When you run a classy joint, like Tiffany & Co, you can’t just board up your windows and start renovating. No, you board up your windows and hire an illustrator to draw a mural on it. Tiffany & Co execs seem to have a pretty good sense of humor though. The mural looks like an illustration from Cosmo or some other chick young woman oriented rag publication. On the side a legend says: “Welcome to Tiffany. Please use our 57th Street entrance while our crown jewel gets a polish.”
Here’s a detail from the front: bow tie boldie has this annoying expression on his face: “he heh, I am surely getting my crown jewels polished tonight.”
This, by the way would have been an interesting photography project – camping out with a long lens across from Tiffany’s and discretely (otherwise Trump and Tiffany security personnel will probably drag you away for this) taking pictures of men walking out with those robin’s egg blue shopping bags. I would not want to do something like that though, as on occasion I walked out of that store carrying the shopping bag and the expression. I am a fan of the 1837TM line.
No, this is Not Hotel W
Dwarfed by the Verizon Building on the left and the Conde Nast Building on the right, and soon to be hidden from view by 1 Bryant Park(an skyscraper under construction, that looks almost exactly like one of the Freedom Tower design rejects), there’s a strange 50 foot wide razor of a skyscraper. It’s called the Bush Building, after Irving T. Bush, a son of a rich refinery operator who instead of living a life of leisure chose to put on a bat’s mask and a cape… wait, actually no, he chose to become a seaport magnate. Also good. I am not sure if
Besides the narrowness, the neo-gothic tower has another peculiar feature: side walls sporting what appears to be a raised brick design
but that turns out to be an illusion created by colored bricks.
There are plans are under way to create a hideous modern add-on building on the side to alleviate the crampdness that the current owners, the Dalloul family of Lebanon. I am not sure what they do for a living, but every article I see mention that the owners are from Lebanon and run a family business. It might be that they are the owners of a cellular company LibanCell, but they don’t seem to have much of a web presence. Anyway, the new addition is a big modern glass bag on a side connected to the Bush Building by floating floors (this is what I call Hugo Simpson’s pigeonrat school of design).
Why build a tower that is only 50 feet wide when there’s space nearby? Why make colored brick designs when you can put windows there? I have no idea. But this is one of the most unique buildings in Manhattan.
Is Irving T. Bush related to the rest of the Bushes that shaped so much of American history? I don’t know, but it seems pretty likely to me. Remember, that besides the two presidents and numerous other various Eulogian Club members holding important posts, the Bush family tree includes Wampanoag tribe members and Memex-inventing Majestic 12 member Vannevar Bush as well as other unusual people. I think Irving T. Bush fits in with them rather well.
P.S. By the way, speaking of the unluckily-numbered antenna-endowed Conde Nast Building. According to Jessica Cutler’s The Washingtonienne : A Novel, girls who work for Conde Nast magazines are known as Conde Nasties. He heh.
Alarming Songs
A few weeks ago I walked around Brooklyn and heard a loud bird singing in a tree. Something seemed peculiar about the song pattern, and it took me a couple of minutes of listening to it to understand what. The bird went “cheeerp – cheeuuuu, cheeeerp – cheeuuuu, chirp – chirp -chirp – chirp” – emulating the complicated sounds of those “Cheap-ass go off every ten minutes car alarmsTM” that emit tones of 4 or 5 different sirens. I really wish I had a voice recorder of some kind there with me.
Apparently it’s nothing new – apparently starlings and mocking birds are known to imitate just about anything, car alarms included. Some Brooklyn “artist” even created a car alarm that emits bird songs instead of sirens, thus completing the circle of mimicry.
Lunch At Tiffany’s
“TIFFANY BLUE BOX and the color TIFFANY BLUE are trademarks of Tiffany (NJ) Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used under license.”
Well, of course if you walk one more block and go to the store, they have the real Robin’s Egg Blue boxes. But do they have these low, low prices and the classy matching van? Street shopping in Manhattan is amazing.
Yet Another Logo Post
I don’t want the Freedom Tower. I want the Twins back. This is a somewhat controversial opinion – some feel that the Twins are gone forever, together with the lives of the people on the planes, in the towers and those who came to help them.
To use M. Diddy’s expression, in Corporate America controversy is not considered “a good thing”. Chock Full O’ Nuts, for instance, removed the towers from its logo.
On the other hand, many other companies still use their old skyline logos that feature the Twin Towers. I have a much bigger collection of these logos, but it’s a little hard to find all of them.
The person who designed Evergreen Diner’s cup either chose an unusual viewpoint or just drew random boxes to represent skyscrapers around WTC.
Manhattan Mini Storage even got the positions right – Citicorp then Empire State then the Twin Towers (if you look from the park towards Brooklyn).
Midtown Electric‘s view is from Brooklyn.
The painter who worked on this kiddy ride did not strive for accuracy, but I guess for the 10 or so years that I’ve seen that particular kiddy ride around I bet nobody was confused about which particular skyline was depicted there. Can any of the Freedom Tower designs do that? Because every time I am looking at the rendering with the Freedom Tower proposals I am thinking – holy crap, that’s Philadelphia (and it looks like I am not alone in that particular opinion).
Apple Tries a New Ad Campaign
Came by this beauty of a BSOD today. It’s not like it’s a rarity to see one on this type of a display, but still.
