Miami Beach, Summer 2018

And here we have a few more hot, summery Florida photos to go with the summer 2018 Miami photos I just posted. This time the photos are from wandering around Miami Beach, which involves a surprisingly long bus ride from Miami proper. Again, it was a fun and interesting place to wander around playing tourist. I just don't have any very deep thoughts about the place. But hey, not every post here has to be me trying to theorize about something for twenty paragraphs, especially when it's New Years Eve and I'm just a post or two short of how many I did back in 2016. I'm sure nobody else cares about that particular goal besides me. Just putting it out there for full disclosure.

I will say that having this many Art Deco buildings in one place, with the usual Miami Deco color scheme, the overall effect gets to be a bit silly after a while. The smattering of 1980s postmodern buildings in the same color scheme, like the first photo above, somehow makes the overall effect even sillier. I said no theories, but my theory about that is that what architects' clients really wanted in the 80s were brand new Art Deco buildings, but with modern wiring and plumbing and so on, and they wanted that right up until they saw what all that attention to detail would cost in 1988. Also no architect under 40 wanted to work on paper anymore and things had advanced so you could get most of the job done on a decked-out Mac IIci, at least so long as you limited the design to a few simple shapes and colors. And out of necessity, a whole new style was born, along with dense art jargon explaining why it's the new One True Way. That's my theory, anyway.

Said theory is based largely on my own experience of trying to do creative stuff on a Mac back then. You'd have this feeling of unlimited possibilities -- and there really was a lot you could do even back then -- but inevitably you'd run into hardware limitations and have to scale things back until the machine would meet you kind of halfway. Wireframes that won't render. Spell checkers that get exponentially slower if your document is too big. Spending hours in PageMaker creating a concert poster for a coworker who needed one, scaling elaborate band logos just right, adjusting fonts by tenths of points, and so on, only to find that the office's low-end laser printer wasn't up to the job. Too many fonts, too much clip art, a few individual band logos that were way too rad and xtreme to be printable at any size. There was talk of going to Kinko's and trying to print from there, but that was Very Expensive, and the poster layout wouldn't quite fit on a floppy anyway, and I think the job eventually got done the old-school way, with tape and a photocopier.

Miami, Summer 2018

For anyone who's tired of all the cold and gloom this time of year, here are some warm summery photos I took in Miami back in 2018. I was in Florida for the launch of the Parker Solar Probe, and had (wisely, as it turned out) built a few extra days into my travel plans in case of launch delays. Ultimately the launch only slipped by a day and then went off without a hitch, so I had a couple of days to burn before flying home. I decided to head south since I'd never been there before, and did a little sightseeing. So this set of photos is from Miami itself, as in the mainland, actual city part. I did wander over to Miami Beach one day, and took another day to go see the Everglades, but those are separate posts I haven't posted yet. Some of these are from walking around (albeit not very far, because heat & humidity), with a few swanky hotel balcony photos mixed in. Overall it was a fun side trip, though I can't say I have any unique or intersting insights to share about the place. So, er, enjoy the photos.

Palace of Fine Arts

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Here's another batch of old SF photos, this time from the famous Palace of Fine Arts, one of the few surviving structures from the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, a World's Fair highlighting the city's recovery from the 1906 earthquake.

Although, strictly speaking, this isn't really a surviving structure. The fair's elaborate faux-Roman buildings were meant to be temporary, and were built cheaply out of wood, plaster and even burlap. The elements took their toll on the surviving buildings, and in 1965 the original palace was demolished and replaced with a more durable copy made with steel and concrete. I'm not sure why, exactly, but this story has always struck me as kind of hilarious. It stands to reason that a few cultural theory papers have been written about this, with the words "simulacrum" and "pastiche" used liberally, and many citations of midcentury French philosophers. I mean, I can't possibly be the first person to think of that.

Anyway, here's a Bollywood number filmed in part at the Palace of Fine Arts, from the 1999 hit film Biwi No. 1.

