What the Romans Saw When They Reached New Parts of the World: Hear First-Hand Accounts by Appian, Pliny, Tacitus & Other Ancient Historians

in History | December 12th, 2023

If you really want to impress your family, friends, and social-media following with your next voyage abroad, consider booking a trip to Thule. But where, exactly, is it? It could be Iceland or Greenland within the Orkney archipelago of northern Scotland; it could be the Estonian island of Saaremaa; it could be the Norwegian island of Smøla. To understand the location of the much-mythologized Thule for yourself — and more so, its meaning — you should consult not sources nor modern but ancient, or at least medieval. That’s the modus operandi of the video above from Voices of the Past, which spends an hour and 45 minutes gathering historical impressions of not just Thule, but every extremity of the known world reached by the Roman Empire.

To much of humanity in antiquity, “the known world” was more or less a synonym for the territory of the Roman Empire. It was through the exertions of that mighty empire’s adventures, traders, and military men that, with time, the world to the north, east, west, and south of Rome itself became ever more “known,” and it is along those four cardinal directions that this video organized its tales.

Telling of expeditions “beyond Carthage,” it draws upon the words of ancient historians Appian of Alexandria, Polybius, and Arrian of Nicomedia; telling of the Roman pursuit of the trade-route “incense trails,” it brings in the Greek polymath Strabo as well as the King James Bible. Accounts of such even farther-flung places as the source of the Nile and the forests of Germania come from Pliny the Elder and the Roman Emperor Augustus.

This is all in keeping with the orientation toward primary sources of Voices of the Past, a Youtube channel previously featured here on Open Culture for videos on Nikola Tesla’s predictions for the world of 2026, Plato’s creation of the myth of Atlantis, ancient Japan as described by ancient Japanese, and the Roman Empire as described by an ancient Chinese historian. However you define it, Rome never constituted the entire world, nor even the entirety of the civilized world. But no previous civilization had ever made such a consistent effort to push its boundaries outward, reaching — and, if possible, mastering — distant realms of seemingly fantastical beasts, unfathomable landscapes, and uninhabitable climates. We might do well to imagine that it was just such places (or at least the Roman perception of those places) best symbolized by Thule, though whether you trust Plutarch, Josephus, or Tacitus’ description of it is up to you.

A Map Showing How the Ancient Romans Envisioned the World in 40 AD

Plan Your Trip Across the Roads of the Roman Empire, Using Modern Web Mapping Technology

Ancient Rome’s System of Roads Visualized in the Style of Modern Subway Maps

The First Transit Map: a Close Look at the Subway-Style Tabula Peutingeriana of the 5th-Century Roman Empire

Human All Too Human: A Roman Woman Visits the Great Pyramid in 120 AD, and Carves a Poem in Memory of Her Deceased Brother

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 9 ) |

Winston Churchill Gets a Doctor’s Note to Drink Unlimited Alcohol While Visiting the U.S. During Prohibition (1932)

in Food & Drink, History | December 11th, 2023

In December 1931, having just embarked on a 40-stop lecture tour of the United States, Winston Churchill was running late to dine with financier Bernard Baruch on New York City’s Upper East Side. He hadn’t bothered to bring Baruch’s address, operating under the incorrect assumption that his friend was so distinguished a personage, any random cab-driving commoner would automatically recognize his building.

Such were the days before cell phones and Google Maps.…

Eventually, Churchill bagged the cab, and shot out across 5th Avenue mid-block, thinking he would fare better on foot.

Instead, he was very nearly “squashed like a gooseberry” when he was struck by a car traveling about 35 miles an hour.

Churchill, who wasted no time peddling his memories of the accident and subsequent hospitalization to The Daily Mail, explained his miscalculation thusly:

In England we frequently cross roads along which fast traffic is moving in both directions. I did not think the task I set myself now either difficult or rash. But at this moment habit played me a deadly trick. I no sooner got out of the cab somewhere about the middle of the road and told the driver to wait than I instinctively turned my eyes to the left. About 200 yards away were the yellow headlights of an approaching car. I thought I had just time to cross the road before it arrived; and I started to do so in the prepossession—wholly unwarranted— that my only dangers were from the left.

Yeah, well, that’s why we paint the word “LOOK” in the crosswalk, pal, equipping the Os with left-leaning pupils for good measure.

