-¦ January 2020 ¦-

WALT WHITMAN

Shapes of democracy total, result of centuries, shapes ever projecting other shapes, shapes of turbulent manly cities, shapes of the friends and home-givers of the whole earth, shapes bracing the earth and braced with the whole earth.	In some unused lagoon, some nameless bay, on sluggish, lonesome waters, anchor’d near the shore, an old, dismasted, gray and batter’d ship, disabled, done. After free voyages to all the seas of earth, haul’d up at last and hawser’d tight, lies rusting, mouldering.

CABLE CAR

Cable Car

THE FINISHED PROTOTYPE, w/ a driver’s cab at either end, appeared on the California Street Line in 1899.

How San Francisco’s cable car came to be built will require more than one stop on its telling, wending this way and that, and passing landmarks of wealth and waste.

Before the cable car, the task for getting to Nob Hill was relegated to paying for a ride in a horse-drawn cab. On October 11, 1869, this necessary yet wanton civic cruelty of using animals as beasts of burden changed for the good. The San Francisco Chronicle had a front page article on the death of a wretch. It took place when a horse finally lost it on California Street and, throttled by the harness, dragged down to its death.

Cable Car When Andrew Hallidie read this, he paused and paced his inner office, reflecting on what if anything he could learn from this. Hallidie was already prosperous, although not yet famous. He had inherited a company from his father. The senior Hallidie had invented and then patented a steel cable: strands of wire lined up and braided into a rope that was super strong, and proved indispensable in the gold fields and gold mines.

Cable Car

Cable Car Hallidie then took on someone's failed enterprise: build a conveyance capable of conquering the city‘s hills, relying on his cable rope. He bought the Clay Street Hill Railway Company and by May 1873 had built tracks and a cable assembly up Clay from Kearny to Leavenworth, a punishing climb of seven blocks.
Cable Car
Early on August 2 1873, a prototype tram was in place and, lantern-lit, Hallidie stepped on board. Activating a grip lever onto to a moving cable, he went up to Nob Hill on that peril-prone maiden voyage. Few were awake to witness a milestone, yet by opening day on September 1, the Clay Street Line was in demand. In 1880 over one million tickets were sold.

The original cable cars were tiny trams powered by a patented grip that alternately holds, and releases, a continuously moving steel cable running under the street. Power is supplied by huge drums housed at nearby power stations along the route.

Cable Car The tram operator is stationed forward of the tram. When he employs the grip to grab and hold on to the moving cable, the tram also moves. When the grip is released, the tram stops moving, even on a hill, using an invention of gear technology preventing slippage. Each car is manned by two operators: the tram operator or gripman, and the conductor.

Andrew Smith Hallidie was born on March 17, 1837 in London, to Andrew Smith (b.1798 Dumfrieshire, Scotland) and Julia Johnstone (Lockerbie). He died April 24 1900, in San Francisco. Six years later his cable car system would survive the 1906 Earthquake.

Cable cars then sprouted worldwide, from New York to Hong Kong. Naples crowned its opening by commissioning a song, “Funiculi, Funicula.”

In 1917, Andrew Smith Hallidie had an innovative building named for him. The Hallidie Building (by Willis Polk) has a facade rising eight stories and sheathed in glass. Cable Car

When news of the discovery of gold in California traveled back east, the brawn and brains of a young nation came westward, where notions of Freedom waltzed hand-in-glove w/ greatness as well as greed.

Cable Car Accordingly, access from the gold mines to San Francisco were surveyed. Roads, bridges and tracks were built wherever gold was found, w/ waystations established for respite and recreation. The mining methods these men brought w/ them quickly evolved to meet the challenges posed by the Comstock Lode and its tributaries.
Cable Car

Cable Car The Industrial Revolution created tools used in scientific precisioning, allowing innovated models to be tested and profitably manufactured. Among these ideas was the ingenuous “square set” created by German engineer Philipp Deidesheimer. Grey Brechin picks up the umbilical cord:
Cable Car The square set introduced methods of construction. Deidesheimer's gift went from constructing safety zones to conduct the backbreaking business of mining into other uses, including the ability of a grid of steel beams and columns to allow support for more height.

