A blog about food, history, data visualization, and more
The Golden Gate Bridge is a global icon, a triumph of engineering, and a work of art. In American terms, it was shaped by the City Beautiful movement, the Progressive Era, and the Great Depression. More mysteriously, the Bridge expresses those forces that science tells us constitute the dynamics of nature itself. Like the Parthenon, […]
I was browsing through the amazing digital archives of the New York Public Library recently, looking for fun stuff to pin to my Slices of Blue Sky Pinterest boards, and I ran across an old postcard from Los Angeles that caught my attention. The photo isn’t much — it’s a pretty big Spanish-style house — […]
One of my less productive minor obsessions is with the 1970s TV show “Emergency.” It began when a saw a bit of an episode set in San Francisco, which led me to buy a set of DVD that included the episode when “Emergency” filmed in San Francisco so I could learn the details of the […]
This post has a few more old San Francisco images from the New York Public Library Digital Collections. The first two of postcards were taken before the addition of a major landmark, and the last was taken before the destruction of a major landmark. Before the Bridge The first photo is an undated postcard from […]
As a child, I sometimes watched the TV series “Emergency”, which ran from 1972 to 1979. Even though it featured crises and injuries that could easily happen to me or my friends or family, the show must have had some kind of attraction. Perhaps it was all of the heavy equipment or the explosions. With […]
San Francisco is a great postcard city: dramatic views of the Bay and hills, the Golden Gate, old and new buildings. And so it’s not surprising to find a bunch of San Francisco images in a collection of early 20th century postcards. This particular postcard collection was produced by the Detroit Publishing Co. and are […]
I find it easy to get lost in the New York Public Library’s Digital Collections, which contain hundreds of thousands of images and a massive collection of menus. One recent morning I was looking for something and stumbled into a large ‘box’ of early 20th century postcards from the Detroit Publishing Company. While browsing through […]
Not finding a satisfactory history of the evolution of Wilshire Boulevard in Kevin Roderick’s Wilshire Boulevard book, I searched for old maps to find the answers (my review of Roderick’s Wilshire Boulevard book). The Los Angeles Past blog led me to the 1897 edition of Maxwell’s Los Angeles City Directory at the California Digital Library […]
Wilshire Boulevard: Grand Concourse of Los Angeles, by Kevin Roderick (with research by J. Eric Lynxwiler) has been on my list for many years and I finally read it last month. On my handful of visits to Los Angeles, I have probably driven the entire length of Wilshire Boulevard, covering a lot of the same […]
In my review of The Box, I noted that containerization required ports to cover much more ground to support cranes, container storage, roadways, and so forth. To illustrate the size of major modern ports, let’s take a look at the Ports of LA and Long Beach. These are the two largest ports in the United […]