Inspired by an attempt to learn more about the five story tenement building located today at 218 Eldridge Street in New York City that his great-great-grandfather lived in, Zach van Schouwen created a super cool interactive visual history or “a complete record of the life cycle” of this block located between Rivington and Stanton Street in Manhattan’s now trendy Lower East Side neighborhood. The journey starts from the street’s pastoral origin in 1795 with James Delancey’s farm. A more indepth version of this can be found on his website where you can click on each building to get more information. And if unfamiliar with this neighborhood, take a virtual tour courtesy of the Google Map street view car.
ABC News also posted on their YouTube page the original televised report of Peter Jennings announcing this “astonishing development” from Germany. What’s interesting, Marc Hirsh points out about this video is comparatively how succinct it was compared to today’s non-stop scrolling, 24-hour media coverage.
Three minutes and nineteen seconds, and then ABC News was out. It’s all but certain that the newsroom was in overdrive by this time, but you don’t see it. Jennings simply reported what ABC knew, called on a journalist close to the action to provide details and promised updates as they became available. And then, most shockingly from the modern-day standpoint, he shut up.
From the archives, check out this letter dated October 19, 1956 by the first director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art to Andy Warhol informing the pop artist that the museum was regretfully rejecting his generously free gift of his drawing entitled “Shoe.” The letter is currently part of the Andy Warhol Museum’s archives located in Pittsburgh. I wonder how the museum today would respond to an unsolicited gift.
The only known film recording of Anne Frank was posted by the Anne Frank Museum recently on their official YouTube channel, where it has since been viewed over 1.6 million times. The grainy home video recorded on July 22, 1941 briefly captures a curious 13-year-old Anne leaning out the window to observe a neighbor’s wedding. A year after this footage was recorded, Anne Frank and her family went into hiding until they were discovered in August 1944. Eight months later in March 1945, Anne died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp just a few weeks before British troops liberated the camp in April. After the publication of her diary, the married couple, still alive today and living in the Netherlands, recognized young Anne in their wedding footage which they shared with Anne’s father Otto who survived. At the Anne Frank House’s request in the 1990s, the couple provided this longer 20-second clip.
Even the passage of nearly a century of time doesn’t keep your embarrassing mugshots hidden from the all seeing eye of The Smoking Gun. Here are some mugshots of hooligans from 1903.
This interesting video compilation of movie clips illustrating the evolution of visual special effects in Western cinema was meant originally as an introduction at a “5th-grader-level” for educational purposes. However, even if you are no longer tackling long division, partaking in mandatory recess, and commuting via a yellow bus, that doesn’t mean you too can’t enjoy and learn from this video.
On a somber note, 64 years ago on this date, a US bomber named “Enola Gay” flew over the city of Hiroshima and its approximate 250,000 residents and dropped the world’s first atomic bomb. An estimated 70,000 people were immediately killed with another 70,000 killed in the aftermath due to radiation exposure and resulting injuries.
Boston Globe’s Big Picture has a collection of photos relating to that day. Hiroshima survivor Issey Miyake, then seven-years-old when the bomb dropped, recently wrote an op-ed in the New York Times sharing his experience publicly for the first time in a bid to encourage President Obama to visit Hiroshima today as “a real and a symbolic step toward creating a world that knows no fear of nuclear threat.”
Today, June 5 marks the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests which is largely symbolized by this photograph of an anonymous Chinese man standing firm against a line of advancing tanks. Four other photographers managed to capture this moment–photographs which had be smuggled out of China past the state security.
NPR sits down with one of the photographers, Jeff Widener (whose version seen above is one of the most widely reproduced photographs of that moment) to discuss how his life was changed by that image.
