The Roaring ‘Twenties: an interactive exploration of the historical soundscape of New York City
An interactive website by historian Emily Thompson exploring the aural atmosphere of New York City in the 1920s. [See also my post “Peddlers, jackhammers, whistles: Historian Emily Thompson lets you hear the sounds of life in 1920s New York City.”] Website Editor’s Introduction A visitor to my home in Los Angeles recently commented on the […]
Overlapping Disasters: Ground Zero Photos Damaged by Sandy
By Lisa Larson-Walker from slate.com: Photo by Michael Redpath Hours after the collapse of the Twin Towers, Michael Redpath, a New York City firefighter from Far Rockaway, Queens, was dispatched to Ground Zero. Over the next six months, he worked on the monumental recovery effort, all the while using his Canon AE-1 to document the […]
World’s Smallest Museum Finds the Wonder in Everyday Objects
By Lisa Hix from CollectorsWeekly.com: Tucked away in a lower Manhattan back alley, the freight-elevator-sized, generically named Museum is one of New York City’s newest curiosities. While it’s only open 16 hours a week, during the day on Saturdays and Sundays, the museum’s contents are viewable 24/7, lit and sealed by glass doors. Passers-by are […]
Type-o-philes Scour NYC for Urban Signage Project
By Jakob Schiller from Wired.com: [Ed. Entertainingly, this article was originally titled “Type-o-PATHS Scour NYC for Urban Signage Project.”] New York City is such a sensory overload, it’s easy to miss the details — like the graphical symphony of typography that’s playing under your visual field. Nyctype.com aims to bring that symphony to the surface […]
If Payphones Survive, Will They Look Like This?
From Mashable.com: When was the last time you used a phone booth to make a call? Odds are, not for several years at least. So are all of those city phone booths rendered useless, relics of a bygone era? Not necessarily — they might just need a bit of a makeover. Late last year, New […]
Uncovering the First, Fascinating Rulebook for [New York City] Subway Sign Design
From TheAtlanticCities.com: Late one night last August, three Pentagram designers rummaging through the design firm’s basement archives found the Rosetta Stone of New York subway graphics: the original Standards Manual, designed by Bob Noorda and Massimo Vignelli in the late 1960s. The 180-page binder, the key to the system’s iconic design choices, outlines a meticulous […]