afiler.com

Cola, Pylons

andyf — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 06:20:39 +0000

Soda Signs. I just about crashed my car when I saw this last night. I’ve been photographing out-of-the-way places for seven years now this month, but this is the first time I’ve seen such amazingly preserved signage. At first I thought this stuff might have been new/restored, but as a friend pointed out, this wasn’t really the neighborhood for that sort of thing. I’m not a big fan of Coca-Cola signage, as I’ve mentioned before, but this sign is in great shape. I’ve seen places that have curved bottlecap signs like this before, though they’ve always been under layers of paint. I’m glad to finally see them. The only type of Coke sign I know I’m missing now is the once-ubiquitous “fishtail”, seen in a Stephen Shore photo of Philadelphia, and on “Sal & Angie’s” in the movie French Connection.

Electric Green. After photographing the store above, I turned right onto MLK Way (a day before the holiday, incidentally), and followed the street for awhile, looking at the progress of the light rail line (looks mostly done here). Near the Henderson Street station, I noticed a strip of green curling up into the hills. I could see an asphalt bike path weaving its way through the green, so I decided to pull over and go for a walk. As it turns out, this is a strip of land underneath a Seattle City Light transmission line, called Chief Sealth Trail. I followed about 2.5 miles of the line, first southeast, where I stopped at the Creston-Nelson Substation (complete with an electrical plug safety sculpture). I then followed it back northwest, past MLK Way, up to near Holly Park, and back to my car (for what turns out to be about a 5-mile round trip). It was really a great sight in the setting sun, especially with Rainier set beautifully against the pylons.

Old Hotels, Deserted Dots

andyf — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 19:33:30 +0000

Hotel Calvert. I saw the Hotel Calvert in Lewistown, Montana on a trip across Montana earlier in the year. I really wanted to stop to stay there, but it was only 2pm. I got a chance this time, and I’m glad I stayed. The hotel was originally a dormitory for those attending the high school across the street. I’m sure that was a useful thing, given the great distances some kids had to travel just to get to a school, and given the horrendous winters in this part of the continent (both of which can be seen in the movie The Slaughter Rule). The Hotel Calvert website says that the dormitory opened in 1917, and it was sold and conversion to a hotel began in 1928. When I showed up at around midnight the hotel, there was no one at the desk, but there was a couple phone numbers given to call. I called one, and got no answer. The second one finally got me someone, who then apparently had to drive over. He apologized for having no rooms with a bathroom available, but I was actually glad to get a room that probably hadn’t been renovated in the last half-century. This turned out to be mostly true, except that the walls had been covered in wood paneling, presumably in the 1960s or 70s. Presumably the doe-eyed clownchild was added around then as well.

Moccasin, Montana is the closest to a ghost town that I’ve ever seen. It’s not completely deserted, but it’s close. There’s still a post office and grain elevator, but that’s about it.

Trainspotting? Though I’m many forms of geek, railfan isn’t one of them. Then why would I pick up SPV’s Comprehensive Railroad Atlas - Dakotas & Minnesota? I picked it up because most Everydots that I’ve photographed were built along rail lines, and some of the tiniest dots only have signage thanks to the railroad. The SPV atlas shows current and former rail lines, and current and former stations and sidings. Since the existence of many of these tiny towns was defined by the railroads, these maps end up being pretty comprehensive. It also helps explain why some maps would list some of these basically nonexistent spots and others would list different ones — the data for those must have come from railroad maps. For me, this means that if I want to be comprehensive, I now have even more dots to visit. While I expect that most of them will have nearly nothing that indicates they were a town, sometimes finding the smallest piece of evidence that they existed feels like a great discovery.

Goodridge Grade A Butter

andyf — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 20:22:17 +0000

I had the pleasure of visiting the Goodridge (Minnesota) Historical Society yesterday, and I came across this beautiful butter box. Daisies are quite popular imagery with dairy products, especially butter. My favorite is a packaging company’s sample imagery for “Best Butter” (not a real product). Now, I’m sure the Goodridge butter packaging wasn’t made specifically for that creamery. It looks like the brand name would have just been stamped in the happy puffy cloud near the daisies. Still, I love seeing that small enterprises could actually have things that had good design, and it’s nice to see any sort of product that came from such a small town.

