Quantcast
Channel: Atlas Obscura: Articles
Viewing all 11432 articles
Browse latest View live

NAM, the Little Weather Model That Could

0
0

article-image

From NAM's website. 

"You know the old saying, garbage in, garbage, out." So began the news segment hosted by Bruce Leshan, a weather analyst camped out, like many weather analysts, at the National Weather Service headquarters in Sterling, Virginia, describing the need for good data in the always-tricky field of weather prediction. While the eastern seaboard of the United States is looking out the window or shoveling the driveway at the blizzard coating the region, weather nerds have kept their eye on something else: the weather models.

In particular, the one who got the closest to predicting today's downfalls.

On Saturday morning, as New York City's snow totals began to rise, metereologists and weather watchers took to social media to declare the radar maps a victory for the North American Mesoscale Forecast System or NAM. It seems that NAM has been calling for more snow in NYC than competing systems the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and the American GFC (made by NOAA) for days—and while there was extraordinary overlap in the different system's predictions, NAM has won big. (This comes after the giant prediction flop that was #snowmageddon last year, when the city shut down the subway system for a storm that barely rated.)

This breaks the trend of dismissing NAM's dire predictions for New York.

Even late yesterday, there were NAM doubters.

How did NAM do this? To say weather modeling is complicated would understate the case. Meteorologists often like to point out that these projections should be looked at side-by-side, not as an either-or, since the mathematical underpinnings can differ greatly even if some of the data is shared. The European model uses 51 different hypothetical situations, the GFC uses 21. The European model got credit for accurately predicting Hurricane Sandy's path days before any American models came close, but in this case, it seems to be a bit off.

The NAM is a smaller model than the European one, or the GFC. This is Dennis Merseau discussing them when NOAA upgraded its weather modeling resolution last January.

While many weather geeks keep saying that the GFS model now has a similar resolution as the NAM, it's like comparing apples to oranges. The NAM, or the North American Model, is a mesoscale model with a horizontal resolution of 12 kilometers (about 7 miles) that's designed to handle smaller systems across the United States and parts of Canada and Mexico. The GFS is designed to handle large-scale systems like nor'easters, hurricanes, the polar vortex, or the jet stream across the entire world. The 12-km NAM and its much higher resolution counterpart, the 4-km NAM, on the other hand, are great tools to use when you want to forecast convection (thunderstorms).

Of course, "winning" is relative to the harm that this giant weather event is causing. The snow will have to settle before we get a full recap of the weather modeling jeers and cheers. For now, though, if you're sick of watching TV and too cold to go outside, maybe try the soothing livestream of Representative Paul Ryan's office. Pro tip: sound off. The jazz is a bit aggressive. 


Why Snow Shoveling is an Unusually Deadly Type of Exercise

0
0

article-image

Experts recommend people over 55 don't shovel snow. (Photo: Sage Ross/Wikimedia Commons)

Yesterday, in the onslaught of announcements from New York officials about the near-record setting blizzard conditions, a data point stood out. At least three people, two in Staten Island, one in Queens died while shoveling snow.

Farther south, a Maryland man also dropped dead during shoveling. Late last night, the New York Times put the shoveling death toll at 6 for the storm.

And that's just this past weekend. A few years ago, Ohio researchers clocked around 11,500 snow shoveling injuries and deaths annually in the United States, with over half being cardiac events. (Normally, cardiac problems account for around 10 percent of hospital visits, according to the Washington Post.) Another study, from 1990 to 2006, found over 1,600 fatalities.

The connection between snow shoveling and heart attacks is fairly well-documented, but the reasons behind the correlation go beyond the fact that shoveling snow is intense exercise—it's a very specific kind of exercise. Per an excellent article in the Conversation:

Snow shoveling is a unique form of exertion. It can be vigorous and challenging to the cardiovascular system in general, and the heart in particular. When combined with the inherent environmental conditions of winter, snow shoveling during or after a blizzard may be the “perfect storm” for a cardiac event in those with known or “occult” (hidden) coronary disease.

So when you are shoveling snow, you are performing an action that is deceptively difficult on your heart. Again, the Conversation: 

First and obviously, it is typically performed in cold weather. Cold air inhalation may cause a reflex constriction of blood vessels, including the coronary arteries. Cold air may also increase the blood’s propensity for clotting. If blood clots form and there is a tear in the inside of the artery, a blood clot could form a blockage.

The second issue is the nature of the exercise—and snow shoveling is unique. It is typically done without a warm up, and includes considerable arm work that increases blood pressure drastically. As blood pressure rises, so too does the work of the heart. Meanwhile, your leg muscles are typically performing isometric work (where you produce a lot of tension but your muscles don’t move your joint – like an even tie during an arm-wrestle). This type of muscle activity, especially in the upper body (as you tightly grip the shovel), raises blood pressure more than, say, walking or jogging.

Added to that a tendency for people to not exhale out after raising their arms ("the Valsalva maneuver") and the fact that it is your chest, not your whole body, that requires a sudden burst of oxygen while shoveling, and it's extremely dangerous for those with heart disease or other underlying conditions. Also, a doctor told the BBC that it doesn't help that circadian rhythms make people more susceptible to heart attacks from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m.—prime shoveling time. 

So, what to do? Experts recommend that people over 55 years old avoid shoveling and there are numerous guides on how to do it safely. But that doesn't mean that healthy older people aren't out on the streets, shoving snow from the sidewalks. Howard Smith, 91, has been outside all weekend. His trick? “The key for me is to use a small shovel,” he told the New York Times, “I want a safe sidewalk, not a heart attack.”

The Famous Photo of Chernobyl's Most Dangerous Radioactive Material Was a Selfie

0
0

Artur Korneyev, Deputy Director of Shelter Object, viewing the "elephants foot" lava flow at Chernobyl, 1996. (Photo: US Department of Energy) 

At first glance, it’s hard to know what’s happening in this picture. A giant mushroom seems to have sprouted in a factory floor, where ghostly men in hardhats seem to be working.

But there’s something undeniably eerie about the scene, for good reason. You’re looking at the largest agglomeration of one of the most toxic substances ever created: corium. 

In the days and weeks after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in late April 1986, simply being in the same room as this particular pile of radioactive material—known as the Elephant’s Foot—would have killed you within a couple of minutes. Even a decade later, when this image was taken, the radiation probably caused the film to develop strangely, creating the photo’s grainy quality. The man in this photo, Artur Korneyev, has likely visited this area more than anyone else, and in doing so has been exposed to more radiation than almost anyone in history.

Remarkably, he’s probably still alive. The story of how the United States got a hold of this singular photo of a human in the presence of this incredibly toxic material is itself fraught with mystery—almost as much as why someone would take what is essentially a selfie with a hunk of molten radiated lava. 


This pictures first came to America in the late 1990s, after the newly independent Ukrainian government took over the plant and set up the Chornobyl Center for Nuclear Safety, Radioactive Waste and Radioecology (spelling often gets changed as words go from Russian to English). Soon after, the center invited other governments to collaborate on nuclear safety projects. The U.S. Department of Energy tapped the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories (PNNL)—a bustling science center up in Richland, Washington—to help.

At the time, Tim Ledbetter was a relatively new hire in PNNL’s IT department, and he was tasked with creating a digital photo library that the DOE’s International Nuclear Safety Project could use to show its work to the American public (or, at least, to the tiny sliver of the population that was online back then). He had project members take photos while they were in Ukraine, hired a freelance photographer to grab some other shots, and solicited images from Ukrainian colleagues at the Chornobyl Center. Intermixed with hundreds of images of awkward bureaucratic handshakes and people in lab coats, though, are a dozen or so shots from the ruins inside Unit 4, where 10 years before, on April 26, 1986, a reactor had exploded during a test of the plant turbine-generator system.

As radioactive plumes rose high above the plant, poisoning the area, the rods liquefied below, melting through the reactor vessel to form a substance called corium, perhaps the most toxic stuff on Earth.

article-image

Corium flowing like lave through the reactor. The valve was made for steam to move through. (Photo: PNNL library

Corium has been created outside of the lab at least five times, according to Mitchell Farmer, a senior nuclear engineer at Argonne National Laboratory, another Department of Energy center outside of Chicago. Corium formed once at the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania in 1979, once in Chernobyl, and three separate times during the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown in Japan in 2011. Farmer creates modified versions of corium in the lab in order to better understand how to mitigate accidents in the future. Research on the substance has found, for example, that dumping water on it after it forms actually does stop some fission products from decaying and producing more dangerous isotopes.

Of the five corium creations, only Cherobyl's has escaped its containment. With no water to cool the mass, the radioactive sludge moved through the unit over the course a week following the meltdown, taking on molten concrete and sand to go along with the uranium (fuel) and zirconium (cladding) molecules. This poisonous lava flowed downhill, eventually burning through the floor of the building. When nuclear inspectors finally accessed the area several months after the initial explosion, they found that 11 tons of it had settled into a three meter wide grey mass at the corner of a steam distribution corridor below. This, they dubbed the Elephant’s Foot. Over the years, the Elephant’s Foot cooled and cracked. Even today, though, it’s still estimated to be slightly above the ambient temperature as the radioactive material decomposes.    

