It's been a long time since I did one of these. Usually these photos are things I just happened to catch. The fact is, lately I haven't been seeing things I thought were worthy of photographing. So I decided to spend some of our nicer spring weather looking for things to photograph. Here's a few items from the River Market area. (Click any of the pictures to view them at full size.)
One of my favorite things about summer is musicians in the City Market. Comments about their abilities aside, if the City or the market's management company ever tries to bar musicians in favor of piped in music, I'll be the first to protest. Street musicians are one of the charms of a major metropolis such as New York or London. On my last trip to Chicago I encountered a Jazz quartet on the sidewalk near the
Wrigley building. There are few places where Kansas Citians can have encounters like that. In my experience the musicians in the River Market are better than the one's in Westport or the Plaza.
On a recent weekday I snapped this photo of a worker doing maintenance work on the Brown and Loe sign hanging over the market square. In case you've never noticed it, this is located on the market side of the building at 5th and Walnut, the one next to the City Market entrance. There is a smaller Brown and Low sign on the west side of the building, which I manipulated in Photoshop to create the generic
"Kansas City" sign I use at the top of some of my posts.
Brown and Loe is a fruit and vegetable wholesaler. I say 'is' because I was surprised to find that they still exist. They don't have a web site that I could find, but with fewer than a dozen employees, their corporate headquarters are in an office building at 76th and State Line Road.
The same day I caught the work on the sign, I stopped to check the progress of the new townhouses on Wyandotte. I can't say this is my cup of tea. I like the location and the rooftop patio. I wouldn't want to live across the street from commercial properties. I definitely wouldn't want this modernist design. (Can anyone tell me why we congratulate ourselves on modern design when the newest buildings in other cities are post-modern?)
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4 comments:
I've seen the merging of past and present architecture that I would call "post-sanity."... but then I'm weird.
I don't worry about the merging of styles. Jazz and Rock and Roll both began as a merging of styles then developed in their own direction.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation and state level historical societies generally advocate an obvious architectural distinction between new and old. I like it.
I don't object to that. These debates often seem to fall into the track of recycled history vs. boring modern. It never seems to occur to anybody that architects could someday come up with something that is as interesting as the old, but does not look like the old. People seem to have trouble absorbing that thought.
Think about this: We know that someone invented the historic styles. We know that someone invented the modern styles. Assume that human nature doesn't change. (I take it as a given.) Someone, somewhere is capable of inventing again. I'm asking, would somebody please do so? Please come up with something other than a blank wall before I have to shoot myself?
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