Hi from Las Vegas. No, this is not Las Vegas. I'm in Las Vegas. This is more trompe l'oeil building art in STL. The building used to be a wearhouse for a clothing distributior. They went out of business and left this hulking building. The wall painting was done while the building was empty. Now it's fancy loft condos and a hotel. Sorry for the electrical wires spoiling the view. They are the bane of photographers. But it's much worse in Japan, where all the cables for everything are above ground, desu ne?
TOMORROW'S POST: the west side of this building, equally strange.
Hey it's been great lending my eye to my hometown for a few days. Here's a shot I took in September 2004 when I took a trip up inside the Arch for the first time in many years. It's a little claustrophobic in the capsules that take you up the leg. But I think it's a pretty awesome experience. When you get to the top you are standing within the triangular segments that make up the structure, with one corner pointing down. So the walls slope in towards the floor, and if you scoot up on a little ledge you can look directly down. It's a fairly dizzying experience, in a good way as far as I'm concerned. The vertigo is amplified in high winds since the Arch is designed to sway as much as 18 inches! That's in a 150 mile per hour wind. But you might feel a little shimmy if you're lucky. So go up in it if you are in town!
So long for now STLMDPB! Remember to check me out in Chicago.
One of the beautiful things about the Arch is how it fills and shapes the space around it. Many pictures in this series are set against a blank sky to emphasize this quality. This one was shot on a bright summer day with the exposure reading taken from the steel of the near leg shining in the sun. That turned the far leg and sky very dark, to good visual effect. It also shows the irregular metal skin composed om many distinct plates. Each plate ripples. The Arch is not mirror-smooth, as it appears in many photographs taken from a distance.It looks like I took this photo floating by the upper part of the Arch in a blimp (see/hear also this link). In fact, I was standing on the Missouri side of Eads Bridge, also a structure of great beauty and an engineering marvel in its time. My vantage point is high up over the Mississippi River.
I'm in Death Valley, California today, taking pictures and wandering up canyons. U "R" US will post one more tomorrow, then back to my regular stuff.
Now this is a very St. Louis scene for me. Sure there are porches like this all over, but I don't encounter them anywhere else in the numbers that I do when I visit St. Louis in warm weather. Admittedly, this was not taken last weekend, when it would not have been warm enough for such a scene to be captured. But this is a favorite from a year ago, and now I have the venue to show it!
I like that this was taken at, not after, a party. For the moment the party has moved elsewhere (to the back yard, I think) and left its remnants on the front porch. I also like the black void beyond and the white paint splatter up the brick wall. It looks to me like a spray of sparks from space. Or something.
For those who aren't familiar, I found this review of Stag beer on ratebeer.com:
Here in Southeast Missouri, we call Stag by several nicknames - Stay Til All Gone, Steak Taters And Gravy, and Belleville (IL) Budweiser [my emphasis]. A dry beer, very filling, never had a hangover on this stuff, albeit quite a few upset stomachs. Plenty of taste, if you can stand it - also, plenty of aftertaste ,again, if you can stand it. Just hasn’t been quite the same since Heilemann swallowed them up. Kind of like Busch Beer after they redesigned the can and dropped the Bavarian logo - something was changed. Back in the early 80’s, Stag was one of the last to stick with the two-tap (upper and lower) keg - back then - considering the college pallate - Stag out of a keg couldn’t be beat.
Is the name of the company headquartered in this building. I always thought the name was slightly funny and that's probably what first got my attention as I was driving by it with my camera at the ready last weekend. I also like the aesthetics of this kind of place, as I have discussed on my Chicago blog here and here. Apparently they don't necessarily make ramming machines, but rather I'm deducing from their website that John Ramming started the company when it was making steamboat parts in the 19th century. And its original location is now occupied by The Arch. Cool, huh?
One note about the photo itself: I took a few other angles, but none of them worked for me because of the slick silver luxury car parked out front. I used that parking sign as both a central focus and to block that car out the old-fashioned, pre-photoshop way.
Meet me in Chicagy [sic].
Greetings STLMDPB readers! This is not a test. This is son of Strangetastes filling in while pops is putting his new super-duper lens through its paces in Death Valley (what a copycat, right?). Which means I got to borrow his white balance determining filter that doesn't fit the new lens. Yippee!
Anyway, I was in Tha Lou last weekend and here's some of the fruit of my snapping. I think this is a lilac bush in front of one of the beautiful old buildings of Lafayette Square. Correct me on identifying that flower, please. I had a hard time picking this shot over this one. What do you think? Here's a wider shot too where passing clouds kinda screwed up my exposure, but you get a better sense of the architecture of the row houses there. Do you think either neighbor conspired about the planting of that bush or the house paint color? Seems too perfect.
Yikes! The National Rifle Association is having its convention here next weekend. The convention was moved here from Columbus, Ohio, to punish that city for passing a ban outlawing the possession or sale of semiautomatic firearms. It will be the biggest convention in St. Louis' history. The meeting will be held at America's Center (get it? America's Center? It's our convention center and we are in the center of the country. Ha ha!) and the adjacent Edward Jones Dome. The dome is our football arena, home of the Rams, and was built onto the convention center to provide additional space for huge meetings. Note the Arch motif on the sign. No better or worse than the way the Statue of Liberty is treated in New York.
You can carry a concealed weapon in Missouri with a permit. There may be fifty or sixty thousand more on the streets next weekend. Fortunately, I will be in beautiful Las Vegas, a peacable city. Las Vegas' marketing slogan is, "What happens here, stays here." Use your imagination.I drive by this billboard every day on my way home from work and I have to say it creeps me out. At least they didn't put Charlton Heston's glaring visage on the sign. Heston, for many years the president of the NRA, is famous for responding to those who favor gun control by proclaiming they would have to pry his weapon "from my cold, dead hands"MONDAY THROUGH WEDNESDAY'S POSTS: While I'm away in the desert, special guest blogger U "R" US of Chicago Flair CDPB fame will post images of a visit to his home town.
Hi from Las Vegas. No, this is not Las Vegas. I'm in Las Vegas. This is more trompe l'oeil building art in STL. The building used to be a wearhouse for a clothing distributior. They went out of business and left this hulking building. The wall painting was done while the building was empty. Now it's fancy loft condos and a hotel. Sorry for the electrical wires spoiling the view. They are the bane of photographers. But it's much worse in Japan, where all the cables for everything are above ground, desu ne?