Ledbetter’s not able to remember exactly where he got these images. He compiled the library almost 20 years ago, and the website on which they were hosted is in rough shape; only thumbnails of the images are left. (Ledbetter, who still works at PNNL, was surprised to learn that any of the site was still publicly accessible.) But he’s sure he didn’t hire someone to take photos of the Elephant’s Foot, so they likely were sent in by a Ukrainian colleague. 


In 2013, Kyle Hill stumbled across the image, which had been shared several times on the internet in the ensuing years, while writing a piece about the Elephant’s Foot for Nautilus magazine, and tracked it back to the old PNNL site. Following his lead, I went back there to look for more details. After a little digging through the site’s CSS coding, I was able to locate a long-lost caption for the image: “Artur Korneev, Deputy Director of Shelter Object, viewing the ‘elephants foot’ lava flow, Chornobyl NPP. Photographer: Unknown. Fall 1996.” Ledbetter confirmed the caption matched the photo.

Korneev turns out to be an alternate spelling for Korneyev. Artur Korneyev is a dark-humored Kazakhstani nuclear inspector who has been working to educate people about—and protect people from—the Elephant’s Foot since it was first created by the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in 1986. The last time a reporter spoke to him, as far as I can tell, was in 2014, when New York Times science reporter Henry Fountain interviewed him in Slavutich, Ukraine, a city built especially to house the evacuated personnel from Chernobyl. 

article-image

A zoomed image of Korneyev 

I wasn’t able to locate Korneyev for an interview, but it’s possible to put together clues embedded in the photos to explain the image. I looked through all the other captions of photos similar photos of the destroyed core, and they were all taken by Korneyev, so it’s likely this photo was an old-school timed selfie. The shutter speed was probably a little slower than for the other photos in order for him to get into position, which explains why he seems to be moving and why the glow from his flashlight looks like a lightning flash. The graininess of the photo, though, is likely due to the radiation.

For Korneyev, this particular trip was only one of hundreds of dangerous missions he’s taken to the core since he first arrived on site in the days following the initial explosion. His initial job was to locate the fuel deposits and help determine their radiation levels. (The Elephant’s Foot initially gave off more than 10,000 roentgens an hour, which would kill a person three feet from it in less than two minutes.) Soon after that, he began leading cleanup efforts, sometimes even kicking pieces of solid fuel out of the way. More than 30 workers died from Acute Radiation Syndrome during the explosion and ensuring cleanup. Despite the incredible amount of exposure, Korneyev kept returning inside the hastily constructed concrete sarcophagus, often with journalists in tow to document the dangers.

In 2001, he brought a reporter from the Associated Press back to the core, where the radiation still measured 800 roentgens an hour. In 2009, Marcel Theroux, the celebrated novelist (and son of writer Paul Theroux and cousin of actor Justin Theroux) wrote an article for Travel + Leisureabout his trip to the sarcophagus and the mad, maskless guide who mocked Theroux’s anxiety as “purely psychological.” While Theroux refers to him as Viktor Korneyev, it’s likely the man is Artur, as he made the same dark joke he would a few years later in a New York Times article.

His current status is murky. When the Times caught up to Korneyev a year and a half ago, he and helping to plan construction of a $1.5 billion arch that, when finished in 2017, will cap the decaying sarcophagus and prevent airborne isotopes from escaping. In his mid 60s, he was sickly, with cataracts, and had been barred from re-entering the sarcophagus after years of irradiation.

Korneyev's sense of humor remained intact, though. He seemed to have no regrets about his life's work. “Soviet radiation,” he joked, “is the best radiation in the world.”

Fleeting Wonders: Winter's Toughest Bugs Have Antifreeze Blood

0
0

article-image

A snow fly does its thing. (Photo: D. Sikes/Flickr)

It's winter. You're cold, you can't get anywhere, everything smells like road salt, and shoveling is both mandated and dangerous. At least there aren't any bugs around, right?

Wrong! Chionea, commonly known as the "snow fly," is a type of crane fly that lives on snow. Not only that—like many animals that have adapted to colder climes, it thrives there, speed-walking on snow crust and drinking melted ice through its proboscis. Snow flies even have glycerol (essentially antifreeze) thickening up their hemolymph (basically bug blood) to keep them from becoming tiny, long-legged Han Solos.

Science has described about 40 species of snow fly in the northern hemisphere, but there are also probably more! Keep your eyes peeled for this winter wonder on your next trip out for provisions.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

The Women Who Rose High in the Early Days of Hot Air Ballooning

0
0

article-image

Spectators watching French balloonist Jeanne-Genevieve Labrosse ascending in a balloon on 28 March 1802.  (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

On the evening of July 6, 1819, British tourist John Poole was in his Paris hotel room when he witnessed something spectacular and shocking. A woman, Sophie Blanchard had ascended to the sky in a balloon, and was set to discharge some fireworks from the basket. But instead, as Poole recounted, this happened:

For a few minutes, the balloon was concealed by clouds. Presently it reappeared, and there was seen a momentary sheet of flame… In a few seconds, the poor creature, enveloped and entangled in the netting of her machine, fell with a frightful crash upon the slanting roof of a house in the Rue de Provence…and thence into the street, and Madame Blanchard was taken up a shattered corpse!

This dramatic death Sophie Blanchard, pioneering balloonist, signaled the beginning of the end of “balloon-mania,” which swept continental Europe and England for almost 40 years and involved women playing crucial roles.

article-image

Balloonist Sophie Blanchard. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons

In 1784, just two years after Joseph Montgolfier invented the hot air balloon, 19-year-old Frenchwoman named Elisabeth Thible was the first woman to go on an untethered balloon flight. On June 4, 1784, a painter and amateur aeronaut named M. Fleurant and the Count Jean-Baptiste de Laurencin were scheduled to go up in La Gustave, named after King Gustav III of Sweden, who was there in Lyon to watch the spectacle. However, the Count got nervous and gave his spot to Thible, said to be a widowed opera singer. Thible, dressed as the goddess Minerva, climbed into the balloon to the delight of the assembled crowd, who were shocked to see a woman braving the open sky. According to historian S.L. Kotar:

The descent went smoothly, but as the balloon touched ground, it burst open at the top and the canvas toppled upon them. Fleurant cut his way out with a knife and went to rescue his “fearless companion,” only to find her already out of danger.

Fleurant credited Thible with the 45-minute flight’s success, recounting how she had bravely fed the firebox during the entire trip.

article-image

A 1784 print showing different balloon designs in France. (Photo: Library of Congress)

Over the next decade, France would be plunged into civil war that would spill beyond French borders. During this turmoil, a new superstar aeronaut emerged on the scene. In 1797, Andre-Jacques Garnerin thrilled war-weary Europe when he became the first person to parachute out of a balloon over the Parc Monceau in Paris. He was made the “Official Aeronaut of France.“  In 1798, the tireless self-promoter decided to pull his most daring stunt yet: to bring a woman up in the air. (It seems everyone had forgotten about brave Elisabeth Thible).

When the Central Bureau of Police got wind of the upcoming stunt, Garnerin was forced to appear in front of officials, who feared the implications of a man and woman being alone together. They also were concerned that air pressure might damage a lady’s delicate undercarriage. The Bureau issued an injunction against Garnerin, only to have it overruled by the Minister of Interior and Police, who stated that there “was no more scandal in seeing two people of different sexes ascend in a balloon than it is to see them jump into a carriage."

The young woman chosen by Garnerin is known to history as simply Citoyenne Henri. The ascent, on June 4, 1798, drew a large crowd to the park, and the flight went smoothly. Citoyenne Henri, much like Elisabeth Thible, enjoyed brief fame before plunging back into anonymity.

article-image

Andre-Jacques Garnerin with Citoyenne Henri in a controversial balloon flight on 8 July, 1798. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

The first golden age of female flight was soon to come, with the Garnerin family leading the way. Garnerin’s wife, Jeanne-Genevieve Labrosse, originally his star pupil, became the first woman to fly solo on November 10, 1798. A year later, she was the first woman to parachute, from an altitude of 900 meters (2,953 feet). Together, the Garnerins performed throughout Europe and the UK, pioneering“acrobatic displays, parachute drops and night-flights with fireworks.” They were soon joined by his niece Elisa (Lisa) Garnerin, who would become a celebrated solo balloonist and parachutist, with 39 recorded descents. 

Elisa Garnerin’s lengthy solo career would be overshadowed by her great rival Sophie Blanchard. The darling of early aeronautics, the tiny, “bird like” Sophie was first taken up in a balloon by her much older husband, the aeronaut Jean-Pierre Blanchard, in December of 1804. Nearly mute on the ground, she was so thrilled to fly that her first words in the air were “sensation incomparable!” She was soon touring as a soloist with her husband, contributing to the party atmosphere of public celebrations around Europe. After her husband’s death, Blanchard continued to tour alone, becoming the “Aéronaute des Fêtes Officielles” of Napoleon.

article-image

 Garnerin with his wife, Jeanne Geneviève Labrosse. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons

Blanchard’s exploits became legendary. “Only comfortable in the air,” Sophie became famous for her night ascents across Europe. She set off fireworks from her balloon to celebrate the 1810 marriage of Napoleon and Marie-Louise, and dropped leaflets over Paris to announce the birth of their son. She toured Italy, Germany and the UK. Blanchard was fearless to the point of recklessness—she was knocked unconscious when she flew too high to avoid a hailstorm, she would fall asleep in her balloon for hours, and suffered nosebleeds and frostbite when she ballooned over the Alps to celebrate the Emperor’s birthday. A true artist, she wore eye-catching bright colored feathered hats, and flattering white cotton empire style dresses with long, billowing sleeves to protect her hands. Most amazing of all was her special balloon, described by the historian Richard Holmes:

She commissioned a much smaller silk balloon, capable of lifting her on a tiny, decorative silver gondola. This was shaped like a small canoe or child’s cradle, curved upwards at each end but otherwise quite open. It was little more than three feet long and one foot high at the sides. ... When she stood up, grasping the balloon ropes, the edge of the gondola did not reach above her knees. It was virtually like standing in a flying champagne bucket.

