Peter Behrens's Blog, page 466

1965 Chevrolet Malibu SS, Pueblo CO

Myers Park and columns

I'm teaching this week at Queens University,  in the Myers Park neighborhood, in Charlotte NC.   It's a lush green campus in a prosperous neighborhood. The architecture is extraordinarily conservative--maybe not surprising for a banking town.
Myers Park looks like it was built as a garden suburb, I'd guess starting in the 1920s--though Queens U., which started as a women's college, was founded 1857, and there are a few 19th century houses around, including this beauty on Queens Road:
A lot of houses in the neighborhood, like this banker-Tudor (below), remind me of houses in Peter Taylor's short stories. Have you read Taylor's wonderful novel, A Summons to Memphis?
What really defines  architecture around here is the column thing. Columns everywhere. I guess they speak to a Southern reverence for tradition, even--or maybe especially--invented tradition.






 You'll rarely see a house of any size in Myers Park without columns somewhere.  Heck, even the massive grocery store, Harris Tweeter, down the road--in a brand new building and clearly competing with Whole Foods--sports columns, columns, columns. The campus of Queens U. is very column-friendly. Doesn't matter the style or size of the building: they pretty much all get columns stapled on somewhere.  We're in red clay country (and termite country) here in North Carolina. so there's a lot of red brick in the domestic architecture, and on the campus. The local red brick is pleasing, kind of humble and elegant at the same time. This campus is verdant in early June, lots of shade trees, dappled lawns. But columns, columns everywhere, on buildings old and new.



The column thing gets a little aggressive. It certainly has swamped the Modernist moment, if there was one, in the South. The mosaic on the face of the library is one of the only modernist gestures on the Queens campus. It is a wonderful piece, I'd guess from the 1960s. But clearly it wasn't "traditional" enough, and quite recently a heavy new portico complete with--guess what--columns!-- has been slapped on the building.

Charlotte NC: Granddaddy's 1978 GMC C10

Often when I come across a clean old original machine, I learn it's been passed down through the family, maybe for 2 or 3 generations. Like last week's 1960 Pontiac Ventura, up in Maine. I'm teaching screenwriting this week in the MFA program at Queens University, Charlotte. It's very green here, and warm. The school is in the middle of Myers Park, a lush, bankerish neighborhood. They sure go in for "traditional" and faux traditional architecture here in the South. Columns, up the wazoo... columns everywhere. Athens was never like this. Stately mansions, etc., all trying to look old money. But this town is a banking center so I guess a lot of the money is fresh. Anyway, walking along Selwyn Avenue yesterday with a couple of poets, Jon Pineda and Nick Lantz, and headed for Thai food, we came across this wonderful orange truck. The owner said it had been his grandfather's. Clean as a whistle, except the traditional C10 rust spots in the fender corners and on the leading edge of the hood. Love that orange though my iPhone camera read it as mostly red. 

1949 Chevrolet, Maine

Food trucks: Teri Yummy (Boston)

From Matt Dallet, esq. "There are several parked outside my office building every day. They rotate.. I'll send as many as I see..."--MD(We're interested in food trucks around the country and around the world, the people who operate in them, and their customers. Please send photographs and notes to autoliterate@gmail.com)             

1948 Pontiac Torpedo at Motorland

 Was it a confident era? Was that why cars were so large? Or was everyone scared, as the Cold War got colder and colder, heading toward hydrogen? Maybe the cars display the opposite of confidence. I guess you could read their gestalt either way. This one's on the block at Motorland in Biddeford, Maine.
 

"Watch Me" Said The Jeep

Thanks to Larry Nordell for the heads-up on 'rare automobile books':
http://www.abebooks.com/books/antiqua...

'61 Austin Healey; 1955 Pontiac (?), and San Francisco Bay

                                           From Michael S Moore in Northern California:"My May California visitation was taken up with contemplating the winter's crop of large paintings and forays to Brian's Salvage in American Canyon, where I found plenty of rust [and a bed for the '45 Chev] there in the salt air...




"Jeff at ABC Muffler always seems to have a wild variety of things up on the racks out East Second...

"Not to be all about gears 'n' grease, we took to the ferry for a last look at SF and lunch with Bryan, briefly in town after the Sinai [not shown]





"Finishing up with Memorial Day Weekend barbecues behind the Olde State Capitol and a surprise visit from our friend William with his oh so 'riginal '61 Healy..."





"Waiting on L's last puzzle-piece to come together;

"And a last little cruise to the jetty before mothballing the '45.



"So, next stop Sand Pass...or Hallelujah Junction...somewhere out there, anywhere...but soon."-MSM

Ottawa Chip Wagons

 from Aidan Oneill, Esq. 
"I don't know why you're interested in these beasts, but here's an unsightly one that's parked outside of our building every lunch hour.  They get quite a lot of business, and the operators are mainly Vietnamese (I think).   It's a point of pride with me that, after almost 30 years in Ottawa, I have never taken tiffin from any of them.  (Not that it shows.)"--AO


(Send jpegs and stories re. the food trucks in your zone to Autoliterate@gmail.com. Especially interested in legendary chip wagons of Halifax NS, and taco trucks of LA. But there's plenty more out there we don't know about, so...)-Autoliterate

Houses, not mills. Saco, Maine

Saco is just across the (Saco) river from the old textile town of Biddeford, Maine which we've been posting recently. Though the towns are adjacent they have distinctly different appearances. Saco was probably the older settlement, and it remained the place where managers and professions lived in large "New England" houses of various styles and eras, while factory hands were lodged in a variety of buildings across the river. Population in Biddeford was denser, the style of houses leaned more to the "three-decker" and other multi-family types of buildings; and Biddeford remained a "French" and working class town, with its parochial as well as public schools. Saco had (has) Thornton Academy, a private school which predates the public school system in Maine and functions as a public (tuition-free) school for Saco.
Since Maine factory towns were often on rivers, and rivers often were the boundaries of New England townships, this allowed a convenient(for the richer town) type of segregation in the 19th century when the mills started to develop and draw in large foreign-born populations of workers.