King Of Sex City 320x240 Jar

I will be travelling overseas for the next few weeks, so this is the PERFECT time to take one of our five video tours (74 videos in all), or read through our past and ongoing features by clicking on the category title.

King Of Sex City 320x240 Jar

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We recommend: NYC DECADE BY DECADE, which chronicles the city's history in 40 ten-year increments; LAYERS OF NYC, a trivia series that tests how well you know the city THEN and NOW; and our newest feature, LITTLE BYTES OF..., which gives readers a brief tour of such sites as the Apple Store on Fifth, the St. Regis Hotel, and the New York Public Library. ENJOY!

"(The king) said he would not ransom Mortimer,/Forbade my tongue to speak of Mortimer,/But I will find him when he lies asleep,/And in his ear I'll holler 'Mortimer!'/Nay, I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak/Nothing but 'Mortimer,' and give it him/To keep his anger still in motion."

Do you see that dome sticking out of the top of the General Assembly Building? It was not in the original plans for the Le Corbusier/Harrison complex. According to New York, the companion book for the documentary by Ric Burns: "Late in the design process, a dome was added to the low, swooping roof of the General Assembly...at the suggestion of Senator Warren Austin of Vermont, who argued that the U.S. Congress would never approve funds for a government building without a dome."

I've never liked that dome. When looking through my pictures of the U.N. for this blog, I realized almost all of them were taken to eliminate the dome. I guess I'm drawn more towards the other lines and curves. For example:

--The young firm of Carrere and Hastings won the competition to design what would become one of the city's best loved buildings. Carrere and Hastings also gave New York the magnificent Standard Oil Building at 26 Broadway, the grand entrance to the Manhattan Bridge at the end of Canal, the Lunt-Fontanne theater on 46th Street, and the Frick Mansion on Fifth Avenue (where the Lenox Library once stood).

--Besides the Gutenberg Bible mentioned above, other treasures among the Library's holdings include the first full folio of Shakespeare's work (1623), the 1640 Bay Psalm Book (the first book printed in English in America), Malcolm X's briefcase, S.J. Perlman's typewriter, the walking stick Virginia Woolf took to the River Ouse, the only known copy of the original folio edition of Columbus' discoveries, Charlotte Bronte's pencil, Jack Kerouac's reading glasses, a lock of Mary Shelley's hair, the writing desk of Charles Dickens as well as a letter opener he made from his cat's paw, and the original stuffed animals A.A. Milne bought from Harrods in the 1920's that inspired the Winnie the Pooh stories (pictured).

On May 23, 1911, the New York Public Library opened its doors on Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd Streets, providing intellectual nourishment on a site formerly occupied by the city's first fresh water reservoir. Very appropriate.

--The King Cole painting in the bar (now known as the King Cole Bar) was commissioned by Astor in 1906 for $5,000 and painted by Maxfield Parrish for the Knickerbocker Hotel. When that hotel was converted into an office building in the 1930's, the famous mural (8' high by 30' wide) was relocated to the bar at the St. Regis, already famous for introducing New York City to the Bloody Mary. The king's face is reputedly of Astor himself and legend has it that Parrish deliberately painted the king passing gas (he grins with curled toes) to the noticeable chagrin of his courtiers on either side. The painting was restored in 2007 and is currently valued for over $12 million.

--The lobby is one of my favorite interiors in the city. In his biography of Frank Lloyd Wright, Brendan Gill writes that Wright and his generation of Chicago architects were inspired by aesthetic experiments in Vienna and Glasgow that seemed to skip over the East Coast and head straight to the Mississippi Valley. "Scores of Secessionist borrowings are to be found in Chicago and almost none in New York City. A possible exception is the interior of the St. Regis Hotel (1901-1904), designed by Trowbridge and Livingston. Though the exterior of the building is in a neo-classical Parisian vein, one observes hints of racy, decadent Vienna in the voluptuously oleaginous bases of the marble columns in the lobby. They appear to be melting, and the effect is a pleasingly erotic one."

Yesterday, we mentioned one of the city's most famous trees--long gone--in whose shade twenty-four brokers signed the Buttonwood Agreement, the origins of what would become the New York Stock Exchange.

After discussing Civil War monuments in New York City, I recap an article by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker in which he calls the Statue of Liberty the city's best Civil War memorial. A woman in my group speaks up.

New York City is different. For one thing, it is older than virtually every other American city. Boston, Philadelphia, Charleston, Savannah, Newport, and Williamsburg come to mind when one thinks of historic places, yet New York City is older than all of them. As for settlements that were already established when Dutch traders first landed at the southern tip of Manhattan--St. Augustine, Fort St. George, Hampton, Plymouth, and Santa Fe--Jamestown, Plymouth, and Fort St. George disappeared, and the other three failed to prosper for the first three centuries of their existence.

Previously, I discussed the four remaining, fully operational, St. Louis cinemas. While looking into their backgrounds, I became fascinated with the history of the past theaters of St. Louis...most of which are long gone.

Most of the entries of St. Louis theaters were written by one Charles Van Bibber. This guy obviously has a ton of experience and first hand knowledge of the city's theaters. I tried to connect with him to get his story and understand how he has so much information and experience with St. Louis theaters. We connected briefly via social media channels, but there was no interest to meet or do an interview. So it goes.

I was at a local tavern and started spieling about my new-found obsession with local theaters, and the conversation spread to the table behind me where sat someone who just happens to be an urban explorer with tenfold my experience. Turns out, this guy has devoted a tremendous amount of time looking into this same topic and just so happens to have a three-ring binder filled with research, photos and info...I have connected with him and hope to revisit that conversation and follow up on this fun topic. We'll see.

Anyhow, after spending a solid week of my spare time reading, riding around and looking for photos of the St. Louis theaters, I thought I should share my findings and a summary of the info I pulled from various sources.

As a result of my online research, I've also become fascinated with the all-black movie and vaudeville houses and will be posting my findings on them as soon as I do a little more poking around and after I read this recent find on eBay:

Of those 132, 38 have no photos available so there is no current photographic evidence readily available online. Sadly some of these were the all-black theaters including Booker Washington, Douglass, Laclede, Casino, Marquette, etc. The Lyric was demo'd for the current Busch Stadium parking garages. All these buildings are gone and photos are not readily available online. Here's a list of the 38 theaters with no photo images on Cinema Treasures:

The Grand Theater at 514 Market was built in 1852 and destroyed in the 1960s for the latest round of bad ideas (read recent NFL football stadium proposal just north of Downtown) associated with Busch Stadium II which stripped most of Downtown of it's history and brought us a ton of parking lots and surface lots...all activity killers. Busch II lasted for a mere 40 years but its wake of destruction was intense and we're left with...parking lots. 2ff7e9595c