Cable Car The term skyscraper came into usage in the 1880s, when enough tall buildings were built in the United States (15), to warrant a designation. These new structures usually came w/ modern plumbing, electrical outlets in every room, a telephone line in every unit, central heating, and elevator(s). Cable Car “ …In the 1990s, NASA took a fresh look at the steel cable in light of a super material, carbon nanotube. This new field of nanotechnology promises a material that is uber-strong, light and flexible. Space Elevators: An Advanced Earth-Space Infrastructure for the New Millenium is the feasibility paper of this new science,to erect a track running on cables, from here to the Moon, a journey of some 62,000 miles.”

Philipp Deidesheimer — Philipp and Mrs Deidesheimer Making mining feasible, also skyscrapers.

• CABLE CAR NOTES:

| Based on San Francisco’s Golden Era by Lucius Beebe and Charles Clego (1060); Cable Car Days in San Francisco by Edgar Myron Kahn (1940); The Headlight, March 1947, published by the Western Pacific Club; Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin by Gray Brechin (1999); and on online articles by Mary Bellis (“The History of Skyscrapers”), Karen Barss (“Manhattan’s Golden Age of Skyscrapers”), and Meghan Neal (“Space Elevators Are Totally Possible”) | NASA ART - A space cable to the moon. | BONANZA — There is a 1959 episode of the TV series featuring a Philipp Deidesheimer storyline. | THANKS — Taryn Edwards, MLIS, Mechanics’ Institute. | THANKS — Penelope Houston, SF Public Library.

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WHAT HE SAID

Gary Hurstwit

Invisible Typeface

A documentary by filmmaker Gary Hurstwit, Helvetica the Documentary (2007) posits this “unseen” naming-convention as the most user-friendly of fonts.

UNIVERSITY TOWN

⇞ CITY OF STUDENTS

Coimbra, a city in northern Portugal, is the see of a bishop, the capital of a province, and a center of learning. In 2013, UNESCO designated the University of Comibra as a University Town Recipient for its World Heritage Sites, “… an integrated university city, w/ a specific urban typology, as well as its own ceremonial and cultural traditions.”

The property consists of two areas: a hilltop complex of buildings, University Hill , and a series of scattered structures which all played a part in the university’s history. There is a 12th century Augustinian monastery which was the first school, and the original library.

The Inquisition swept into Portugal in 1567, and Coimbra was one of the three local centers tasked to conduct it. Outlasting these strictures, the university bounced back, w/ strengthened statutes, a reorganized syllabus of studies, greater emphasis on education in the vernacular, and the re-establishment of freedom of research. The old castle on the hilltop was finally pulled down to make way for new buildings.

A seal was then struck, a praxe, consisting of a spoon (symbol of punishment), scissors (symbol of unruliness), and a stick (symbol of self-defense).

University of Coimbra

Founded in 1290, the University of Coimbra is the second oldest continuous institution of higher learning in Europe (the University of Paris is older), and the first university town in the world. In this northern Portuguese city, a world treasure become sited inside a national treasure, the school moved into a former royal palace on the summit of the hill, and grew to become a gathering spot for academics, writers, artists, who nicknamed this the Lusitanian Athens, ‘Lusa Atenas’.

⇞ CAMPUS

An early champion of the new science of circumnavigation, an observatory was built to make spatial sense of the stars.

Investitures and major events take place in the ‘Sala Grande dos Actos,‘ below portraits of kings and queens. A cathedral, already there when the university arrived, was gifted by Jesuits. The throne room is now used for PhD candidate examinations, and nothing else.

The four rooms of the ‘Museu de Arte Sacra’ contain, among holy habits and chalices, books of early sacred music. There is a museum of natural history. A colonnaded walkway by the grand patio was added in the 18th century, the ‘Via Latina.’ The campus chapel, ‘Capela de Sao Miguel’, means that no student need run downhill to another one.

A Botanical Garden blossomed in 1772, that delightful Victorian experiment of Eden on earth, sprouting wherever colonialism circled.