Dots, Crushes

andyf — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 07:29:48 +0000

Petrel, North Dakota

Everydot: North Dakota. Earlier this summer, I drove to and from Minnesota. The route passes through North Dakota, of course, and so I had to work on my project of photographing every town in that state. I spent a solid day photographing dots on a diagonal path from Marmarth, North Dakota to Lemmon, South Dakota and North Lemmon, North Dakota. The most challenging dot to photograph was Petrel, North Dakota, which I reached by driving along US 12 in South Dakota, taking a gravel road back into North Dakota, and then walking half mile along a grassy path.

The next day turned out rainy, so I headed in the direction of home. On my eastward trip, I’d really hoped to find some big old brick hotel in some downtown where I could get a cheap room with a bathroom down the hall. I knew such a thing had once existed and figured it might still. I saw a brick hotel in Lewistown, Montana, but I didn’t feel much like quitting for the day when it was only 2pm. In Sand Springs, I saw a billboard for the Northern Hotel in Winnett, 44 miles in the opposite direction. I ended up driving to Miles City, since I new there was a big old hotel there, the Olive Hotel. I went to the counter and was delighted to find that they still had rooms available. I was less delighted when I discovered I’d be staying in the Olive Motel across the street.

On the way back to Seattle, I passed up an old wooden hotel in Scobey and passed by an old brick hotel in Plentywood that I only now discovered existed. Instead, I ended up a hundred miles down the road in a smoking room an icky 1980s hotel. The next night, however, I ended up at the Ryan Hotel in Wallace, Idaho, purely by chance. It was exactly what I was looking for, and was unrenovated except for the added convenience of a toilet and shower in the room (in place of the next room over’s giant closet perhaps?).

Everydot: Douglas County, Washington. This past weekend, I drove across the Cascades into eastern Washington. I exited I-90 at George, Washington and drove northward. I was again on a search for old brick hotels, and this time I vowed to stop and get a room no matter how early in the day. Early in the evening I hit Waterville and came upon the striking Waterville Hotel. I met Dave and Amy, who run the place, and Dave gave me a tour of the place and directions to Alstown. On the way there, I passed a very dry cemetery surrounded by miles of stubbly fields. The next day, I photographed almost every town in Douglas County. I returned to the Waterville where I sat out on the porch, recalled the day’s adventures, and had some wine and cheese (all of which was a nice change from sitting on a smoky motel bed and eating a microwaved sandwich).

Crushed Orange Crush

Another Secret Crush. Back in April I discovered a 20+ year old Orange Crush bottle inexplicably sitting in a flower box. This weekend, while looking to see if anything remained of Matthiesen, Washington, I found an old garbage dump. Whoever was dumping their garbage there was a fan of orange soda, and in particular, Orange Crush. I had to grab a fairly well-preserved Crush can just because it was such an odd occurrence.

Geodata. On my Douglas County trip, I brought along my old Garmin eTrex Legend handheld GPS unit. I hadn’t done anything with geotagging before, but I figured I’d haul the unit around and see if I could get anything out of it later. Before I left I went to the tracklog menu and saved what was already there, hoping that I might be able to get geodata from past trips where the GPS rode around in my car. A few days after I got back, I decided to pull off the tracklogs. What I ended up with was about 2/3 of my most recent trip timestamped and ready to be synced with my photos, plus the trips I saved (from 2003, as it turns out) sans timestamps. Rather counterintuitively, saving the tracklogs on this unit preserves some data while destroying others.

The timestamped tracklogs got synced perfectly thanks to gpsPhoto.pl. Since I’d already uploaded the photos to Flickr, I synced those separately, with GPSTagr. This was great, because I ended up with all the photos I took on a map.

Now I wanted to do this for the other 6000+ Everydot photos I’d taken. I figured I’d be able to get geodata for them by connecting the tags I’d put on them with a place name database and adding that via the Flickr API. I downloaded the database from the USGS’s Geographic Names Information Service. For places in Canada, I used Natural Resources Canada’s Geographical Name Search Service. All this was glued together with a Ruby script, and before long, nearly all of my 430 or so Everydots were geotagged.

