You can see how on-edge everyone is down there. Sean Duffy would poop his pants.
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Right?!? Just… normally people going about their day, doing normal shit… And Sean Duffy would be totes scared…
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The Queen Mary 2.
Don’t call it a “cruise ship.” It’s an ocean liner. In fact, these days it is the ocean liner.
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Cool! I’ve been intermittently following the posts of someone returning from Europe on her, and he posted about their arrival earlier today.
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Interesting. I hope it was a bon voyage.
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I didn’t notice it at a glance. I was looking at the water to see ships and that looked like city behind it!
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Dear Brother will be a guest lecturer-in-residence onboard QM2 next month, with follow-up gigs later and into next year. he will be talking about Mesopotamia, (what else?) archaeology, history and concepts surrounding “money” and some other stuff. i am very excited for him!
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That sounds great.
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it’s pretty much his YouTube channel stuff, but more detailed and focused in a 45 minute talk, rather than 10 -15 minute video.
i find it all quite fascinating, but then, i may be a bit biased.
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Eh! Dat’s only Brooklyn.
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A story of a building, part I.
I recommend that everyone enlarges and zooms-in on these pictures to appreciate the grungy textures.
Notice this dilapidated building in the center of this picture. This is 36 West 17th Street, Manhattan.
It was built in 1851. At some point the exterior of the lower three floors was updated. I would guess those windows are from the 1920s. The first three floors were probably intended for retail, with the large central windows for displays. The upper two floors might have been for residential use, or for offices — the kind of dingy office Sam Spade would work out of.
I was walking past this a few weeks ago, and it struck me that this building has looked like this for a long time.
I assumed it’s an abandoned building. This not unusual. This is a “high-rent” area. Developing a new residential building would be very lucrative, but arranging such a deal can take a long time. Perhaps there was some deal, and it fell-through in 2008. There were a lot of failed real estate deals at that time.
I thought back as long as I could. It seems to me the building has always looked like this. Is that possible? Imagine being an urban explorer and breaking in, probably through the roof, would you find inside? It would be a fascinating time capsule.
So I looked on Google Street View. The earliest image they have of this address is from 2011, and it looks exactly the same.
Here is a closer look at the third floor window.
Try to look in through the filth. What can you see in there?
Do you see the cardboard box with “A-S” on the side, resting on some sort of small card catalog? From Google Street View, I can see that the box has been there in the window, untouched, for at least the past 10 years.
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Part 2
Here is the ground floor. The sign is hand-painted.
Here is a close-up of the doors. The doors in the center would lead into the ground floor retail. Behind the door on the left would be mailboxes and a long staircase that leads to the upper floors. In front of the door on the left, is the trapdoor that leads into the basement.
As we can see, the sign was painted sometime after 1984, because that is when the 212 area code was introduced.
Again, I invite you to zoom in to fully appreciate all the grimy details.
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Part 3
Here is a close view of the display window. Nothing has been touched. Take a moment to read the disintegrating paper sign.
This was intentionally painted bright yellow. They wanted to attract attention. And yet, the walls are mere peg-board. Perhaps there was some idea of mounting samples on the wall. At some point they decided otherwise, and everything is still as it was carefully placed decades ago.
Here is an other view where you can really see the samples.
Also note the long-forgotten bottle of Jaygol insecticide. Ever heard of Joygol? It was manufactured in Brooklyn, but not anymore. The faux-antique lettering of the “Jaygol” logo looks to me like it is out of the 1940s. The design of the “New Squeeze Bottle” looks like it’s from the 1970s.
So that’s all we can see, but it is not the end of the story.
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Out of curiosity I typed “Barry Supply Company” into the Google to see if anything would some up.
Turns out, they are still in business and have a pretty nice website.
An excerpt from their About Us page:
Since World War II, there have been many manufacturers of metal, vinyl and wood windows and doors established in the USA. Some of these companies had a life span of a few years while some are still in business.
Many of the manufacturers who went out of business, and current ones, used and use hardware that is very unique in its design. That meant that, if a window or door was in perfectly good operating condition, except for broken or worn out hardware, it would have to be replaced if the hardware wasn’t available.
We are specialists in duplicating obsolete window and door hardware, as well as miscellaneous hardware items of a similar nature. We can furnish almost anything that you might require either by having it in stock or by making it in our shop.
…
It will be a real pleasure to hear from you and helping you at any time.
Thank you and have a pleasant day.
Barry Wein - General Manager
Carlos DeJesus - Parts Manager
So, behind the grimy surface, they are still in there machining custom parts.
This is an up-scale neighborhood now. But here in this building is a lingering remnant of Manhattan’s industrial past. Manufacturing used to be quite common on Manhattan Island for much of the 20th Century. Such places have become few and far-between since the 1980s.
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I wanna know how that glass is still intact with the lintel sagging like that.
I guess they are a window place; maybe the lintel sagged first and they cut the glass to fit.
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Where is this?
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