Walk. Freeze. Eat. Repeat.

Magnet #1020 - Disney, New York City

Fact: I paid way too much for this magnet. But. It was opening day at Disney's new Flagship store in Times Square a few weeks ago, and so, was totally worth it.

Plus, look at it! So darn cute! If they had a second one, with a complementary set of Disney ones (they could so do one with just the princesses!), I would totally have gotten it.

Spent the day playing tourist again in my city - one of my favorite things to do here. One of my former clients from Italy is here this week with her boyfriend, so we went wandering around Queens and midtown.

Yes, Queens. They wanted to go, so I brought them all the way out to Corona Park and the Queens Museum of Art, to see all the World's Fair stuff. You know I love it there.

Her BF is an architect, so he was totally interested in the architecture out there, and in midtown. So I picked up a copy of Francis Morrone's Architectural Guidebook to the City for him - remember him? The dude who gave the Plaza tour?

I firmly believe that all visiting architects should have that book in hand while wandering around town. We wandered through Grand Central, up Park Avenue to visit the Seagram Building, Lever House and the Frank Lloyd Wright showroom, over to Madison for the AT&T/SONY Building - such a pleasure to wander around with someone who appreciates the buildings themselves! We followed that by a quick trip into Cartier, St. Patrick's, Rockefeller Center, and Times Square for Disney, M&Ms and Hershey's, and Toys R Us.

Yep. All day. Loved it. Walking, freezing and eating. My kind of day.

Well, without the freezing, maybe.

Past, present and future

Magnet #695 - 1939 World's Fair

I love World's Fairs - I've been to one or two, but mostly I love seeing what the other ones have done in the past.

The 1939 World's Fair first piqued my interest because it played host during the 5-day royal visit of King George and Queen Elizabeth, the same visit that included hot dogs up at FDR's place in Hyde Park.

The fair was held out in Queens, so it was at the Queens Museum of Art (one of the few original fair buildings) where I bought this magnet. It's a fair poster that features the theme center - Trylon and Perisphere, what some reports called the ball and bat. Heh.

It housed the "Democracity" exhibit, a utopian world view of the future. People would walk up the long, giant ramp around the globe, through the 610-ft tower, and into the 18-story giant globe, which was reportedly something like twice the size of Radio City's interior.

What I can't believe is how these two giant structures were dismantled at the end of the fair! Actually, most of venues were demolished after the fair, leaving various supercool books and random supercool footage and documentaries to tell their stories of long ago.

I picked this magnet for today, because after being totally sucked into Being Erica on Hulu, I'm totally watching this Being Erica Do-Over Marathon on SoapNet today.

I completely and totally disagree with the major plot-point of the show. Our heroine Erica has had a life of bad choices. In fact, she has so many regrets in her 32-year-old lifetime that the fates have granted her a way to go back in time to fix and/or course correct her life.

Don't get me wrong, there are probably one or two events in my life I wouldn't mind revisiting or course correcting, but I can't see a sadder outcome than a life of bad choices and regrets.

Still, I'm thoroughly charmed by Erica, played by Erin Karpluk. She's a cute character, and watching this Erin chick play her, is like watching the best of Lauren Graham and Joanna Garcia. Even though she's that cute chick that boys fall over themselves for, she's still kinda everyday normal, and you just want to be her pal. If only to borrow from her superdupercute (though not everyday-sized, but whatever) wardrobe.

Plus, she's somewhat close in age to me, so when she goes back in time, it's always fun to see the clothes and music I grew up with. And, I'm sure it's that same music that will make a DVD boxset cost-prohibitive to produce, so I'm dropping the show to DVD.

Truth be told, though, if I had the chance to go back in time to visit for a bit, it likely wouldn't be the famous places or people and not necessarily even my own timeline. It'd probably be these World's Fairs and Expositions dotted through history - each fair a snapshot of a time period, with a dreamy focus on the future that they were all expecting, based on a past they didn't want to forget.

Ducks in disguise

Magnet #466 - Pekkle in Costume

Wanted to use something happy-making in an attempt to make the month of June be the best month ever in 2009.

Sanrio's now retired Pekkle. C'mon. How can you not love this guy.  

He's a lifeguard. Wheeeeet! 

He's a surfer. Hang ten, dude!

He's a pirate! Argh!

I actually have a bigger set of Pekkle with the individual pieces for these costumes on the lower level of my cube at work, so that all the little visiting munchkins can play with him. Kids have a fascinating attraction to magnets - some like to eat them, some like to make funny outfits, and some wonder why Pekkle's pirate outfit doesn't go with the Fuzzy Bear next to the Pekkle set and why Fuzzy Bear's dresses don't work on Pekkle.  Heh.

Anyway, as I was typing this, a supercute news story just came on tv...looks like the news wants something happy to report as well.  Apparently, in Queens, a Momma duck and her flock of ducklings were out for a stroll along a Whitestone Expressway service road...and the little ones fell into the sewer grate!  Oh, noesss!

No worries - the NYPD emergency service guys stopped traffic to fish the nine ducklings out, and they all made it home safely!