Agua Prieta, Sonora

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Here are a few old photos from the town of Agua Prieta, Sonora, a Mexican border town across the fence from Douglas, Arizona. This was a brief stopover on an early 1990s tour bus trip around Arizona & the California desert. Many of the other people on the bus were British, German, or Australian and doing the youth hostel thing across the US. So a side trip a few blocks into Mexico was an exotic side trip for them. Wandering around a Mexican border town with a bunch of English people was... unusual. They seemed to think I ought to be an expert about Mexico, due to being from the same hemisphere and all. Technically I'd had a year and a half of high school Spanish, and could translate signs some of the time, and I could explain the food to people who didn't know what a taco was, and some cultural bits and pieces to people who didn't know anything about fotonovelas or luchadores. I may not have been history's greatest cultural ambassador, but I'm pretty sure they were lucky to have me. They could have gone with one of the other Americans instead, like the dreadlocked trustafarian dude from Napa Valley wine country, who made sure everyone knew how rich his parents were. He seemed to think he was quite the roguish adventurer, and went off by himself in search of the town's red light district, only to discover there wasn't one. He was actually pretty upset about that, which was kind of hilarious and pathetic at the same time.

One key thing I had no clue about (this being the pre-Wikipedia era) was the history of the town we were visiting. It turns out that a century ago this little town had a significant role in the Mexican Revolution. Two battles were fought here (the second of which helped to trigger Pancho Villa's infamous raid on Columbus, NM), and in 1920 the Plan of Agua Prieta was drafted here, the spark for a rebellion that drove Mexico's first postwar president from office.

I also didn't have much of a clue at the time about key tourist sights, so I'm not sure which church is pictured here. It was somewhere near the border crossing, I think, but I wandered around the area in Google Street View and didn't see anything that looked quite like it. So it's possible we were more lost than we realized at the time. I also took a few photos around the border crossing area, I suppose because the US side of every border crossing I've been through has always creeped me out. They're designed to look all high tech and hostile and intimidating and all-powerful, but they do it in a sort of petty ham-fisted way; imagine the Galactic Empire from Star Wars, but administered by the DMV, with taser-crazed mall cops for Stormtroopers. (Note to self: I should probably delete these few sentences before the next time I travel internationally. Apparently they like to Google people at the border now, and speaking ill of border enforcers can lead to all sorts of fun complications, First Amendment or no.)

Sadly there's a US State Department travel advisory for the Agua Prieta area right now, due to the ongoing drug cartel wars. Coworkers at an office elsewhere in Mexico have explained to me that it's a manageable problem so long as one cartel "owns" your city. It's only when cartels fight over territory that things get really ugly.

King County Administration Building, Seattle

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Here are a couple of photos of Seattle's bizarro King County Administration Building. It's the box with the hexagonal patterns all over the outside, right down to the windows, and a high windowless skybridge. I vaguely remember calling it the "beehive building" when I was a kid, and wondering about the people who work there. I'm not claiming King County is an outpost of Hellstrom's Hive, but sometimes I think it would explain a lot.

It's an ugly building, but I suppose at least it's ugly in a unique way. I imagine the architects genuinely believed they were creating something cool and innovative, thinking outside the usual cookie-cutter International Style box, which is really quite sad considering the result. Back in 2006 there was a proposal to demolish it and put in an enormous 42 story office/condo complex, but the global economy imploded before the idea got off the ground. That may be just as well; an abandoned half-built skyscraper would be about the only thing that could be uglier than the current building.

Oregon Portland Cement Gargoyles

The Oregon Portland Cement Building is a small but historic industrial building at SE 1st & Madison, next to (and below) the Hawthorne Bridge viaduct. Its sorta-Art Deco look is unusual for Portland, and more decorative than you'd expect from a cement warehouse. Like much of the Central Eastside, it's been converted to lofts in recent years, which means it's gotten a fresh paint job, including gold paint for the four gargoyles on the front of the building. These gargoyles are why we're here, actually; the building's National Register of Historic Places form explains:

The subject building was designed by noted Lake Oswego architect Richard Sundeleaf. In Frozen Music: A History of Portland Architecture (1985), authors Bosker and Lencek describe Sundeleaf as an architect who catered to "Portland's entrepreneurs on the rise", designing many offices, warehouses, and industrial plants in a modernistic tone. Sundeleaf's knack for tailoring anarchitectural style to fit a client's image is exemplified in the subject building. Bosker and Lencek go on to state: "With its cast-stone classical dentils and bulldog-faced gargoyles designed by Lavare, this creamy concrete structure projected a serene lyricism that celebrated the dignity of modern building materials," and "every effort was made to demonstrate the versatility of the cement manufacturers product."

