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.)

Frank McMahon: Visual Journalist

Talk about witnessing history! The journalistic career of Franklin McMahon, took him everywhere from Mission Control to watch the first moon landing, to the Chicago Eight trial, to the Watergate hearings, the Vatican, and the inner workings of the European Common Market. McMahon, who died Saturday at age 90, recorded it all with a pencil and sketchpad.

In 1955, Life magazine hired McMahon to cover the Emmett Till trial in Mississippi. Till was the black teenager visiting from Chicago who, after whistling at a white woman, was taken from his uncle’s home in the middle of the night and brutally murdered. McMahon recorded visual snippets of testimony and he captured the truly historic moment of Till’s uncle being the first black person to testify against a white person in Mississippi. (The white male defendants, who were acquitted by the white, male jury, later admitted to the killing for a paid magazine story.)

Read about McMahon’s life and the global reach of his journalistic pursuits in his Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame bio.

At the end of the New York Times obit, there is an attempt to define exactly who this man, with no definable job category, was. First there’s a paragraph describing what he was not, and then McMahon gives us what I think, is a perfect definition of a visual journalist.

Mr. McMahon insisted he was not a courtroom artist, although he was widely praised for his coverage of the Chicago Eight … He also said he was not an illustrator, although he was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame. He was definitely not a portraitist, he said, because he never met his subjects. “I sit in the corner and make drawings of them,” he said.

And he even rejected the label of artist, though his work has been shown at many museums, including the Smithsonian. What he was, he said, was simply a reporter, who used art to tell stories.

Slideshow of Franklin McMahon's work at Chicago Reader

Selling Space

Tucked away in Duke University’s vast archive of outdoor advertising, is a small group of photos about the selling of outdoor ad space. In addition to the expected blank billboards and “your ad here” signs, are a handful of altered photographic prints, artifacts of the sales process. 

Easily believable as a John Baldessari series—swap out faces for buildings and apply rectangular rather than circular color patches--these photos from a Columbus Ohio real estate company, showed advertisers exactly where their ad would appear. As for the choice of using red (as opposed to the obvious white), there’s no way of knowing if it was inspired by the latest shade of nail polish, Russian Constructivism, or Dorothy’s ruby slippers.

It’s entirely possible, too, that the bright red color went beyond identifying the available space. It may have offered the subliminal suggestion that with an ad in that spot, your business could achieve a status of living color in the otherwise dreary black and white landscape of ordinary commerce.

John Baldessari, The Fallen Easel, detail, 1987

 Gustav Klutsis In Memory of Fallen Leaders, 1927 (via MoMA)

There's alway's an office wise-guy who has to be different!

It kind of makes me want to go out, buy billboard space, and actually paint it red. 

But wait ... It looks as if someone has done that already!

Wall space available in Trenton, c.1920.

Blank Highway Billboards

These road photos out-Hopper Hopper for stark, abstract loneliness.

Atlantic City Billboards

Whited-out billboards, above, from 1942 and below, 1951.

Cool “invasion arrow” is added to this 1926 day/night composite with crowds.

Separate day and night scenes from 1923.

A Nanosecond Made Visible

This clip of computer pioneer, Rear Admiral Grace Hopper visually explaining a nanosecond is so complete, that it needs no introduction, or summation. I have nothing to say except WATCH IT! 

I promise you a most satisfying data visualization experience.

via It's Okay To Be Smart