Another cab ferried the wounded Churchill to Lenox Hill Hospital, where he identified himself as “Winston Churchill, a British Statesman” and was treated for a deep gash to the head, a fractured nose, fractured ribs, and severe shock.

“I do not wish to be hurt any more. Give me chloroform or something,” he directed, while waiting for the anesthetist.

After two weeks in the hospital, where he managed to develop pleurisy in addition to his injuries, Churchill and his family repaired to the Bahamas for some R&R.

It didn’t take long to feel the financial pinch of all those cancelled lecture dates, however. Six weeks after the accident, he resumed an abbreviated but still grueling 14-stop version of the tour, despite his fears that he would prove unfit.

Otto Pickhardt, Lenox Hill’s admitting physician came to the rescue by issuing Churchill the Get Out of Prohibition Free Pass, above. To wit:

…the post-accident convalescence of the Hon. Winston S. Churchill necessitates the use of alcoholic spirits especially at meal times. The quantity is naturally indefinite but the minimum requirements would be 250 cubic centimeters.

Perhaps this is what the eminent British Statesman meant by chloroform “or something”? No doubt he was relieved about those indefinite quantities. Cheers.

Read Churchill’s “My New York Misadventure” in its entirety here. You can also learn more by perusing this section of Martin Gilbert’s biography, Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Oh My God! Winston Churchill Received the First Ever Letter Containing “O.M.G.” (1917)

Winston Churchill Goes Backward Down a Water Slide & Loses His Trunks (1934)

Winston Churchill’s List of Tips for Surviving a German Invasion: See the Never-Distributed Document (1940)

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She lives in New York City, some 30 blocks to the north of the scene of Churchill’s accident. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

The Beatles Versus the Stones: An Animated Battle of the Bands

in Animation, Music | December 11th, 2023

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The Beatles or the Stones? We’ve been debating that question for the past 60 years. Above, the London-based company Dog & Rabbit continues the conversation with a clever video that animates Beatles and Stones album covers. From there, all kinds of high jinks ensue.

The “Beatles vs The Stones” animation has won awards at various festivals. Recently made available online, you can watch it above.

via Colossal

Watch Classical Music Come to Life in Artfully Animated Scores: Stravinsky, Debussy, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart & More

Watch Animated Scores to Music by Radiohead, Talking Heads, LCD Soundsystem, Photek & Other Electronic/Post-Punk/Avant-Garde Musicians

Animated Series Drawn & Recorded Tells “Untold Stories” from Music History: Nirvana, Leonard Cohen, Blind Willie Johnson & More

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Glen Hansard & Lisa O’Neill Perform a Stirring Version of “Fairytale of New York” at Shane MacGowan’s Funeral: Watch Their Send-Off

in Life, Music | December 10th, 2023

On Friday, Glen Hansard & Lisa O’Neill performed “Fairytale of New York” at Shane MacGowan’s funeral, giving the Pogues’ frontman quite the send-off. The moving performance took place before a packed church in Nenagh, a country town in Ireland. And it all ends, perhaps fittingly, with mourners dancing in the aisles. Below, you can also watch Nick Cave perform a Pogues song from 1986, “A Rainy Night in Soho.”

Shane MacGowan & Sinéad O’Connor Duet Together, Performing a Moving Rendition of “Haunted”

RIP Shane MacGowan: Watch the Celtic Punk Rocker Perform with Nick Cave, Kirsty MacColl & the Dubliners

The Wondrous Night When Glen Hansard Met Van Morrison

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

College Presidents Lampooned on Saturday Night Live’s Cold Open

in Comedy, Current Affairs | December 10th, 2023

Ouch!

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The Oldest Voices That We Can Still Hear: Hear Audio Recordings of Ghostly Voices from the 1800s

in Computer Science, History, Life, Technology | December 8th, 2023

What history nerd doesn’t thrill to Thomas Edison speaking to us from beyond the grave in a 50th anniversary repeat of his groundbreaking 1877 spoken word recording of (those hoping for loftier stuff should dial it down now) Mary Had a Little Lamb?

The original represents the first time a recorded human voice was successfully captured and played back. We live in hope that the fragile tinfoil sheet on which it was recorded will turn up in someone’s attic someday.