The sculptor behind the gargoyles was Gabriel Lavare, a California sculptor who lived in Portland for much of the 1930s. For the most part he specialized in sculpted reliefs, like his minimalist lions at the entrance to Washington Park. I've always liked those lions, so when I realized he created these gargoyles too, a blog post about them was basically inevitable. The post about the lions includes a rundown of his career in Portland, so I don't think I need to rehash that here. The short version is that he found success here, but he left by the early 1940s and the city promptly forgot about him. Pointing out obscure and forgotten stuff is kind of a specialty of this humble blog, and in this case it's an obscure and forgotten person, someone who created some interesting work while he was here.

Lovejoy Park Shelter

I've done quite a few posts about Lovejoy Fountain over the years this blog's been going. It's in my neighborhood, and I'm kind of fond of it. Besides the fountain itself, the park's also home to a large wooden shelter structure, on the west end of the park, "upstream" of the fountain. The shelter was part of the original park design, and it was designed by a duo of prominent architects, Charles Moore & William Turnbull. So I figured it merited a post of its own.

A Metropolis Magazine article about Moore, "Why Charles Moore (Still) Matters", mentions the shelter project briefly:

“Who threw this tantrum?” That was the reaction—according to Halprin—of a number of Moore’s Yale architectural colleagues when they saw his Lovejoy Fountain Shelter (1966), perched atop the concrete waterfall designed by Moore, Halprin and Turnbull. The whole Portland Open Space Sequence, of which Lovejoy is a part, recalls the natural forms of the nearby High Sierra, with sprays, erosion channels, tumbled rocks, and weirs. Made of a series of board-formed concrete slabs, the fountain works as well with water as without. The pavilion serves as both mountaintop and protection, its expressive hillocks made with a latticework of straight wooden members. One explores the fountain like a natural discovery, climbing down, scaling up, losing one’s sense of oneself in the city. Moore had been interested in water as an element of architecture since his student days; that was, in fact, the topic of his doctoral dissertation at Princeton. In period photographs, one can see the fountain and the shelter against the geometric, repetitive backdrop of nearby SOM towers. “Looking at the photograph of that form, now 50 years old, I thought: This is what people are doing with the computer now,” Lyndon says. “How amazing is the juxtaposition again with the corporate modernism in the background. The latter was the norm of the time.” Before Frank Gehry (with whom Moore and his partners competed for the Beverly Hills Civic Center) lofted an angled chain-link fence in the air at his own famous house, Moore was working with the everyday to make something more monumental, memorable, and strange.

I'd just like to point out here, for the sake of geographical accuracy, that the Sierra Nevada mountains are nowhere near Portland as the article claims. It's true the Halprin designs were inspired by the Sierras, though. If they were being built today, the architects would have the decency to fudge and say they were inspired by the Cascade mountains, which are nearby. But no matter. The "who threw this tantrum?" reaction didn't entirely die down after 1966. A local architecture critic, writing about the Keller and Lovejoy fountains, recently referred to the shelter as "startlingly ugly". I'm not sure I agree; it seems like the fountain, and the park as a whole would look strangely unbalanced without the structure there.

I imagine the city would secretly love to remove the shelter, because homeless people often sleep under it to avoid the rain, which of course is the worst thing imaginable. But they can't tear it out, because it's part of the park design, and so is on the National Register of Historic Places as of 2013. So instead they're obligated to preserve and maintain it, which presents another problem. The shelter is a striking design but not necessarily built to last for decades in this climate. It slowly decayed for years, and its crazy-angled roof began to sag, and it became a case study in an article titled "When a Master Work Fails" (i.e. physically, not aesthetically)). Money arrived with the city's renewed interest in this part of town, and it finally underwent a major renovation that completed in spring 2014.

