Went to Dinkytown. Visited the old bookstore, and found some back issues of Pencil Points, a magazine of architectural rendering. 1938 edition had an illustration of the Skyscraper Airplane Landing Pad of the Future, drawn by Hugh Ferris. That was enough reason to buy it right there, but it also had a lovely color ad for a tiled bathroom with the elegant headline Modern Toilets. (Excellent name for a website, right there.) Every aspect of the magazine bespeaks an exceptional sense of style, of design - and yet so few items of the era were designed according to these ideas. Most things were just . . . things. It’s not like everyone ran out and bought Streamlined Living Room sets in the 30s - on the contrary. I’d guess that whatever items people had that conformed to the new aesthetic, they were small consumer items - cold-cream jars, perhaps a toaster, a cracker box. Maybe a few items of furniture. I’d guess that the average house in 1939 looked a lot like it did in 1928 - which is to say, heavy, archaic, with beaded lampshades and classical motifs. The idea that the 20s and 30s were an era of widespread sophistication and elegance is, I believe, a crock of shite.

Walked around the old neighborhood. Was astonished, again, to see the building that occupies my old house. It could be a 1950s dorm. And as much as I’ve come to appreciate the 50s aesthetic, this one hails from the cheap unadorned lazy 50s - looks more like a project than an upscale apartment. The rest of the neighborhood looks shabbier than ever, and it looked shabby back in the old days. All the houses look sad and broken, like a collection of beaten mules. I don’t know how they stand, or what will happen to them; the housing stock is so poorly maintained that they’ll all go down, eventually. Did it look that bad when I lived there? Probably. I didn’t care. Having come from the Land of Ramblers, all these old old houses were a source of constant fascination.

Got my pictures of the Valli, or Dub’s Pub as it’s now called. Drove over to Ralph and Jerry’s - only to discover that the world’s most famous convenience store has been completely gutted, and is undergoing some sort of reconstruction. I felt the same way I’d felt when I saw the Gray’s Drug building gutted for a new restaurant: happy that the building was being saved, but sad that the last few atoms of a place I knew quite well had been utterly obliterated. Better that than wrack and ruin, of course. But still.

I walked across the street to take a picture of R&Js, and tonight when I downloaded the pictures I realized why I loved living on that corner, and working in that store: it’s an Edward Hopper corner. Homely, careworn, familiar; home.