Apparently Edison got it in the can on the first take. The great inventor later reminisced that he “was never so taken aback” in his life as when he first heard his own voice, issuing forth from the phonograph into which he’d so recently shouted the famous nursery rhyme:

Everybody was astonished. I was always afraid of things that worked the first time.

His achievement was a game changer, obviously, but it wasn’t the first time human speech was successfully recorded, as Kings and Things clarifies in the above video.

That honor goes to Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, whose phonautograph, patented in 1857, transcribed vocal sounds as wave forms etched onto lampblack-coated paper, wood, or glass.

Edison’s plans for his invention hinged on its ability to reproduce sound in ways that would be familiar and of service to the listening public. A sampling:

A music player
A device for creating audiobooks for blind people
A linguistic tool
An academic resource of archived lectures
A record of telephone conversations
A means of capturing precious family memories.

Léon Scott’s vision for his phonautograph reflects his preoccupation with the science of sound.

A professional typesetter, with an interest in shorthand, he conceived of the phonautograph as an artificial ear capable of reproducing every hiccup and quirk of pronunciation far more faithfully than a stenographer ever could. It was, in the words of audio historian Patrick Feaster, the “ultimate speech-to-text machine.”

As he told NPR’s Talk of the Nation, Léon Scott was driven to “get sounds down on paper where he could look at them and study them:”

…in terms of what we’re talking about here visually, anybody who’s ever used audio editing software should have a pretty good idea of what we’re talking about here, that kind of wavy line that you see on your screen that somehow corresponds to a sound file that you’re working with…He was hoping people would learn to read those squiggles and not just get the words out of them.

Although Léon Scott managed to sell a few phonautographs to scientific laboratories, the general public took little note of his invention. He was pained by the global acclaim that greeted Edison’s phonograph 21 years later, fearing that his own name would be lost to history.

His fear was not unfounded, though as Conan O’Brien, of all people, mused, “eventually, all our graves go unattended.”

But Léon Scott got a second act, as did several unidentified long-dead humans whose voices he had recorded, when Dr. Feaster and his First Sounds colleague David Giovannoni converted some phonautograms to playable digital audio files using non-contact optical-scanning technology from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Dr. Feaster describes the eerie experience of listening to the cleaned-up spoken word tracks after a long night of tweaking file speeds, using Léon Scott’s phonautograms of tuning forks as his guide:

I’m a sound recording historian, so hearing a voice from 100 years ago is no real surprise for me. But sitting there, I was just kind of stunned to be thinking, now I’m suddenly at last listening to a performance of vocal music made in France before the American Civil War. That was just a stunning thing, feeling like a ghost is trying to sing to me through that static.

Scanning technology also allowed historians to create playable digital files of fragile foil recordings made on Edison devices, like the St. Louis Tinfoil , made by writer and early adopter Thomas Mason in the summer of 1878, as a way of showing off his new-fangled phonograph, purchased for the whopping sum of $95.

The British Library’s Tinfoil Recording is thought to be the earliest in existence. It features an as-yet unidentified woman, who may or may not be quoting from social theorist Harriet Martineau… this garbled ghost is exceptionally difficult to pin down.

Far easier to decipher are the 1889 recordings of Prussian Field Marshall Helmuth Von Multke, who was born in 1800, the last year of the 18th century, making his the earliest-born recorded voice in audio history.

The nonagenarian recites from Hamlet and Faust, and congratulates Edison on his astonishing invention:

This phonograph makes it possible for a man who has already long rested in the grave once again to raise his voice and greet the present.

Suzanne Vega, “The Mother of the MP3,” Records “Tom’s Diner” with the Edison Cylinder

A Beer Bottle Gets Turned Into a 19th Century Edison Cylinder and Plays Fine Music

400,000+ Sound Recordings Made Before 1923 Have Entered the Public Domain

The Web Site “Centuries of Sound” is Making a Mixtape for Every Year of Recorded Sound from 1860 to Present

Stream 385,000 Vintage 78 RPM Records at the Internet Archive: Louis Armstrong, Glenn Miller, Billie Holiday & More

– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Why Violins Have F‑Holes: The Science & History of the Renaissance Design

in Music | December 8th, 2023

Before electronic amplification, instrument makers and musicians had to find newer and better ways to make themselves heard among ensembles and orchestras and above the din of crowds. Many of the acoustic instruments we’re familiar with today—guitars, cellos, violas, etc.—are the result of hundreds of years of experimentation focused on solving just that problem. These hollow wooden resonance chambers amplify the sound of the strings, but that sound must escape, hence the circular sound hole under the strings of an acoustic guitar and the f‑holes on either side of a violin.