There are five faculties (‘theologia’, ‘direito’, ‘medicina’, ‘mathematica’, ‘philosophia’) w/ disciplines in judicial and European court systems, interdisciplinary nuclear science, and the arts. (The university had begun by teaching law, rhetoric, mathematics, theology, medicine, grammar and Greek.) The teaching staff consisits of some 70 professors and lecturers. Semester is from autumn to the start of summer, when two months of exams take place. The ordinary degree resulting in the title ‘licenciado’ lasts five years. The degree of ‘doutor’ takes another year and another examination. Medical students study eight years.

The university has a digital repositorium inside a tech park involved in research and incubation. There is a repository for the project April 25, documenting the toppling of a dictatorship. Auxiliaries of the city-wide university system take on citizen practices such as sports, theater, and botany and preservation; there are several kindergartens and nurseries under its wing.

⇞ LIBRARY

When the university outgrew the original city library, a second one was built in the 18th century, on University Hill, the ‘Biblioteca Joanina’, the oldest university library in continuous use in the world, and housed in three large and resplendent Baroque rooms w/ painted ceilings.

The first room has a light green palette, the second a darker green, and the third room has a “… shade like that of orange Niger leather”; rich in gilt and exotic wood, lined w/ 300,000 volumes in galleries runing around the walls, incl. arguably the most valuable collection of Bibles in the world.

There are unpublished manuscripts of Domenico Scarlatti, thought lost but rediscovered in the 20th century, because they were incorrectly catalogued. By the front door, a passageway can take one down to the river, the ‘Palacios Confusos’, by a series of steps posing as alleys, past houses of different styles and years.

⇞ STUDENT BODY

The student body numbers about 25,000, and the dress code is a black Prince Albert coat, worn w/ black trousers, black cape batina, black dress tie; generally students go bareheaded. A military hospital happens to be located nearby, because.

Freshmen may not be on the street after the bell has rung at 6pm, on penalty of being shaved bald, if caught. Another form of punishment is to measure the long bridge over the Modego w/ a match, and it must be done w/ meticulous accuracy. Even a good and sinless freshman must be prepared to run errands whenever required to do so by a sophomore or junior, but he may be “protected,” and the errand countermanded, by a friendly senior (‘quartanista’). In turn a sophomore and a junior are known as a semi-harlot (‘mejo prostituo / prostituta’) and a total harlot (‘total prostituo / prostituta’) respectively.

These ‘estudantes’ make up about a third of the town’s inhabitants. Their graduation ceremonies take place in May. It’s then that a localized form of ‘fado’ is sung, by male students only, and only on the steps of the old cathedral when 10pm comes around, w/ lyrics more intellectual and romantic than the genre asks for, love songs tuned to the passions and sentiments of the students, who perfume the air w/ their lamentations until dawn.

Fado ‘Ali, o lirio do scelestes vales, tendosen fim, terão a seu começo, para não mais findar, nossos amores.’ (Yonder, lily of celestial valleys, your end shall be their beginning, our loves ne’er more to perish.) — Antero de Quental

⇞ STUDENT REPUBLICS

In the mid-1950s there were eleven “republics” or student organizations, active in the university.

One of them is ‘Pra-kys-tao‘ (Here We Are), a fraternity of ten students for the mutual benefit of themselves and their always-slender budgets, and to satisfy wants such as traditional evenings of wine and shrimps in town. Membership was open, upon unanimous favorable vote, to students of any race, color, religion or political creed except, during that period, communism. In the most pratical way, the student who had been a member longest is automatically president. Using a rotation system, two students, followed by two more then two more, serve as executive officers for fifteen days. They run the republic and must explain and justify all outlays of money, and a debate on this topic may be opened at any time, all decisions being made by majority vote, and to be taken at the dinner table. Freshmen may not vote on money matters but on anything else. This particular republic had only 13 electric light bulbs for 15 rooms, incl. the dining room, kitchen and hallway. Pin-up girls papered over every wallspace, the harem of the eye (‘Harem do Olho’). One wall had graffiti: “Artillery Exported to Pra-kys-tao for the Protection of the Marshall Plan.”

