" (Tableaux du Roy) on Wednesdays and Saturdays. The Luxembourg gallery included Andrea del Sarto's Charity and works by Raphael; Titian; Veronese; Rembrandt; Poussin or Van Dyck. It closed in 1780 as a result of the royal gift of the Luxembourg palace to the Count of Provence (the future king, Louis XVIII) by the king in 1778. Under Louis XVI, the idea of a royal museum in the Louvre came closer to fruition. The comte d'Angiviller broadened the collection and in 1776 proposed to convert the Grande Galerie of the Louvre – which at that time contained the plans-reliefs or 3D models of key fortified sites in and around France – into the "French Museum". Many design proposals were offered for the Louvre's renovation into a museum, without a final decision being made on them. Hence the museum remained incomplete until the French Revolution.
The Louvre finally became a public museum during the French Revolution. In May 1791, the National Constituent Assembly declared that the Louvre would be "a place for bringing together monuments of all the sciences and arts". On 10 August 1792, Louis XVI was imprisoned and the royal collection in the Louvre became national property. Because of fear of vandalism or theft, on 19 August, the National Assembly pronounced the museum's preparation as urgent. In October, a committee to "preserve the national memory" began assembling the collection for display.
The museum opened on 10 August 1793, the first anniversary of the monarchy's demise, as Muséum central des arts de la République. The public was given free accessibility on three days per week, which was "perceived as a major accomplishment and was generally appreciated". The collection showcased 537 paintings and 184 objects of art. Three quarters were derived from the royal collections, the remainder from confiscated émigrés and Church property (biens nationaux). To expand and organize the collection, the Republic dedicated 100,000 livres per year. In 1794, France's revolutionary armies began bringing pieces from Northern Europe, augmented after the Treaty of Tolentino (1797) by works from the Vatican, such as the Laocoön and Apollo Belvedere, to establish the Louvre as a museum and as a "sign of popular sovereignty".
The early days were hectic. Privileged artists continued to live in residence, and the unlabeled paintings hung "frame to frame from floor to ceiling". The structure itself closed in May 1796 due to structural deficiencies. It reopened on 14 July 1801, arranged chronologically and with new lighting and columns. On 15 August 1797, the Galerie d'Apollon was opened with an exhibition of drawings. Meanwhile, the Louvre's gallery of Antiquity sculpture (musée des Antiques), with artefacts brought from Florence and the Vatican, had opened in November 1800 in Anne of Austria's former summer apartment, located on the ground floor just below the Galerie d'Apollon.
On 19 November 1802, Napoleon appointed Dominique Vivant Denon, a scholar and polymath who had participated in the Egyptian campaign of 1798–1801, as the museum's first director, in preference to alternative contenders such as antiquarian Ennio Quirino Visconti, painter Jacques-Louis David, sculptor Antonio Canova and architects Léon Dufourny or Pierre Fontaine. On Denon's suggestion in July 1803, the museum itself was renamed Musée Napoléon.
The collection grew through successful military campaigns. Acquisitions were made of Spanish, Austrian, Dutch, and Italian works, either as the result of war looting or formalized by treaties such as the Treaty of Tolentino. At the end of Napoleon's First Italian Campaign in 1797, the Treaty of Campo Formio was signed with Count Philipp von Cobenzl of the Austrian Monarchy. This treaty marked the completion of Napoleon's conquest of Italy and the end of the first phase of the French Revolutionary Wars. It compelled Italian cities to contribute pieces of art and heritage to Napoleon's "parades of spoils" through Paris before being put into the Louvre Museum. The Horses of Saint Mark, which had adorned the basilica of San Marco in Venice after the sack of Constantinople in 1204, were brought to Paris where they were placed atop Napoleon's Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel in 1797. Under the Treaty of Tolentino, the two statues of the Nile and Tiber were taken to Paris from the Vatican in 1797, and were both kept in the Louvre until 1815. (The Nile was later returned to Rome, where the Tiber has remained in the Louvre to this day.) The despoilment of Italian churches and palaces outraged the Italians and their artistic and cultural sensibilities.
After the French defeat at Waterloo, the looted works' former owners sought their return. The Louvre's administrator Denon was loath to comply in absence of a treaty of restitution. In response, foreign states sent emissaries to London to seek help, and many pieces were returned, though far from all. In 1815 Louis XVIII finally concluded agreements with the Austrian government for the keeping of works such as Veronese's Wedding at Cana which was exchanged for a large Le Brun or the repurchase of the Albani collection.
For most of the 19th century, from Napoleon's time to the Second Empire, the Louvre and other national museums were managed under the monarch's civil list and thus depended much on the ruler's personal involvement. Whereas the most iconic collection remained that of paintings in the Grande Galerie, a number of other initiatives mushroomed in the vast building, named as if they were separate museums even though they were generally managed under the same administrative umbrella. Correspondingly, the museum complex was often referred to in the plural ("les musées du Louvre") rather than singular.
During the Bourbon Restoration (1814–1830), Louis XVIII and Charles X added to the collections. The Greek and Roman sculpture gallery on the ground floor of the southwestern side of the Cour Carrée was completed on designs by Percier and Fontaine. In 1819 an exhibition of manufactured products was opened in the first floor of the Cour Carrée's southern wing and would stay there until the mid-1820s. Charles X in 1826 created the Musée Égyptien and in 1827 included it in his broader Musée Charles X, a new section of the museum complex located in a suite of lavishly decorated rooms on the first floor of the South Wing of the Cour Carrée. The Egyptian collection, initially curated by Jean-François Champollion, formed the basis for what is now the Louvre's Department of Egyptian Antiquities. It was formed from the purchased collections of Edmé-Antoine Durand, Henry Salt and the second collection of Bernardino Drovetti (the first one having been purchased by Victor Emmanuel I of Sardinia to form the core of the present Museo Egizio in Turin). The Restoration period also saw the opening in 1824 of the Galerie d'Angoulême, a section of largely French sculptures on the ground floor of the Northwestern side of the Cour Carrée, many of whose artefacts came from the Palace of Versailles and from Alexandre Lenoir's Musée des Monuments Français following its closure in 1816. Meanwhile, the French Navy created an exhibition of ship models in the Louvre in December 1827, initially named musée dauphin in honor of Dauphin Louis Antoine, building on an 18th-century initiative of Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau. This collection, renamed musée naval in 1833 and later to develop into the Musée national de la Marine, was initially located on the first floor of the Cour Carrée's North Wing, and in 1838 moved up one level to the 2nd-floor attic, where it remained for more than a century.
Following the July Revolution, King Louis Philippe focused his interest on the repurposing of the Palace of Versailles into a Museum of French History conceived as a project of national reconciliation, and the Louvre was kept in comparative neglect. Louis-Philippe did, however, sponsor the creation of the musée assyrien to host the monumental Assyrian sculpture works brought to Paris by Paul-Émile Botta, in the ground-floor gallery north of the eastern entrance of the Cour Carrée. The Assyrian Museum opened on 1 May 1847. Separately, Louis-Philippe had his Spanish gallery displayed in the Louvre from 7 January 1838, in five rooms on the first floor of the Cour Carrée's East (Colonnade) Wing, but the collection remained his personal property. As a consequence, the works were removed after Louis-Philippe was deposed in 1848, and were eventually auctioned away in 1853.