Yay! Happy news!

Stepping into the map

Magnet #414 - Queens Museum of Art NYC Panorama

Looks weird, right? It's the borough of Manhattan, as seen in the NYC Panorama over at the Queens Museum of Art.

I freakin' love this place. I've mentioned it before, but Robert Moses had it created for the 1964 World's Fair. It amazed people back then, and it's doing the same thing now.

I love looking at maps - so when I see this thing, I just kinda want to sit for hours, trying to look at different neighborhoods, figuring out where my buildings are, watching the plane fly in and out of La Guardia. Endless entertainment.

I've done one guided tour walking around the little skyway veranda thing, but Jeremiah's Vanishing New York got to go behind the scenes and actually walk in it.

Supercool blog entries for for his entire visit:

Panorama Part 1: New York Paleotectonic, in which we learn where all vanished buildings go to die, and also how to adopt a NY building. $10k is a bit steep for me, but I'd love to buy the Sony Tower. Or the Fred F. French building. Or 30 Rock. Or the Ford Foundation building. Or...yeah, it'd be hard to decide.

Panorama Part 2: Brooklyn in a Book, in which we learn a bit about Brooklyn.

Panorama Part 3: A Walk Up the East River, in which we step. Into. The. Map. Yep, Joey Tribbiani would have been proud.

Freakin' awesome.

It's a great, big beautiful tomorrow!

Magnet #226 - Unisphere, Symbol of the 64-65 World's Fair, Queens

So, this weekend is Open House New York, where several buildings and attractions in all five boroughs of NYC open their doors for the public.

I freakin' love this weekend - where else can you get more than a hundred tours around town - all free! They have several different types of tours, geared toward kids, architecture, sustainability, the arts, etc.

The only problem I have with OHNY (besides that it's sponsored by Target who hasn't built a damn Manhattan location yet, thus taunting the crap out of me), is that it's only for a weekend, and it's virtually impossible to do more than a few tours in that amount of time. And, then, you have to localize your tours, so that you're not running around all five boroughs like a madwoman.

For example, this is the first year that I'm doing Queens. Yesterday, we did the Trolley tour around Flushing Meadows/Corona Park, where we had a young tour guide tell us about the different areas inside the park. And later today, we're hopefully going to be able to make it on to the Architectural tour.

Another obsession of mine are the two World's Fairs (1939, 1964) that NYC has hosted, both in this park. The Unisphere on this magnet was built by US Steel for the 64 World's Fair, and was meant to symbolize peace through understanding. Corporate sponsorships were the order of the day, and it allowed them to unveil several supercool things to the world, such as:

• Disney launched the Carousel of Progress and It's a Small World.
  
• Ford debuted their Mustang, in this weird automated carousel of cars thing, where people could get in line and ride the car of their choice. Some of the guys that used to climb through the fences to avoid the entry fees say that they used to just come for the day, and ride the Mustang, timing their places in line to "get" the Mustang. And then once it was over, queue up again for it.
  
• The Vatican brought Michelangelo's Pieta all the way from home!
  
• The Belgian Village featured Belgium Waffles - which stands out for fairgoers as one of the most memorable foods of the fair.
  
• Clairol launched some sort of hair product there (hairspray?), and they hired several local girls to be hair models.
• New York State's Tent of Tomorrow Pavilion was a highlight (/pun intended) of the fair. I've heard from a coworker that it was just the coolest thing ever because of the glass ceiling. But also on the floor of the pavilion, Texaco sponsored a to-scale roadmap that you could walk all over, and see all of the Texaco locations in NY. Pretty nifty. Nowadays, the steel infrastructure is definitely falling by the wayside, its last bit of notoriety being used as spaceships for Men in Black.
• Robert Moses (one of the city's most renowned planners/builders/all around city-shaper) had built an almost 10,000-square-foot panorama of the city - with almost 900,000 buildings! You can still visit it today at the Queens Museum of Art - and it's superfabulous. I could literally spend hours looking at it. It's basically in this giant room, with a veranda kind of thing along the wall, and you look down on it trying to pick out certain buildings and stuff.

Oh, I do tend to go on about this stuff, this is probably my longest post ever. Sorry - it's just fascinating the amount of money that people poured into this fair that ended up pretty much a financial disaster.

Anyway, so most of this fun stuff you can find out online, or at the terrific Queens Museum in Flushing, there's actually a superdupercool documentary about the fair that PBS did. They show actual footage of the fair, and interview several attendees. So freakin' neat.

Anyway, off to the fair...grounds!

eta:
So, I wrote all of the above before the 2-hour walking tour with an architecture professor and his PPT with superneat personal pictures of the fair. All of that, plus reading a postcard book on the way home, might qualify me to be able to give that tour all on my own now. Heh. Anyone want to go to Queens? I'll totally FB my staycation in Queens sometime tonight. Odd. I had wanted this year to be my Get-to-know-Brooklyn year, but it's turning out to be my Get-to-know-Queens year, instead. Heh.

eta2:
Those that know me, know that I love eta'ing my own posts. But, here's the FB pic album of the weekend.