The Brooklyn Bridge

The 19th century equivalent of a trip to the moon.

When you begin talking about iconic American landmarks, it's difficult to separate the arts from the sciences--architecture from engineering, beauty from function. Take the Brooklyn Bridge, for example. I have a bridge I want to tell you (about). Okay, bad joke, yet quite apart from stand-up comedy, no bridge has been metaphorically bought and sold more often. German immigrant, John Roebling's engineering masterpiece has been far more influential as a subject for painters, poets, playwrights, novelists, and movie makers than any other bridge in the world, including the London Bridge (now in Arizona)&nbsp keeps falling down in the children's nursery rhyme.

Though rising to hair-raising heights, far more people died on the ground from
what was called "caisson disease" than from falls.

 

Graceful engineering, subject to
structural overkill, might explain why
the bridge has stood for 129 years.

Roebling's Brooklyn Bridge has never fallen down, though some, shortly after it was built (1870-83) weren't so sure it wouldn't. Six days after its opening, a rumor the bridge was about to collapse caused a human stampede in which twelve people were killed. Quite apart from those, the bridge was a killer. Worker safety standards were developed "on site" as the bridge was being built. The number 27 is often mentioned, but that's only an estimate of those killed during the thirteen years the bridge was under construction. Both John Roebling and his son, Washington, were incapacitated as a result of injuries sustained in simply supervising construction (John Roebling died of his injuries before the bridge was completed). Washington Roebling's wife, Emily, ended up supervising the project in her husband's place for some eleven years. (He gave her a crash course in bridge construction from home.)

Brooklyn Bridge, 1920s, Joseph Stella



The pedestrian level, Stella's inspiration.

Though the bridge was far from being the first suspension bridge ever built (it was Roebling's fourth), it was, at the time, the longest, at well over a mile in length (a record it held until 1903). At some $15-million, it was also the most expensive. Artistically, John Roebling's Neo Gothic tower drawings, indeed, the bridge itself, are works of art. As so often happens with graceful iconic landmarks, art inspires art. The most famous of the bridge's painters was undoubtedly Joseph Stella (above, right). He did an entire series of abstract futurist paintings peering through Roebling's soaring granite and limestone arches from the bridge's upper level pedestrian walkway (six lanes of vehicular traffic utilized the lower level).




Brooklyn Bridge, 1983, Andy Warhol

Joseph Stella wasn't the only iconic American painter to be inspired by the iconic bridge. Andy Warhol, some sixty years later, utilizing photo-silkscreen media (above), rendered his own impressions as have countless photographers, sculptors, muralists, even tattoo artists. In 2008, a Danish conceptual artist, Olafur Eliasson (bottom), went so far as to create a temporary waterfall cascading into the East River from one of the bridge's piers.

A bridge over troubled waters? New York City Waterfalls, 2008, Olafur Eliasson

Painting Freedom

The Four Freedoms Speech, Franklin D. Roosevelt, January 6, 1941

Without a doubt, the most difficult task an artist can attempt is to render a concept. Even painting portraits is easier. A few days ago, in discussing artists and illustrators, I made a passing reference to Norman Rockwell's Four Freedoms series. Tackling a concept like freedom would be difficult for any artist, but four of them? Moreover, in this case, the artist didn't even have the freedom to decide himself which four freedoms to paint. That decision was made by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his famous "Four Freedoms" State of the Union Speech before Congress on January 6, 1941. He enumerated them: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. They were freedoms Roosevelt proclaimed not just for Americans, but that people everywhere in the world ought to enjoy. The first two were First Amendment rights. The second two went beyond what the founding fathers had ordained to proclaim "economic security" and "human security." Economic security has since come to be known as the "social safety net." Human security later came to be embodied in the United Nations Charter--the freedom from international aggression. Even today, more than two hundred years after the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights, all four of these freedom goals remain works in progress, broadened, and sometimes narrowed, with the winds of political change.



Great paintings are seldom born whole, but evolve, as shown in Rockwell's preliminary
studies for Freedom of Speech, 1942.

Freedom of Speech--For Rockwell, a Yankee New Englander, this one was relatively easy. Nowhere in the world is this freedom more in evident than in the region's purest example of democracy--the town hall meeting. Rockwell was at his best when depicting genre, and his heroic blue-collar (literally) spokesman came to him as naturally and clearly as any scene he ever painted. Yet even at that, the depiction did not come easy. The painting evolved from two largely unsatisfactory preliminary efforts before Rockwell decided to start over, arriving at the low, upward point of view, his main figure against a stark, dark background.