The short-lived Second Republic had more ambitions for the Louvre. It initiated repair work, the completion of the Galerie d'Apollon and of the salle des sept-cheminées, and the overhaul of the Salon Carré (former site of the iconic yearly Salon) and of the Grande Galerie. In 1848, the Naval Museum in the Cour Carrée's attic was brought under the common Louvre Museum management, a change which was again reversed in 1920. In 1850 under the leadership of curator Adrien de Longpérier, the musée mexicain opened within the Louvre as the first European museum dedicated to pre-Columbian art.
The rule of Napoleon III was transformational for the Louvre, both the building and the museum. In 1852, he created the Musée des Souverains in the Colonnade Wing, an ideological project aimed at buttressing his personal legitimacy. In 1861, he bought 11,835 artworks including 641 paintings, Greek gold and other antiquities of the Campana collection. For its display, he created another new section within the Louvre named Musée Napoléon III, occupying a number of rooms in various parts of the building. Between 1852 and 1870, the museum added 20,000 new artefacts to its collections.
The main change of that period was to the building itself. In the 1850s architects Louis Visconti and Hector Lefuel created massive new spaces around what is now called the Cour Napoléon, some of which (in the South Wing, now Aile Denon) went to the museum. In the 1860s, Lefuel also led the creation of the pavillon des Sessions with a new Salle des Etats closer to Napoleon III's residence in the Tuileries Palace, with the effect of shortening the Grande Galerie by about a third of its previous length. A smaller but significant Second Empire project was the decoration of the salle des Empereurs below the Salon carré.
The Louvre narrowly escaped serious damage during the suppression of the Paris Commune. On 23 May 1871, as the French Army advanced into Paris, a force of Communards led by Jules Bergeret set fire to the adjoining Tuileries Palace. The fire burned for forty-eight hours, entirely destroying the interior of the Tuileries and spreading to the north west wing of the museum next to it. The emperor's Louvre library (Bibliothèque du Louvre) and some of the adjoining halls, in what is now the Richelieu Wing, were separately destroyed. But the museum was saved by the efforts of Paris firemen and museum employees led by curator Henry Barbet de Jouy
Following the end of the monarchy, several spaces in the Louvre's South Wing went to the museum. The Salle du Manège was transferred to the museum in 1879, and in 1928 became its main entrance lobby. The large Salle des Etats that had been created by Lefuel between the Grande Galerie and Pavillon Denon was redecorated in 1886 by Edmond Guillaume, Lefuel's successor as architect of the Louvre, and opened as a spacious exhibition room. Edomond Guillaume also decorated the first-floor room at the northwest corner of the Cour Carrée, on the ceiling of which he placed in 1890 a monumental painting by Carolus-Duran, The Triumph of Marie de' Medici originally created in 1879 for the Luxembourg Palace.
Meanwhile, during the Third Republic (1870–1940) the Louvre acquired new artefacts mainly via donations, gifts, and sharing arrangements on excavations abroad. The 583-item Collection La Caze, donated in 1869 by Louis La Caze, included works by Chardin; Fragonard, Rembrandt and Watteau. In 1883, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, which had been found in the Aegean Sea in 1863, was prominently displayed as the focal point of the Escalier Daru. Major artifacts excavated at Susa in Iran, including the massive Apadana capital and glazed brick decoration from the Palace of Darius there, accrued to the Oriental (Near Eastern) Antiquities Department in the 1880s. The Société des amis du Louvre was established in 1897 and donated prominent works, such as the Pietà of Villeneuve-lès-Avignon. The expansion of the museum and its collections slowed after World War I, however, despite some prominent acquisitions such as Georges de La Tour's Saint Thomas and Baron Edmond de Rothschild's 1935 donation of 4,000 prints, 3,000 drawings, and 500 illustrated books.
From the late 19th century, the Louvre gradually veered away from its mid-century ambition of universality to become a more focused museum of French, Western and Near Eastern art, covering a space ranging from Iran to the Atlantic. The collections of the Louvre's musée mexicain were transferred to the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro in 1887. As the Musée de Marine was increasingly constrained to display its core naval-themed collections in the limited space it had in the second-floor attic of the northern half of the Cour Carrée, many of its significant holdings of non-Western artefacts were transferred in 1905 to the Trocadéro ethnography museum, the National Antiquities Museum in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and the Chinese Museum in the Palace of Fontainebleau. The Musée de Marine itself was relocated to the Palais de Chaillot in 1943. The Louvre's extensive collections of Asian art were moved to the Guimet Museum in 1945. Nevertheless, the Louvre's first gallery of Islamic art opened in 1922.
In the late 1920s, Louvre Director Henri Verne devised a master plan for the rationalization of the museum's exhibitions, which was partly implemented in the following decade. In 1932–1934, Louvre architects Camille Lefèvre and Albert Ferran redesigned the Escalier Daru to its current appearance. The Cour du Sphinx in the South Wing was covered by a glass roof in 1934. Decorative arts exhibits were expanded in the first floor of the North Wing of the Cour Carrée, including some of France's first Period Room displays. In the late 1930s, The La Caze donation was moved to a remodeled Salle La Caze above the salle des Caryatides, with reduced height to create more rooms on the second floor and a sober interior design by Albert Ferran.
During World War II, the Louvre conducted an elaborate plan of evacuation of its art collection. When Germany occupied the Sudetenland, many important artworks such as the Mona Lisa were temporarily moved to the Château de Chambord. When war was formally declared a year later, most of the museum's paintings were sent there as well. Select sculptures such as Winged Victory of Samothrace and the Venus de Milo were sent to the Château de Valençay. On 27 August 1939, after two days of packing, truck convoys began to leave Paris. By 28 December, the museum was cleared of most works, except those that were too heavy and "unimportant paintings [that] were left in the basement". In early 1945, after the liberation of France, art began returning to the Louvre.
New arrangements after the war revealed the further evolution of taste away from the lavish decorative practices of the late 19th century. In 1947, Edmond Guillaume's ceiling ornaments were removed from the Salle des Etats, where the Mona Lisa was first displayed in 1966. Around 1950, Louvre architect Jean-Jacques Haffner streamlined the interior decoration of the Grande Galerie. In 1953, a new ceiling by Georges Braque was inaugurated in the Salle Henri II, next to the Salle La Caze. In the late 1960s, seats designed by Pierre Paulin were installed in the Grande Galerie. In 1972, the Salon Carré's museography was remade with lighting from a hung tubular case, designed by Louvre architect Marc Saltet with assistance from designers André Monpoix, Joseph-André Motte and Paulin.
In 1961, the Finance Ministry accepted to leave the Pavillon de Flore at the southwestern end of the Louvre building, as Verne had recommended in his 1920s plan. New exhibition spaces of sculptures (ground floor) and paintings (first floor) opened there later in the 1960s, on a design by government architect Olivier Lahalle.
In 1981, French President François Mitterrand proposed, as one of his Grands Projets, the Grand Louvre plan to relocate the Finance Ministry, until then housed in the North Wing of the Louvre, and thus devote almost the entire Louvre building (except its northwestern tip, which houses the separate Musée des Arts Décoratifs) to the museum which would be correspondingly restructured. In 1984 I. M. Pei, the architect personally selected by Mitterrand, proposed a master plan including an underground entrance space accessed through a glass pyramid in the Louvre's central Cour Napoléon.
The open spaces surrounding the pyramid were inaugurated on 15 October 1988, and its underground lobby was opened on 30 March 1989. New galleries of early modern French paintings on the 2nd floor of the Cour Carrée, for which the planning had started before the Grand Louvre, also opened in 1989. Further rooms in the same sequence, designed by Italo Rota, opened on 15 December 1992.
