Uncategorized

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What Penn Station used to look like will make you weep with longing

In 1910, when New York City transportation terminal Pennsylvania Station opened, it was widely praised for its majestic architecture. Designed in the Beaux-Arts style, it featured pink granite construction and a stately colonnade on the exterior. The main waiting room, inspired by the Roman Baths of Caracalla, was the largest indoor space in the city — a block and a half long with vaulted glass windows soaring 150 feet over a sun-drenched chamber. Beyond that, trains emerged from bedrock to deposit passengers on a concourse lit by an arching glass and steel greenhouse roof.This may sound unfamiliar for present-day residents of New York City, who know Penn Station as a miserable subterranean labyrinth.

Source: What Penn Station used to look like will make you weep with longing

The vanished streets of Old Paris

Eugène Atget (1857-1927) took up photography because he felt he had failed as an artist. Beginning in 1898, he made it his mission to record the old streets of Paris.
Atget saw himself as a documentary recorder, and actually described himself as an “author-producer.” The fact that many of his photographs were taken in quiet areas at dawn was not purely an artistic choice but a practical one: Atget’s camera and photographic technique were outdated for the time, and required long exposures. As a result he worked when streets were largely empty.
He recorded the shops, streets and architectural details of a Paris that would be swept away by modernization, begun by Georges-Eugène Haussmann on the instructions of Emperor Napoleon III in 1853. The program would not draw to a close until 1927.

Source: The vanished streets of Old Paris

19 Amazing Time Capsules Still Underground (And What’s Inside Them) 

            <blockquote><a href="http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/19-amazing-time-capsules-still-underground-and-whats-512832682"><img class="alignnone size-full" src="http://ontarioexploration.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/18qlt1raiuduojpg.jpg" alt="" /></a>I love time capsules. But more often than not, they're extremely boring. Most American time capsules from the 19th and 20th centuries contain a Bible, some stamps, a few coins and plenty of newspapers. Some throw in an American flag for good measure. But every once in a while there's something fascinating inside — something that makes you feel like you're not wasting everybody's time going through the pageantry of unearthing these incredibly low-tech time machines.</blockquote>

Source: 19 Amazing Time Capsules Still Underground (And What’s Inside Them)

The bizarre magnetic forest rings of northern Ontario / Boing Boing 

            <blockquote><a href="http://boingboing.net/2016/01/17/the-bizarre-magnetic-forest-ri.html"><img class="alignnone size-full" src="http://ontarioexploration.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/ForestRings1.jpg" alt="" /></a>Geoff sends us a post about “the ‘strange phenomenon’ of naturally-occurring ‘forest rings,’ or circles up to 2km in diameter only visible from the air, in northern On…</blockquote>

Source: The bizarre magnetic forest rings of northern Ontario / Boing Boing