After Napoleon’s ousting in 1814, Blanchard switched from imperialist to monarchist and became the “Official Aeronaut of the Restoration.” Her night flights became more and more technically daring and dramatic:

Her small balloon lifted more and more complicated pyrotechnical rigs, with long booms carrying rockets and cascades, and suspended networks of Bengal lights, all of which she would skillfully ignite with extended systems of tapers and fuses. At the height of these displays, her small white figure and feathery hat would appear like some unearthly airborne creature or apparition, suspended several hundred feet overhead in the night sky, above a sea of flaming stars and colored smoke.

It all came crashing down on July 6, 1819, when Blanchard's balloon caught fire over Paris and she fell to her death. Her untimely end led one unsympathetic critic to quip, "A woman in a balloon is either out of her element or too high in it."

article-image

French balloonist Sophie Blanchard, standing in the decorated basket of her balloon during her flight in Milan, Italy, in 1811.  (Photo: Library of Congress)

Although balloon-mania subsided, women continued solo flights that astounded their male counterparts. One example is the brilliant, scientifically gifted Wilhelmine Reichard, the first German woman to make a solo flight in 1811. Along with her husband, Johann, Reichard made many scientific observations and notations while in the air. She did solo flights until 1920, becoming a darling in the German press, lauded for her boldness and courage.

There was also the lovely cockney teenager known as Miss Stocks, who shocked English patriarchs in 1824 when she survived a nasty crash that killed Thomas Harris, the male pilot. To reassure themselves, male onlookers convinced themselves that Harris had died in an act of chivalry, protecting Miss Stocks from the full impact of the fall.

The end of the 19th century would see a resurgence of female balloonists and aerialists, particularly in America and England. Women like Lizzie Ilhing Wise, the golden haired inventor “Madame” Carlotta (Mary) Meyers, Leila Adair, Leona Dare, Jenny Van Tassel, and Mrs. Graham would all become famous for their exploits in the sky.  Together, they would pave the way for the pioneer female aviators and astronauts of the 20th and 21st centuries.  

Video Wonder: Mountain Unicycling

0
0

Think mountain biking looks tricky? Remove a wheel, and you’ve got mountain unicycling.

As Ross, a 52-year-old unicyclist, notes in the video above, this unusual sport is “a very very inefficient way to get around the woods."

Riding a unicycle anywhere, let alone down mountain paths scattered with rocks, roots, mud and sand, requires a certain type of courage. Hit the trails with this ragtag crew of middle-aged men as they zip downhill on their one-wheeled contraptions.

Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

Were Portuguese Explorers the First Europeans To Find Australia?

0
0

article-image

Is this the first map of Australia? (Photo: Wikipedia)

Did a secret search for Marco Polo’s islands of gold lead Portuguese explorers to be the first Europeans to discover Australia? According to some theories, the Dieppe maps, a series of artful 16th century maps say yes. 

Operating in the mid-1500s, the Dieppe mapmakers created elaborate, hand-made world maps for wealthy patrons and royals. The French artists who created the maps were just that, leaving the actual exploration to others and simply translating more utilitarian nautical charts into things of beauty. The surviving maps are beautifully rendered, although their exact cartographic sources seem to have been lost to time. This becomes most problematic in the case of "Java la Grande", a giant landmass unique to the maps that was drawn between Antarctica and what we would today consider to be Indonesia. According to some modern researchers, this mystery island is actually the first record of Europeans seeing Australia.

article-image

The map has been inverted to represent the modern view, but Java la Grande can be found where Australia would be. (Photo: Wikipedia)

The maps, with their fancy compass roses and detailed illustrations, were intended to be pieces of art, rather than navigational aids, but their information had to come from somewhere. The names and script on the charts are written out in a mix of French and Portuguese, giving rise to the theory, which was popularized in Kenneth McIntyre's 1977 book, The Secret Discovery of Australia, that the mapmakers of Dieppe were getting their view of the world, at least in part, from Portuguese expeditions. In particular, one of the maps that came out of Dieppe, (and is survived by a faithful recreation) depicts the east coast of the fabled Java la Grande with place names almost exclusively in Portuguese. Given the vagaries of the Dieppe map sources, this has led to the theory that it was the Portuguese who were the first Europeans to spy the Australian coast.

In addition to the general location of Java la Grande on the maps, there are certain features that adherents to the theory claim are unmistakably bits of Australia, such as an inlet that looks like Botany Bay and the Abrolhos island chain.

article-image

Java la Grande was thought to be so big the map was awkwardly extended. (Photo: Wikipedia)

As to what expedition could have seen the coast, it is suggested by McIntyre that it was a search for Marco Polo’s fabled Isles of Gold that led to the discovery. Wealthy Portuguese explorer Cristóvão de Mendonça is recorded as having been tasked by King Manuel with sailing out in search of Polo’s treasure islands, but actual record of this voyage has been lost, if there ever was one. Manuel was notoriously secretive about the findings of his exploration teams.

According to popular history, Australia was first visited by Europeans when Dutch explorer Willem Janszoon “discovered” the continent in the early 17th century, and later fully explored by Captain Cook. While no direct evidence of Portuguese discovery exists, there have been other findings that seem to support the theory of their early Australian discovery. Various ruins, cannons, and other archeological artifacts have been found on the Australian continent that believers say point to Portuguese discovery, but the Dieppe maps remains the prime source of speculation.

An Afternoon At Boston's Newest Parody Storefront, 'Cash For Your Warhol'

0
0

article-image

Cash For Your Warhol, Inman Square's newest fake business. (All Photos: Atlas Obscura)

Inman Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a quiet neighborhood that feels distant from the city’s universities, a good place to linger in a café or browse through bookstores and antique shops. Last week, though, the square got a loud newcomer: an art project masquerading as a small business, decked out in safety yellow and advertising “Cash For Your Warhol.”

The store, nestled between a tony wine bar and a vegetarian fast-food stop, is insistently garish, festooned with signs that repeatedly shout its name and purpose. A thin banner across the top elaborates some common wares: “MAO / MARILYN / SOUP CANS / ELECTRIC CHAIR / ELVIS.” Inside, the joke continues, in the form of smaller jokes: oversized checks on the walls from successful purchases, and a board detailing the most sought-after works.

The back wall is covered by a vinyl sign so enormous that its edges have to be folded over, the slogan truncated into “AS FOR YOUR ARHO.” Overseeing it all is Geoff Hargadon–the energetic Somerville resident who, depending on your preferred narrative, serves either as company founder or artistic mastermind.

article-image

Hargadon in front of his most-wanted board.

Hargadon, a financial planner by day, has been pretending to buy Warhols since 2009, when the recession spawned an influx of bandit signs promising ”Cash For Your Home” and “Cash For Your Gold.” Fascinated by the sheer bluntness of the signs, Hargadon started collecting them. At some point, while thinking about markets left untapped, “the phrase [Cash For Your Warhol] just popped into my head,” he says. He set up a hotline (617-553-1103), designed his own line of signs, stickers and billboards, and stuck them all over major cities from Kentucky to Pennsylvania.

The storefront, which opened in January 2016, is the latest incarnation of the project, which has also taken the form of several gallery shows and an installation outside Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum, which at one point considered selling a portion of its collection. Now that it’s a brick-and-mortar operation, Cash For Your Warhol is even more public-facing. Hargadon threw a "totally packed" opening bash, and hosts visitors during irregular hours, which he announces on Twitter.

article-image

The signs that started it all, in their new digs.

Do people ever bring in art? “Not Warhols,” Hargadon says. Someone recently asked if he could authenticate watercolors, and a neighborhood wanderer managed to sell him a couple of very old soda cans, which Hargadon has placed on the desk. They’re not quite Campbell’s soup cans, but they lend the place a certain seriousness. There's a rather splendid orchid unfurling next to them, with a card “signed” by a well-known gallery owner, congratulating Hargadon on his “expansion.”

Not everything in the store is tongue-in-cheek. On the bulletin board, Hargadon has pinned up some legal correspondence so strange that even he couldn’t make it up. Last year, an art buyer began using the project’s design and ethos to actually purchase Warhols, via the very similar website cashforyourwarhols.com. Hargadon sent him a cease and desist order, and although the process has been fairly smooth, he can’t stop thinking about it–it makes him, he summarizes, “a fake business going after a real business because they’re interrupting my ability to be a fake business.” It tickles him enough that he’s considering working on a spinoff project about it.

article-image

Crates, checks, and an orchid, all of questionable provenance.