There are whole galleries of this stuff, and, you know, if I were a person developing MS-powered billboards, I would change the color of BSOD text/background to black to spare Microsoft public embracement.
Don’t you think it’s a good idea, eh, Scoble?
Barnacles
I broke the threaded comments (you can still comment, but there won’t be any threading) again while fixing the xml-rpc vulnerability. If you run WordPress you need to fix it too.
I really need to upgrade my comment engine to use openid and a normal captcha script that will have decent usability (and not forget all the input if somebody makes a typo).
Architectural Pain in the Ass
I have to apologize for this cringe inducing intro wherein I attempt to translate an old kindergarten joke from Russian into English. Sorry, but I really can’t find a better way to do this.
So, in an enchanted forest a wolf catches a rabbit. A talking rabbit, apparently, as the rabbit says — look, how about this — I’ll give you two puzzles to solve, and if you do, I’ll take you to the place where my friends and family hang out. If you can’t solve them — you let me go. The wolf agrees. The first puzzle is : “Two rings, two ends and a bolt in the middle.” The wolf does not know. “It’s scissors” – says the rabbit. OK, then, the second one. “No doors, no windows, house full of guests.” “No idea” – says the wolf. “It’s a cucumber” says the rabbit, and the wolf lets him go. Next day a bear catches the wolf, and the wolf makes a similar deal with the bear. OK, what is it – “no doors, no windows, ass full of cucumbers?”
Every time I pass 2 Columbus Circle that’s what I am thinking about. An ass full of cucumbers. (I shudder to think about where this page is going to be located in Google search results).
Edward Durrell Stone created this perforated windowless museum that looks like a Soviet-era public bathroom on crack. In fact, I am pretty sure that’s what Mr. Stone was smoking. Well, actually according to Great Fortune by Daniel Okrent he was a hardcore drinker during his earlier years and later quit. So I guess he either drank too much or not enough.
Unsatisfied with uglification through regular soulless International Style this architect came up with a whole new kind of ugly. He took the starkness of modernism and combined it with unnecessary and non-functional ornamentation. For his own house he took a normal 19th century brownstone and paced a perforated grille over it. Funnily enough, even though he raped the creation of a Victorian architect, his own widow could not undo the concrete monstrosity that he wrought — together with other brownstones his house is now protected as a landmark.
2 Columbus Circle is thankfully not considered a landmark. There are some people out there though that think that it should be. Even they agree that Stone’s building is ugly and useless. But they like the fact that it’s a challenge, a slap in the face of architects who built beautiful and/or useful buildings in Manhattan.
I remember seeing Edward Durrell Stone House while passing it by in a cab and immediately turning my head around and going “WTF!??”. None of the hundreds of good looking brownstones in New York ever evoked this reaction from me. They mostly make me count along these lines as I walk by: “2 million, 4 million, 6 million, 8 million, 9.5 million, 12 million and a carriage house – so let’s say 12.5 million worth of brownstones on this street in Brooklyn”.
Stone reminds me of another architect who also created some terribly ugly and uninspired buildings, in one of which I spent many years. Wallace Harrison spent most of his entire life building terrible International Style buildings. Actually, he started his career together with Stone, working as one of the architects working on the Rockefeller Center design. Rockefeller Center was severely criticized while it was being constructed, but later on became an almost immediate favorite of both critics and laypeople, becoming one of the most celebrated architectural landmarks of New York. His later creations were mostly in International Style. He designed the 6th avenue Rockefeller Center Extension which mixed Deco and International style, and then a horrible row of International style nightmares.
I absolutely love the quote from Grea Fortune: “”The new buildings, with their broad plazas, generous promenades. and underground concourse system… are an exciting integral extension of Rockefeller Center in design, concept and philosophy.” But this was like saying that nuclear war is an integral extension of Quakerism …”
Interestingly enough, Harrison, after being rejected by critics and his patron, Nelson Rockefeller, became very bitter and disillusioned with International Style as evidenced by this rather homophobic quote (also from Grea Fortune):
“His late life, he claimed was “ruined … by the German Bauhaus and its groups of friends who have had a disastrous effect on American architecture.” Elsewhere he characterized the proponents of the International Style as “homos who found it a good public relations [sic] to hang their hats on” “.
Well, I think that homosexuals (yeah, blame it all on them, right) have nothing to do with Harrison’s and Stone’s solidified nightmares. It’s just that they were horrible architects.
What Good Is a Blog Without Cat Pictures?
Tilde the Cat thinks she is people: today she reported for work in her own cubicle, just like her master.
Greek Cups of New York
This is a short follow-up to my two older articles, New York in a Cup and NYC’s Syntactic Sugar.
The shelves in my cubicle are currently hosting an small exhibition called “Greek Cups of New York”. I collected these cups over a period of a few months (unfortunately these days most bodegas serve coffee in cups marred with bank ads). I took the cups home over the weekend to take some pictures.
Here it is in all its glory, Sherri Cup Inc, Anthora, the cup that started it all.
And here are some of the ripoffs that I could find. Evergreen diner actually has a custom cup with the pre-911 skyline. It’s my favorite.
[Update] CRAP. By pure coincidence NYT has an aricle about a guy with a humongous collection of these cups the same day I finally got around to posting about my own tiny collection. Damn, it’s so fricking hard to be even semi-original (I learned about the history of the cups from another website as well).