On 18 November 1993, Mitterrand inaugurated the next major phase of the Grand Louvre plan: the renovated North (Richelieu) Wing in the former Finance Ministry site, the museum's largest single expansion in its entire history, designed by Pei, his French associate Michel Macary, and Jean-Michel Wilmotte. Further underground spaces known as the Carrousel du Louvre, centered on the Inverted Pyramid and designed by Pei and Macary, had opened in October 1993. Other refurbished galleries, of Italian sculptures and Egyptian antiquities, opened in 1994. The third and last main phase of the plan unfolded mainly in 1997, with new renovated rooms in the Sully and Denon wings. A new entrance at the porte des Lions opened in 1998, leading on the first floor to new rooms of Spanish paintings.
As of 2002, the Louvre's visitor count had doubled from its pre-Grand-Louvre levels.
President Jacques Chirac, who had succeeded Mitterrand in 1995, insisted on the return of non-Western art to the Louvre, upon a recommendation from his friend the art collector and dealer Jacques Kerchache [fr]. On his initiative, a selection of highlights from the collections of what would become the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac was installed on the ground floor of the Pavillon des Sessions and opened in 2000, six years ahead of the Musée du Quai Branly itself.
The main other initiative in the aftermath of the Grand Louvre project was Chirac's decision to create a new department of Islamic Art, by executive order of 1 August 2003, and to move the corresponding collections from their prior underground location in the Richelieu Wing to a more prominent site in the Denon Wing. That new section opened on 22 September 2012, together with collections from the Roman-era Eastern Mediterranean, with financial support from the Al Waleed bin Talal Foundation and on a design by Mario Bellini and Rudy Ricciotti.
In 2010, American painter Cy Twombly completed a new ceiling for the Salle des Bronzes (the former Salle La Caze), a counterpoint to that of Braque installed in 1953 in the adjacent Salle Henri II. The room's floor and walls were redesigned in 2021 by Louvre architect Michel Goutal to revert the changes made by his predecessor Albert Ferran in the late 1930s, triggering protests from the Cy Twombly Foundation on grounds that the then-deceased painter's work had been created to fit with the room's prior decoration
On 6 June 2014, the Decorative Arts section on the first floor of the Cour Carrée's northern wing opened after comprehensive refurbishment.
The Louvre, like many other museums and galleries, felt the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the arts and cultural heritage. It was closed for six months during French coronavirus lockdowns and saw visitor numbers plunge to 2.7 million in 2020, from 9.6 million in 2019 and 10.2 million in 2018, which was a record year.
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Special NOTE: On Feb. 8, 2012 I attached a comment, readable & easily discoverable on Page 2 of the comments below, that details the vast corporatist scheme, fronted by Jeb Bush, financed in part with hundreds of millions from Rupert Murdoch (FOX nooze), to privatize American public education & reduce it to 'virtual' schools - not to improve anything (as national & international educational research studies clearly show), but rather to become the final recipients of the taxes people pay so that they can skim huge profits off of the top while providing grotesquely inferior services & lots of lying propaganda to keep the public bamboozled. I beg everyone to read the report.
The McGuffey's Ecclectic Spelling Book was published in 1879.
Raymond Cyrus Hoiles (1878-1970) founded Freedom Communications, a newspaper publishing & broadcasting company that has never hesitated to shape the news to fit right wing ideology. When Hoiles was alive & roaring I lived in Orange County, California, home of the equally right wing Walt Disney & Walter Knott, & was frequently compelled to suffer people who agreed with Hoiles' constantly editorialized insistence that public education was a form of theft & communism that must at once be got rid of. Hoiles was motivated by his fundamentalist Christian persuasions, & quite serious. We should restrain our laughter at the abysmal stupidity of his example, because in many ways he & people like him won & are still winning control of public education. - To introduce the article below, I'll say a little about the Christian strategy.
For many years Orange County's teachers worked under a Draconian ruling that forbade the teaching of values. There is no way around the fact, however, that the statement, "Values may not be taught," is itself a value statement belonging to a class of propositions known as Epimenidean Paradoxes. A comparably illustrative sentence would be, "This is not a sentence." Or, a favorite of the best hypnotists, used when addressing a resistant subject, "Do not obey any instruction which I give you."
What, then, was intended by those who created the paradoxical Orange County law? Well, if any teacher dared to say or imply something that would be disagreeable to any person whose beliefs began & ended with church, flag & free-for-all capitalism, then that teacher could be charged with teaching values & be suspended. One family friend, a young man teaching at an elementary school in Anaheim, was charged, hounded, publicly disgraced, threatened with death & discharged from his post, immediately after which he died from a heart attack. The case was depicted in Life Magazine. His only crime was that he was Jewish. His wife, also a teacher, remained bereft & embittered the rest of her long life.
These people became increasingly invisible over time, largely by devising ever more clever ways for gaining control of both education policy & the public dialogue about education.
Ralph Reed, working for Pat Robertson & the Christian Coalition, devised the "stealth agenda" to place fundamentalists in every local school board in America. The plan helped select & fund candidates, who in accord with Reed's instructions never mentioned their religion or religious connections when campaigning for office. In 1983 Reed rigged an election at his university - he got started early, in other words. Recently we learned that Mr. Reed & Jack Abramoff were associate crooks. The revelation forced Reed to abandon his run to become the lieutenant governor of Georgia. Mr. Reed will not disappear, however. He remains a darling of the far Christian right, & owns Century Strategies, a dirty-tricks political consulting & lobbying organization. In 1999 Karl Rove got reed a nice contract with Enron, which was paying Reed $30,000 per month. And guess who recently went to Georgia to try to save poor Reed? Rudy Giuliani, who has the hots to be the next U.S. president & is pandering to the Christians so he can be their new burning Bush.
Stealthiness did not go away when the Christian Coalition folded & Reed went off on his own to rig elections for big bucks. Rather, the stealth moved into policy matters. For instance, all the phony propaganda claiming religious & private education is more successful, creating the excuse to promote vouchers (for which the motives are both religious & racist). Or, most recently, Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, which was sought by the Christians not because they believed all the testing of students would lead to improved education, but rather because they wanted teachers to be made too busy preparing students for endless tests about facts to find time to do the great evil thing, which is the teaching of concepts. Teaching concepts leads to teaching logic, scientific & other academic methodologies which by their nature instill respect for critical - read, skeptical - thinking. Dogmatists, advertisers & con men have equal cause to fear skepticism.
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From: Truthdig.com
Taking Back Our Schools--and Fixing Them
Full text with links: www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060425_taking_back_our_sch...
Posted on Apr. 25, 2006
By Wellford Wilms
The recent news reported in The New York Times that schools are throwing out science, social studies and art to make time for drilling students in remedial math and reading is a sign of things gone terribly wrong. Former New York State Commissioner of Education Thomas Sobol told the Times that narrowing education to just math and reading would be akin to restricting violin students to playing scales day after day. “They’d lose their zest for music.” But most schools that serve poor populations, like those in Cuero, Texas, are squeezed to meet federal math and reading standards. Cuero Superintendent Henry Lind told the paper, “When you have so many hours per day and you’re behind in some area that’s being hammered on, you have to work on that.”
