Posts Tagged ‘streets’
“Here, are the stiffening hills”*…
The San Francisco street grid dates to the 1839 plan of Swiss ship captain and surveyor Jean-Jacques Vioget, who laid out the city on a north–south, east–west grid without regard to its topography. Subsequent plans extended the grid, except for its inflection south of Market Street…. and continued the practice of honoring geometry over topography, resulting in some of the steeper streets in the world.
Photographer Dan Ng explored…
What would San Francisco be without its steep hills?
Well for one, if would be much easier to walk around and without much effort. It would be easier to park a car and not have to curb the wheels. We would not have runaway vehicles and tennis balls.
On the other hand, we would not have cable cars, beautiful views and quaint neighborhoods. We would not have the many movies and postcard images to view. In fact, San Francisco would not be San Francisco.
By tilting the camera, I attempted to “level” the hills. These images whimsically portray the streets of San Francisco…flat. But thank goodness it isn’t!
See his more of “leveling” photos: “The Streets of San Francisco… but Flat?”
And on the subject of city streets: using OpenStreetMap, Andrei Kashcha’s City Roads project lets you enter any town or city in the world and generates a map of all the streets within its city limits.
* Rhondda Valley,” Collected Poems
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As we seek balance, we might spare a thought for Paul Lorin Kantner; he died on this date in 2016. A musician, he’s best known as co-founder, rhythm guitarist, and occasional vocalist of Jefferson Airplane, a seminal San Francisco psychedelic rock band of the counterculture era. He continued these roles as a member of Jefferson Starship, Jefferson Airplane’s successor band.
Coincidentally, one of his his Airplane co-founders, Signe Toly Anderson, died on the same day.
“A thin grey fog hung over the city, and the streets were very cold; for summer was in England”*…
With his collaborator John Morrison, Harold Burdekin photographed the streets of the city of London in the dark for his book London Night, published in 1934. In a time before stricter air pollution controls, the pair chose foggy nights to make their images, giving the light in the photos a sense of weighty presence.
The book was printed a year after the much more famous photographer Brassaï published his influential project Paris de nuit (Paris at Night). Unlike Brassaï and the British photographer Bill Brandt, who published a book of nighttime photos of London in 1938, Burdekin and Morrison chose to record only scenes with no people in them. The resulting images are forebodingly empty…
More (photos and background) at “Spooky, Beautiful 1930s Photos of London Streets at Night.”
* Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed
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As we penetrate the pea soup, we might recall that it was on this date in 1940, during the Battle of Britain, that the German Luftwaffe launched a massive attack on London as night fell. For nearly 24 hours, the Luftwaffe rained tons of bombs over the city, causing the first serious damage to the House of Commons and Tower of London.
One year later, on this date in 1941, the day after the air attack on Pearl Harbor, Great Britain joined the United States in declaring war on the Empire of Japan.
The House of Commons, Parliament, after the attack
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