Our Favorite Links
Want to watch New York grow up? Check out this site,
which features a series of intricate animations which present a "layered,
cartographic history of the lower half of Manhattan Island, and an exploded
timeline chronicling the real estate development of high-rise office buildings
which constitute the skylines of midtown and downtown Manhattan."
"Come, travel with me, as I guide you on a tour
through the fabulous and vanishing ruins of my beloved Detroit,"
beckons artist/photographer Lowell Bioleau, whose site is a treasure-trove
of photos of Motor City landmarks in varying degrees of disrepair and
decay.
This California-based non-profit mounts gallery exhibits,
conducts tours of fascinating, but little-known landscapes, particularly
those "changed by the hands of industry, art, commerce or defense,"
publishes a semi-annual newsletter, "The Lay of the Land," and
maintains a database of "unusual and exemplary North American land
use sites" (New York-area entries include the site of the Love Canal
disaster, the Meadowlands Trash Museum, and the Brooklyn Bridge anchorage).
Showcasing the work of New York artist Kevin Dresser,
this site answers a question asked by many a subway rider: "Who
paints those squiggly patterns on the walls, and why?" It also
features a short film that follows Dresser as he trolls the city's less-traveled
corners for abandoned cars - then covers them with layer upon layer of
spray-painted patterns.
Based at the City University's Graduate Center, the
Gotham Center sponsors a wide range of projects (including conferences,
curricula development, and videotapes) intended to "boost the visibility
- for citizens, tourists and students - of New York's badly under-appreciated
and under-developed historical assets."
Provides online access to the Center's database of
primary-source materials (including photos, customs forms, and ships'
passenger manifests) that tell the stories of the millions of immigrants
who passed through Ellis Island between 1892 and 1924.
Crumbling hospitals! Abandoned bridges! Built-over
streets! Hours of fun for obsessive urban antiquarians.
A visual record, lightly and somewhat obscurely annotated,
of the work of this semi-secretive organization, which sponsors the "dangerous
and entirely unscientific application of archaeological principles to
inspect [sic] evidence of previous human habitations and demises, preferably
involving an amateurish and histrionic analysis of human relics, case
and site assessments based on children’s diagrams of parlor games, and
palindromic investigations of imaginary crime scenes."
The centerpiece of this website is a virtual tour
of this fascinating museum, which is housed in a former tenement building
at 97 Orchard Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
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