But by the looks of things, hammering students for higher test scores isn’t making much of a difference. Most students have already lost their zest for learning. How do we know? In Los Angeles, upwards of 50% of Latino and African American students never finish high school. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
I’ve been a professor of education at UCLA for more than 25 years and am convinced that despite the fads that come and go, nothing has put a dent in the public schools’ failure to educate inner-city children. In fact, things are getting worse. But I am also convinced that we’ve been looking in the wrong places for solutions. My own research across a wide array of organizations—corporations, trade unions, public schools, colleges, teacher unions and police agencies—suggests another way of looking at the problem and that solutions will come from a new direction.
This essay is a proposition—one that I hope will spark a lively debate among Truthdig readers and inform policy leaders. Future essays will examine Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s campaign to take over the public schools, analyze whether teacher unions can be a force for productive change, and expose promising ways to rebuild public investment in the schools.
Let’s start with Jonathan Kozol’s new book, “The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America.” It is a scathing indictment of American social policy that banned racial segregation in public schools in 1955 and then turned a blind eye to its implementation. Today, Kozol says, schools are more segregated than ever. But he fails to explain why resegregation has occurred. Because Kozol overlooks the root causes of the problem, his solutions—spending more money on dysfunctional schools and wishing for a social mandate to desegregate the schools—miss the point.
To be sure the problems are undeniable. Kozol examines the appalling condition of big-city schools. In school after school we see children who are brimming with potential but who are walled off from the larger society and abandoned by the schools. Most middle-class white Americans simply cannot comprehend the horrid schools that Kozol describes. Ceilings fall in, toilets are filthy, libraries, music and arts have been stripped away. Teachers in these schools, who are paid 40% less than teachers in the suburbs, are forced to teach “scripted” lessons that are written for children who are deemed incapable of learning.
It is all part of the latest reform pushed by the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind initiative, a reform aimed at the singular pursuit of increasing test scores. Learning has been stripped of its intrinsic meaning and reduced to simplistic steps—“Authentic Writing,” “Active Listening,” “Accountable Talk”—that hamper teachers in teaching anything but how to take a test. Behind it all is an attempt to impose control, much as mass production techniques were used a century ago, to standardize instruction to fit new immigrants to the system.
Meanwhile, millions of children are failing. In nearly half of the high schools in America’s 100 largest districts, fewer than 50% of students graduate in four years. Most of these students are from poor Latino and African-American families. And from 1993 to 2000 the number of failing schools has mushroomed by 75%. Mayor Villaraigosa calls Los Angeles’ high dropout rates “numbers that should put a chill down your spine.”
The reasons, Kozol argues, are lack of money and racial discrimination that produce inferior and segregated schools. No doubt this is partly true. We have tried to desegregate the schools for a half-century and failed. Middle-class white parents have voted for individual freedom with their feet, enrolling their children in private schools, leaving the public schools more segregated than ever. The same is true for middle-class black families. Gail Foster, an educator who has studied black independent schools, was quoted in 2004 in The New York Times as saying: “Many of the most empowered parents and families are removing their children. What’s left, in even working-class communities, are schools filled with the least empowered families. Families with the least parent involvement to offer, families with the least help with homework to offer. There’s been a continual outflow for at least 10 years, and it isn’t stopping now.”
More money is not the answer either. Kozol points to wide disparities in educational expenditures ranging from $11,700 per student in New York City to $22,000 in suburban Manhasset. Disturbing as that is, study after study shows that equalizing money does not necessarily equalize learning.
In 1966, sociologist James Coleman conducted the most extensive study ever made of desegregating education and found that what mattered most in students’ learning was the economic status of their peers rather than the racial makeup of the school. He also found that school funding was not closely related to students’ achievement—their families’ economic status was far more predictive. Coleman’s findings were controversial and led to a bitter debate, but they have been replicated many times. Daniel Patrick Moynihan summed it up best when he commented shortly after Coleman’s groundbreaking study, “We should begin to see that the underlying reality is not race but social class.”
Since social class matters because money follows privilege, and since desegregation will take generations to eradicate, what can be done now? Are poor children doomed to attend grossly inadequate schools? Surely not. We must find ways to remove the influences that have crippled the schools. Money must be diverted from bloated bureaucracies that snuff out innovation. Instead it must go directly to schools where principals and teachers can influence what is taught and what children learn, and help bring parents back into the fold. Otherwise, it is going down a rat hole.
Parents have a significant role to play in their children’s education, but their voices have been largely silenced. Over the last 40 years, we have witnessed the decline of civic involvement and the growing dominance of self-interest over the greater good, a social deterioration that sociologist Robert Putnam calls “hollowing out” in his 2000 book “Bowling Alone.” One result, as the old saying goes, is that “the rich get richer” and the poor fall ever further behind in crumbling schools.
Over the last 25 years, education in general has been taken from ordinary citizens and teachers by politicians, administrators, union leaders, publishers, test makers, consultants, university professors, hardware and software developers and the media, each playing its part in keeping alive the illusion of reform. All in all, this $1-trillion industry has replaced the common interest, and no one, it seems, can muster the will to rein it in.
Local control is only a dim memory. Decisions now come from the top—from the federal and state governments, school boards and high-level administrators who have little knowledge of what goes on in the classroom. Teachers are left out of these decisions, carrying on the best they can, safe in the assumption that the newest fad, like those before it, will blow over. Parents are all but forgotten.
While command-and-control management may seem to produce results in the short run, it strips schools of the capacity to develop the stable leadership that is necessary to sustain success. Principals are besieged with demands from district offices and from the educational fads that emanate from publishers and university researchers. Many principals know that they put their careers in peril unless they do what their bosses want. One elementary school principal told me, “District directives undermine our own abilities to think for ourselves, to believe in what we see and know.” When schools discover something that works, it is rarely sustained because they lack authority or stable leadership.
In 1969 when I worked for the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, I monitored the schools in impoverished Ocean Hill-Brownsville in New York City. The local school board hired a charismatic superintendent, who fired incompetent teachers and hired young and idealistic ones. The firings set the local board at odds with the huge teachers’ union, which demanded due process for the fired teachers. The superintendent, Rhody McCoy, was convinced that good teachers had to respect the children they taught. He put it in plain words: “If you’re convinced that this kid is doomed by nature or by something else to lead a shrunken and curtailed life, then you’re basically incompetent to teach that child.” The experiment worked. Observing classrooms left no doubt in my mind that students were learning. Eager first-graders sat attentively on the floor in semicircles shouting out answers to fraction problems and reading aloud. The schools buzzed with excitement as parent helpers streamed in and out of classrooms. But in a bitter power struggle the board seized authority and the experiment ended.
Years later, in 1985, Deborah Meier, a passionate educator who founded Harlem’s Central Park East Secondary School, achieved stunning successes that led the school to be celebrated as a model alternative school in Time magazine. But it could not be sustained beyond Meier’s unique leadership. Today, 10 years after Meier left, a respected children’s advocacy group, Insideschools and Advocates for Children, reports that the Harlem school “…has fallen on hard times in recent years with rapid staff turnover, low staff morale and uneven discipline.”
In risk-averse environments like public schools, few principals will stick out their necks, because they don’t want to buck the bosses downtown. Courageous and visionary principals like Rhody McCoy and Deborah Meier keep coming. But charismatic leadership is no match for heavy-handed district management, which always wins out.
