Saturday, June 28, 2014

Farewell, Antiques Garage

After 20 years, the Antiques Garage is closing. Sunday, June 29th will be the last day before the space begins its transformation into a 270,000 square foot hotel tower.

Many of the vendors, like Janet West, below, who's managed to offer cool stuff there for 17 years, will migrate to the outdoor lot at 25th St. between Sixth Ave. and Broadway. I guess it might start to feel like the old Chelsea parking lot fleas. Which will be nice, but also means that it's just a matter of time ...
     






Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Sugar, Unsweetened


There are still two weekends left to see Kara Walker’s searing installation, "A SUBTLETY: OR THE MARVELOUS SUGAR BABY, AN HOMAGE TO THE UNPAID AND OVERWORKED ARTISANS WHO HAVE REFINED OUR SWEET TASTES FROM THE CANE FIELDS TO THE KITCHENS OF THE NEW WORLD ON THE OCCASION OF THE DEMOLITION OF THE DOMINO SUGAR REFINING PLANT."

Last weekend the wait was about 40 minutes on a line that stretched for blocks, so plan accordingly. Also check the Creative Time website for exact hours. I see they've just extended Saturday and Sunday viewing to 7 pm.

The space reverberates with the haunted past of the sugar industry and the damage—human, environmental, political, and otherwise—it has inflicted in satisfying our collective sweet tooth. The Domino factory, which during the 19th century refined more than half of the sugar in the U.S. will soon be erased by development, but the history will not.

You can  read more herehere, and here,  but this mother speaks for herself. And she’s gotten the walls to talk too.






The molasses figures are melting.






Friday, June 20, 2014

Splendor of the Grass


I never imagined finding such animated illustrations inside a book titled “Fodder and Pasture Plants.” It was published by the Canadian Department of Agriculture in 1913, at exactly the time, a continent away, Braque and Picasso, were deep into Cubism, and Kandinsky was pioneering pure abstraction. Were these oddly angular, calligraphic renderings of grasses the work of someone other than a traditional botanical illustrator? It turns out the answer is yes, but he wasn’t a starving expressionist with a beret. The artist was Norman Criddle, a noted entomologist who happened to seriously know his way around a box of paints.


Criddle was born in Englnad in 1875 and his family moved to Manitoba in 1882, where they established a farm. According to Memorable Manitobans, “He developed the “Criddle Mixture” of poisons to counter the grasshopper menace in 1902 and was employed by the government to demonstrate its use to farmers. He became entomological field officer for Manitoba in 1913 and was appointed provincial entomologist in 1919.” The Criddle Mixture continued to be used for the next 30 years. The Rocky Mountain locust of the 1902 crop threat is now extinct.

As a family of naturalists, the Criddles were responsible for considerable collection and documentation of natural specimens, and with invaluable long term record-keeping of flora, fauna, bird migrations and weather.

So much for art school.

















Norman Criddle in his lab.



Norman Criddle with two of his pet crows.
Photo by Dr. R. D. Bird




In 1906, years before “Fodder and Pasture Plants,” Norman Criddle illustrated “Farm Weeds of Canada.” The paintings are more traditional,  but as you can see in Clover Dodder, there are hints of the sophisticated compositions to come.

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Scoring in WIlliamsburg


(click to enlarge)
Williamsburg taqueria La Superior, is a casual low-key kind of place that serves phenomenal tacos and margaritas. For the World Cup tournament they’ve installed a couple of TVs and a custom scoreboard. The festive elimination diagram, designed by a friend of the restaurant, consists of Vasarely-like clusters silkscreened onto plexiglass.



Elsewhere in Williamsburg ...
Notice for a filming of Girls this week.

Fabulous wall!

Monday, June 9, 2014

Letters From D-CONE

A 2002 plan to convert Newburgh, NY's Kreisel's Furniture building to the Sunset nightclub never materialized.

I call them D-CONEs, “Depressed Cities Of the Northeast.” You know them by their telltale signs: hanging baskets of purple petunias in a downtown where there are more stores vacant than occupied; a desolate pedestrian mall, configured in the 1970s or 80s, which was supposed to bring foot traffic to Main St. (Could this be why the pedestrian mall-ification of Manhattan gives me the creeps?); a “revitalized waterfront” or other large budget project which never became the tourist-magnet it was projected to be; a designated “historic district,” branded with tasteful banners and serif type.

The largest employers are usually healthcare and social services. And you don’t have to look very far to find a dialysis center and a furniture rental.

Smaller cities such as Lewiston, Maine (36,000), and Gloversville, NY have managed to attract enough post-college 20 and 30-somethings, to support a food coop and arts events. Larger cities like Utica, New York, whose population has shrunk down to 62,000 from a high of 102,000 in 1930, feel beyond hope. Almost everything about them, from the “Job Fair” banners to the obesity rate of the population is heartbreakingly sad.

What these cities lack in economic health, they make up for in typographic abundance. Having missed out on the transformative development more tech-oriented metro centers experienced, these cities now stand as urban palimpsests. The remains of multi-era commercial signage record their every stage of deindustrialization and decline.

The wrecking ball will swing one day, no doubt, so make that detour to a D-CONE near you. Take photos, have a meal at a local eatery, and try to buy something. You might even be inspired to invest in some cheap real estate. 


The cities plotted above, and pictured below, are here simply because I happened to pass through them during the last few years. The chart's six cities with no state designation are in New York. I’ve included Bethesda and Detroit as reference points for the extremes on the spectrum of employment and income.


Gloversville, New York










Utica, New York

















Springfield, Massachusetts






Lewiston, Maine




Yonkers, New York







Pittsfield, Massachusetts









Newburgh, New York











Albany, New York









I'm so curious about this calligraphic signage. I might have to go back to Albany and investigate.







Poughkeepsie, New York


















Newark, New Jersey




All photos by L. Eckstein, with occasional street view images from Google.

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