I’ve often wondered about this particular shape and assumed it was simply an affected holdover from the Renaissance. While it’s true f‑holes date from the Renaissance, they are much more than ornamental; their design—whether arrived at by accident or by conscious intent—has had remarkable staying power for very good reason.

As acoustician Nicholas Makris and his colleagues at MIT announced in a study published by the Royal Society, a violin’s f‑holes serve as the perfect means of delivering its powerful acoustic sound. F‑holes have “twice the sonic power,” The Economist reports, “of the circular holes of the fithele” (the violin’s 10th century ancestor and origin of the word “fiddle”).

The evolutionary path of this elegant innovation—Clive Thompson at Boing Boing demonstrates with a color-coded chart—takes us from those original round holes, to a half-moon, then to variously-elaborated c‑shapes, and finally to the f‑hole. That slow historical development casts doubt on the theory in the above video, which argues that the 16th-century Amati family of violin makers arrived at the shape by peeling a clementine, perhaps, and placing flat the surface area of the sphere. But it’s an intriguing possibility nonetheless.

Instead, through an “analysis of 470 instruments… made between 1560 and 1750,” Makris, his co-authors, and violin maker Roman Barnas discovered, writes The Economist, that the “change was gradual—and consistent.” As in biology, so in instrument design: the f‑holes arose from “natural mutation,” writes Jennifer Chu at MIT News, “or in this case, craftsmanship error.” Makers inevitably created imperfect copies of other instruments. Once violin makers like the famed Amati, Stradivari, and Guarneri families arrived at the f‑hole, however, they found they had a superior shape, and “they definitely knew what was a better instrument to replicate,” says Makris. Whether or not those master craftsmen understood the mathematical principles of the f‑hole, we cannot say.

What Makris and his team found is a relationship between “the linear proportionality of conductance” and “sound hole perimeter length.” In other words, the more elongated the sound hole, the more sound can escape from the violin. “What’s more,” Chu adds, “an elongated sound hole takes up little space on the violin, while still producing a full sound—a design that the researchers found to be more power-efficient” than previous sound holes. “Only at the very end of the period” between the 16th and the 18th centuries, The Economist writes, “might a deliberate change have been made” to violin design, “as the holes suddenly get longer.” But it appears that at this point, the evolution of the violin had arrived at an “optimal result.” Attempts in the 19th century to “fiddle further with the f‑holes’ designs actually served to make things worse, and did not endure.”

To read the mathematical demonstrations of the f‑hole’s superior “conductance,” see Makris and his co-authors’ published paper here. And to see how a contemporary violin maker cuts the instrument’s f‑holes, see a careful demonstration in the video above.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

RIP Norman Lear: Watch Full Episodes of His Daring 70s Sitcoms, Including All in the Family, Maude, The Jeffersons, and More

in History, Television | December 7th, 2023

On the evening of January 12, 1971, CBS viewers across the United States sat down to a brand new sitcom preceded by a highly unusual disclaimer. The program they were about to see, it declared, “seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices, and concerns. By making them a source of laughter, we hope to show — in a mature fashion — just how absurd they are.” Thereafter commenced the very first episode of All in the Family, which would go on, over nine full seasons, to define American television in the nineteen-seventies. It did so not just by daring to find comedy in the issues of the day — the Vietnam War, the generation gap, women’s lib, race relations, homosexuality — but also by spawning a variety of other major sitcoms like Maude, The Jeffersons, and Good Times.

Even if you didn’t live through the seventies, you’ve probably heard of these shows. Now you can watch full episodes on the official Youtube channel of Norman Lear, the television writer and producer involved in the creation of all of them and many others besides.

If you’ve ever seen Sanford and Son, Fernwood 2 Night, Diff’rent Strokes, or One Day at a Time (or if you happened to catch such short-lived obscurities as Hanging In, a.k.a. Pablo, and Sunday Dinner), you’ve seen one of his productions. His death this week at the age of 101 has provided the occasion to acquaint or reacquaint ourselves with Archie and Edith Bunker, George and Louise Jefferson, Florida and James Evans, and all the other characters from what we might now call the “Norman Lear multiverse.”