Take Foshay Learning Center in Los Angeles, for example. In 1989, Howard Lappin took over a failing middle school. With the help of teachers and an infusion of money, Lappin wrested control from the district and transformed Foshay. The school expanded into a K-12 “learning center” and became largely autonomous of the district’s bureaucratic requirements. Teachers and administrators decided who would be hired and what would be taught. Foshay succeeded, and in 2000 its high school was selected by Newsweek as one of the 100 best in America. But in 2001 Lappin retired, and his unique leadership was lost. Today Foshay is being threatened with sanctions by the district and the county because gains in students’ test scores have stalled. As the school has fallen under the district’s “one-size-fits all” bureaucratic requirements, the impact has been to undermine the once vibrant teacher leadership that made the school so enviable.
The problem with public education is not with the teachers, or with the children, but the way we organize the schools. Probably the greatest casualties are teachers themselves, who are forced to accept decisions by authorities about teaching that they know to be nonsense. One professor interviewed by Kozol said that forcing an absurdity on teachers teaches something: acquiescence. For example, in study after study, teachers report that relying on test scores as sole marks of student achievement and teaching scripted lessons destroy students’ natural love of learning. And such practices also erode teachers’ professional authority, which is fundamental to student learning.
Why is it so hard to foster the only kind of reform that really works, which is right in the schoolhouse? Because politicians, school board members and administrators are under intense pressure to produce immediate results, i.e., higher and higher test scores—a goal that is pursued through directives from districts with little input of principals, teachers and parents. Superintendents serve at the pleasure of school boards, and most board members are elected or appointed and have limited terms of office. As test scores have become the measure of educational quality, everyone is under immense pressure to show fast results or be turned out.
No wonder that school boards hire superintendents who promise to deliver quick results. But few do. Superintendents last on average only three or four years. Many are thwarted by outmoded bureaucracies that were designed a century ago using top-down control practiced in American industry to mass-produce learning. Within these organizations, power has quietly accumulated, making them all but impervious to outside influence. Sid Thompson, former superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, told me: “Trying to change the district is like trying to change the direction of a fast-moving freight train. You might knock it off course for a moment, but before you know it it’s rattling right down the tracks again.”
Frustration and suspicion about who might emerge from the shadows to sabotage their plans often lead superintendents to jealously guard their power. In 2002, Day Higuchi, then president of United Teachers Los Angeles, the Los Angeles teacher union, had high hopes for working with the school district’s new “can-do” superintendent, Roy Romer. Higuchi hoped that Romer would endorse a new union initiative called Lesson Study, a plan to help teachers work collectively to improve classroom lessons. At a breakfast meeting that I attended, Higuchi presented Romer with an invitation to work with the union to develop and spread Lesson Study across the district. When Higuchi finished, Romer flipped over his paper placemat and with a red felt pen drew a box with an S in it. “That’s me,” he said. Beneath he drew 11 boxes with smaller s’s in them, representing the 11 local superintendents, and below that, a number of small boxes with roofs, representing schools and teachers. Then, pulling his face near to Higuchi’s, he drew bold red arrows pointing downward from the top. Romer jabbed his pen in the air to accentuate each word: “You cannot usurp my authority to manage this district!” It was a dumbfounding moment, one that revealed the true underside of the use of power. Here was a chance for a new superintendent to forge a small but significant step with the union, but Romer, who recently announced his resignation, explained that he was “in a hurry.” He clearly had little time for ideas that were at odds with his own. In the end his refusal to work with the union undermined the possibility of creating a broader base of power that could transcend self-interest.
Nor are the unions exempt from self-interest. A few years ago I helped establish a national group of union presidents called TURN (Teacher Union Reform Network) who were dedicated to remaking their unions as forces to improve education. One way was to cooperate with administrators and encourage teachers to use their classroom know-how to redesign teaching at the schoolhouse. But hostility and mistrust run deep. The union leaders became nervous, fearing that fellow unionists would attack them for “collaborating” with the enemy and that if the effort to collaborate failed they would share the blame. Don Watley, president of the New Mexico Federation of Educational Employees, commented: “It’s like the Normandy landing. We’ve got the best troops in the world. We’ve got the best officers in the world. And we’ve got the best equipment in the world. But at 0800 when we hit the beach half of us are going to get killed!” Sadly, in the years to come, the ingrained mistrust, and the unpredictable dance of union politics, prevented these unionists from becoming a positive force in educational reform. Instead, they have been reduced to stockpiling power, much as the Soviets and Americans stockpiled nuclear weapons during the Cold War, to oppose any hostile moves the other side might make.
So what can be done to break the standoff between teacher unions and districts? How can teachers’ professional authority be restored? How can parents be awakened and brought back into the fold? Experience shows that it can be done. Schools such as Harlem’s Central Park East Secondary, Los Angeles’ Foshay Learning Center, those in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, and many others attest to the fact that schools can be made into safe places where children learn. Sustaining them is the hard part.
There is little doubt that trying to build good schools with command-and-control management doesn’t work. School boards, superintendents and union officials need to clear the obstacles—unnecessary bureaucratic requirements and outmoded work rules—to make innovation at the schoolhouse possible. These top-level educational leaders also must make resources available to support new ways of teaching. Jonathan Kozol has it right. Teaching is the only reform that counts and it can be done only at the schoolhouse by teachers, principals, parents and students working together.
Turning school districts upside down will also mean turning a century of top-down management on its head. But where is such bold leadership to be found? One promising place is among big-city mayors. But they must resist trying to take over the schools, as they did in New York, Chicago and Boston with mixed results at best. Instead, popular mayors could use their influence and visibility to tell the truth about the condition of education and to build a popular consensus about how change must occur.
In the next essay I am going to examine what mayors can do. Waiting for the schools to be saved by someone else is nonsense. Only concerted local action offers a chance. Doubters should recall Margaret Mead’s observation: “Never doubt that a small group of concerned people can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
Copyright © 2006 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
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International Finance Centre (abbr. IFC, branded as "ifc") is an integrated commercial development on the waterfront of Hong Kong's Central District.
A prominent landmark on Hong Kong Island, it consists of two skyscrapers, the ifc mall, and the 55-storey Four Seasons Hotel Hong Kong. Tower 2 is the tallest building in Hong Kong, usurping the place once occupied by Central Plaza. It is the third-tallest building in the Greater China region and the seventh-tallest office building in the world, based on structural heights; by roof height, only the Shanghai World Financial Center, Taipei 101 and Sears Tower exceed it. The International Commerce Centre, currently under construction above the MTR Kowloon station and scheduled for completion in 2010, will usurp 2IFC's various titles.
The Airport Express Hong Kong Station is directly beneath it.
(via wikipedia)
The International Finance Centre (abbr. IFC, branded as "ifc") is an integrated commercial development on the waterfront of Hong Kong's Central District.
A prominent landmark on Hong Kong Island, it consists of two skyscrapers, the ifc mall, and the 55-storey Four Seasons Hotel Hong Kong. Tower 2 is the tallest building in Hong Kong, usurping the place once occupied by Central Plaza. It is the third-tallest building in the Greater China region and the seventh-tallest office building in the world, based on structural heights; by roof height, only the Taipei 101, Shanghai World Financial Center, and Sears Tower exceed it. The International Commerce Centre, currently under construction above the MTR Kowloon station and scheduled for completion in 2010, will usurp 2IFC's various titles.
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This is Finance Tower, the second tallest building in Belgium.
The tallest building in Belgium is, like this one, in Brussels. It’s called ‘South Tower’ and you can find it right outside the Eurostar terminal.
I didn’t realise while I was taking photos of both of these buildings, spread quite far apart in Brussels, that they were indeed the tallest two in Belgium, so it was nice to learn this fact while writing this post.
