March 20, 2007
IF YOU CAN'T SAVE IT, AT LEAST DOCUMENT IT
This week's feature at Gotham Gazette (put out by the Citzens Union Foundation) is an transcript of a recent Gotham Gazette Readiny NYC Book Club meeting. Featured guests were Kevin Walsh of ForgottenNY and Roberta Gratz, the author of two books about urban development. Walsh recently published a book version of his site and I was reading it in the Grand Central Terminal bookstore the other day [if Kevin is reading this, rest assured I intend to actually buy a copy soon] and it is fantastic. Forgotten New York: Views of Lost Metropolis is an everyman's guide to discovering the little-known about the city, as well as documenting and sharing the bits of NYC that are disappearing without most of us even knowing they were there. The Gotham Gazette transcript comes with some great photos illustrating essential NYC items lost to the ages. Here's some of the transcript:
In 1963, they also eliminated all the cast iron lampposts on 6th avenue. These lampposts dated back to 1910. Overnight, they were wiped out. Even at that young age, I had been filling notebooks with drawings of these cast iron lampposts, in all their different designs.
Those two events put a kernel in my head: you better get stuff on camera before they destroy it. Much to my regret, I didn't do anything about it until 1998. Imagine if I had done that all those years.
With the onset of the Internet, I got the idea of doing a Web site called Forgotten New York about all the things that you see in the street that are unusual, unnoted, that people don't look at or don't see.
In New York everybody's rushing around. They're not looking up, they're not looking down. They just want to get where they're going. But I took a slow walk around, and took a bicycle, and looked at the painted ads on the side of buildings. Some of these things go back to the 1880s. There's one on 17th street and 6th avenue that talks about Victorian carriages and trotters for horses. We call them Wall Dogs ads, because the guys who used to paint them were called wall dogs.
I took photographs of all this ephemera – all these things that people had not noticed. I got a critical mass of 50 pages together, and I set up the Web site. We have been around for eight years, and we've got four million hits so far. So it's been moderately popular.
Read the whole transcript.
Tagged: architecture, books, forgotten ny, gotham gazette, kevin walshPosted by Lexiphane at March 20, 2007 9:08 PM
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