Pattern Recognition in the Built Environment

andyf — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 19:47:35 +0000

NE 18th Ave rail corridor, Minneapolis

On a long walk through Seattle with my friend Max Action, Max pointed out to me distinctive markers of tunnels, from purple glass sidewalk-windows to giant grates. To him, I couldn’t help but point out vestiges of long-dead businesses painted, carved, and built into buildings.

On my walk home, while listening to Evan Doorbell narrate a phone trip, I noticed curved lines in the sidewalk concrete, and changes in the material of the curb. As I looked, I could see that the business on this block had changed over time, and driveway/alley cutouts had been added and removed. This is a tiny, tiny thing, but as we walk over ground (literally or figuratively) hundreds and hundreds of times, we start to recognize patterns, whether it’s conscious or not.

Max has an excellent ability to recognize subterranean patterns from above; similarly, Evan Doorbell can hear the smallest click, thunk, or ka-chunk in the old analog phone system and know just what it is. For me, once I saw how these old urban commercial nodes mapped so directly to the Minneapolis streetcar system, I couldn’t stop seeing urban design patterns that persisted 50 years after the end of the streetcars.

Subways, Dots

andyf — Wed, 16 May 2007 19:11:26 +0000

Seattle Subways. The Seattle Monorail Project was far from the first abandoned transit plan for the city. Seattle had interurban and electric streetcars over a century ago, but by 1926, there was a desire for real rapid transit, like in Chicago or New York. By 1928, there was a comprehensive proposal that included station drawings, route maps, projected traffic graphs and numbers, and lots of stuff you’d see in modern transit planning.

Read more…

Anydot? Everydot. A very nice spread of my photos can be found in the mnartists.org supplement to the Rake magazine this month. Unfortunately, the issue cover and index both identify my project as Anydot, instead of Everydot. Hopefully those googling for me might find this post if they search for “anydot“.

Secret Crush

andyf — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 03:53:42 +0000

Orange Crush / 1980s(?)

Orange Crush. On a walk down Bellevue Ave this sunny afternoon, I saw this Orange Crush bottle caked with mud and sitting in a flower box outside an apartment building. It feels a bit weird picking up something that seems like it can’t be that old, yet the graphic design is quite a few generations old. I’ve encountered this particular design before, at the Orange Crush laundromat, though I wouldn’t have guessed that design would have shown up on a bottle that seems so (relatively) recent.

Dirty Orange Crush / 1980s(?)

Orange Crush Laundromat

Such a bottle occupies a particular space in time — it’s a round 16oz glass bottle, with a styrofoam label, a UPC, and no Nutrition Facts or other nutrition info. I sort of know these bottles as ones I might have occasionally gotten as a kid — but by the time I was buying many sodas, they were in plastic bottles, save for Jolt, which kept the 16oz glass bottles a little longer. Before these chubby nonreturnable bottles, there were the returnable bottles with the pry-off tops. I vaguely remember a bottle vending machine at the ASCS office in Warren. While Orange Crush comes in 20oz/600ml plastic bottles like everything else now, it’s come full circle and is available in 12oz glass bottles with the other “speciality” sodas (along with some other revived brands like Bubble Up and Dad’s).

I’m In Print! I was recently featured in the mnartists.org newsletter. That same feature will be partially reproduced in the mnartists quarterly arts supplement in The Rake, which hits the street April 30. There may be some more publicity coming in the near future, but I’ll hold off on that until I have a firm date for things.

New Site. I’ve started a new site, using a name I’ve held for awhile, oddmart.com. I have a few notes on books: the How to Show Telephone Numbers On Letterheads booklet by Ladislav Sutnar and Asmara: Africa’s Secret Modernist City, as well as a couple that originally appeared this site. On oddmart I’ll also be selling some of the import-only graphic design books, as well as some reprints of out-of-copyright design books.