Freedom of Worship,
1942, Norman Rockwell

Freedom of Worship--This one was even more difficult. Rockwell had never tackled the subject of religion in American life before. Though he was to do so at various times later in his career (his 1959 Easter Sunday comes to mind--a well-dress wife and kids marching off to church while an unshaven father in pajamas slouches in an armchair reading the Sunday paper). Rockwell had, from time to time, taken on serious subjects, yet humor was his stock in trade. However, no simple genre scene, humorous or otherwise, would work here. There was a war on. Freedom was much too serious for that. Yet, religion was a touchy subject. The artist was forced to turn to the montage, a relatively new creative device at the time (1942), coupled with a nearly monochromatic rendering and a subtle inscription near the top of the painting "Each according to the dictates of his own conscience."

Freedom from Want,
1942, Norman Rockwell

Freedom from Want--Rockwell considered this painting to be the least successful of the four. Here genre reigns, even subtle humor in a holiday snapshot scene immediately identifiable to virtually every American family then and now. There was no sense of "want," but neither was there any sense of need. Given wartime rationing at the time, the work might even be considered inappropriately extravagant. The painting comes across as a typical Saturday Evening Post Cover for the last week in November. Of all Rockwell's paintings, this one has been one of the most lampooned. Yet, it's hard to visualize any other image or event that would adequately convey the difficult, even radical (for its time) concept Roosevelt had imposed upon Rockwell's efforts.

Freedom From Fear, 1942,
Norman Rockwell

Freedom from Fear--Fear is a deeply personal emotion. It involves both the known and the unknown. Rockwell touches both elements. The newspaper headlines reflect known fears. The tender, parental love and caring reflects the deeper, more desperate fears of the unknown. The adults absorb these fears, attempting to hide them in protecting their offspring. In effect they seek to provide their children with the very freedom they lack themselves.

Unbelievably, after his year-long endeavor, Rockwell's Four Freedoms were rejected by the Department of the Army when he offered to donate them to the war effort. Rebuffed, Rockwell turned to his old friends at The Post where they were published in successive issues between February 20 and March 13, 1943, accompanied by matching essays. Freedom from Fear was seen as the most powerful of the four. Later, if the War Department had little use for them, the Treasury Department did. Rockwell's paintings were sent on tour and raised more than $130-million in war bond sales.

Washington's Monument

April, cherry blossoms, the tidal basin, a colorful sunset--Washington would be pleased.



The Mills design was scaled back over the
years due to its cost, bearing only a passing
resemblance to what we know today.

Washington has many monuments. That's true of the man as well as the city. Virtually every state has a Washington County (except for the state of Washington) and any number of monuments and memorials to our first president. However when one mentions the Washington Monument the 555-foot tall stone obelisk on the National Mall is the first, perhaps the only one to come to mind. It's become a national icon (literally) towering over the Capitol, the White House, even Washington's own image on Mount Rushmore (not literally in the last instance). The strange thing is that when it was proposed during the early 1800s, a monument to George Washington was actually quite politically controversial. Of course, then, as now, everything in Washington is politically controversial.

 

 

George Washington died in 1799. His body was barely cold before Congress wanted to erect a pyramidal mausoleum for him on the mall. Barring that, they wanted to bury him in a crypt under the Capitol dome. The family prevailed upon them to do neither. So matters stood until 1836 when there was a design completion for a monument and an architect named Robert Mills won first prize. The first controversy involved the site. Logically it should have been at the point where the east/west axis of the Capitol Mall crossed the north/south axis of the White House. L'Enfant's plan all but designated such a site. However, that point was rejected because the Potomac River bottom land there was too unstable. Though still centered on the mall, the site chosen was more than a hundred yards off-center to the White House. Typical of Washington (the city, not the man), it was another twelve years before construction began in 1848.


The Capitol Mall looking west toward the Potomac about 1868. The Department of
Agriculture is to the left, the 150-foot stump of the Washington Monument stands
on what was then the riverbank just beyond that.

An 1870s vintage proposal
for completion of the
Washington Monument.

Thomas McLelland's Gothic
confection.

