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The renovation of Pulitzer Fountain and the part of Grand Army Plaza around it is finished, and I hate it. It looks so bare and sterile to me. And there's no shade! It doesn't help that they were barely running any water through the fountain.
Imagine putting all this time and money to renovate Pulitzer Fountain and Grand Army Plaza. Imagine creating a permanent plaque to honor and showcase the people who donated money to the effort. Imagine seeing the first text you're inscribing look like this, deciding that's fine, and continuing to do more just like it and then post it. It's nearly illegible.
At least you can read this plaque.
This is what Pulitzer Fountain looked like in 2011. (Those animal heads were a temporary art installation of sculptures by Ai Weiwei.)
The Bradford Pear trees in the background were ripped out during the renovation.
Imagine putting all this time and money to renovate Pulitzer Fountain and Grand Army Plaza. Imagine creating a permanent plaque to honor and showcase the people who donated money to the effort. Imagine seeing the first text you're inscribing look like this, deciding that's fine, and continuing to do more just like it and then post it. It's nearly illegible.
At least you can read this plaque.
This is what Pulitzer Fountain looked like in 2011. (Those animal heads were a temporary art installation of sculptures by Ai Weiwei.)
The Bradford Pear trees in the background were ripped out during the renovation.
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Thanks! I’m happy to hear that someone likes this. Sometimes I feel like I’m blogging into a void…..
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Heh. I'm a spastic introvert who's working on dropping decades of societal masks and leaning into her introversion. Sometimes, I feel I'm hanging out in a void. So, yeah... appreciate the blogging. A lot of them are artistically motivating.
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Pomona looks bereft without the trees around her.
The renovated plaza certainly isn't presenting the idea of abundance.
I'm glad to help! I'm often wandering the city alone, and I like to share some of the things I see. I've learned that I take in a lot of details a lot of people around me don't notice. One, is that I look up in Manhattan....
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The formatting had hiccuped, but your image link was still viable. I'm happy about that because there weren't a lot of good images of the Peninsula out there in the wild. Yours, I could look closely at.
Thanks for the Wikipedia link. Too fun! Also, some great artwork.
Regarding looking up - I've been living in the countryside for about a year and a half now. I'd forgotten what the sky was like. Still nothing like a desert sky, but I'm happy to look up and see more than a handful of stars.
I've a feeling I'm going to fall down an 'architectural style' rabbit hole.
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With the adoption of LED lighting in streetlights, replacing the light pollution of the old sodium bulbs, I'm seeing more stars in the city's night sky than I used to. Driving through the mountainous parts of Pennsylvania, I remember feeling like their skies somehow felt long and not so much tall.
It's been killing me that in recent years entire blocks of old buildings in Manhattan and Queens are being torn out, to be replaced by the blandest modern bullshit, a lot of glass boxes or something cheap looking. I love Beaux-Arts, though I couldn't have whole blocks full of it because it's pretty busy visually. I'm happiest in a cityscape that has building of several styles intermixed, especially styles with decorative flourishes like Beaux-Arts, Renaissance, Gothic Revival, Art Deco, Romanesque, Baroque, Victorian, and Neoclassical. Like the mixes in Little Italy and the Flatiron District, though I'm afraid about what might have been torn out of them since I last saw them. I'm not so much for Bauhaus, Brutalism, Futurism, Modernist, Deconstructivism, or Post-modernist. The area of Queens I live in has a lot of Tudor styling and a lot of brick homes, which make me happy.
Sometimes I enjoy something that's a mishmash itself, like the Baudouine Building, which has a small Greco-Roman temple thing at the top. Sometimes I just think something is fun, like the Lipstick Building.
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The renovation of Grand Army Plaza involved a total repaving, so they probably figured it’d be easier and cheaper to tear the old trees out than work with them, but I was so sorry to see them go and it ruined the aesthetic and comfort level of the plaza for me.
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That first plaque looks like they forgot to fill in the letters with gold stuff, honestly. Send it back, it's not done!
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This plaque had to go through several people before being cemented publicly in place, and none of them said anything?
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