For now, though, he’s putting his efforts into the storefront. “Before I moved in I thought I’d be really self-conscious,” Hargadon says, “but it’s actually really relaxing in here.” He pauses. “See that guy out there?” Through the plate glass, a rushing pedestrian has slowed down and is squinting at the signs. “That’s a classic reaction,” Hargadon says. “He might come in, he might not. I usually just let them look.” The man continues on, stopping once more to look over his shoulder.

If he comes back to visit, however, he can look forward to a tour as bright and vertiginous as a screenprinted car crash. “Some of the stuff in the store is real, and some of it isn’t. And if people really want me to tell ‘em, I’ll tell ‘em,” says Hargadon. But it's “better to leave it in the gray.”


How the ‘Einstein of Sex’ Kept the World’s First LGBT Movie Safe from Nazis

0
0

article-image

A scene from Different from the Others, in which Körner meets his blackmailer (Photo: Courtesy of UCLA Film & Television Archive)

The first LGBT film ever made was released in Berlin, not long after the end of the Great War, and it was almost lost entirely.

A silent film, filled with love, betrayal, art and suicide, Different from the Others argued, very explicitly, that being gay was natural and that the only problem with relationships between two men were the laws that criminalized them. It was co-written by a sexologist and a movie producer, and though it was a popular film, within a year of its release in 1919, it had been banned from cinemas across Germany.

Any of the 30 or 40 original copies that were still around when the Nazi Party took over are now gone; a film like this one would have been singled out for destruction.

Original footage from the movie survived only serendipitously. After the first version of the film was censored, one of the co-writers, the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, patched about 40 minutes of it into another film, a copy of which ended up in a Russian archive, where it sat, untouched, for decades.

Over the past few years, film archivists at UCLA have been working to combine that footage with photos taken from Hirschfeld’s own collection and additional stills from the movie, in order to create a version as loyal to the original as possible. In February, that cut of the film will premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival, and audiences will have a chance to see a Different from the Others that’s as close an approximation of the original as has been seen since before World War II.

article-image

Looting of Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexology (Photo: Wikimedia)

No copy of the full film has ever been found, so any current version of the film must fill in the gaps with photos and subtitles. But one of the treats of the footage that was saved is the appearance of Hirschfeld himself, in short glimpses, wearing oval-lensed glasses and a thick, dark mustache, corners upturned. He’s less well known in America today than the sexologist Alfred Kinsey, but Hirschfeld was once considered “the Einstein of sex,” a pioneering scientist whose ideas about sexuality were truly new. (He also showed up in the second season of Transparent, in the guise of Bradley Whitford, a.k.a. Josh Lyman.)

Hirschfeld’s own Institute for Sexology opened in 1919 in Berlin. But his radical-for-the-time ideas dated back even further, to the 1890s, when he first proposed that sexuality existed on a spectrum and that homosexuality was a natural orientation for a minority of people.  

Different from the Others was conceived during an unusually free moment in German culture. At the end of 1918, the government had lifted all censorship of books and films, and Hirschfeld’s co-producer, Richard Oswald, wanted to take advantage. He had been finding success with didactic movies that touched on sexual realities, like syphilis or back-alley abortion, and he proposed to Hirschfeld that they collaborate.

The two writers packed into the film both a scientific lecture about sexuality and the story of Paul Körner, a successful violinist, who was played by Conrad Veidt, one of the most famous German actors of his day. Körner and his student, Kurt Sivers, fall in love, but their relationship is marred by a blackmailer, and Sivers flees.

Bereft, Körner recalls the struggle to live with and conceal his sexuality, but then he’s educated by Hirschfeld and comes to terms with it. In the middle of the movie, as Körner is trying to explain to Sivers’ sister why he cannot love her, he takes her to a lecture given by Hirschfeld, who explicates his theory of sex. When Körner's blackmailer is caught and prosecuted, the secret of Körner’s own sexuality comes out, and though he receives only a token official punishment, his professional life is ruined, and he commits suicide. 

article-image

A 1919 poster for the film (Photo: Wikimedia)

This plot was drawn from Hirschfeld’s preoccupations. Since the 1890s, he had been fighting against Paragraph 175, a law that criminalized homosexual acts, and arguing that the law did more to assist blackmailers than it did to stop homosexuality. He was also deeply troubled by suicide in the gay community; he once wrote that one of the greatest satisfactions of his life had been to keep at least some people from killing themselves.

By 1919, though, Hirschfeld was already, in some ways, old-fashioned, “an avant-gardist of the belle époque,” whose rivals for leadership in the gay rights movement thought of him as “a fossil of a bygone era," as James Steakley, an academic who studies 20th century gay history in Germany, writes. But if the plot and storyline were drawn from the pre-War era, the movie was still a radical piece of culture. When it came out in May 1919, nothing so accepting of and positive about homosexuality had ever been shown on film before.

Where the film was distributed, it filled movie houses. But in some parts of Germany, screenings were banned almost immediately or restricted to audiences of people over the age of 20. Within a few months, Hirschfeld and Oswald were organizing special screenings for politicians, with little success. The opposition to the film (and others made in this free period) was so strong that by 1920, the parliament had reinstated censorship. Different from the Others was quickly banned–in part on the recommendation of Hirschfeld’s rivals, who claimed to cure homosexuality with hypnotism, which the film depicted as an ineffective ruse.

Hirschfeld was still allowed to show the film at his own institute, but he wanted it to have a wider audience. Over the next few years, he tried to edit the film into some form that would make it past the censors, and, very briefly, in 1927, he succeeded. His movie Laws of Love was an educational picture, which combined David Attenborough-esque nature footage of sex in the animal kingdom with parts of Different from the Others.

The film was shown in theaters for just a week and was not well reviewed, before it was yanked from public distribution. A version of that movie, though, made it to Russia, where it stayed safe (and forgotten) for decades.

article-imageSome of the images in Hirschfeld's collection (Photo: Wellcome Images/Wikimedia)

In the later decades of the 20th century, the most widely seen copy of the film was just 24 minutes, a version that had been edited in 1928 to evade censorship. In 2004, though, the Munich Film Museum rescued the footage from the archive and cut together a restored version. “The Munich version was a breakthrough,” says Steakley, who translated the text for the English version.

It's also the basis for the new cut of the film. Jan-Christopher Horak, now director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, oversaw that earlier restoration, and, when he came to California, started working with Outfest, an L.A. organization that promotes LGBT films, on a new version, based on that same footage from the Moscow archive. 

“We have about half the film, maybe slightly more,” says Horak. “That’s all there actually is. There has been a search all over the world, but so far no one has found more. No print was found in other countries. We’re lucky to at least have some of this material.”

The version that will premiere in February at the Berlinale makes some improvements on the 2004 German version, though. Horak says that a “very, very long synopsis of the film,” found in censorships records, gave them additional hints as to how the existing footage should be ordered and how the plot worked. The latest version also has newly uncovered stills from the film, some of which were saved in film magazines from the time, including an additional shot from Körner’s funeral.

The most important update, though, may be to the lecture that Hirschfeld gives. In the film, he showed his own slides about the nature of human sexuality, including people in gay and lesbian relationships, as well as transgendered and transsexual people. In the new version, those slides come from Hirschfeld’s four-volume history of sexuality, which includes selections from his photo archive and from the photos that once hung on the wall of his Institute for Sexology.

“We can’t say for certain that these were the actual images in the film,” says Horak. “But they could have been.”

With the information available, this may be the best version of the film that can be made–unless, by chance, there's more original footage, somewhere in the world, hidden away.

Behind the Scenes of Brooklyn's Airbnb Igloo–Now Trying For Tinder Sponsorship

0
0

article-image

The Boutique Igloo for 2: the perfect spot for a first Tinder date. (All photos: Justin Seeley)

This weekend, a small group of Brooklyn entrepreneurs and snow-lovers built an igloo and listed it on Airbnb. Now, having been politely removed from the booking site, they have their eye on a new patron: Tinder. 

If you haven’t seen their igloo, currently trending on Facebook and Twitter, here’s a glimpse at the original Airbnb listing, written by Griffin Jones, one of the four-person team of builders:

“Dripping with ingenuity and alt-lifestyle aura lays the Snopocalypse of 2016's most desirable getaway. Hand-crafted, and built using only natural elements—we're offering the experience of a life time in this chic dome-style bungalow for you and bae.”

article-image

The igloo builders at work. The whole process took around six hours.

While Patrick Horton has been the face of the igloo in the media, the construction effort involved three or four folks and around six hours of labor. Justin Seeley, one of Horton’s roommates, says that Horton was indeed the “mastermind” behind the effort and that they’d been scheming about building a snow structure and pondering its potential to go viral before the “Snowpocalypse” even hit.

That Friday night, before New York City got over two feet of snow and the start of their architectural efforts, the group watched YouTube videos on igloo building for beginners. Technically, of course, it’s a quinzee—made from hollowing out snow rather than stacking blocks of it—which they’ve been getting a lot of crap about online. 

article-image

Seeley says they hollowed it out a little ways at a time and then hung out inside, scared that it would fall.

After the post went up on January 24, they did get requests from five people looking to stay the night. (While the group has been hanging out in their dwelling, no one has actually slept there.) One was from a guy trying to rent it out for the whole month of July. After taking them down six hours later, Airbnb offered Horton a $50 coupon to use when booking a real room for rent through its app and Web service.

article-image

Cozy, no?

