Can This Amusement Park Be Saved?
Fiberglass bears are among the animal scattered around Clementon Park and Splash World in Clementon, New Jersey. The park, originally opened in 1907, and closed abruptly in 2019, was up for auction last month. Credit…Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times
From The New York Times: CLEMENTON, N.J. — Their coats buttoned against the chill of a gray Friday in March, people were climbing the stairs of the water slides and the roller coaster with clipboards and measuring tapes. They ducked under the carousel’s turnstile to peer around its striped canvas cover, wind tattered and hanging to the ground in places, and walked the edge of a murky wave pool.
It was three days before the auction of Clementon Park and Splash World, and a few dozen prospective bidders carried stapled packets listing 410 lots, from the Scrambler to the trash cans.
‘A parallel universe’: From juke joints to feed stores, the humble beauty of America’s forgotten roadside buildings celebrated in a mesmerising new photo book
Cold Spring Hotel, Greene County, New York. Wallis says that many of the buildings in the book have been preserved ‘not through careful restoration but through ongoing use and routine maintenance’
From The Daily Mail: Venture down America’s backroads and you’ll find, in the words of photographers Steve Gross and Susan Daley, ‘a parallel universe’, a world of lost-in-time buildings ‘that often goes unnoticed’.
In a series of road trips the pair, who live in New York City, trained their lenses on over 100 forgotten buildings from New England to the Deep South and published the resulting images in a mesmerising coffee table book called Backroads Buildings – In Search Of The Vernacular (Schiffer Publishing).
The tome contains pictures of roadside cafés, feed stores, grange halls, juke joints, general stores, cobblers’ shops, tinkers’ sheds and even a coffin warehouse.
‘They capture history’: the projects saving Spain and Portugal’s shop signs
The Letreiro Galeria project has amassed some 250 signs that sit in a borrowed warehouse space in Lisbon. Photograph: Adriano Fagundes/Letreiro Galeria
From The Guardian: Fire engine red, bordered by polka dots and stretching the length of three cars, the sign for the Orte clothing store had long loomed over Madrid’s Alcalá thoroughfare, its presence steady even as fast-food restaurants and chain stores began moving into the area.
When the store closed its doors and the space was poised to be rented, news swiftly reached Alberto Nanclares. Within days he was on site, working with a team to painstakingly pry the sign from the facade where it had sat for more than five decades.
10 Tips to Preserve Places from the Recent Past
The preservation of Modernist and other recent architecture may entail some unique challenges. Jan Uy/Flickr/CC BY-NC 2.0
From the National Trust for Historic Preservation: In the preservation world, the term “recent past” most commonly refers to historic places younger than 50 years old. Modernism, which is another term often associated with the recent past, is generally defined as a style that began to flourish in the United States in the 1930s. Both describe places and cultural resources that are among the most under-appreciated and vulnerable aspects of our nation’s heritage.
You may already know about our country’s recent past story through architectural icons like the Farnsworth House or Glass House (both National Trust Historic Sites), designed landscapes like Lawrence Halprin’s Freeway Park, and nationally significant historic sites like Lorraine Motel, associated with the civil rights movement.
Can the ArcLight Cinema in Hollywood Be Saved?
PHOTOGRAPH: MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES
From Wired: An arc light, or arc lamp, is a source of illumination created when electricity flows between two carbon electrodes. Use of arc lamps dwindled in the 20th century, edged out by incandescents, but for a long time they were a common light source for movie projectors. Mostly this little detail is just a fun fact—something interesting to bring up at parties. But this week, it’s a reminder that the history of cinema is long, even when our memories are short—and that the news of ArcLight Cinema shutting down can bring back a flood of recollections, even for people who may not know the theater chain’s namesake.