I’ve never observed a consensus on anything between Amazon and the American Booksellers Association, but a new initiative from a bipartisan group of 10 U.S. senators seems to have found that improbable sweet spot, at least for now. Called the Marketplace Fairness Act, according to Publishers Weekly, a new law would have the “goal of […]
Who knew? Not me, but British urbanite Tom Scott did. Rubble from Bristol, England comprises the landfill for Waterside Plaza on the east side of Manhattan. Post-WWII the British city had many bombed-out buildings, material that was brought back to the US from the UK in ships that used it as ballast. I was at the plaza a couple years ago for a conference, though I had no idea then that the example of modern architecture has this unlikely origin. Check out the video by Tom Scott. H/t my English friend Garry Benfold who brought this cool city story to my attention.
The favorite scary character of my youth was the TV prankster Ghoulardi (real name Ernie Anderson, the father of film director Paul Thomas Anderson). The interesting doc here—based on the 1997 book, Ghoulardi: Inside Cleveland’s Wildest TV Ride, brought out by Gray & Company, an enterprising Cleveland publisher doing books of local interest—shows how Hollywood studios’ rediscovery and repackaging of their old horror classics for local TV stations in the late 1950s and early ’60s prompted many local TV stations to program horror movie shows, often known by names such as “Shock Theater.” In Cleveland, where I grew up, we were fortunate to have one of the most colorful and interesting of these early horror film hosts. Ghoulardi. Watching him during my childhood, though it be would be many years until I ever heard the term “meta,” I instinctively loved how he inserted himself in to whatever monster or horror film he was showing, somehow putting his own image on to the TV screen, jousting with, say, “Cyclops,” trying to subdue the creature with his a cane and rancorous insults. His outrageous schtick—in a a gray sweatshirt and scraggly goatee, with dangling cigarette-holder—made him an early iconoclast of ’60s pop culture. Ghoulardi was a kind of low-rent Professor Irwin Corey, if you remember “The World’s Foremost Authority,” some before years Corey, turning 100 this year, took his act to the Tonight Show.
As with the attempted bans of comic books, chronicled in David Hadju’s Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America, Ghoulardi was condemned by goo-goo parental groups who tried getting him off the air. Despite this, his usual Friday night slot, coming after local news, around 11:30pm, grew to include a Saturday afternoon show. The decency crowd might have succeeded in sidelining him, during this pre-cable era, with only three TV stations in Cleveland, but he was so popular with kids, and his audience was so large, there was no way the station would’ve dropped his show in its prime. When Ghoulardi did finally go off the air, it was because Anderson moved to Los Angeles, where he worked in TV with his longtime pal, and earlier sidekick, Tim Conway, later of “McHale’s Navy.”
Walking with my good friend Karl Petrovich in the NYC nabe of Soho almost thirty years ago, I spied this handsome panel truck that had a version of my name painted on it, only I spell my first name with just one ‘l’ and my middle initial is ‘S,’ not ‘C.’ It was an odd doppelganger moment—evidence of someone like me, but not me. Karl had a camera, and we snapped a pic of me in front of the truck, emblazoned with this PCT’s architectural practice, with outposts in NYC and strangely, in far away Tulsa. It was a memorable, weird, modern moment, pre-Internet. As a grace note, here also is a picture I took of my pal Karl, sadly now deceased. We were classmates at Franconia College in the 1970s.
Crisp NY day, along the Hudson in RSD Park at abt 100th St. Shiny steel gray river, 78 blocks from great gray bridge. pic.twitter.com/PB70uZiL3a
— Philip Turner (@philipsturner) October 20, 2014
As a Manhattanite I don’t get behind the wheel much these days, but I sure enjoyed it when I was younger, growing up in Cleveland. I remember the sneakers I had on—I pedaled the little car with them, Fred Flintstone-style. “Yabba-dabba-do!”
As a New Yorker who walks, bikes, and occasionally gets around in the city by taxi, I have been alarmed by the dangers on our streets and the numerous fatal encounters among pedestrians, bikers and cars. In August, I attended a public meeting held by NYC Council Member Helen Rosenthal, announcing potential changes to the local streets, designed by the Dept of Transportation to minimize these dangers, and “calm” vehicular traffic, as the planners put it. In the weeks since that meeting, West End Avenue has been freshly paved, and now new lane markers have been painted, which I hope will fundamentally alter the traffic flow, and improve the safety of all local residents. Please examine the screenshots below to see for yourself, or all the photos and charts via this link, which reveal the new design in its entirety. A key part of the plan boils down to dividing the 60-foot wide avenue differently than it’s been configured for many years. Rather than the avenue being divided in to six lanes each ten feet wide (with two of those lanes reserved for parking, and four lanes reserved for northbound and southbound traffic), the plan (view PDF here) will see the parking lanes on each side of the avenue widened to thirteen feet, the traffic lanes widened to eleven feet, and the creation of a center turning lane to allow for safer turns on to the neighborhood’s side streets. At some intersections, no turns from or on to side streets will be permitted.href=”http://philipsturner.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/SaferStreets-WEA.jpg”>
Now that the new lanes have been painted, I hope the city will quickly put in place public education and new signage, to make clear to drivers, pedestrians, and bikers how the new configuration is supposed to work. I am concerned that in the short term, the new markings will befuddle many people, leading to dangerous impatience and confusion. If you are an upper west sider, and want to know more about the efforts of Council Member Rosenthal and the DoT to improve safety, you may visit Rosenthal’s website, where you can submit your own suggestions. At Rosenthal’s site, you can also join her email list, to receive the many communications they forward from the DoT.