The whole thing was meant to be funny and ridiculous, says Seeley, but they definitely didn’t think it would get as big as this. "I think part of the joke was us making fun of some of that [hipster] culture, which is maybe part of the reason that it was funny," he says. Local film crews and reporters have been showing up, eager to get a glimpse of the icy abode, along with curious Brooklynites. The igloo is in their private yard, however, so access is quite exclusive.

Structural integrity aside, with blankets, pillows, and mood lights, the igloo is pretty cozy. Seeley and his buddies think it’d be great for a first Tinder date—roomy and romantic, but chilly enough to encourage snuggling. In fact, they want to get the igloo sponsored by the dating app. “Pat is actually going to change his Tinder profile picture to the igloo,” says Seeley. “He wants to start a campaign: 'Swipe right on the igloo.'" 

Full disclosure, Atlas Obscura has a connection to the igloo—events director Megan Roberts provided libations to the hardy hipsters—a label they accept (“I guess, because we live in Brooklyn and do kind of offbeat things”). But the clock for sponsorship, Tinder or otherwise, is ticking. Seeley says though the roof is still intact, it’s starting to sink a little and the whole thing seems to be getting a bit shorter. 

“We’re joking that we’re going to start an igloo business,” says Seeley. “You never know—the next snowstorm we might be at it again.” 

Wildwood's Doo Wop Beach Hotels Are Desperate for Your Love

0
0

article-image

A passer-by ponders the lights at Laura’s Fudge Shop in Wildwood, New Jersey. One of the first stores near the boardwalk, Laura’s opened in 1926 and sells online in the off-season. (All photos: Raphaelle Guillon)

The “Wildwoods Shore Resort Historic District” of New Jersey—known as the “Doo Wop Motel District” to locals—lies primarily along a two-mile stretch of beach in Wildwood, New Jersey. Visitors to the town will find the largest concentration of mid-20th-century commercial motels, called Doo Wops, in the nation, each featuring its own fantasy theme, eye-catching sign, vivid color palette and kitschy ornaments.

Up until the late 1990s, nearly 100 motels stood within this district alone, virtually untouched since their original construction in the 1950s and 60s. Between 2000 and 2005, however, unchecked real estate development in the area led to the demolition of several notable motels, such as the Chateau Bleu, the Panoramic Motel, and the Lollipop Motel. Now many of those same tourists stay in new Mediterranean-style compounds from Memorial Day to Labor Day, as the Doo Wops have lost a bit of luster. 

But the situation worsens after Labor Day for at least seven months; the once bustling streets, restaurants and boardwalk give way to utter desolation. It’s been said that visitors can “shoot a canon down New Jersey Avenue without hitting anyone.”

article-image

During the summer, Romeo’s Pizzeria on Pacific Avenue, serves pizza from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m., specializing in slices for the sauced since 1975. Last September, Wildwood’s tourism board dedicated the 12-by-40-foot “Twist Again” mural in Romeo’s parking lot to Chubby Checker, who first performed his iconic dance at the Rainbow Club in 1960. 

A few years ago, Wildwood undertook three initiatives to bring vacationers to the town all year round, but aside from the fall Boardwalk Classic Car Show, the Irish Festival and Seafarers Weekend, they have so far been met with scant attention and even sparser turnout.

While the economy may roar through the summer, in the winter, it sleeps. In January 2015, the unemployment rate hit 17.9 percent before it fell to 6.4 percent by August, although the county’s tourism industry drew $5.8 billion in spending last year—New Jersey's second-highest county total.

article-image

A mélange of restored and reassembled neon signs from demolished Wildwood motels outside the Doo Wop Experience museum. Inside the museum is a “neon sign garden” that celebrates the “architecture, design, music and pop culture… that made Wildwood famous in its heyday of the 1950s and 1960s.”

Still, as year-round tourism wanes and the baby-boomers age, jobs become more elusive and historic buildings become more difficult to maintain. The Doo Wop way of life dies a little bit every year.

The following photos, shot by Raphaelle Guillon in the height of the 2015 summer season and over Thanksgiving weekend that same year, illustrate Wildwood’s spectacular rise in the years after World War II—and its gradually diminishing glory.  

article-image

A classic example of mid-1950s “open-view, DooWop” architecture, the Bel-Air motel features “real and fake palm trees” that “sway in the ocean breeze and cast shade on the hand-built Tiki Hut and poolside lounge chairs.”

During the winter, its pink-flamingo sign offsets the Caribbean Motel, built in 1957 by Lou Morey—of boardwalk attraction fame. Among the signature features of the once ultra-modern motel are a curving “Jetson Ramp” that winds its way from ground level to the second-floor sundeck and crescent-shaped pool.  

article-image

An Asian elephant stands waiting for passengers outside the drained pool of the Singapore Motel on the Wildwood shore. Designed to look like a 1960s South Asian pagoda, the Singapore has a mixed reputation, despite the laughing Buddha near the beach entrance.

article-image

A statue of the Virgin Mary stands guard over the recently renovated Blue Marlin motel. A staple of the area for nearly 50 years, the Marlin suffered from noisy guests and outdated amenities until Mary came along with new ownership. 

article-image

A plastic owl watches sun-bathers at a motel near the beach in Wildwood New Jersey, September 2015. 

article-image

A closed Beach Taxi stand off the boardwalk of Wildwood, New Jersey. In the summer, John Deere gators take tourists and their things to any shore spot, including Morey’s Pier Waterfront Park, for $3 one way. Wildwood's beach is estimated to be as wide as 2,000 feet in spots. 

Why the Man Who Popularized Birthstones in America Came to Loathe His Creation

0
0

article-image

A hunk of topaz, the birthstone of November. (Photo: Parent Géry/Wikimedia Commons

As children, many Americans get introduced to the idea of birthstones—that the month of your birth corresponds to a special jewel. Some lucky people get diamonds (April). Others are stuck with the more pedestrian garnet (January) or the esoteric peridot (August). But while many know of the existence of these gems, it’s less clear why.

It turns out that birthstones are both an American invention and an ancient tradition.

In 1913, George Frederick Kunz, a vice president of Tiffany & Co., wrote the definitive book on gemstones and their folklore in 1913. In this book, which , he discussed the history of “natal stones” and people’s beliefs in their mystical powers. 

Unfortunately, his work was more influential than he wanted. Later that year, a jewelers’ organization published an official list of 12 birthstones.

Even though his job was selling jewelry, Kunz felt that birthstones had a special allure that should be protected from commercial interests. “There is grave danger that the only true incentive to acquire birth-stones will be weakened and people will lose interest in them,” he wrote.

article-image

 

Zodiac sign/birthstone combo. (Photo: Akki1234singh/Wikimedia Commons

Humans have been making jewelry from colored stones for at least 40,000 years, but the earliest claim on the origins of birthstones comes from the Jewish historian Josephus. In his book Antiquities of the Jews, written in the first century A.D., he described the ceremonial costume of Aaron, Moses’ older brother and the first high priest of the Hebrews. It was quite an outfit: over a linen tunic spun with gold threads and a floor-length tasseled robe, Aaron wore a bedazzled breastplate.

“Twelve stones were there also upon the breastplate, extraordinary in largeness and beauty,” Josephus wrote. The jewels were arranged in four rows and couched in gold settings. “The first three stones were a sardonyx, a topaz, and an emerald. The second row contained a carbuncle, a jasper, and a sapphire. The first of the third row was a ligure, then an amethyst, and the third an agate…the fourth row was a crysolite, the next was an onyx, and then a beryl.” Each stone bore the name of one of the 12 tribes of Israel, but Josephus added that they could just as easily represent the months of the year and the signs of the Greek zodiac.

The connection between precious stones and astrological signs continued into Europe’s dark ages, when Isidore, the Bishop of Seville, compiled his Etymologiae in the early 7th century. The immense encyclopedia laid out the bulk of human knowledge to that point in history (perhaps that’s why the Vatican declared Isidore the patron saint of the Internet), including the 12 gems associated with signs of the zodiac, a list nearly identical to the one Josephus described.

For the next thousand years, cultures in Europe and the Middle East used zodiacal gems as charms for casting spells, healing diseases and bringing good luck. Wealthy people might own the full set and only carry the one corresponding to the current astral sign, but there were exceptions. Kunz claimed that the Italian noblewoman Catherine de’Medici wore a girdle embedded with 12 enormous gems bearing “talismanic designs.”

 article-image

 

A portrait of Catherine de’Medici before she stopped wearing jewels in favor of mourning dress. (Photo: François Clouet)

In the late 19th century, immigrants brought sets of zodiacal gems with them to America. At the time, there were few American jewelers and most consumers knew little about gemstones or their lore, said Robert Weldon, a gemstone expert at the Gemological Institute of America. “This was a relatively new culture that didn’t have a gemological tradition,” Weldon said, so many consumers associated the stones with the months of the year.

Tiffany & Co. sensed a marketing opportunity. The company published a pamphlet about natal stones, written by Kunz, with vignettes describing the qualities they transfer to the wearer. “Who first beholds the light of day, in spring’s sweet flowery month of May, and wears an Emerald all her life, shall be a loved and happy wife,” Kunz predicted. Others got a warning. “Wear a Sardonyx or for thee, no conjugal felicity, the August-born without this stone, ‘tis said must live unloved and lone.”

