what about the plastic animals?

Mid-Century Wheeling

Wheeling is another Rust Belt cities along the Ohio River.  Its population peaked at over 60,000 in the 1930s.  Today less than half that many live in the city.  There were plenty of empty storefronts downtown and it was easy to find a place to park.  I dutifully put a few coins in a cobweb covered meter at one spot.  While walking around I noticed that I was the only person who had fed the meter.

One benefit to having a dying downtown is that the old buildings don't get modified, which results in a de facto preservation policy.  There were plenty of buildings and storefronts that looked like they hadn't changed in decades.  Dane has a better picture of the Spic & Span Cleaners.  I was tired and didn't feel like switching out the wide angle lens.

Wheeling is only an hour from Pittsburgh, but Kaufman's of Wheeling is not related at all to Pittsburgh's old Kaufmann's Department Store.  The latter is no more but I did visit the Kaufmann family house in rural Pennsylvania.

Santa's Butt

Formerly banned in Maine.  Deemed worthy by very serious reviewers.  Santa's Butt Winter Porter was enjoyed by my father and me on the night before Thanksgiving.

Seventh Avenue Birdhouses

Over the weekend I noticed these birdhouses in the little triangle park bound by Waverly Place, Charles Street and 7th Avenue.  The apartment building is a model of the condo at 15 Charles (switch to Street View and look up), and the Birdbath Bakery is across Charles from the park, but there wasn't any indication that the houses belonged to either.

Unrelated:  The Muppets perform Bohemian Rhapsody.  For comparison, the original and computer, manualist, brass band, male octet and computer versions

I'm away until next week.  Happy Thanksgiving everybody!

Blue Eyes

I got nothing today so feast your eyes on this guy I saw in the window of a furniture store on Bond St.

Bread and Football

It was such a nice day today.  I went down to the New Amsterdam Market and bought bread (walnut raisin in the foreground) and cheese.  Then I sat down on a bench near the Brooklyn Bridge to read the paper.  Looking at the sports section I see the crazy score highlighted above.  It's true!  West Liberty, of West Virginia, beat Edinboro, of Pennsylvania, 84 to 63.  There was a Division II record 1394 yards on offense.  That must have been an exhausting game to watch.

Autumn Leaves

Over the last couple of Sundays I gathered a bunch of colorful autumn leaves and run them through the scanner.  If you were in Morningside Park and saw someone stuffing leaves into the folds of the Sunday Times that was me.  The first batch is on Flickr.

These yellow guys were from the second batch.  The second batch didn't turn out as well as the first.  There were some amazing leaves that I pressed into the pages of Webster's Third International Dictionary with The Complete Calvin and Hobbes on top for weight.  By the time I got the scanner revved up on Tuesday night most of those leaves had turned brown.

My artistic abilities are limited so I have to let the leaves tell their own story.  Christophe Niemann is much more talented and clever, as his amazing Bio-Diversity set of manipulated leaves attests.

R.I.P. Jeanne-Claude

Jeanne-Claude, who with her husband Christo brought The Gates to Central Park in 2005, died yesterday.  She is quoted in the NY Times obituary as saying that the art she and Christo made expressed “the quality of love and tenderness that we human beings have for what does not last.”

On to Wheeling

Time to leave Ohio and enter West Virginia for the second time on this trip.  That's the Wheeling Suspension Bridge and the back of the legendary Capitol Music Hall in Wheeling.

Crop Reporting Guard

The very serious guard is in the 1962 edition of the Annual Report of Activities of the State Department of Agriculture and the State-Federal Cooperative Program of the United States Department of Agriculture, Statistical Reporting Service.  I found the report ages ago when I was living in Lincoln.  I bought it solely for this picture, but did you know that over 146 million pounds of peanuts were grown in Oklahoma in 1961?

Football Country

Driving into St. Clairsville it was clear I was getting close to the center of the football universe.  The Red Devils had an okay season this year, finishing 6-4 overall but only 2-3 in league play, a far cry from their outstanding 12-1 season two years ago.

While there were plenty of football jerseys and cheerleader megaphones on Main Street there weren't any people.  The buildings were well-kept and attractive but all I remember seeing open were a couple of pizza places and maybe a bar.  It was a Sunday afternoon but it seemed odd that every single downtown retail place was closed.