Courthouse Square, Edgefield SC

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Here are some old photos from the Courthouse Square in Edgefield, South Carolina. These photos are from the late 90s and show the town as a sleepy little rural county seat. It was a short day trip from Augusta, and the town was undeniably cute, but there just wasn't a lot to do once you were there. Google Street View indicates it's become a lot more twee since then. When your town square looks like a movie set, this sort of thing is bound to happen sooner or later, especially when you're a reasonable day trip distance from Atlanta. Moreover, given the rate of urban growth in Atlanta, Edgefield will probably be absorbed as a distant eastern suburb within a decade or so. I'm only half joking when I say that.

Anyway, yes, that obelisk in the center of the square is a Confederate war memorial. And yes, that's a statue of local son Senator J. Strom Thurmond next to it. Apparently -- and I was unaware of this until now -- there's a tiny etching of a cockroach, er, "Palmetto bug" hidden under Thurmond's right coattail. There is probably no polite way of looking for it, however.

Thurmond and his staff excelled at bringing home the pork to South Carolina, and Edgefield County in particular. The locals showed their gratitude by naming things after him, and since he was in office an uncommonly long time, they started to pile up after a while: Parks, roads, dams, schools, everything. You can't throw a rock without hitting something named for him, but then an outraged local will shoot you, so doing this is not advised. Thurmond even has half a lake named after him. There's a large reservoir on the Savannah upriver of Augusta that Georgia knows as Clarks Hill Lake. That's the name it was built under, but South Carolina later renamed their portion of it to be Lake Thurmond, and the dam as J. Strom Thurmond Dam. Georgia, not sharing South Carolina's enthusiasm for the man, declined to follow suit. You can always tell which side of the river someone's from by what name they call the lake.

Pics: St. Augustine, FL

Here's another slideshow from St. Augustine, Florida. You've already seen Castillo de San Marcos and the Flagler College campus; this slideshow is everything else, or at least everything else I have photos of. The historic City Hall, various old churches, and a few city streets in the touristy Old Town area. Sadly I had to drive back to Cocoa Beach that afternoon and couldn't explore the city's frozen daiquiri bars or go on a cheesy "ghost hunting tour" or anything. So I'm pretty sure I didn't get the full St. Augustine experience, for good or ill. I suppose I could go back again, although at this point I've finally seen the old fort, and Vegas is a lot closer if I just want a giant daiquiri.

Flagler College, St. Augustine, Florida

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When I was in Florida back in 2011 for a Mars rover launch, I made a side trip up to the town of St. Augustine to visit Castillo de San Marcos, a centuries-old Spanish fort I'd tried and failed to visit on two previous occasions. Since I was there anyway, I wandered around the historic (if heavily touristed) downtown for a bit, taking photos of anything that looked old. One of the highlights of the area is Flagler College a small private liberal arts college built around the former Ponce de Leon Hotel. The ornate hotel building is nowhere near as old as the Spanish fort; it was built in 1888 by railroad oligarch Henry Flagler, in a sort of Spanish-Moorish fantasia style. I didn't go inside to look around, but apparently the interior is a bit over the top as well. The building's actually a concrete structure, with electricity designed in from the beginning. Which is a bit more forward-thinking than you'd expect for the year 1888. As you might imagine it's on the National Register of Historic Places, a fake-historic building that's become historic in its own right with the slow passage of time.

Pics: Beaufort, SC

Here are a few old scanned photos from Beaufort, SC. These few photos don't really give a full picture of the place; taking photos was expensive back in the 90s, and remember 36 shots per roll? Oh, the good old days, or not. The city, or town really, is like a tiny copy of Charleston, SC. You'll be able to see this better once I get around to scanning my Charleston photos. Or you could just Google Charleston; that will work too. Or Bing, I guess. Anyway, we lived in Augusta at the time, about a 2 hour drive inland, and Beaufort was a bit shorter drive than going to Charleston. There's much more to do in Charleston, of course, but Beaufort and nearby beaches were worth an occasional day trip.

