A weekly round-up of my favorite preservation related stories from around the web and in the news. Click on the title of each story to jump through to the original article/blog post.
To Get Around Town, Some Cities Take A Step Back In Time – WFPL
New trolley in Memphis, TN. Image via WFPL
“Streetcars were popular in many cities in the last century, but trolleys disappeared in most cities as cars flourished and cities switched to buses and subways for mass transit. In 2001, Portland, Ore., was the first to develop a new kind of streetcar system. Success there led to a resurgence, with at least two dozen cities planning, building or expanding trolley lines.” What’s old is new again!
Ansel Adams’ Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar – Library of Congress
Mrs. Naguchi and two children at the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California. Image via the Library of Congress
“In 1943, Ansel Adams (1902-1984), America’s most well-known photographer, documented the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California and the Japanese-Americans interned there during World War II. For the first time, digital scans of both Adams’s original negatives and his photographic prints appear side by side… Adams’s Manzanar work is a departure from his signature style landscape photography. … [T]he images also include views of daily life, agricultural scenes, and sports and leisure activities (see Collection Highlights). When offering the collection to the Library in 1965, Adams said in a letter, ‘The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice, and loss of property, businesses and professions, had overcome the sense of defeat and dispair [sic] by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment….All in all, I think this Manzanar Collection is an important historical document, and I trust it can be put to good use.’”
Upper East Side – To Live in an Artwork – NYT
Edward Durell Stone’s 1956 home. Image via NYT
“The unique Upper East Side townhouse that served as home and muse to the modernist architect Edward Durell Stone, who in 1956 replaced its classic brownstone facade with a wall of windows camouflaged by a then-controversial white concrete grid of interlaced circles and squares, is poised to enter the market at $9.95 million. The home, at 130 East 64th Street, stands out like a snowflake on its tree-lined block between Park and Lexington Avenues”
50 States or 11 Nations? – NPR
Colin Woodard’s map of the “11 nations.” Image via NPR
“For hundreds of years, this nation has been known as the United States of America. But according to author and journalist Colin Woodard, the country is neither united, nor made up of 50 states. Woodward has studied American voting patterns, demographics and public opinion polls going back to the days of the first settlers, and says that his research shows America is really made up of 11 different nations.” What say you? Agree or disagree?
