Fish inside of fish, walking fish, fish in trees, flying fish... (Pieter van der Heyden after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1557, engraving, via Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Source: metmuseum.org
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The most beautiful subway station in New York City is locked, inaccessible, since the last passengers stepped off its platform on December 31, 1945. The City Hall station was the “jewel in the crown” of the city’s first subway line, which opened October 27, 1904, connecting Lower Manhattan to 145th Street. Arched Romanesque Revival tile ceilings, cut amethyst glass skylights, brass chandeliers, and a proud oak ticket booth proclaimed the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) subway as an underground marvel of both transportation and elegance. However, a short curving platform that only accommodated five cars, lack of turnstiles, and the close proximity to a much more popular Brooklyn Bridge station, made the City Hall station obsolete in just a few decades. In its final year, it only had a daily count of 600 passengers passing through its regal interior.
Turn-of-the-century photographs of New York City in the early morning by Robert L. Bracklow, nicknamed Daylight Bob for his fear of the dark. More at Hyperallergic.
Source: hyperallergic.com
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American Beeches Maple Grove Cemetery Queens
The small grave of Elisabeth Riis, wife of journalist, reformer, and photographer Jacob Riis, has worn down since her death in 1905, including the lamb asleep on top. However, the two trees Riis planted at the site stand tall, their canopy of leaves gracefully winding above Maple Grove Cemetery in Kew Gardens, Queens.
According to NYC Parks, the twin American beeches are both over 60 feet tall. On my early November visit, their dark green leaves were tinged with autumnal yellow, but still had yet to fall. A rosary was hanging on one trunk. Maple Grove Cemetery was opened in 1875 and once had its own train station; it’s much quieter now. It still has an air of Victorian mourning with its winding paths and contemplative angels, although not nearly as ostentatious as Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx or Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.
Jacob Riis lived to 1914, eventually leaving his Richmond Hill, Queens, home, where they lived on Beech Street (there’s some reports the cemetery trees were from their front yard), and relocating to Massachusetts where he’s buried. Over a century later, somewhere below the earth I imagine the beech roots tangled through the tombs, where somewhere Elisabeth was buried in her wedding dress next to two of her young children.
Maple Grove Cemetery shares this 1906 diary entry by Riis on the planting of the trees:
I have been up to the cemetery to see [her] grave just now. It is beautiful indeed. We have planted up two of the little beeches and a small Laburnum, also a red barley azalea from our garden […] I have put up a granite headstone with [her] name and years of birth and death, and on top a little lamb lying down and looking very sweet.
Illustration from "Quarles' emblems: illustrated by Charles Bennett and W. Harry Rogers" (1861) (via Internet Archive)
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In 1920s Hamburg, a dancer couple created wild, Expressionist costumes that looked like retro robots and Bauhaus knights. The dancers were Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt, and through the new Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MKG) online collection, their tragic, forgotten story can be rediscovered.
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Our Victorian “yellowback” novel tag-a-thon is tomorrow! Have you checked out the sneak peek of the novels we’ll be tagging? I’m particularly fond of the seasonally-appropriate Bones and I, or the skeleton at home!
The expanded Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room at the Rubin Museum of Art in NYC.
Source: hyperallergic.com
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For 10 weeks in a disused church basement somewhere in the Midwest, Julie Schenkelberg built a turbulent installation of broken furniture, found objects, and housing rubble anointed with blue and gold paint. It now fills Asya Geisberg Gallery for Embodied Energies, the Brooklyn-based artist’s third solo show with the Chelsea gallery, inspired by the corroding of her Rust Belt hometown of Cleveland.
Sure 1900 game hunter, taxidermy those bears like vengeful demons emerging from your wall. (via Internet Archive)
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A 400-year-old church drowned in 1966 has reemerged in Mexico. As reported earlier this month by Notimex, Mexico’s official news agency, and picked up this week by English-language press, the Temple of Quechula was revealed when water in a reservoir in the Chiapas state fell over 80 feet.
Lovely illustration of birds bearing a funerary pall, "Death & burial of Cock Robin" (1840), via Internet Archive
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In the 19th century, Henrietta Louisa Koenen, wife the Rijksmuseum Print Room’s first director, took a prescient interest in acquiring prints by women artists. These works date from the 16th century, such as a woodcut by Marie de’ Medici, daughter of Grand Duke of Tuscany Francesco I de’ Medici, to the 19th, with hand-colored engravings by Madame Alliot. This month Printing Women: Three Centuries of Female Printmakers, 1570–1900 opened at the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, highlighting this collection for the first time since 1901.
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American Elms Mall Rock Outcrops, Central Park Manhattan
I’m not a fan of summer. The heat makes me tired; the small irritations of living in New York City are enhanced, the delayed trains, the push of strangers in the subway and streets. But I do love the extended light, when the day cools off and there’s a cool illumination that lingers over everything.
The other night I walked in Central Park in this fading light, and found these two beautiful American elm trees entwined over a rock outcrop just off the Mall, which is itself surrounded by a stunning elm grove. Despite these trees appearing as one, NYC Parks has them separately on their Great Trees list, with one 55.76 feet tall, and the other 78.72 feet. Looking at where their trunks creep together on the stone, part of the exposed bedrock in the Manhattan park, it’s hard to see where one ends and the other begins.
As I sat on a bench across from the tree, I noticed a huge red-tailed hawk sitting at his own perch on one of the huge branches. Perhaps a relative of Central Park’s famed Pale Male? There is much about the city that can get exhausting, especially as the heat rises in July, but I love that not only does NYC have its list of favorite trees, it also has a hawk popular enough to be known by name.
I’m not very good at keeping up my personal Tumblr, but looking I’m Tumblr-ing about NYC trees this summer!
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Germany’s Real-Life Grand Budapest Hotel
It turns out the fictitious European town in which Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotelwas set isn’t so fictitious after all.
Hidden amidst the Brandenburg forest 15 kilometers (9.32 miles) north of Berlin are buildings seemingly lost in time and built in such grandiose socialist-classicism style, you wouldn’t be surprised if a concierge named Gustave greeted you at the door or a “Boy With Apple” painting adorned the walls. Winding back the clock a few decades to the Cold War era, it was within these very four walls that the German Democratic Republic (GDR) brainwashed young people and officials from all around the world with propaganda about the ideals of socialism and the evils of the capitalist West.
From 1951 to 1990, the FDJ (Freie Deutsche Jugend) youth academy was the top-secret educational facility for the official communist youth movement of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, occupying a vast 43 000 square meters at Bogensee near Wandlitz. Today, despite being relinquished and left to decay for over two decades, these buildings haven’t lost their majestic, otherworldly charms.