Attempting to find out the name of the building above, I went on to Google Maps and retraced the steps I took while I as walking from central Brussels to the Atomium to find the building and figure out what it was. The fact I was there 9 months ago did not make this too easy, and made me wish I had a GPS device for my phone. Once found, I did a quick Google search and that’s when I realised it was the second tallest building.
It was only after my curiosity made me want to know what the tallest building in Belgium was that I found I had also taken photos of it on the same trip.
I seem to gravitate towards tall buildings I guess :)
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Replacing an earlier scanned photo with a better version.plus Topaz DeNoise AI 21-Jan-25.
Named: "Spirit of Westmoreland". Fleet No: "566".
First flown with the Airbus test registration D-AVZM, it was re-registered D-ASSY a few days later. The aircraft was delivered to ILFC International Lease Finance Corporation and leased to UK charter airline, Air World as G-BXAW in Mar-97. Air World was merged into Flying Colours Airlines in Nov-98 and it returned to the lessor in early Jan-99.
It was leased to Air Jamaica as 6J-JMD a few days later and returned to the lessor 10 years later, in mid Mar-09. The aircraft was leased to Turkuaz Airlines (Turkey) as TC-TCE in May-09. It was wet-leased to Al Wafeer Air (Saudi Arabia) for a Haj Pilgrimage operation between Oct/Dec-10. Turkuaz ceased operations at the end of the lease and the aircraft was returned to the lessor and stored at Medina, Saudi Arabia.
In Mar-11 the aircraft was re-registered N851LF and moved to Shannon, Ireland for further storage in May-11. It was re-registered again in Aug-11, this time as EI-ESI and remained stored at Shannon. The aircraft was leased to Al Masria Universal Airlines (Egypt) as SU-TCC in Oct-11. It returned to the lessor as EI-ESI in Jun-13.
In Aug-13 the aircraft was leased to Hermes Airlines (Greece) as SX-BHT. It was wet-leased to Air Moldova between May/Oct-14 and again between Apr/Oct-15. It was returned to the lessor in Mar-16 and stored at Craiova, Romania.
The aircraft was leased to Olympus Airways (Greece) in Jul-16, using the same registration. It was wet-leased to Air Moldova the following day and returned to Olympus in Mar-17. It was wet-leased to Wings of Lebanon, short-term, between Apr/May-17 and then to Windrose Aviation (Ukraine) between May/Oct-17. On it's return to Olympus the aircraft was initially stored at Istanbul before being ferried to Goodyear, AZ, USA where it was permanently retired in Jan-18.
In honour of the International Day of Happiness on 20 March 2017, I asked a selection of people to choose an object that makes them happy. I then photographed and interviewed them about these items.
"One of the things that me and my wife Debbie first bonded over was a shared love of Agatha Christie. We decided to buy them all, and had a list we'd cross off on visits to second hand book shops. The last one, an American edition called 'The Golden Ball and Other Stories', we couldn't find anywhere so resorted to eBay.
We could of course have bought them all on Kindle, but there's nothing like having the objects on a bookshelf. It's also nice that there's a history to second hand books, knowing others have read them. And Penguin covers look lovely.
I'm reading them in chronological order; there are around 90. It's interesting comparing the pre-war stories (people with servants in country houses), to the post-war ones (people can no longer can find the staff as the nouveau rich servants have enough money to buy their own houses).
Since we started buying these, Debbie has had problems with her vision, so she is listening to them as audio books."
Taken after that shot from the airport. Was supposed to go home straight but changed my mind and went to this place to see how a blue hour shot using the finance building as background will look like. Would have wanted some more light trails but it was an early friday evening so not many cars are out on the roads.
Explore: May 17, 2009 | H.P. #185 Huge thanks everyone!
(Former) English, Scottish & Australian Bank:
Historical evidence indicates that this building was constructed around 1882 for Philip Bolger, a grocer, who acquired the land from James Gibbon in that year. Bolger borrowed £3,000 from Gibbon in the same year he bought the land – possibly to finance construction of this two storey masonry building. The building was constructed during a period of growth and economic confidence which stimulated the expansion of Fortitude Valley.
Fortitude Valley was established during the 1850s, spurred by Lang’s Scottish Presbyterian immigrants who were denied land grants by the colonial government. Schools and churches were established during the 1860s with the census of 1861 reporting a population in the district of over 1300. The 1880s was a time of great commercial and residential growth in the Fortitude Valley area as both the population and the economy boomed. The imposing new Holy Trinity Catholic Church replaced the existing one in 1882 and large ornate hotels such as the Empire, the Prince Consort and the Wickham were constructed to cater to the rapidly growing population. New commercial premises were also erected to take advantage of the economic prosperity.
Early photographs show that Bolger’s building was originally more ornate, in keeping with the flamboyant style favoured in the 1880s. It had two triangular pediments, the bases of which are still evident today.
Bolger occupied the building until the 1890s when it was taken over by Jason Yetting and Son, Tea Importers. During the later half of the 1890s the building was used as a boot warehouse then from 1901 until 1920 by Albert Goodall, a bootmaker. Another boot manufacturer, John Charity, gained title to the property in 1920 and he ran his business from these premises until 1926.
In 1927 the building was converted to a bank after the English, Scottish and Australian Bank gained title in that year. This is likely to have been the period in which the alterations to the building’s external features took place. Like the 1880s, the 1920s were a time of economic confidence, particularly in the Valley which now rivalled the CBD as a major shopping precinct.
The English Scottish and Australian Chartered Bank was incorporated in the United Kindgom in 1852. On 21 August 1893 the English Scottish and Australian Bank Limited was established in Australia, based in Melbourne. It went on to have 104 branches spread throughout Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia and Queensland.
In the 1920s, the bank expanded, acquiring the London Bank of Australia, the Commercial Bank of Tasmania and the Royal Bank of Australia. This boom ended with the 1930s depression. Wartime controls limited the bank’s revival and the 1950s witnessed a period of turbulent growth. On 10 December 1968 the English Scottish and Australian Bank merged with ANZ.
The building at 100 Wickham Street was sold to Lanart Pty Ltd in 1973 and changed hands again in 1983. From the 1990s to the present, the building has been occupied by “Monty”, a second hand dealer and pawnbroker.
Muller Brothers Building:
Until the mid-1880s, Wickham Street was a quiet and sparsely populated street. Although the section between Duncan and Brunswick Streets hosted the Roman Catholic chapel from the late 1850s and the Prince Consort hotel from the early 1860s, Anne Street (as it was then spelled) was the main commercial district of Fortitude Valley. The Valley itself was a quiet and sparsely populated town until the 1880s, when an economic boom encouraged the construction of brick and stone buildings, replacing wooden ones. Residents of the Valley also began demanding better services, including improved transport, roads and sewage systems. The boom also assisted the development of Wickham Street, which became an increasingly important retail area from the 1880s.
Phillip Bolger obtained title to the site in April 1882, with the help of a £3,000 mortgage, and ran an oyster saloon on the site. The property was sold in 1885, firstly to Benjamin Waylett in May and then to John Watson in July. The site was located between stores run by drapers Quinn and Moylan and the former Roman Catholic Chapel.
The building was constructed for John Watson in 1886. Watson was a renowned figure in nineteenth century Brisbane, a Scottish immigrant whose varied career included roles as contractor, former lessee of the Bulimba Hotel and ferry and postmaster of the Breakfast Creek area. In the 1880s he began his first forays into his career as politician, elected to the Bulimba Divisional Board. He had become its chairman in 1885, when a financial scandal erupted and caused the resignation of all board members. Watson disclaimed knowledge of the problem (defrauding the Treasury) and was reinstated to the Board. In 1886 he was a member of the Booroodabin Divisional Board and stood for election for the seat of Fortitude Valley, which had been vacated after the sudden death of Francis Beattie.
