14:
Wandering about the Wallabout:
(I know. Walleyed? Walrus? I didn’t know it existed either.)
Last weekend was Open House New York, an annual citywide event that hosts tons of free tours, covering everything from the Croton Aqueduct in the Bronx to ironwork studios in Bushwick. Sunday morning was crisp and clear when we headed to Fort Greene Park to meet our tour guide for the Wallabout tour. This, I soon learned, is the section of North Fort Greene/Clinton Hill that surrounds the BQE and ends at the decrepit Brooklyn Navy Yard on the East River.
There’s an astonishing array of architectural styles in this area, from pre-Civil War homes to monster brick chocolate factories and printing presses, and the graffiti, I noticed, is equally diverse. We zigzagged up and down streets to check it all out (at one point standing in front of an empty lot that was formerly home to a “remarkable example of Depression-era building” that had just been torn down. Can you imagine a whole tour like that? I can. So meta. (Or something.) and the tour culminated (I use that word lightly) with Walt Whitman’s last standing residence.
An 1840s single-family home.
Gosh, I love wales.
The highest concentration of pre-Civil War wood-frame houses in New York. The one all the way to the left (which, by the way, is adjacent to the BQE) hasn’t been repaired since the 1960s and is expected to collapse within the next few years. As we walked past I saw a Puerto Rican flag covering a 2nd-story window.
Classic overgrowth.
Real guerilla advertising. (PS. Krasdale is, ahem, a generic brand.)
One architectural historian described this pre-war industrial block as “sublime.”
I feel confused by the word “sublime.”
More classic overgrowth. Getting a feel for it now?
Looks SO fun.
Local Hasids dressed to the nines. Seriously, I do love their white stockings.
And (drumroll) we finally made it to the highly romanticized (by me) home of Walt Whitman….
Vinyl siding??? I feel so cheated. And he only lived here for a year. Jeez. I was so overwhelmed with disappointment that I don’t even know what street we were on.
object-lesson.com
30:
Let me introduce you to our guest blogger Gabrielle Begue. She is a freelance writer and editor living in Brooklyn. She’s a big fan of neutral tones. On her blog, Object Lesson, she gushes about the awesome appeal of objects. Now, here she is…
My boyfriend is a graphic designer. He is also a raging type nerd. It’s impossible for us to walk down the street without stopping to dissect the kerning of a laundromat sign or marvel at some insane hand-painted lettering in a deli window. “Look at those serifs!” “Jesus, that is the craziest ƒ I have ever seen.” “Ugh, why did they choose Comic Sans? They’re basically asking us not to eat here.”
Now he pop quizzes me on fonts. We’ll be walking to dinner and, even if I’m in the middle of a sentence, he’ll point and say, “Name that typeface!” Now I do know a few fonts – as a writer and editor I am intimate with Times New Roman, which I know makes him cringe – but I can’t readily recognize them, especially not under the gun like that. Over time I picked up some names that I would just throw out, hoping one would stick. My first choice is usually Hobo because I like to say “hobo.” I also like to say Bodoni (a.k.a. the Vogue typeface) because it sounds like what a surfer would call a donut or a hot girl. Recently, though, I’ve become a little more savvy thanks to the sometimes illustrious, sometimes weird, always memorable origins of the fonts’ names.
So, like a weakling who’s been bullied and takes it out on his little sister, I’ve constructed my own brief pop quiz for you readers, culled from the copious signage of Brooklyn.
Answers at the end of the post.
Here we go:
1. First, I’ve learned that this is like the cardinal sin of type treatment: vertical type. As my boyfriend would say, “Barf!” But looking beyond that, this type shares its name with a very generous New York neck-beard enthusiast whose wife invented jell-o.
2. Let’s focus on “beacon’s” (unless you want to show off and name the second one, too). If asked, this typeface would probably choose to sit in a Wassily chair and rationalize this very rational choice in crisp, steely Deutsche.
3. Duh, easy. This one’s a movie star.
4. This font probably hasn’t shaved in a long time. By the way, it’s inexplicably popular in my neighborhood. I chose this business because I like the alliteration.
5. Bonus round. Can you name ALL THREE fonts on this awning? I sure as hell can’t.
So how did you do?
1. Cooper Black
2. Bauhaus
3. Helvetica
4. Hobo
5. Anybody’s guess.
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