The best place to start is with the premiere of All in the Family, which introduces the Bunker clan and the central conflict of their household: that between boisterously prejudiced working-class patriarch Archie Bunker and his bleeding-heart baby-boomer son-in-law Michael “Meathead” Stivic. Later episodes introduce such secondary characters as Edith Bunker’s strong-willed cousin Maude Findlay, who went on to star in her own eponymous series the following year, and the Bunkers’ enterprising black next-door neighbors the Jeffersons, who themselves “moved on up” in 1975. (So far did the televisual Learverse eventually expand that Good Times and Checking In were built around the characters of Maude and the Jeffersons’ maids.)

An outspoken proponent of liberal causes, Lear probably wouldn’t have denied using his television work to influence public opinion on the issues that concerned him. Yet at their best, his shows didn’t reduce themselves to political morality plays, showing an awareness that the Archie Bunkers of the world weren’t always in the wrong and the Meatheads weren’t always in the right. By twenty-first-century standards, the jokes volleyed back and forth in All in the Family or The Jeffersons may seem blunt, not least when they employ terms now regarded as unspeakable on mainstream television. But they also have the forthrightness to go wherever the humor of the situation — that is to say, the truth of the situation — dictates, an uncommon quality among even the most acclaimed comedies this half-century later. Watch complete episodes of Norman Lear shows here.

Watch Mad Magazine’s Edgy, Never-Aired TV Special (1974)

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Watch the Opening Credits of an Imaginary 70s Cop Show Starring Samuel Beckett

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Busy Person’s Introduction to Large Language Models (LLMs)

in Online Courses, Technology | December 7th, 2023

You’re busy. You don’t have much time to figure out the deal with Large Language Models (aka LLMs). But you have some curiosity. Enter Andrej Karpathy and his presentation, “A Busy Person’s Introduction to Large Language Models.” It’s a one-hour tutorial that explains “the core technical component behind systems like ChatGPT, Claude, and Bard.” Designed for a general audience, the video explains what Large Language Models (LLMs) are, and where Karpathy sees them going. Andrej knows what he’s talking about. He currently works for OpenAI (the maker of ChatGPT), and, before that, he served as the director of artificial intelligence at Tesla.

As one YouTube commenter put it, “Andrej is hands-down one of the best ML [Machine Learning] educators out there.” At Stanford, he was the primary instructor for the first deep learning class, which has become one of the largest courses at the university. Enjoy.

Neural Networks for Machine Learning: A Free Online Course Taught by Geoffrey Hinton

Google Launches a Free Course on Artificial Intelligence: Sign Up for Its New “Machine Learning Crash Course”

Stephen Fry Reads Nick Cave’s Stirring Letter About ChatGPT and Human Creativity: “We Are Fighting for the Very Soul of the World”

Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT: It’s “Basically High-Tech Plagiarism” and “a Way of Avoiding Learning”

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

A Visit to Tianducheng, China’s Eerily Empty $1 Billion Copy of Paris

in Architecture, Travel | December 6th, 2023

Not quite a century ago, Shanghai was known as “the Paris of the East.” (Or it became one of the cities to enjoy that reputation, at any rate.) Today, you can catch a high-speed train in Shanghai and, just an hour later, arrive in a place that has made a much more literal bid for that title: Tianducheng, a district modeled directly on the French capital, complete with not entirely unconvincing faux-Haussmannian apartment buildings and boulevards. Struggling to attract residents in the years after its construction on farmland at the outskirts of Hangzhou in 2007, Tianducheng soon came to be regarded as one of China’s over-ambitious ghost towns.

Bizarre as it may seem to those unfamiliar with recent trends in Chinese city-building, Tianducheng actually belongs to a kind of imitative tradition. “On the outskirts of Beijing, a replica of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, is outfitted with cowboys and a Route 66,” writes National Geographic’s Gulnaz Khan.