Tenders were called in March for the construction of two two-storey brick stops for J. Watson, Esquire, by renowned and flamboyant architect Andrea Stombuco, who was also the Catholic Diocesan architect. Stombuco, like Watson, attracted a great deal of notice in nineteenth century Brisbane society, infamous for his fiery temper and his manner of dressing. He was also responsible for the design of several heritage listed buildings, including St Patrick’s Church in the Valley (1882) [600210]; St Francis Xavier Church, Goodna (1881) [600553]; Heckelmann’s Building, Brisbane (1884) [600104]; and a residence, Bertholme (1883) [600263]. Stombuco began practising with son Giovanni in 1886 (Watson’s building being one of its first commissions) and the partnership was responsible for the design of, inter alia, St Joseph’s Catholic Church at Kangaroo Point and St Joseph’s Christian Brothers’ College at Nudgee, before Andrea Stombuco left Brisbane for Perth and Giovanni Stombuco retired.
Watson’s choice of Stombuco to design his new building may have been influenced by his long connection with the architect. In his work as a contractor, Watson had worked with Stombuco on Benjamin Bros’ new warehouse (1884) and ‘Palma Rosa’, Stombuco’s residence (1887) [600219]. He was in attendance at the opening of the latter building in 1887, along with a number of other prominent contractors. Watson had also erected the new belfry for the new St Patrick’s church in 1886, a building which Stombuco had designed. Stombuco had also designed the Brunswick Street drapery of Watson’s father-in-law, John Gillies, in 1880.
The construction of Watson’s new building was preceded by excavation work, carried out by Cornelius Ryan. The presence of porphyry under the site necessitated blasting operations, which were commenced in early April. On 16 April a passer-by, Felix Henry, was killed by a large stone (estimated as weighing between 5-7lb) loosened by a blast. Watson’s name was not mentioned in newspaper reports of the blast, and Watson was not reluctant to mention in May that he was undertaking the construction of two new shops which would cost £3,000 and would help beautify Wickham Street. Despite this dedication to his ward, he lost the election by 26 votes. He later won the seat and represented the Valley in 1888.
The shops were finished and leased to tenants from around 1887. Watson’s father-in-law, Gillies, managed the lease of the building, known as ‘Watson’s buildings’. Although it was a single building, it contained two shops which were considered to be separate ‘buildings’. Each building contained six rooms, including a shop and dwelling and was described as being in the best part of Wickham Street, located next to drapers Quinn and Moylan and the former Catholic chapel. The building could also be accessed by a small laneway running behind the property, which backed onto the Valley rail line, under construction at the time Watson’s building was completed. Watson had been a member of the Valley Railway Committee and an active participant at meetings in the 1880s calling for a railway to be extended to the Valley. Although Watson had favoured a line through Petrie’s Bite and not through Watson’s properties, as the line eventually ran, he continued to support the railway and encourage the extension of the line to Bulimba, or at least to the Bulimba reach of the river. John McMaster, a fellow politician, later credited Watson with being instrumental in the development of the Valley railway.
From the 1890s, the building hosted a succession of Chinese merchant businesses. The presence of Chinese merchants in the Valley was not uncommon; the first Chinese shops had opened in the 1880s, located mainly along Wickham Street, and Chinese market gardeners worked on the edge of the Valley. However, the occupation of Watson’s buildings by Chinese merchants was somewhat unusual, as John Watson was the leader of the Valley branch of the Anti-Chinese League and had stirred up anti-Chinese sentiment in the months leading up to the 1888 elections. The first round of elections had culminated in an anti-Chinese riot on 5 May, in which a large group had run through the city and Valley damaging the shops of Chinese merchants. Watson, who had campaigned on a stance of removing the Chinese from the country, was elected to the seat of Fortitude Valley by a considerable margin a week after the riots. Police were positioned in front of every Chinese shop in the Valley on the evening of the election, discouraging any further damage from the ‘larrikin classes’. The Chinese Immigration Restriction Act 1888 was passed later in the year. Nevertheless, tea importer James Yeteng and merchants Wo Yick Chong and See War and Company ran their businesses in succession from one of the shops for ten years, from 1892-1902.
Watson’s building was occupied by small drapery businesses and Muller Brothers, importers, from 1902. The Muller brothers (Max and Emil) resided upstairs at number 194. A 1913 photograph of Wickham Street shows Watson’s buildings, Maher’s building and the Prince Consort Hotel.
Following the death of John Watson in 1912, the property and the McGeehin building next door were placed in trust. The remarriage of Watson’s wife Christina left her unable to inherit and the five remaining beneficiaries, Watson’s children, intended to divide the properties so that each owned one of the shops on Wickham Street. The new Undue Subdivision of Land Prevention Act 1923 passed by the City Council intended to restrict subdivisions to properties with over 20 foot frontages, but the Watson beneficiaries successfully appealed the Council’s decision in 1924. The Muller Brothers building was passed to Charles Ferrier Watson, who inherited shop 194, on 6.98 perches of land and George Alexander Hilliary Watson, who received shop 196 on 7.43 perches. The properties also carried charges in favour of Mary Murray (another of Watson’s children, who had not inherited a property) and Christina Scott, Watson’s widow.
The Watson brothers leased the properties separately, although to similar tenants who ran tailoring or drapery businesses, and from the 1940s cafes and saloons, which had become increasingly popular in the Valley. Both properties were sold in the late 1940s and alterations were made to the shop-front of 194 in 1950 (owned by M. Andronicos, 1948-1967) and 1956 (leased by G.F. Price); and to the shop-front of 196 in 1952 (owned by D. Mee Sing), to the café in 1953 (owned by Leonard Young) and to the awning in 1965 (owned by Joe Kong).
The shops continue to be owned separately and run as commercial properties (restaurants and cafes).
(Former) McGeehin & Co Building:
The McGeehin & Co building is located on the original site of the Fortitude Valley Roman Catholic Church and School, built in the late 1850s. The Valley had been settled by European immigrants in the late 1840s and the street, named Wickham after magistrate and surveyor Captain Wickham, was in existence as early as 1855, although it was only a dirt track which meandered through a series of private properties and terminated in a swamp. Churches and hotels appeared early in the development of the Valley, and along with small dwellings, the first buildings on Wickham Street included the Catholic Church and the adjacent Prince Consort Hotel, established around 1862. The church, a small wooden building with an attached schoolhouse, was the second Catholic Church and one of only fourteen churches in the Moreton Bay settlement by 1859. The population of Fortitude Valley increased over the ensuing two decades and although it was merely a small town in comparison with the central business district, the Catholic congregation outgrew the Wickham Street building. A new Cathedral designed by diocesan architect Andrea Stombuco was constructed in Morgan Street, near Ann Street. The new building was consecrated in December 1882 and the congregation removed there, while the school was continued by the Sisters of Mercy until 1887, when it moved from the ‘dilapidated buildings’ on busy Wickham Street to a new school house in Ivory Street. The new building, St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church, is listed on the Queensland Heritage Register [600210]. The old church remained hidden but intact on the Wickham Street site until 1911, when work undertaken for the construction of new premises revealed the old wooden chapel.