The company occasionally added or replaced gems that were difficult to obtain or expensive. In 1912, the National Association of Jewelers called for an official birthstone array, leading to the list that Kunz so loathed. The selections weathered style trends with only handful of additions to bring us to today’s list:

January (Garnet)

February (Amethyst)

March (Aquamarine)

April  (Diamond)

May (Emerald)        

June (Pearl, Alexandrite)

July (Ruby)

August (Peridot)

September (Sapphire)

October (Opal, Tourmaline)

November (Topaz, Citrine)

December (Turquoise, Zircon, Tanzanite)

As for Kunz’s prediction, it did not come true. American interest in birthstones remains strong over 100 years after his book. “Colored gemstones are very, very popular right now,” says Doug Hucker, C.E.O. of American Gem Trade Association, an industry group. Hucker attributes their prominence to the trend in fashion for clothing, accessories, shoes and jewelry in matching hues. And while birthstones like diamonds and rubies will always be in style, jewelers are selling a wider variety of gems in birthstone colors—like Tanzanite, a deep blue sparkler that was designated an alternative birthstone for December in 2002.

“What is remarkable is the consistency in the stones for more than 2,000 years,” Weldon said. “People want to believe in something that was believed by the ancients. Why mess with it?”

Fleeting Wonders: Doomsday Clock Remains At 3 Minutes

0
0

article-image

This prescient still from the 1928 film Safety Last illustrates our current predicament. (Image: Harold Lloyd and Wesley Stout/WikiCommons Public Domain)

Ever wondered how close we are to the end of the world? Experts weighed in today, and they say three (metaphorical) minutes. At a press conference this afternoon in Washington, D.C., representatives from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists unveiled the latest version of their Doomsday Clock, which has the Earth holding steady a few ticks from total destruction.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists was founded by Manhattan Project veterans in 1945, after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Two years later, the group adopted the "Doomsday Clock" in order to sum up and illustrate the various perils of the nuclear age. Every year, the Bulletin's Science and Security Board determines a diagnosis, with the help of the 16 Nobel Laureates on their Board of Sponsors.  

article-image

A graph of the Doomsday Clock's panic level, from its inception until last year. (Image: Fastfission/WikiCommons Public Domain)

The clock's minute hand moves back and forth depending on exactly how impending the apocalypse seems. In 1991, after global superpowers reached a nuclear resolution, we were a comfortable 17 minutes away. Things have gotten gradually scarier since then, and last year, due to climate change and growing nuclear arsenals, the hand first ticked forward to 11:57.

This year, key factors included climate change, missile-making, and "other existential threats," said Rachel Bronson, Executive Director of the Bulletin. "In spite of some positive news... nuclear tensions between the US and Russia have grown," and "tensions between Pakistan and India remain high," explained Lawrence Krauss, chair of the Board of Sponsors. The clock is stopped for now, but it's one the world might want to stop winding. 

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

Fleeting Wonders: An All-Female Senate

0
0

article-image

Tuesday morning's Senate crew. (Screenshot: C-SPAN)

The Senate is normally a divisive place, full of shouting matches, endless filibusters, and the occasional violent caning. But yesterday, in the aftermath of the D.C. blizzard, everyone who showed up in the chamber had at least one thing in common—they were all women.

Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, pointed this out in her closing statement. "As we convene this morning," she said, "you look around the chamber, and the presiding officer [Senator Susan Collins, R-ME] is female. All of our parliamentarians are female. Our floor managers are female. All of our pages are female."

"This was not orchestrated in any way shape or form," she added. "We came in this morning and looked around and thought 'something is different this morning'—different in a good way, I might add."

"Perhaps it just speaks to the hardiness of women," Murkowski continued. "You put on your boots and put your hat on and get out, slog through the mess that is out there." After mentioning she "spent a good portion of my weekend shoveling," the Alaska senator noted she was "ready to be back at work where it's a little less rigorous."

To be fair, there were a couple of guys in the mix over the course of the morning—including Senate Chaplain Barry Black, who opened the session with a prayer to "give our lawmakers the wisdom to seize the opportunities of the myriad seasons." Clearly everyone took this to heart in their own way.

The Senate reconvenes today at 11 a.m.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

Red Tides Are The Auroras of the Sea

0
0

article-image

A cloud of neon algae surrounds St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea (Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Flickr)

"Too much of a good thing" might be the most apt way to describe the beautiful environmental phenomena known as algal blooms, or "red tides."

Usually materializing in spring and summer, these "blooms" are colorful underwater clouds of microscopic organisms that take advantage of surplus nutrients in the water. Occurring in both oceanic and freshwater bodies of water, red tides create gorgeous, swirling patterns in the water that look not unlike the auroras of the arctic, had they been dunked under the waves.

Unfortunately, red tides can devastate their surroundings. The dense algal build up can harm fish, and even larger beasts, like manatees. Microscopic organisms also struggle, since the algae end up hogging nutrients and oxygen. If they get bad enough they can even begin to grow huge, smelly piles of slime that will wash up on the beach. The EPA often refers to them as HABs, or Harmful Algal Blooms.

The causes of blooms vary—from excess fertilizer being dumped in the water, to naturally shifting currents, that put an flood areas with an excess of nutrients. But no matter how unwanted, the bloom are consistently gorgeous. Check out some of the best images we could find below. 

article-image

The coast of Estonia (Photo: Mapbox/Flickr)

article-image

The Swedish island of Gotland (Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Flickr)

article-image

Lake Erie (Photo: NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research/Flickr

article-image

Off the La Jolla, California coast (Photo: eutrophication&hypoxia/Flickr)

article-image

Off the coast of South Africa (Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Flickr)

article-image

New Zealand (Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Flickr)

article-image

Barents Sea (Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Flickr)

article-image

Off the coast of Argentina (Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Flickr)

article-image

The Sea of Marmara in Turkey (Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Flickr)

article-image

Lake Ontario (Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Flickr)

article-image

Bay of Biscay (Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Flickr)

article-image

Barents Sea (Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Flickr)

article-image

The Bay of Biscay (Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Flickr)

article-image

The Gulf of Mexico (Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Flickr)


Why Cheetah Researchers Spend A Lot Of Time Sneaking Up On Bushes

0
0

article-image

For some wildlife biologists, daily research begins with figuring out what that dot is. (Photo: Anne Hilborn)

Look closely at the above picture. Halfway between the foreground and the horizon, tucked into the waving grass, is something. It's still, and shadowy, and vaguely pointy, but has very few other discernible characteristics. Go ahead and zoom in if you want.

Ok, got it? Quiz time. Is that a cheetah–or not?

article-image

A definite cheetah, and the fruit of a lot of horizon-scanning. (Photo: Anne Hilborn)

Even among the always-enigmatic big cats, cheetahs are particularly mysterious creatures. We're not 100 percent clear on the nuances of how they breed and how they fit into their environments. Researchers are trying to figure out how these very endangered animals live their lives so they can develop better conservation plans.

But in order to even begin addressing these larger questions, your average cheetah researcher spends much of her workday guessing what is or isn't a big cat, says ecologist Anne Hilborn. "In Serengeti, we don't have any cheetahs that are collared, so we basically have to go out and find them by eye," she explained in a phone interview, "Sometimes they're just sitting there on a termite mound by the road looking really photogenic, but most of the time it involves hours and hours, and sometimes days, of driving around."

article-image

Classic cheetah shape–a small triangle on top of a large one. (Photo: Anne Hilborn)

Hilborn was a research assistant with the Serengeti Cheetah Project from 2004 to 2007, and returned to the park in 2014 to collect data for her own projects. Over her long tenure, she has developed several tricks to maximize her cheetah-spotting chances–getting up at dawn before the heat makes everything hazy, looking out for clumps of staring tourists or hyper-alert gazelles, and scanning for particular shapes. From far away, "when cheetahs are sitting down, they sort of look like an upside-down triangle with a really tiny upside-down triangle on top of it," she says. 

Even this distinct silhouette is no guarantee. Hilborn has been fooled by stumps, bushes, clumps of grass, leopards, Kori bustards, and "any of the millions of [other] things that you wouldn’t think looked like a cheetah, but actually does." Termite mounds are particularly tricky:

(The Unidentified Field Object at the top, by the way, did not turn out to be a cheetah. It was a bush.)

If it is, indeed, a cheetah, the search is not over. Step two involves using spot- and scar-based identification to figure out exactly which individual has graced you with her presence, in order to get a sense of her day to day activities. Step three, in many cases, means collecting cat scat–a whole separate search-and-gather procedure that involves further patience ("it's really hard to predict when a cheetah is going to poop"), and sometimes, if things are really dire, getting out of the Land Rover and sniffing.

Hilborn is the current steward of the @realscientists Twitter feed, where, along with hosting games of Cheetah or Not, she is regaling readers with harrowing tales of elephant-adjacent scat collection and hyena reproduction. Luckily for desk-chair biologists, she has provided a number of signs for easy identification: try the #ratemylion and #cheetahface hashtags for great close-ups of those research subjects she did manage to track down.

Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to cara@atlasobscura.com.

Get Over Here, Man: Decoding the Bro-Hug

0
0

Get over here, man! (All illustrations: Franziska Barczyk)

About 25 seconds into Tupac Shakur’s music video for the 1993 hit “I Get Around,” it happens. Shakur walks through a pair of French doors onto a porch, turns to his left where one of his friends is standing, and pulls him into a four-step embrace: hand clasp, shoulder bump, back pat, release. It’s a casual, cool greeting, and both men smile as they carry it through to completion. With one simple gesture, Shakur seems to say to his friend: “You belong here.”