Work continued until 1854, the Virginia marble reaching a height of 150 feet. Then financial mismanagement of the Know Nothing Party and eventually the Civil War brought things to a halt. There it sat for 22 years, an embarrassing, ignoble stump literally in the nation's front yard (above). After the war, money was tight, politics was even tighter, and no one could agree on what to do. Finally, the nation's centennial in 1876 was the impetus to complete the project, except that engineers quickly discovered the bluestone foundation of 1848 was totally inadequate, threatening to turn the monument into the leaning tower of Washington. It had to be reinforced with lots and lots of concrete. Proposals for completing the effort ranged from the sublime (a monumental statue of Washington atop the completed portion making it, essentially, merely a pedestal, left), to the ridiculous (converting it to a Gothic cathedral-like structure, above, right).


The Washington Obelisk

Costs were still a problem--an estimated one million dollars ($21-million today). Mills' birthday-cake circular colonnade was the first to go, though Victorian prudes objected to the "naked" obelisk (today it's sometime seen as a national phallic symbol). As work began anew in 1879, the triumphal North insisted the rest be of Massachusetts marble (the change of hue was so obvious Virginia marble was once more used from the 176-foot level on up). The capstone was set in 1884, the monument opened to the public in 1888. Later improvements involved the replacement of a steam elevator (12 minutes to the top) with an electric one in 1901 (cutting the trip to 70 seconds). When completed, Washington's monument was the tallest building in the world, a title it held for five years until the completion of Paris' Eiffel tower in 1889 (986 feet tall). It's still the tallest masonry structure in the world. An earthquake in August, 2011, has closed the monument for repairs until 2014.

HTML Part 5

(See 03-27-13 for HTML Part 4)

Without a doubt, the one thing that has made the Internet such an incredible success revolves around the freedom of choice it offers. In computerese, we call this interactivity. Without it, the Internet experience would be hardly more than an online Yellow Pages or maybe computerized TV. With interactivity, in accessing a Web site, users are immediately confronted with dozens of choices allowing them to wander at will among its offerings. Or, at the click of a mouse, the user can disappear like Spock on Star Trek. And the key to this amazing "cyberportation"? As the Disney song says, "The thingamabob, that does the job" we call the link--or sometimes (if you're really rambunctious) a "hotlink," or "hyperlink." Of course, the other important ingredient in this magical little wonder is the "URL," the Universal Resource Locator, which is, in fact, quite similar to the "online Yellow Pages" I spoke of earlier. Every Web site has a number which is reflected by a lengthy alphanumeric label appearing in quotation marks. Moreover tacked onto the end of this label, making it even longer, can be various pages or images connected with the site, making possible, not only our amazing cyberportation between sites, but within the site as well.

There are three components in a link. First comes the letter "a" which is the abbreviation for anchor. Betcha didn't know that. I'll bet you thought all along it was "anch" or "anc" or maybe just "an." Of course the beloved < comes first. Following the "a" is the reference comment "HREF" followed by "=" and the URL in quotation marks followed by another >. Thus the link looks like:

Actually there is one more element to the link and that is the closing </A>. I've separated this from the main link because the link and its anchor closing tag are both invisible to the browser user. Between them has to appear something for the user to click on. It might be an image (see lesson 4) or simply the plain text words Click here, which would appear underlined, in a different color (often blue) and would, in fact, be the only visible element of the link. Notice there are no quotation marks around the Click here. Any text outside quotation marks will appear "as is" on  the Web page (more on that in Part 6).

What I've outlined above is a link to my Web site which any of you are welcome to include in the code of your own site along with the name of my site or simply my autographed picture, available free upon request. If, however, you simply want to access a different page of your own site, then it's even simpler. Replacing the URL in quotation marks would simply be the title of your page "biography.html", for example, provided that both the "linked from" and the "link to" HTML files are both in the same folder on your Internet Service Provider's (ISP) server. This code would thus read:

If you were accessing a larger version of a painting from what we call a "thumbnail," then the HREF= would be followed by the file name for the full-size image in quotation marks, "MyBIGpainting.jpg" for example, with the image tag for the thumbnail (as discussed in lesson 4) between the link and the closing anchor tag. Thus, the thumbnail link would appear:

(This assumes all files for your site are in the same folder on your ISP's server.) Of course, included within the image tag would probably be some size indicators for the thumbnail image. Don't forget to close the tag with </A>. Google hates it when you skip things like that.

