Ephemera Friday: Green Pieces

Not too much that's Irish here, but I'm going green from St. Paddy's Day with ephemera from my personal archive. Is drinking good for the environment? Have a great weekend! 

Remains of the Bay

As part of Jamaica Bay Unit of the Gateway National Recreation Area, Dead Horse Bay is now a protected environment along with the other historic and natural sites in the area like Floyd Bennett Field, Fort Tilden, Jacob Riis Park and the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge.

Though hardly pristine, the stretch of beach is a far cry from its years as a garbage dump for New York. From the New York Times:

Dead Horse Bay sits at the western edge of a marshland once dotted by more than two-dozen horse-rendering plants, fish oil factories and garbage incinerators. From the 1850's until the 1930's, the carcasses of dead horses and other animals from New York City streets were used to manufacture glue, fertilizer and other products at the site. The chopped-up, boiled bones were later dumped into the water. The squalid bay, then accessible only by boat, was reviled for the putrid fumes that hung overhead. A rugged community of laborers, many of them Irish, Polish and Italian immigrants, lived in relative isolation on neighboring Barren Island, which shared the bay's unsavory reputation. (story) 

You can read about life on Barren Island in even greater detail, in this New York Times article from 1939. It is a report on the last 25 families to remain in the area as it was being cleared for construction of the Belt Parkway.

Here are some finds from a hot sticky early summer outing ...

Curly Bracketology

via Typophile

Just as “CD” can mean one thing to a banker and quite another to a music-lover, so too, the term “brackets” can have quite unrelated meanings to different people.

For example, I travel in circles where “brackets” are simply typographic characters. They come in straight and curly varieties and vary from typeface to typeface. 

But for most of the population, “brackets” is the diagram for the elimination tournament of the NCAA Basketball Championships. “March Madness,” as it’s called, (and which also has a whole other meaning), must be what happens when you watch 32 college teams play 67 games.

Far less lucrative to proprietors of sports bars, is the other “March Madness,” which occurs amongst European hares. The elimination tournament, which is especially frenzied during the month of March, is for the prize of mating with the doe, whose receptivity for breeding is limited to only a few hours during each of her six-week cycles.

A female will viciously fight off her suitors, giving them scarred ears. Hares have been observed to stand on their hind legs and hit each other with their paws, a practice known as "boxing" and this activity is usually between a female and a male and not between males as previously believed. When a doe is ready to mate, she will start a wild chase across the countryside, shaking off following males until only one remains. After this the female will stop and allow the remaining male to mate with her. Wikipedia

 

Why not try Book Antiqua?

Or you can pick a bracket style from the fabulous

Tor Weeks poster, A Field Guide to Typestaches.

Happy National Bracket Day!

(Whatever font you choose.)

Gunpowder Labels

DuPont might be best known for creating a synthetic parallel universe of our natural material world. The company replaced silk with nylon, glass with Lucite, rubber with neoprene, and stone with Corian. So synonymous is the company with chemicals, that substances such as Lycra, Teflon, and Kevlar have become household names. But when founder Eleuthère Irénée du Pont established the company in 1802, its sole business was the manufacture of gunpowder.

By the war of 1812, DuPont was the largest supplier of black powder to the U.S. government. During the Civil War, the company provided almost half of the powder used by the Union forces. As explosives technology advanced, the company became a leader in dynamite production and smokeless powder. (More detail here.)

Around the time of WWI, DuPont diversified into chemicals, and by the 1990s moved completely away from the blasting business. What remained with the company, however, was an amazing archive of powder labels. It now resides at the Hagley Museum and Library along with the rest of the corporate archives. Everything from duck shooting to mine blasting is represented and in addition to the DuPont brand, there are labels of acquired mills, and a collection of foreign labels as well. There are even a few original sketches.