The government agency building a 102-story skyscraper at the World Trade Center site is investigating the discovery of two sets of blueprints for the building that a homeless man says he found in the trash.

The schematic documents for the Freedom Tower, under construction at ground zero, were marked “Secure Document - Confidential,” the New York Post reported Friday.

The documents, dated Oct. 5, 2007, contain plans for each floor, the thickness of the concrete-core wall, and the location of air ducts, elevators, electrical systems and support columns, the Post reported.

Michael Fleming told the newspaper he found the documents on top of a public trash can in downtown Manhattan, with written warnings on it to “properly destroy if discarded.”

{ AP/NY Post | Continue reading }

For the women of the mid-19th century, a fine hotel was a perilous place to be. Not only did respectable gentlewomen run the risk of consorting with prostitutes (a popular book of etiquette advised female travelers to keep a safe distance from any broad with “a meretricious expression of eye”), but extended time away from the joys of cooking and cleaning might ruin them for life. One defender of home and hearth described the lady hotel dweller this way: “Idle and lazy, and dyspeptic from the want of exercise, she becomes such a mere puppet and machine that she loses all sense of individual responsibility.”

Even if she managed to avoid the whores and dyspepsia, she ran great risk of seduction, possibly by a traveling salesman. And if she contrived to keep her virginity intact, there was always luggage to lose. The detective Allan Pinkerton declared that there was “no more prevalent or more popular branch of dishonesty” than the robbery of inns.

Did hotels really merit such expansive social anxieties? In Hotel: An American History (Yale University Press), the University of New Mexico historian A.K. Sandoval-Strausz responds with an emphatic yes. Hotels, he argues, were “a significant episode in the modern idea of a pluralistic, cosmopolitan society,” and conservatives invested in the status quo were right to fear them.

{ Reason | Continue reading }

photo { Square America }

{ On May 13th auction house Christie’s will offer up the Palm Springs Kaufmann House to bidders. Pre-sale estimate of the home: $15 million-$25 million. | LA Curbed }

new york craigslist > manhattan > missed connections
You helped me to move in some stuff - m4m - 25 (Roosevelt Island)
Date: 2008-04-14, 8:29AM EDT

I was picking up a sofa from you.

You are super hot.

photo { Hiroki Tanabe, architect }

{ Sophie Dejode, Bertrand Lacombe, Philip Vormwald, Thirty-two Fingers, 2008 | more }

previously { Forced perspective at DisneyWorld }

Okay, I’ve known that astrology was total bullshit since I worked at a telephone psychic hotline named Magikal Journeyz during college, but my horoscope today is so inaccurate that I’m ready to give up on it completely:

“Lucky you! You’re coming into a time of great abundance. Love, travel, adventure — all the good stuff is headed your way. Take your vitamins, you are going to need all the energy to can get!”

Yeah right. Today Con Edison shut my power off and they’re not going to turn it back on until tomorrow. So, it looks like I’ll be stumbling around by candlelight like Young Frankenstein. I hate life.

Also I have some good stories about my tragic trip to the Empire State Building a couple of days ago, but I don’t really have the energy (literally, my laptop is about to run out of batteries) to explain it right now. Let’s just say that I almost puked off of the top of “The Observation Deck”.

{ Dancing at gunpoint }

photo { Shalom Sharon Hair }

{ stereohell }

{ If everyone in New York City washed their laundry in cold water for just one day, the energy savings could be 5.7 million kWh. Enough to power every light in the Empire State Building for an entire month. | Tide Coldwater: Building, Saatchi, New York, 2007 | Ship + Stadium}

{ Geoffroy de Boismenu }

{ The Magic Roundabout | It is an innovative system which was constructed after consultation with the British Road Research Laboratory. Traffic flow around the smaller, inner roundabout is actually anti-clockwise, whereas traffic flows in the usual clockwise manner around the five mini-roundabouts and the outer loop. | Wikipedia | Armin Grewe | Google Maps }

It was called the longest window in the world when its red, sapphire and purple panels were unveiled to airport travelers in 1960. Artists called the window – longer than a football field and more than 20 feet high – one of the most important stained-glass works in the U.S.

But American Airlines quietly began dismantling the window’s 900 panels last week at its old John F. Kennedy International Airport terminal, after years of debate and pleas by employees and artists to find a way to keep the abstract, multicolored piece intact.

Many museums asked to display the window – over 300 feet long and 23 feet high – said it was too large. And the airline said that removing it in one piece, moving it and storing it would cost many millions.

Smith said that small pieces of the window would become floor displays at Kennedy Airport, at the airline’s Fort Worth, Texas, headquarters, and at a Long Island museum. The rest is being given to an antique salvage company that is taking down the glass for free.

An artist who said he studied with the window’s designer said the airline was too cheap to properly restore a priceless work of art.

“That was American Airlines’ visual identity at Kennedy for 50 years. To just throw it in a trash heap is incredibly disrespectful,'’ said Kenneth vonRoenn, an architect and glass artist in Louisville, Ky. “To intentionally destroy it because it was more cost effective … it’s regrettable.'’

Artist Robert Sowers created the modern glass facade for American’s terminal when it opened in 1960 at Kennedy, then known as Idlewild Airport. It was believed to be the world’s largest stained-glass window at the time, and the first to be featured so prominently in a U.S. building.

{ AP/USA Today | Continue reading }

image { American Airlines ad, 1968 }