Without a doubt, the link is the most powerful force the HTML writer has at his or her disposal. Using them with style and grace (not to mention a good deal of forethought) makes the visit to your site a genuine pleasure. But nothing on the Internet is more frustrating than links that don't work, except perhaps those that don't work right. In our next excursion into the mysteries of HTML, we'll take as our text the handling of text (which I alluded to earlier in my Click here text).

Automobile Design

Time has not been kind to my second entry into the Fisher Body Craftsman's Guild.
Originally there was a windshield, steering levers, and two tall tail fins just behind
the passenger compartment (their loss was no great loss).

Back when I was a kid in my early teens, I was, like man boys my age, in love with cars. I wasn't so much infatuated with what made them run as how they looked. My first car was a hand-me-down 1956 Plymouth Belvedere, my second a '61 T-Bird, my third, a 1970 Pontiac Firebird. Except, perhaps, for the Plymouth, they've all since become classics. Before attaining a licensable age, I was into plastic 1/24 scale model cars. I spent on them every spare cent I could muster and over the years put together a collection of around twenty. Then I became aware of something called the "Fisher Body Craftsman's Guild." This was an annual competition involving the design and building of 1/12 scale model "cars of the future. "They supplied four rubber-tire wheels, we did the rest. I designed three entries two of which I actually sent off to Detroit. For all my hours of labors I received a couple certificates of appreciation. Much more valuable, however, was the appreciation I gained for excellence in design, not just of things on four wheels, but for virtually everything we touch, each and every day.

The 1947 winner by Chuck Jordan, who, by 1965, was in charge of GM's Styling Center.
A replica of this model now rest in Detroit's Ford-Edison Museum



In this 2010 photo, Geza Loczi
holds his 1965 winning model.
Shortly thereafter he joined
the GM design staff.

The Fisher Body Craftsman's Guild competition ran from 1930 through 1968, sponsored by General Motors to encourage teenaged boys toward a career as automobile designers (there's no indication that girls ever entered or were even eligible, which may have something to do with the guild's demise). Prizes for the winners included scholarships and trips to Detroit to tour the company's design studios. In the early years, the competition involved the building of Napoleonic carriage models which were Fisher Body's iconic symbol. Later, the contest evolved into possible designs for their product--auto bodies. At one time, the guild was second only to the Boy Scouts in teen membership, some eight million boys having competed over the years.



It's no accident that for many years, General Motors relied on Fisher for their line of auto bodies. Fisher had been designing transportation vehicles since the horse and buggy days. Their early car designs were literally "horseless carriages." Then, in 1924, GM's founder, Alfred P. Sloan came up with the concept of "planned obsolescence." He required his designers such as Harley Earl and Frank Hershey to come up with new bodies, if not new internal components, every year. The September debut of new models became the standard for the industry up through the early 1970s. Some consider this period nostalgically as the "golden age" of automotive design. Then economic chaos hit the auto industry, forcing both designers and engineers to pitch the tail fins and two-toned paint jobs and suddenly "get real."



What ten years did for tail fins. 1949 on the left, 1959 on the right.

Despite a teen design completion that was well ahead of its time, the great strides in automobile design were not coming from the mammoth General Motors or the somewhat stodgy Ford Motor Company (the T-bird was no Corvette), but from third place automaker, Chrysler where a man named Virgil Exner became the father of the ubiquitous 1950s tail fin borrowed from GM's Frank Hershey, who later borrowed it back, sparking a competition between the two automakers which rose to such heights (literally) as to gain the winner, GM's 1959 Cadillac, the nickname, "the rocket launcher."  Some claimed it looked more like the rocket itself.



Virgil Exner's 1959 Dodge wasn't exactly modest when it came to tail fins.

Faberge

Starting in 1885, the Faberge egg became an Easter tradition in the Romanov family,
each year, becoming ever larger and more elaborate.

The first time I ever heard of Faberge was fifty years ago when I graduated from high school and someone gave me a small bottle of cologne by that name. Even today, I still have a little of it left, and it still brings back fond memories--first dates, cruising around with the guys, wasting thirty-cent a gallon gas looking for first dates. It was probably another twenty years or more before I came to realize why the cologne maker borrowed (or stole) the name Faberge for their product. (The truth is, the family sued, the name was sold several times, and Rayette Inc. the makers of Brut men's toiletries, ended up with it.) Before I ever heard of their famous eggs though, it sounded like maybe the name for a French chocolatier rather than a Russian fine jeweler (actually the family was of French descent).