“Red telephone booths, pubs, and statues of Winston Churchill pepper the corridors of Shanghai’s Thames Town. The city of Fuzhou is constructing a replica of Stratford-upon-Avon in tribute to Shakespeare.” To get a sense of how Tianducheng fares today, have a look at “I Explored China’s Failed $1 Billion Copy of Paris,” the new video from Youtube travel channel Yes Theory.

The group of friends making this trip includes one Frenchman, who admits to a certain sense of familiarity in the built environment of Tianducheng, and even seems genuinely stunned by his first glimpse of its one-third-scale version of the Eiffel Tower. (It surely pleases visiting Parisians to see that the developers haven’t also built their own Tour Montparnasse.) But apart from Chinese couples in search of a wedding-photo spot, this ersatz Eiffel Tower doesn’t seem to draw many visitors, or at least not during the day. As Yes Theory’s travelers discover, the neighborhood doesn’t come alive until the evening, when such locals as have settled in Tianducheng come out and enjoy their unusual cityscape. The street life of this Champs-Élysées is a far cry indeed from the real one — but in its way, it also looks like a lot more fun.

A 3D Animation Reveals What Paris Looked Like When It Was a Roman Town

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

How Central Park Was Created Entirely By Design & Not By Nature: An Architect Breaks Down America’s Greatest Urban Park

in Architecture, Nature | December 6th, 2023

New Yorkers have a variety of sayings about how they want nothing to do with nature, just as nature wants nothing to do with them. As a counterpoint, one might adduce Central Park, whose 843 acres of trees, grass, and water have occupied the middle of Manhattan for a century and a half now. Yet that “most famous city park in the world,” as veteran New York architect Michael Wyetzner puts it in the Architectural Digest video above, is both nature and not. Though Central Park may feel as if it has existed since time immemorial, organically thriving in its space long before the towers that surround it, few large urban spaces had ever been so deliberately conceived.

In the video, Wyetzner (previously featured here on Open Culture for his explanations of New York apartments, subway stations, and bridges, as well as individual works of architecture like Penn Station and the Chrysler Building) shows us several spots in Central Park that reveal the choices that went into its design and construction.

Many were already present in landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s original plan, which they submitted to an open design competition in 1857. Of all the entries, only theirs refused to let the park be cut apart by transverse roads, opting instead to round automobile traffic underground and preserve a continuous experience of “nature” for visitors. (If only more recent urban parks could have kept its example in mind.)

Central Park would be welcome even if it were just a big of expanse of trees, grass, and water. But it also contains many distinctive built structures, such as the much-photographed mall leading to Bethesda Terrace, the “second-oldest cast-iron bridge in the United States,” the dairy that once provided fresh milk to New York’s children, and Belvedere Castle. That last is built at three-quarters scale, “which makes it appear further away than it actually is, and gives it this sort of magical fairy-tale quality,” the same trick that the builders of Disneyland would employ intensively about a century later. But the priorities of Walt Disney and his collaborators differed from the designers of Central Park, who, as Vaux once said, put “nature first, second, and third — architecture after a while.” If a mutually beneficial deal could be struck between those two phenomena anywhere, surely that place is New York City.

An Architect Breaks Down the Design of New York City Subway Stations, from the Oldest to Newest

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

What the Romans Saw When They Reached New Parts of the World: Hear First-Hand Accounts by Appian, Pliny, Tacitus & Other Ancient Historians

Winston Churchill Gets a Doctor’s Note to Drink Unlimited Alcohol While Visiting the U.S. During Prohibition (1932)

The Beatles Versus the Stones: An Animated Battle of the Bands

Glen Hansard & Lisa O’Neill Perform a Stirring Version of “Fairytale of New York” at Shane MacGowan’s Funeral: Watch Their Send-Off

College Presidents Lampooned on Saturday Night Live’s Cold Open

The Oldest Voices That We Can Still Hear: Hear Audio Recordings of Ghostly Voices from the 1800s

Why Violins Have F‑Holes: The Science & History of the Renaissance Design

RIP Norman Lear: Watch Full Episodes of His Daring 70s Sitcoms, Including All in the Family, Maude, The Jeffersons, and More

A Busy Person’s Introduction to Large Language Models (LLMs)

A Visit to Tianducheng, China’s Eerily Empty $1 Billion Copy of Paris

How Central Park Was Created Entirely By Design & Not By Nature: An Architect Breaks Down America’s Greatest Urban Park

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