Certain campus traditions take place to mark the academic seasons, involving parades through the city, each rife w/ its own occult rituals. The noisy Latada - Festa das Latas (celebration of end of class), and the older Queima das Fitas (burning of the ribbons), which goes on for eight days, involving light blue ribbons for the Sciences, dark blue for Letters, yellow for Medicine and purple for Pharmacy.

⇞ CITY OF CULTURE

The original footprint of Coimbra has spilled downhil, and locals distinguish between the older Upper Town and the Lower Town.

The area bordering the Modego River is Cicade Baixa, downtown, where commerce happens amid Romanesque, early Baroque, Rococco, and Gothic structures, sporting Moorish shadows and sucumbing to the nautical notions of the Manueline style.

A Portuguese queen is buried downtown, in a silver tomb housed in the convent of ‘Santa Ciara-a-Nova’. The Fountain of Life, waiting for you since the 14th century, is behind this church.

Unto the 1920s Coimbra was all but inaccessible by road to travellers, not to mention damp beds and dangerous foods. Sacheverell Sitwell visited in the 1950s:

“… At Coimbra not only has there been wanton and appalling destruction of what was old and beautiful, but new University buildings have been erected which are really shaming in their blatant ugliness. The sculptures, particularly, are of an insulting hideousness. … Not that there is anything in the least Portuguese about these abominable buildings of Coimbra. But it is sad, too, because, Coimbra being the university town of Portugal, so many Portuguese retain memories of Coimbra and an affection for it all through their lives, and those memories will now forever more be tinged and coloured by the ugly buildings. There is no possible excuse for hideousness upon this scale; but it might, at least, be practised elsewhere and not in Coimbra.”

▶ Luis de Camões

⇞ The Lusiads

Arguably the most famous student of the University of Coimbra is Luis de Camões, who (might have been) born in Coimbra in 1524 but known to have passed age 56 in Lisbon. His fame is partly based on supreme mastery of the Portuguese language and is its lyric poet, and his most famous work is a tour de force recounting the tragedy of Indes de Castro of Spain and her love Prince Pedro of Portugal, and her murder by jealous courtiers. She was killed by a fountain in the Garden of Tears (‘Quinta das Lagrimas’) in the convent of Santa Clara; where pond lilies are have been known to flower red.

A stone slab by the fountain bears the following verse by Luís Vaz de Camões (Lusiads, Ill, 135), here in a translation by Lord Byron:

Lusiads of Cameos — Tomb of Luis de Camões in Lisbon.

Mondego’s Daughter-Nymphs the death obscure Wept many a year, with wails of woe exceeding; And for long memory changed to fountain pure, The floods of grief their eyes were ever feeding; The name they gave it, which doth still endure, Revived Ignez, whose murdered love lies bleeding. See yon fresh fountain flowing ‘mid the flowers, Tears are its water, and its name ‘Amores.’

▶ Manueline Style

⇞ Maritime Motif

Flush w/ wealth from the Spice Trade, Portugal experienced a brief period where money became as abundant as sea water, and lavished it on an indigenous artform.

The discoveries brought back by the sea voyages Pedro Alvares Cabral and Vasco da Gama aroused the already composite Portuguese style, toying w/ Flemish, Italian and Late Gothic elements. The newly rich gathered the bounties of the sea trade and repurposed them an architectural vocabulary in churches, monasteries, palaces and castles, and a maritime motif applied to furniture, sculpture and painting. The style was given a name in 1842 by the Viscount Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen, in his description of the Jeronimos Monastery. The characteristics of this Manueline style, named for King Manuel I (1495-1521), resulted in ornate portals, bevelled crenellations, conical pinnacles, and eight-sided capitals.

There were semicircular arches on doors and windows, columns of carved rope, and a wanton disregard for symmetry. There were symbols of Christianity and latter-day Templars, botanical flourishes, artifacts found on ships, all garlanded by Islamic filigree work and Moorish traceries.

Manueline Style — Davy Jones’s locker Detail of the Triton Gate, standing guard in Sintra. Nautical wonders like seaweed and barnacles added to the dense ornamentation. More.

