The Brooklyn Dodgers proposed domed stadium, designed by Buckminster Fuller, was to replace Ebbets Field for the Brooklyn Dodgers to allow them to stay in New York City. The Dodgers instead moved to Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles, California.  First announced in the early 1950s, the envisioned structure would have seated 52,000 people and been the first domed stadium in the world, opening roughly a decade before Houston’s Astrodome.  The stadium would have been located at the southeast corner of Flatbush Avenue and Atlantic Avenue, on the site of the Barclays Center. It would have cost $6 million to build and been privately financed. It was never built.

more

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BUCKY!

The Paramount Theatre

November 24, 1928 to August 1962

a movie palace with 4,084 seats, and a Wurlitzer that was second only in size to the organ at Radio City Music Hall, with 2,000 pipes and 257 stops.  it also hosted plenty of concerts, with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly and many many many others rocking its hizouse

then it was bought by Long Island University Brooklyn and the movie dreams were turned into hoop dreams…

The Arnold and Marie Schwartz Athletic Center

November 30, 1963 to Present

The Paramount Theatre was converted to a gymnasium and was home The LIU Brooklyn Blackbirds, until they moved to a new facility in 2006.  The Schwartz Athletic Center still stands, and plays host to the occasional sporting event

this is what it looked like in 2008

if it still looks like this, our new 2012 goal is to play basketball here

hat tip from - Beautiful Photographs of Decaying and Repurposed Movie Palaces

Deltron 3030 album cover

is no future!  is past!!!

visitors marching from the Trylon into the Perisphere to inspect Democracity – The City of Tomorrow, where they will stand on revolving galleries to look down on a panorama of the future for an admission of 25 cents, at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.  photo by David E Scherman

btw, the ’39 World’s Fair opened on this very day!!!

wait, Pittsburgh’s Igloo [RIP] had a retractable roof????  and it was the first retractable roof of a major-sports venue in the world, like ever?????????!!!!!!!!!

what the Igloo looked like in February of 2012… 

:(

The American Gothic House, also known as the Dibble House, is an iconic Carpenter Gothic house in Eldon, Iowa.  It was the backdrop of the 1930 painting American Gothic by Grant Wood.  You can visit the house and even take yer own jacka$$tic photos!!

Wood decided to paint the house along with ‘the kind of people I fancied should live in that house.’  He recruited his sister Nan (1899–1990) to model the woman, dressing her in a colonial print apron mimicking 19th century Americana. The man is modeled on Wood’s dentist, Dr Byron McKeeby (1867–1950) from Cedar Rapids, Iowa

July 19, 1980 – on Nan Wood Graham’s birthday, and 50 years after the painting was completed, Carl E Smith and Nan pose in front of the house in celebration of mounting the bronze National Historic Plaque on the American Gothic House [via]