His greeting has many names: bro-shake, bro-hug, hip-hop hug, pound, dap. Whatever name it goes by, in the last 30 years the gesture has become ubiquitous—it’s almost impossible to walk across a college campus or into a bar without seeing it performed. I’ve even tried it, but my bro hug had none of the natural grace of Tupac’s, and my guy friends responded with blank stares. It’s clearly a man’s greeting, and its popularity in this moment in time is no coincidence.

“Twenty years ago it wouldn’t have been common to see men hugging each other as a normal greeting,” explains Kory Floyd, a communications professor at the University of Arizona. “It really evolved as a way for men, especially young men, to show their affection for each other in a way that’s culturally accepted.” Part of the reason the greeting has become so popular now is because our ideas about sexuality, as a culture, are more flexible, Floyd says.

But enlightened as we may be, it’s still important for men to defend, as Dr. Akil Houston of Ohio University calls it, their “fragile notion of masculinity.” Thus the bro-hug: A socially acceptable display that combines affection with aggression. Men can hug each other in public, but they maintain an arm barrier between their torsos and pat each other just once or twice on the back.

As Floyd puts it, “It both demonstrates participants’ strength and minimizes the amount of contact between their bodies.” Win-win.

article-image

According to Houston, who studies hip-hop, the bro-hug was originally an African-American cultural practice. Its initial spike in popularity probably occurred in the 1980s, when channels like MTV, BET, and Video Music Box launched, serving up hip-hop culture to millions of new viewers. Once visible in the mainstream, the formerly niche bro-hug began to be imitated en masse.

This, says Houston, is how the bro-hug spread, but it’s not where it began. The gesture itself is much older, and tied to the history of black oppression. “Generally, if you look at how people have resisted oppression, one of the key ways is through the body,” he says. “Expressions that go against proper decorum are a way for people to exert themselves and express their humanity.” The antithesis of the bro-hug would have been the gentleman's handshake.

article-image

For a gesture that began as a means of resistance, it’s now remarkably commonplace, caught up in the endless cycle of cultural appropriation. When you see twenty-something investment bankers using it to greet each other at a happy-hour spot, chances are they’re not using it to subvert an oppressive institution; more likely they’ve adopted the bro-hug for its social function.

But like all social interactions, the bro-hug can go awry. “There’s nothing more awkward than going in expecting a handshake, then realizing you (yet again) screwed up another ‘bro’ handshake,” one Redditor wrote in a cry for “halp.” His fellow Redditors rushed to chime in: “Watch their hand placement. If it’s a waist level, 90 degrees, it’s most likely a handshake.” “Extend your hand first to dictate which handshake you want.” “When saying goodbye to someone, throw your hand up at a 45-degree angle, palm out.”

More than anything, as their comments suggest, the the bro-hug is about picking up on social cues, and “responding to other people’s body language,” as Marcus Jones, a recent NYU graduate, sees it. Jack Salva, a Missouri resident, agrees: “It’s a respect thing. You’re allowing someone to be close to you, so if there’s a misunderstanding between two people about their level of comfort with each other, it might get awkward.” 

Misread the comfort level and you’ll end up like Kanye West and John Mayer—West goes in for a bro-hug, Mayer fakes him out and turns the thing into a real hug, and in the end West is left smiling, shaking his head, and wondering what went wrong.

There is no doubt that a set of unwritten rules governs the bro-hug. Mayer’s bungle is funny to watch, but Houston says a gaffe such as his could have consequences. “If I meet someone and we give each other a bro-hug, and mine doesn’t measure up to what the other person feels is legitimate, my identity is in question,” he says. It’s like belonging to a club, he explains. If someone doesn’t know the password, their membership is suspect. If Tupac’s friend had fumbled the clasp or given one too many back pats, perhaps the party would’ve come to a screeching halt.

To Houston, the bro-hug’s popularity might be a sign that it’s on its way out. Seeing it everywhere is like hearing the words “bling” and “swag” on the shopping channel, he says. It’s a sign that the cool factor is gone, sucked out by the establishment. Jones agrees, but for different reasons. “I’ve noticed, at least in New York, it’s dying down a little bit,” he says. “I’m just straight-up hugging people now.”

If anything the bro-hug will evolve along with our notions of masculinity, not dictating but responding to the way men express affection for each other.

Romans Once Filled the Colosseum with Water and Staged an Epic Mock Sea Battle

0
0

article-image

An artist's rendering of an ancient Roman naumachia. The emperor's got some serious front row seats. (Image: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Being appointed party planner in ancient Rome for a simulated naval battle, or naumachia, would be a nightmare. Consider the logistics behind staging one of these manic events in a lake, arena, or artificially constructed basin: flooding and then draining the water, organizing all the condemned criminals and prisoners of war, procuring the right weapons, managing the spectators, arranging the boats (biremes, triremes, and even quinqueremes), orchestrating the fighting, overseeing security, importing sea creatures, keeping tabs on brothels, and of course, pleasing the emperor.

If you messed up the head honcho’s celebration, he might just throw you into the cess pool and cheer you on as you fend for your life.

article-image

A fleet of boats, thousands of oarsmen, utter chaos. (Image: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Naumachiae are thought to date back to the third century BC, and appear to have taken place only four or five times in history. The term itself, which translates to “naval combat,” can signify both the event itself and the place where it took place. As massive ordeals requiring far more resources than your average Roman spectacle, naumachiae were only orchestrated for exceptionally celebratory occasions. You can think of a naumachia kind of as gladiator battle scaled up and tossed into an enormous pool, with competing fleets of oarsmen and fighters loosely reenacting a historical battle, or simply improvising their brutality. (Men already awaiting execution sometimes needed to be goaded into killing each other for the sake of mass entertainment. Oh, ancient Rome.)

article-image

A true extravaganza. (Image: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

The first naumachia on record, in 46 BC, was in honor Julius Caesar’s quadruple triumph, which ended wars in Gaul, Egypt, against Pharnaces of Pontus, and against King Juba of Numidia. The naumachia was a centerpiece in an extravaganza also involving music, horse-racing, infantry and cavalry combat, and a few low-key elephant battles. Aquatic displays and general over-the-top antics were popular at the time, though not much is known about them in detail.

article-image

Another sort of nautical spectacle, this one apparently involving sea monsters. (Image: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

For Caesar’s naumachia, ships representing the Tyrian and Egyptian fleets were set afloat in a basin constructed near the river Tiber . The boats were staffed with 4,000 oarsmen and 2,000 fighting men. It’s unclear how much of the ensuing face off was pre-orchestrated, how much was theatrical, and how much was simply bloody mayhem, but whatever the case, the scale and novelty of the spectacle drew thousands of spectators who crowded and even camped along the streets to catch a glimpse. In the chaotic frenzy, spectators even ended up trampled to death in their eagerness to see boats clash and blood spilled.

Another aspect of the mass spectacle was a sexual one. The poet Ovid wrote of a later naumachia, “With such a throng, who could not fail to find what caught his fancy?” A naumachia, with its crowds and chaos, was rife with drunkenness and debauchery and abundant opportunities for anonymous trysts and dalliances between men or women. Prostitutes and brothels were also a part of many festivities.

article-image

Imagine trying to fill this thing up with water. (Image: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Augustus threw a naumachia in 2 BC involving a basin broad enough to hold 30 ships representing Persian and Athenian fleets. A bit later, in 52 AD, Claudius demanded his own naumachia, this one on a lake and involving 19,000 soldiers and 100 ships meant to represent rivals Rhodes and Cecily. According to Tacitus, the prisoners at this showcase refused to fight, forcing Claudius to send down his imperial guard to instigate some blood shedding. 

In 57 AD, Nero held a naumachia in a wooden amphitheater filled not only with water, but also with water creatures such as seals and hippos (though it’s unclear what happened to the imported marine life when the water was immediately after drained from the amphitheater to make room for a land contest). A few decades later, in AD 80, the third day of a multi-day, multi-activity extravaganza dedicated to Titus featured a naval standoff of 3,000 men.

The natural venue for an event of this scale would, of course, be Colosseum itself. Details are a bit sketchy, but Romans did apparently try to turn the gladiatorial ring into waterworld at least once. According to Roman historian Cassius Dio (235 AD), a sea fight did take place in the famed amphitheater in 86 AD; it apparently involved a violent rainstorm that led to the deaths of all the combatants as well as many of the spectators. Underground chambers beneath the Colosseum support this possibility, though it’s a puzzle to imagine imperial event managers somehow pumping enough water to float a fleet of boats into the world’s largest amphitheater. Stranger things have happened, but not often.  

Fleeting Wonders: Challenger Astronaut Christa McAuliffe's Lost Lessons

0
0

article-image

Christa McAuliffe gets a weightlessness preview aboard the zero gravity aircraft. McAuliffe used some of her zero-G time to practice her lesson plans. (Photo: Keith Meyers/NASA Public Domain)

Thirty years ago today, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded after takeoff, searing itself tragically into the national consciousness. Many of the Americans mourning today watched the disaster from their elementary school classrooms, and are particularly remembering Christa McAuliffe, the social studies teacher chosen from thousands of applicants to be the first civilian in space.