▶ Aeminium

⇞ Roman Footprint

Machado de Castro Museum — The most important remains in Coimbra is an underground gallery of arches that once supported the Roman forum, and brimming w/ Visigothic artifacts, the **Cryptoporticus da Anemium**. For protection a tower, the Montemor, was built closer to the sea, allowing guarded access to estuary of the oxbow shape of the Mondego river, as well as nearby vineyards.

▶ Sources

[ 1 ] [1] California and the Portuguese by Celestino Soares, SPN Books Lisbon 1939. [2] Eyewitness Travel Guides: Portugal w/ Madeira & the Azores, DK Publishing Inc London 1997. [3] The Finest Castles in Portugal, text Julio Gil, photographs Augusto Cabrita, Verbo 1996. [4] A History of Spain and Portugal in two volumes, by Stanley G. Payne, The University of Wisconsin Press 1973. [5] The Nagel Travel Guide Series : Portugal, Nagel Publishers Geneva 1956. [6] A New History of Portugal 2nd Edition by H.V. Livermore, Cambridge University Press London 1976. [7] Portugal and Madeira by Sacheverell Sitwell, William Clowes and Sons London 1954. [8] Portugal the Pathfinder: Journeys from the Medieval toward the Modern World 1300-ca.1600, edited by George D. Winius, The Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies Ltd, The University of Wisconsin Press 1995. [9] Port and the Douro by Richard Mayson, Faber and Faber London 1999. [10] Portuguese Concise Dictionary 2nd edition, Harper Collins 2001. [11] Spain and Protugal, Handbook for Travellers by Karl Bedacker, fourth edition. Leipsic: Karl Baedeker, publisher. London: George Allen & Unwini Ltd., New York: Chas. Scribner’s Sons. 1913. [12] A Traveller's History of Portugal by Ian C. Robertson, line drawings by John Hoste, Interlink Books New York 2002. [13] World Food by Lynelle Scott-Aitken and Clara Vitorino, Lonely Planet 2002. CREDITS Culled from reporting by Tim Pozzi,the University of Coimbra website, the Internet, and guide books. Photographers incl., among others, Francisco Antunes.

▶ Street names

[ 2 ] Some Coimbra street names include: Rua Anthero de Quental, Alameda do Jardin Bot, Estrada da Beira, Rua do Loureira, Couraca dos Apostolos, Rua das Padeiras, Rua das Solas, Rua da Moeda, Rua da Louca, Rua do Corvo, Rua do Joao Cabreira, Rua da Sophia, Rua de Mont’arroio, Rua do Corpo de Deus, Rua do Borralho, Rua dos Estudos, Rua Lourenco d’Almcida, Rua Venancio Rodriguez, Rua Garrett, Rua do Thomar, Rua de Alex Herculano, Rua Ferreira Borges, Rua do Visconde da Luz, Rua da Sophia, Rua de Castro Mattoso, Rua de Oliveira Mattos.

▶ Street names

[ 3 ] Complete list of 2013 UNESCO World Heritage Sites’ New Inscribed Properties.

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WHAT HE SAID

Dr Mabuse

HISTORIC CENTER RECIPIENT

Agadez, Niger

Starting point for a journey across the Sahara, taking in “ports of call” to Timbuktu, Ghat, then Ghadames, and finally Tripoli, on the shores of the Mediterranean.

Seat of a Tuareg sultanate which was established in 1449. Occupied by the French since the early 1900s, and known of rebellion ever since. The Tuareg people are the original Canaanites from the Bible, inhabiting ancient Palestine and Phoenicia, and its lingua franca is the Hausa language, a subgroup of the Chadic languages group, and therefore a part of the Afroasiatic language family.

Started in the 1400s to serve as the south gateway into the Sahara, the Historic Centre of Agadez in Niger is now a Historic Center Recipient and a 2013 UNESCO World Heritage Site. This desert town was founded to become a center of commerce for the trans-Saharan trade, and by the 1500s the populace was 30,000. 2013 UNESCO Historic Center Recipient In 1976, area mining for uranium allowed the local economy to established a school, the Ecole des Mines de l'Air.

