TIME CONSUMING

 

Details of the facade of the Dinks Parrish Laundry. I realized as I edited these pictures that I don't know a thing about how terrra cotta is made. I looked up the Wikipedia article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architectural_terracotta, and don't understand all of it. Complicated! I can't imagine how much time and money it took to produce and install this, or how the economics worked on a humble commercial building.       

 

A friend told me about another unusual laundry. It is not as complex and harder to photograph due to its location but still interesting. We will see it tomorrow.

DINKS PARRISH LAUNDRY

A bit of fancy, a stone wedding cake on Olive Street in midtown. It was a major commercial laundry for many years, the two names referring to the families who owned it. The laundry went out of business some years ago. There may or may not still be some loft apartments upstairs. The ground floor left houses a new microbrewery. The rest of the ground floor is vacant.

This may be the most elaborate surviving terra cotta work in town. One online reference describes it as "either a heavenly flight of fancy or the product of a bricklayer on LSD: Moorish architecture on steroids, replete with spires wrapped in carved grape vines and snowflakes, flower blossoms and clamshells." 

Some detail of the facade tomorrow.   
 

            

THURSDAY ARCH SERIES

Taken at the end of our ride with Ellie on one of the Mississippi River tour boats. The two that are usually around are called the Tom Sawyer and the Becky Thacher. We were pulling up to the dock. The helicopter the kid and I rode on last month made a perfectly timed appearance.      

JOHANNES AND HIS FRIEND SAY WEAR A MASK

And last in this series, Dan Ricketts' spin on Vermeer's Girl With A Pearl Earring. The earring is a bit hard to spot. The first version had white polka dots on the mask, perhaps a reference to the pearl. Rickets changed his mind, as painters do.

I once had the privilege of seeing this painting in person.  It is in a small museum in The Hague. It's surprisingly little but the beauty made my jaw drop. In a way, it is like the Grand Canyon or the Taj Mahal. No photograph can prepare you for the experience of standing before it.

Got a good and rather unusual Thursday Arch Series picture for tomorrow.            

GOD AND ADAM SAY WASH YOUR HANDS

But no shaking hands. No touching. And, um, remember not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.