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"Draw a picture of a house," the big sister instructed the younger one, and the little girl's sketch was remarkably accurate. Her drawing was not the predictable A-frame with requisite chimney and smoke, but a squat, domed structure with striped siding. It was Alaska in the 1960s, and the girl was drawing her idea of the typical family home: a Quonset hut. This story, along with oral histories, essays, artifacts, and photographs, has been collected in Quonset: Metal Living for a Modern Age. In addition to the book, the NEH-supported project includes a Web site and an exhibition now on display at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art.

During the housing crunch of the late 1940s, thousands of people across the nation converted these surplus military huts into unconventional homes, churches, and restaurants. Today, the Quonset has largely vanished from most of the American landscape--and most people's memory.

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photo murals


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i really dont care for this container guy kalkin


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wwl the big 870

"between 3 and 7 in the afternoon (PST) and click on Listen Live. (They'll make you fill out a form, but it's nothing and worth it.) It's a call in-show hosted by a pair of chicory-steeped who-dats named Deke Bellavia and "Pal" Al Nassar. For four hours a day, they buck up a devastated city, giving practical advice -- "Sha, you best make sure all your circuit breakers is thrown when they come round to turn on your power" -- listen to people going bugshit about bureaucracy -- "I told that FEMA lady, 'Hon, I got a contractor fixin' to take OFF my new roof if you don't get the check over here soon'" -- and give the latest news about the city and state governments tripping all over each other."

They're passionate and local in a really fucked-up locale.

---for example: a call from a honeysuckle-toned woman the hosts called Miss Margaret. She'd obviously lost everything, but was full of sweet southern optimism. Seems her earlier calls to the show had caught the attention of Life (or, as she called it, Life's) Magazine and they've done a story on her that's coming out soon. She was thrilled and convinced that "help is on the way" for the people who live on her street. "I know it's true because you keep getting calls from people who say, 'I'm coming to New Orleans next month and I'm going to go to Constance Street to see Miss Margaret. And now it's going to get bigger." (I guess word's gotten out on the internet stream.)

Deke: Miss Margaret, I'm going to be in the city all day tomorrow and I want to find you and have a rich coffee with you.

Margaret: Love to, Brother Deke, but you know I don't have my kitchen
back. I'm going to have to make it for you instantly.

Deke: I'll take it however you got it, dawlin'.
via v zars
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CVI painting stretchers


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Philip Johnson is gone, but not forgotten. A slick sales campaign by real estate marketing firm The Sunshine Group tells us that the Urban Glass House, a vestige of the final projects designed by the late, renowned architect, is rising as we speak in a fast-changing urban industrial outpost at the western edge of SoHo and just north of Tribeca.

The neat marketing package belies a convoluted backstory: First, this isn’t the building Johnson intended as his last legacy (in fact, it is more of a tribute design than one of his own.) Second, the man who dreamed up the project and hired Johnson’s firm-restaurateur-turned-developer Nino Vendome, who after 9/11 turned his nearby restaurant into a home-away-from-home for thousands of rescue and recovery workers at Ground Zero-has all but vanished from the project as well.

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WD50


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