Sovietskiy Design? (Советский дизайн?)

andyf — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 00:42:14 +0000

Saraj Prezla (bread crumbs)

Balkan Foods. At a Balkan market in Fargo, I found a few pieces of Extant Design that have a definite Soviet air to them. The Zlatni Puder evokes memories of lots of late East German graphic design (which I mentioned previously here in Extant DDR). They’re particularly enjoyable because it seems most post-Soviet packaging design has been thoroughly Westernized, usually with the latest swoosh-twist-3D-glow effects.

Zlatni puder from Klas

Zlatni puder (verso)

Haferflocken.

Soviet-era Design Books. I love the book SED: Stunning Eastern Design and its miniature half-clone DDR Design, and now I’ve discovered a newer, bigger book on DDR (East German) design, called DDR Design (unrelated to the other DDR Design above), by Günter Höhne (English-language info here). It’s in German only, but lots of large color pictures make it a great piece of extant design porn nonetheless. In the same series as DDR Design, but by different authors are DDR Kochbuch (DDR Cookbook), DDR Backbuch (DDR Baking Book), and DDR Getränkebuch (DDR Drink Book). They’re in German only, and more text-heavy, but design freaks, and English-speakers who care to translate recipes to attain some weak sense of Ostalgia might still get from them some enjoyment.

Take Gastrin.

Everlasting Inventory. Not just a good synonym for Extant Design, Everlasting Inventory / Permanentny Remanent, is a book on “promotional graphic design in the Polish People’s Republic” that I’m anxiously awaiting. My credit card has been charged 123.99 złoty, and I think an email may have told me that my order has shipped. In the same series is Not Only the Poster / Nie Tylko Plakat, on “promotional graphic design in Poland between the wars”. The website Reklamowy oldschool shows a number of “oldschool” Polish ads. I’d like to find more postwar graphic design from other trans-Iron Curtain states, but the closest I’ve otherwise found is the pre-WWII-era Obraztsy graficheskogo dizaina / Образцы графического дизайна (Graphic Design Samples), from Russia.

west central dots

andyf — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 20:06:51 +0000

State of the Art Education , Lockhart, Minnesota

Spooky School. This former school building sits unloved but not abandoned, in Lockhart, Minnesota. It seems massive for a town of this size. There are three floors of classrooms. The top two have roofs and floors collapsing into them, but the bottom floor is yet uncrushed. A sign scrawled where a chalkboard once was exhorts (other?) vandals to get out now.

Commercial Architecture , Melvin, Minnesota

Downtown Cow Town. Melvin, Minnesota has sidewalks, which is rare for a Dot this small on the map. What’s even more rare is that it also has curbs. Unfortunately, anyone trying to walk on the sidewalks is met with 25,000 volts, since this part of town is now a cow pasture.

More Dots. This day, I visited Melvin, Greenview, Beltrami, Hadler, Anthony, Heiberg, Flaming, and Sundal. Greenview was identified only by business (once a grain elevator?) alongside the railroad. Flaming seemed to be nearly nonexistent and was only on one of my two maps. A different map used in 2005 made me conclude that Sundal was also nonexistent, but I revisited it and found I’d been in the wrong spot. Sundal, near Rindal, does exist, in the form of a church and an abandoned creamery.

Greenview, Minnesota

Beltrami, Minnesota

Hadler, Minnesota

Anthony, Minnesota

Heiberg, Minnesota

Flaming, Minnesota

Sundal, Minnesota

secret streetcars

andyf — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 02:50:11 +0000

Como-Harriet Line Linden Hills

The Como-Harriet Line. It’s now just a tiny museum line in southwest Minneapolis, but it once served downtown Minneapolis, the university, and the capitol. Much of its path was down city streets, where the signs of streetcars are long-gone. Through Como Park in St Paul and Linden Hills in Minneapolis, however, the line had its own right-of-way, off city streets. If you look carefully, you can still find signs of this.

The Como-Harriet museum line ends at Linden Hills Blvd, near Lake Harriet. From there, the only evidence of a streetcar line is a gently curving path of oddly placed alleyways and greenspace. I followed this pathway to France Ave and the streetcar suburb of Morningside, which merged with Edina in 1966.