McAuliffe's fans and loved ones have granted her many formal legacies–a conference, a Center for Education, even an asteroid. But there's another way to remember the adventurous teacher. McAuliffe left a more personal legacy behind, in the form of unfinished business: eight carefully designed lesson plans, detailing the classes she meant to teach from the shuttle.  

article-image

McAuliffe and Gordon practice the hydroponics experiment. (Photo: NASA)

Part of McAuliffe's job as Teacher in Space was to "perform both live and filmed science lessons," explains "Challenger's Lost Lessons," a report available on NASA's website. Along with aerospace education expert Bob Mayfield and understudy teacher Barbara Morgan, McAuliffe developed various space-friendly lessons, dealing with everything from hydroponic bean-growing to the effects of zero gravity on simple machines. As the report puts it, "these lost lessons, prepared for the nation and world's school children, were never done." 

The constraints of spaceflight necessitated creative solutions–all the materials required "had to fit within the confines of one mid-deck locker" about the size of a toolbox, and they had to be totally safe for spaceflight, explains Mayfield in the original plan documents.

Things that are easy on Earth–like hammering a nail into a board–were "immediately vetoed" by the commander, simply because the force involved "would have to be transmitted to either a crew member or the craft." And, as a brief video of McAuliffe, Morgan, and Mayfield trying to work with the hydroponic chamber in Zero G shows, gardening is a lot less grounded in space.

McAuliffe, though, remained very grounded, as shown in a practice video for one of the experiments, which involved mixing liquids of different densities. After knocking a bottle to the ground by accident, she quips, "Oh, this zero-gravity environment is just awful!"

Plus, as with so much about the Challenger mission, civilian enthusiasts stepped in to help. For the hydroponics experiment, in which McAuliffe planned to test whether mung beans could be grown via nutrient misting, Disney's Epcot Center inspired the watering apparatus, while volunteers like "John St. John, an eighth grade student from Friendswood, Texas," helped test different plant containers.

Jerry Woodfill, a longtime NASA engineer, stumbled on these lesson plans in the mid-2000s and updated them with sketches, comments, video clips, and other supporting information, in order to make them suitable for classroom use. "Though lost in the sense that they perished with Challenger and her crew," he writes, "recounting, redoing, and examining them is, in a sense, a resurrection."

If you would like to resurrect one or two of these experiments on the ground, check out the eight lesson plans here (Woodfill has made them suitable for Earth). They may not be quite as wondrous on our planet as they would have been from space–but they're some of the last homework the nation has, assigned by a brave teacher who lost her life teaching us to reach for the stars.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

Why New York City Has a Public Bathroom Problem

0
0

article-image

Decommissioned bathroom in Wall Street subway stop in NYC. (Photo: Daniel Schwen/Wikimedia Commons

The NYPD issues between 20,000 and 30,000 citations for public urination each year. But while there may be victims of that crime (mostly, sides of buildings and passersby), it’s not clear who really is at fault—the person who is relieving him or herself, or the city.

Public urination, which may soon be reduced from a misdemeanor to a more minor violation, is a response to a significant infrastructure in New York and most other major cities. And unlike other infrastructure issues—bike lanes, say, or graffiti—the problem that results in public urination has proved ridiculously intractable. It is one of the hardest urban problems to fight. 

“Public toilets are as essential a part of street infrastructure as streetlights,” says Carol McCreary of PHLUSH (“Public Hygiene Lets Us Stay Human). “They need to be part of the same package, and the fact that they’re not makes no sense.” New York City, just to take an example, offers public bathrooms in some parks (around 700 of the 1,700 total parks in the city) and a couple in scattered subway stations, both of which are often closed. And there are three pay toilets, one in Manhattan, one in Brooklyn, and one in Queens. Compare that to Singapore, which has fewer inhabitants and over 30,000 public bathrooms. 

article-image

A public bathroom built in Philadephia, in 1922. (Photo: Public domain)

Public bathrooms have a long history, dating back to the bathhouses of the Romans, but the first major urban centers to offer a public bathroom program were Berlin and London, in the mid-19th century (you can read more about that in Der Spiegel, if you can understand German). New York City, though, never adopted this trend. By the turn of the century, New Yorkers were complaining about the total lack of public toilets with no optimism for a solution whatsoever. Suggestions for public restrooms were made by as important a group as the Committee of Seventy, the Samuel J. Tilden-led anti-corruption group. “Probably the most flagrant failure in American sanitation today is the almost universal lack of public convenience or comfort stations in American cities and towns. Failure like this to provide proper public toilet facilities is to fail in one of the very elements of sound public health,” pled MIT doctor William T. Sedgwick to the New York governor in 1915.

They got nowhere.

Elsewhere, bathroom facilities sprung up. Eisenhower’s highway program in 1956 included resources for creating rest stops along the brand-new interstate highways—a crazy idea, at the time. But soon enough, travelers were able to find bathrooms while on the road. At first, those bathrooms were all pay toilets, only able to be unlocked with a dime, but four high school buddies (seriously) created a campaign that eventually ended the reign of the pay toilet in around 1976. After enough lawsuits and public outrage, facility after facility was unlocked.

article-image

Rest stops changed the travel game in U.S. (Photo: McGhiever/Wikimedia Commons

Though it was great that the public bathrooms became free, it had undesirable side effects as well. Restrooms came to be seen as a horrible money pit, an expensive facility that brings in no money but which costs huge amounts of money to clean. Architects and city planners crafted the bare minimum of public bathrooms required by the law, which was often none at all. (Office buildings and hotels have minimum bathroom requirements, but are not really public.) And the company that made the locks for the public bathrooms before those high school kids shut them down conducted a huge marketing campaign in which they promised that free public bathrooms would be home to all sorts of unwanted people and unwanted acts by those unwanted people: drug use, vandalism, minorities, public sex, maybe even gay sex, who knows? Those perceptions stayed for decades after, and in part persist today. These perceptions are not completely untrue, but they’ve been used as an excuse to stop even trying to create a decent bathroom infrastructure.

The people who build our cities became enemies of the public bathroom. They remain so, but they have enemies themselves. 

In fact, the activist groups desperately trying to get public bathrooms in American cities never really went away. PHLUSH, McCreary’s group, is one of a small handful of groups fighting upstream, like a salmon trapped in a river of urine, to get public restrooms installed in cities. Their reasoning is multipronged. For one thing, adding public bathrooms is linked with revitalization (or gentrification, depending on how you look at it) of distressed neighborhoods. It’s kind of the same idea as attacking litter or graffiti, which is strongly correlated with decreases in other types of crime.

article-image

A Colorado public bathroom. (Photo: Bradley Gordon/Flickr)

Urine is not a fantastically dangerous substance, gross though it might be. It’s alleged to have corroded a pole in San Francisco, and theoretically holding it in for a long period of time can be dangerous, but for the most part, the objections to public urination are more aesthetic. It smells, for example. But the main reasons to institute a public bathroom system in a city is simply because we should. “It’s a fundamental human right,” writes Safe2Pee, another activist organization. It is a need shared by all people, and to not provide bathrooms while making public urination illegal is kind of ridiculous.

Yet it’s proved incredibly difficult to get any traction in the effort in many cities, New York included. The main reason is that it’s a costly and difficult project. Cities like Portland, where PHLUSH is based, have a low enough density that it’s possible to construct sidewalk public bathrooms. (The Portland Loo, a metal pod placed on the sidewalk, has been a success there and elsewhere.) But in New York, the density of people on sidewalks is much too high to stick a public restroom every four blocks. “Restrooms are expensive, even modular units placed in parking lots,” says McCreary. The Portland Loo costs about $60,000 each to construct, and another $1,200 a month to maintain. To install a few thousand of these around New York could veer into the tens of millions of dollars just to install.

But, depressingly enough, that’s not even the biggest problem. At least, not the most frustrating one. “The peepee caca jokes are...we usually warn people, you're gonna get six months of jokes and funny headlines from the press,” says McCreary. “And television journalists are the WORST.” Any mention of spending on toilets meets with horrible, cheesy jokes and a weird belief that this is not a real problem, or not worth bothering with. “I think why it’s hard is that we don’t talk about it. It’s really hard to push it on the policy agenda,” says McCreary.

But we’re at a strange tipping point right now. Bathrooms are in the public eye more than ever, thanks to the battle over gendered bathrooms specifically as they apply to transgendered people. Starbucks, long considered New York City’s unofficial public bathroom operator, has basically stopped allowing people to use their bathrooms. The city’s new relaxation of the laws banning public urination may be sensible, but they don’t answer these age-old problems: where does a New Yorker go to pee?

 article-image

Bathrooms in the Church Street station in NYC. (Photo: Sam Sebeskzal/Wikimedia Commons)

Some private sources are stepping up to answer that question. AirPnP, a punny and apparently buggy app, allows users to put their bathrooms up for rent. Posh Stow & Go is sort of like a locker room infrastructure, with locations offering locker storage and bathrooms. But these apps are as yet unreliable, and even at peak density don’t come anywhere near the amount of bathrooms a city like New York should have. Both federal law and New York plumbing code demand a minimum number of bathrooms based on the number of employees or visitors to a business, but make no requirement that those be made available to the public—so business have, almost invariably, chosen to keep them for customers or employees only. The war for the people's toilets continues. 

 

Viewing all 11432 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images