With a large new church nearly ready for its parishioners, the Wickham Street land was offered for sale in September 1881. It passed through the hands of the church’s clergy before the property of one rood and 21 perches was sold to contract builder and politician John Watson in 1889.
Scottish-born Watson was a well-known figure in nineteenth and early twentieth century Brisbane. He had arrived in Queensland with his wife Eliza in 1864 and settled near the river on what is now Oxford St in Bulimba. By 1866 he had acquired a license for the Bulimba Ferry Hotel (later the Bulimba Hotel) and was the lessee of the Bulimba ferry. He was a man of many trades, having worked in the shipping and building industries, constructed the Victoria Bridge (1888-9) and several wharves and jetties around Brisbane, provided postal services for Breakfast Creek and Bulimba and served in various political functions, including chairman of the Balmoral and Bulimba Boards and a Member of the Legislative Assembly for the Valley Ward. Watson was politically conservative and a protectionist, claiming at a political meeting that he always bought from the Valley. On the other hand, he was not one to shy away from controversy and publicity: he was the head of the Anti-Chinese League, had been chairman of the Balmoral Board when it was involved in financial scandals, drove the Bulimba steam punt into the oncoming ship Wyandra, and was duped out of £100 on a trip to London in 1909. He also felt strongly that the Brisbane River should be kept clean, protesting the dumping of sewage into the river. Watson was married three times and died in 1912 at his Bulimba residence.
Watson’s connections with the Valley were significant. As its representative from 1888-1896, he was credited with having been instrumental in bringing the railway to the Valley. Watson had been vocal about the location of tramlines in the Valley and was among the deputation of ratepayers who approached the Mayor in 1903 about the possibility of commencing markets in the Valley. As a contractor he had constructed the belfry for the new Valley Catholic Church in 1886. He purchased multiple properties along Wickham Street from 1882 and in 1886 commissioned Andrea Stombuco to design two two-storey brick shops on the premises, now the heritage listed as Muller Brothers’ Buildings. Watson’s second wife Elizabeth Gillies was the daughter of a Brunswick Street draper and his father-in-law, John, managed the lease of the Wickham Street properties throughout the 1880s and 1890s.
The exact date of the construction of this building is unknown, although it was almost certainly between 1898, when the property was classified as vacant land, and 1905, when the Brisbane Courier provided a history of the old Wickham Street church and added that:
[t]he land in question is no longer devoted to religious purposes, for the hand of commerce had been laid upon it, and it is now occupied by business premises owned by Mr John Watson.
The buildings were probably constructed around 1902, coinciding with a flux of development on Wickham Street. Transportation to the Valley had swept away the isolation of the township, and the Valley had emerged as a prime shopping and industrial destination. Investors began to take advantage of the circumstances, with those lucky enough to own land in the street constructing newer, larger buildings on their sites to attract tenants and customers. In addition, many of the timber buildings that had survived the development boom of the 1880s were demolished in the 1900s and replaced by more substantial masonry buildings, as required for a First Class building area.
From 1902, the building was occupied by grocers McGeehin & Co and an oyster saloon. McGeehin was later joined by Tolman, who lived in the residential portion upstairs. The buildings, described after a fire in 1910 (which damaged only goods within the shop), were three two-storey shops with residential quarters upstairs, similar to the Muller Brothers building. It remained a grocery store and oyster bar well into the 1920s. A photograph of this building taken in 1913 from the McWhirters building, looking down Wickham Street, shows the distinctive facades of Watson’s buildings.
Following the death of John Watson in 1912, the property and the Muller building next door were placed in trust. The remarriage of Watson’s wife Christina prevented her from inheriting, so the five remaining beneficiaries intended to divide the properties so that each owned one of the shops on Wickham Street. The Council was reluctant to subdivide properties which were so small (each had a frontage to Wickham Street of less than twenty feet), but Watson’s beneficiaries successfully appealed the Council’s decision and the properties were subdivided in 1924. Joseph Gillies Watson inherited shop 202, Isabella Margaret Dobson (nee Watson) shop 200 and William Francis Watson inherited shop 198, each parcel comprising around 8 perches of land. The properties also carried charges in favour of Mary Murray (another of Watson’s children, who had not inherited a property) and Christina Scott, Watson’s widow.
Each new owner continued to lease the properties, particularly as cafes, restaurants and wine saloons, which became popular in the Valley in the 1930s and 1940s. The shop in the centre (200) was run as a wine saloon for close to forty years (c.1915–c.1954). Alterations to the shops fronts and awnings were undertaken in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as interior changes such as a toilet block added in 1955. The properties continue to be owned separately and are used for commercial and entertainment purposes.
Source: Brisbane City Council Heritage Register.
In 1997, the owners of the Miami Heat of the National Basketball Association, which then played in the eight-year-old, publicly financed Miami Arena, threatened to move to Broward County unless they were given the $38 million parcel of land for the new arena by Alex Penelas, then-mayor of Miami. The agreement provided that the county receive 40% of annual profits of the arena above $14 million.
Kaseya Center is a multi-purpose arena on Biscayne Bay in Miami, Florida. The arena was previously named American Airlines Arena from opening in 1999 until 2019, FTX Arena from 2019 until 2023 following the bankruptcy of FTX, and Miami-Dade Arena during an interim period in 2023. Since April 2023, the naming rights to the arena are owned by Kaseya under a 17-year, $117.4 million agreement.
The arena has capacity for 19,500 people, including 2,105 club seats, 80 luxury suites, and 76 private boxes. Additionally, for more intimate performances, The Waterfront Theater, the largest indoor theater in Florida, is within the arena complex, seating between 3,000 and 5,800 patrons. The theater can be configured for concerts, worship events, family events, musical theatre shows and other stage productions. American Airlines, which has a hub at Miami International Airport, maintains a travel center at the venue.
The arena is known for its unusual scoreboard, designed by artist Christopher Janney and installed in 1998 as part of the original construction. Drawing on the underwater anemone forms, the scoreboard also changes colors depending on the atmosphere.
For concerts in an arena configuration, end stage capacity is 12,202 for 180° shows, 15,402 for 270° shows, and 18,309 for 360° shows. For center stage concerts the arena can seat 19,146.
WTVJ, the city's NBC owned-and-operated station in Miami, had their Downtown Miami Studios in the back of the arena from 2001 until 2011.
In 2013, the Miami Heat paid rent on the arena for the first time pursuant to the percentage rent agreement with the county; the payment was $3.32 million.
The arena is directly served by the Miami Metrorail at Government Center station via free transfers to Metromover Omni Loop, providing direct service to Freedom Tower station and Park West station stations, within walking distance. It is also within walking distance from the Historic Overtown/Lyric Theatre station.
The arena has 939 parking spaces, with those spaces reserved for premium seat and Dewar's 12 Clubhouse ticket holders during Heat games. Park Jockey manages the arena's on-site parking.
Credit for the data above is given to the following website:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaseya_Center
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkjockey
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The Nouvelle Mosquee du Vendredi (1998) in Moroni, Grande Comore, Union of the Comoros, was financed by a Middle Eastern princeling.
FINANCE IN 2030
Technology is transforming finance at breakneck speed, and the pace is only accelerating. Meanwhile, financial incumbents and upstarts are crossing borders as never before. The CEO of America’s most global big bank shares his thoughts on what this means and what the industry—and personal banking—will look like ten years down the road.
Michael Corbat, Chief Executive Officer, Citigroup
Moderator: Adam Lashinsky, FORTUNE Photography by Rebecca Greenfield/Fortune