The unusual thing about the place is that the surrounding salt marshes often stretch right up to the edge of town. There could be a row of gaudy 19th century mansions, and then what looks like howling wilderness right at the end of the street. I've always liked salt marshes (and you can probably tell that since most of the photos here are salt marshes), so I thought having them next door was a very cool aspect of the town. It may also be a reason Beaufort stayed small though; up until the late 1940s, malaria was still endemic to this part of the South. Living next to a mosquito-filled swamp maybe wasn't always the best plan back then. By the time the threat of disease abated (thanks to a massive federal public health and aerial spraying campaign) the town was old and historic, ready to be rediscovered & preserved for posterity. I hate to say it, but it's possible we have DDT to thank for this quaint little place.

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Bulloch County Courthouse

Here's an old photo, snapped from a moving car, of the historic Bulloch County Courthouse, in Statesboro, Georgia. Or most of it; I had an old point & shoot 35mm camera back then and my aim wasn't that great, as you can probably tell here. A few years after I took this, the courthouse was restored and the exterior white plaster was either removed or painted over, so it's mostly a red brick building now. I think I liked it better before the restoration, to be honest. I thought it was kind of an interesting building, though not quite interesting enough for us to stop and look around the town. I know it's a college town and supposedly is a bit more culturally lively than your average county seat in rural Georgia. Which admittedly isn't saying a lot.

If the name of the town sounds familiar at all, it might be due to the classic blues song "Statesboro Blues" by Blind Willie McTell. If you aren't familiar with it, his original version and the famous Allman Brothers cover are out there on the youtubes. Though I admit that after listening carefully to both, I'm still not sure if it's good or bad when somebody has a case of the Statesboro Blues, or maybe if it's a little of both.

Pics: Brunswick, GA

Here's another slideshow of old 1990s travel photos, this time from Brunswick, GA. That Wikipedia article makes the place sound practically bustling, which is not really how I remember it. We sort of stopped and wandered around a bit, and it was weirdly quiet and nothing was open. It might have been a Sunday, come to think of it. Plus I'm trying to remember a period of about hour or two from close to 15 years ago. And I may be misremembering it, because I remember a weird dreamlike place of enormous live oak trees and Spanish moss and tumbledown gothic buildings and 300% humidity and ghosts and pirates and time not quite flowing in a straight line, exactly. If I hadn't taken any photos, I'm not sure I'd believe the place was real. Even with photos I'm still not 100% sure.

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Pics: Savannah, GA

I recently dug out and scanned a batch of old travel photos, so here's a slideshow from historic Savannah, GA, taken sometime in the late 1990s. It was a brief visit and I haven't been back since then. (The visit wasn't motivated by Midnight-in-the-Garden mania, I hasten to add; I've never even read the book.) Much of the city is a protected historic district, and Google Street View confirms it hasn't changed a lot in the last 15 years or so.

And yes, there is a photo of the Talmadge Memorial Bridge in the slideshow. I only had dialup internet back then and blogs didn't even exist yet, but it's almost like I knew, somehow.

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Punahou Circle Apts.

A few photos of the Punahou Circle Apartments tower, in Honolulu at the corner of Beretania and Punahou Streets. I tracked this building down because President Obama lived here as a child. (I realize I'll probably get birther whackaloon trolls for saying that. But hey, that's why Blogger gives me a "Delete Comment" button.) A "Modernism + Recent Past" Google Map by the Historic Hawaii Foundation has this to say about the building:

Childhood home of President Barack Obama (from age 10-18); built by Emma Kwock Chun, who around 1936 became the first Asian to own and develop property in the exclusive Diamond Head area, and one of the first female real estate developers in Hawai‘i. The “Circle” in the building name is an homage to the Waikīkī Circle Hotel, which was developed by Mrs. Kwock Chun in 1962.

Honolulu is home to seemingly countless mid-1960s high rise towers similar to this. The Punahou Circle building has some groovy mid-60s details to it, but before its historic associations came along, it doesn't seem to have been considered an architecturally significant building. Even now, Emporis says almost nothing about it. Now, of course, it will likely be designated a historic landmark someday, thanks to its most famous former resident. For now, though, most of the search results you find for the building are actually apartment rental listings, and the place sounds fairly affordable by Hawaii standards.