The 2011 census counted a total of 124,324 people living in Agadez and the European language they speak is French. There is an international airport named after a Tuareg leader, Mano Dayak, but due to the ongoing Tuareg rebellion in the region, Agadez is unsafe for travel.

2013 UNESCO Historic Center Recipient — A mosque made of clay, built in 1515, still stands. It was restored in 1814 and is the world’s tallest mud minaret, at 88.5-ft. Chinese scroll depicting the first camel to enter Cathay.

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PIXELS

PALIMPSEST

Climate Strike 2019

Students walk out of class in worldwide protest.

Francisco Mattos

Mural Day 2016

Sixteen panels from an anonymous wall mural, on Mission and 18th in San Francisco, May 1.

Francisco Mattos

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DEAD DRAMA

|…| A few of the inhabitants in the Sacramento Historic City Cemetery are regularly remembered by Eric Bradner's Philosopher Pickett, poking around written records while in costume and bringing to life this and that. |…| The California Gold Rush era produced pioneers and millionaires, and many are buried here, commanding a thoughtful placement marrying the kleiglight w/ the kabala – the cemetery is located on Broadway with the main gate facing 10th Street, a one-way boulevard returning visitors back to the land of the living and passing by the state capital, its mall and offical museum, to where county jail and train tracks happen to await. |…| Established in 1849 to be the final resting place for early Californians, including from state government, the military, the Civil War, and various fraternities. Buried are some 600 victims of the mid-19th century Cholera Epidemic, the heiress Aimée Crocker is here, as is the son of Alexander Hamilton, and Donner Party survivor Elisabeth Philippine Zimmerman. |…| The oldest cemetery in the capital of California is an outdoor museum - built as a Victorian garden w/ low brick walls creating flower beds and resting places. Sacramento Historic City Cemetery closes everyday at 5pm.

☛ | The doctor who succumbed to disease

Feeling faint and calling out for a glass of warm water, the newest legislator to the state Capitol did not make it through his first speech on that day in 1923. Instead, this transplant to California, a physician from Oregon, succumbed to influenza, a disease he had experience treating, a disease he was exposed to as early as 1918, and was dead before he hit the floor. Dr. Gustave H. Douglas – druggist/politician, State Plot d.3-27-1923 age 59.

▶ Related cemetery tour

ODDER THAN THE ODD FELLOWS - An Eric Bradner Tour [06-06-2015] The Odd Fellows and the Masons are the big two fraternal organizations, but there were many other less well-known groups of do-gooders, incl. the Redmen, the Druids, the Woodmen of the World, the Knights of Pythias and the Ancient Order of United Workmen.

☝| The shoemaker who committed suicide

Ending his life by jumping into Sacramento River at the end of R Street, this accused wife-beater was a local shoe-maker whose last name was Hummel. He left sucide notes to his wife and to his brother-in-law; his body never was recovered.

▶ Related cemetery tour

HABERDASHERS - an Eric Bradner Tour [date?] From hatters to milliners to tailors and bootmakers, Sacramento pioneers had you covered from head to toe. Without skirting the issue, we'll stitch together some ripping good yarns about these early clothiers, and learn about Victorian fashions (and fashion victims!).

♻ Regale Philosopher Pickett w/ your own tale from the tombs.

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| Top |

-| January 2020 |-

WALT WHITMAN

Shapes of democracy total, result of centuries, shapes ever projecting other shapes, shapes of turbulent manly cities, shapes of the friends and home-givers of the whole earth, shapes bracing the earth and braced with the whole earth.	In some unused lagoon, some nameless bay, on sluggish, lonesome waters, anchor’d near the shore, an old, dismasted, gray and batter’d ship, disabled, done. After free voyages to all the seas of earth, haul’d up at last and hawser’d tight, lies rusting, mouldering.

CABLE CAR

Cable Car

THE FINISHED PROTOTYPE, w/ a driver’s cab at either end, appeared on the California Street Line in 1899.