Gustav Faberge,
the founder.

Peter Carl Faberge,
the egg maker.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gustav Faberge came to Russia in the 1830s as an apprentice goldsmith, then started creating his expensive baubles in Saint Petersburg around 1842 from a basement store, though one in a fashionable shopping district. It was another forty years before they made it up to a ground level establishment. Gustav's son, Peter Carl, followed him into the business as the company, during the 1880s, became involved in restoring valuable jewelry artifacts belonging to the Hermitage museum. This led to their own work also being displayed within the museum's hallowed walls, which led to Tsar Alexander III commissioning the House of Faberge to creating an Easter egg gift for his wife. She was delighted.



The Hen Egg, 1885, by Faberge

This first effort came to be known as the Hen Egg. It consisted of an unspectacular white enameled egg which opened to reveal a golden yolk, which opened to reveal a golden hen, which opened to reveal a replica of the imperial crown from which was suspended a tiny ruby egg. In the years that followed Peter Carl Faberge was given complete artistic freedom to create the "Imperial Eggs," each one with a surprise buried deep within. Even the Tsar didn't know what to expect each year when his wife "cracked opened" the egg. Faberge went on to create fifty-three more eggs for the royal family until 1918 when the Bolsheviks nationalized Faberge, deciding to try their own hand at making fancy eggs...only to shoot their best customer.


The Faberge Coronation Egg, 1897, perhaps the most famous
and elaborate of all the Imperial Eggs, took fifteen months
(working day and night) to craft with all its working parts.

 

Ice Sculpture

A favorite at weddings, perhaps because
of the symbolism--swans mate for life.

A few days ago I mentioned in passing an art form which I had never written about before (there are getting to be very few such topics any more). There's an old joke aboard cruise ships about the woman who asked, "What do you do with your ice sculptures after they melt?" The answer to that may be, "Use them to water down the drinks, of course." All kidding aside, as I pointed out in writing about food sculpture (03-28-13), there has always been a close connection between food and this elegant, if fleeting, form of sculptural creativity. It's an art form that has to "die," towering over the buffet line in order to be appreciated. Although they are nearly ubiquitous aboard cruise ships, ice sculptures also accompany the more elegant wedding buffets, anniversaries, and birthdays once the years climb well into the higher double digits. They range in size from molded ice cubes (which really don't count) to mammoth extravaganzas limited in size only by their weight and how many men it takes to hoist them into position without creating an ignoble pile of crushed ice.

Harbin's Ice and Snow World--148 acres, over 2000 palaces, all built in just 14 days.

The history of ice sculpture dates back to the frigid realm of 17th century China to the province of Heilongjiang and the small fishing town of Harbin. There ice fishermen used to freeze buckets of water then remove the bucket and carve out a deep hole in the center in which they mounted a candle to create a crude lantern as a means of lighting their way to their favorite hole in the ice. This may be the oldest reference to "fire an ice" as well. Apparently it was cold enough that the candle didn't significantly melt the ice surrounding it. When Russia's Trans-Siberian Railroad hit town in 1897, Harbin became the home of it's own ice and snow carving festival. (Maybe I should write sometime on building snowmen.) Since then, ice carving festivals have sprung up in a long list of countries around the world, some of which are so tropical their duration may well be counted in minutes rather than days (there's one in the Philippines, for instance).

Ice is a bit easier to carve than marble.

If we limit our appreciate of ice sculptures to buffet table adornments and high speed carving competitions, we do the art form a grave injustice. There is also ice architecture (to support ice gargoyles, I suppose). The first such ice palace was commissioned by a Russian empress named Anna in 1740, complete with ice cannon firing ice cannonballs (what happens if a snowball fight escalates into an arms race). In 2000, Saint Petersburg built a replica of Anna's original ice palace, some 21 feet tall covering nearly a thousand square feet using ice blocks from the Neva River and then fusing them together (with hair dryers, perhaps?). Actually, ice sculpting tools range from small chain saws to rotary grinders, razor-sharp chisels, and even blowtorches. Not to be outdone by their Arctic neighbors, Sweden builds an ice hotel every year complete with icy beds, chairs, and of course the standard, run-of-the-mill ice bar, specializing in vodka. The room rate also includes lots of furry bedclothes.

Sweden's annual ice hotel--cozy, even a round bed. What, no ice bucket?