One other odd item came up while searching for more info about the building. If you use Google Earth, someone went to the trouble of compiling a KML file of all Magnum P.I. locations around the state. I'm not sure why it came up in the search because the Punahou Circle building doesn't seem to have been used in the show. But I went to the trouble of downloading the file and checking, just in case, and I thought it was kind of fun even though it turned out to be a red herring, so I figured I'd pass it along anyway. So enjoy, or whatever.

Pics: Downtown Tacoma

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A set of photos from downtown Tacoma, WA, which is full of old, historic, and often empty buildings. I took these photos several years ago and uploaded the set a while back, but never got around to creating a post around them. In large part this is because I don't know anything about any of the buildings you see here. I actually spent much of my childhood in Federal Way, just north of Tacoma, but as far as I can recall we never went anywhere near Tacoma's downtown. Nor do I recall going there at any point between then and the day I showed up with a digital camera. Nothing looked remotely familiar when I stopped by, which is actually a pretty reliable indicator. In any case, the first couple of links above have some info about the city's historic buildings, so you might want to follow those if you see anything interesting in the slideshow here.

There's one other structure I'd like to mention here, which isn't pictured because the city never managed to build it. Back in the mid-1990s, a pair of Russian "paper architects" were asked to design a pedestrian bridge connecting downtown Tacoma with the waterfront, far below. They came up with a fanciful wooden pier-like structure that quickly became a cause celebré in town. Which, unfortunately, was not the same thing as having actual funding for the project. It was around this time that the Portland Art Museum hosted a show of their designs, Brodsky & Utkin: Paper Architecture in a Real World. Based on those designs it's hard to say how realistic, by which I mean buildable under the usual laws of physics, their Tacoma proposal may have been. Was still a cool idea though.

Seattle Central Library

A few old photos of Seattle's Central Library. I usually roll my eyes when cities bring in Big Name Architects to design civic institutions for them, especially when said architects spend a great deal of time theorizing and conceptualizing and talking about their unbuilt projects. I do like the building, though, so all's well that ends well. And Wikipedia insists Mr. Koolhaas once wrote a screenplay for Russ Meyer. Which, speaking in my capacity as a fan of bad movies, wins him a few points.

Space Needle

A few nighttime photos of the Space Needle in Seattle from a few years back. I don't have any daytime photos of it, nor do I have any from the top. The last time I was at the top, I had lunch at the revolving restaurant and caught a bug from a plate of potato skins. Oh, the indignity. This was back in the late 1980s when people thought potato skins were fancy for some reason; it was a dark and primitive time. I'm told everything's under new management and so forth now.

Corn Palace

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So here's the one and only Corn Palace, the famous municipal auditorium in Mitchell, South Dakota. Every year the exterior of the building is decorated with multicolored murals made of corn. The murals are slowly eaten by birds over the course of the next year, and after the next harvest a fresh new mural design goes up. The murals shown here date to 1996-97 and have a hunting and fishing theme. Which I imagine is a popular theme in this part of the world.

Having come from a non-corn-growing part of the country, we had never heard of the place when we stumbled across it. But apparently it's a major tourist attraction in this part of the world. There's even a gift shop across the street, offering Corn Palace-themed knicknacks and doodads. We wandered inside to look around, but inside it just looks like any old small town auditorium. They were setting up for a high school basketball game and we didn't want to get in the way, so we didn't stick around long.

As a small bonus (since I only have one picture of the Corn Palace itself), here's a picture of the town's cool Art Deco City Hall, which sits right next door to the Corn Palace.

empire state building, july 2000

A few photos of and from the Empire State Building, taken when I was in NYC for a trade show back in July 2000. These photos had the same color issues as the Hawaii photos in the previous post, but even more so; I imagine I had both rolls developed at the same time (I was always bad about getting film developed in a timely way), so the same junior trainee probably dinked around with both rolls. In any case, I played around a little and decided I liked these photos highly desaturated, with just a touch of the cyan shading remaining.

I have one other photo I'm not posting here. Someone else took it for me, and it shows me standing there on the Empire State Building observation deck, a goofy grin on my face, with the Twin Towers over one shoulder. Looking at it really weirds me out. Which is strange since WTC photos I'm not in don't affect me that way, but there you have it. So don't expect to see that photo anytime soon.