How San Francisco’s cable car came to be built will require more than one stop on its telling, wending this way and that, and passing landmarks of wealth and waste. Before the cable car, the task for getting to Nob Hill was relegated to paying for a ride in a horse-drawn cab. On October 11, 1869, this necessary yet wanton civic cruelty of using animals as beasts of burden changed for the good. The San Francisco Chronicle had a front page article on the death of a wretch. It took place when a horse finally lost it on California Street and, throttled by the harness, dragged down to its death.	When Andrew Hallidie read this, he paused and paced his inner office, reflecting on what if anything he could learn from this. Hallidie was already prosperous, although not yet famous. He had inherited a company from his father. The senior Hallidie had invented and then patented a steel cable: strands of wire lined up and braided into a rope that was super strong, and proved indispensable in the gold fields and gold mines.	Hallidie then took on someone's failed enterprise: build a conveyance capable of conquering the city‘s hills, relying on his cable rope. He bought the Clay Street Hill Railway Company and by May 1873 had built tracks and a cable assembly up Clay from Kearny to Leavenworth, a punishing climb of seven blocks. Early on August 2 1873, a prototype tram was in place and, lantern-lit, Hallidie stepped on board. Activating a grip lever onto to a moving cable, he went up to Nob Hill on that peril-prone maiden voyage. Few were awake to witness a milestone, yet by opening day on September 1, the Clay Street Line was in demand. In 1880 over one million tickets were sold.

How San Francisco’s cable car came to be built will require more than one stop on its telling, wending this way and that, and passing landmarks of wealth and waste.

The original cable cars were tiny trams powered by a patented grip that alternately holds, and releases, a continuously moving steel cable running under the street. Power is supplied by huge drums housed at nearby power stations along the route. The tram operator is stationed forward of the tram. When he employs the grip to grab and hold on to the moving cable, the tram also moves. When the grip is released, the tram stops moving, even on a hill, using an invention of gear technology preventing slippage. Each car is manned by two operators: the tram operator or gripman, and the conductor.	Andrew Smith Hallidie was born on March 17, 1837 in London, to Andrew Smith (b.1798 Dumfrieshire, Scotland) and Julia Johnstone (Lockerbie). He died April 24 1900, in San Francisco. Six years later his cable car system would survive the 1906 Earthquake.	Cable cars then sprouted worldwide, from New York to Hong Kong. Naples crowned its opening by commissioning a song, “Funiculi, Funicula.” In 1917, Andrew Smith Hallidie had an innovative building named for him. The Hallidie Building (by Willis Polk) has a facade rising eight stories and sheathed in glass.

The original cable cars were tiny trams powered by a patented grip that alternately holds, and releases, a continuously moving steel cable running under the street. Power is supplied by huge drums housed at nearby power stations along the route.

When news of the discovery of gold in California traveled back east, the brawn and brains of a young nation came westward, where notions of Freedom waltzed hand-in-glove w/ greatness as well as greed. Accordingly, access from the gold mines to San Francisco were surveyed. Roads, bridges and tracks were built wherever gold was found, w/ waystations established for respite and recreation. The mining methods these men brought w/ them quickly evolved to meet the challenges posed by the Comstock Lode and its tributaries.	The Industrial Revolution created tools used in scientific precisioning, allowing innovated models to be tested and profitably manufactured. Among these ideas was the ingenuous “square set” created by German engineer Philipp Deidesheimer. Grey Brechin picks up the umbilical cord: The square set introduced methods of construction. Deidesheimer's gift went from constructing safety zones to conduct the backbreaking business of mining into other uses, including the ability of a grid of steel beams and columns to allow support for more height.	The term skyscraper came into usage in the 1880s, when enough tall buildings were built in the United States (15), to warrant a designation. These new structures usually came w/ modern plumbing, electrical outlets in every room, a telephone line in every unit, central heating, and elevator(s). “ …In the 1990s, NASA took a fresh look at the steel cable in light of a super material, carbon nanotube. This new field of nanotechnology promises a material that is uber-strong, light and flexible. Space Elevators: An Advanced Earth-Space Infrastructure for the New Millenium is the feasibility paper of this new science,to erect a track running on cables, from here to the Moon, a journey of some 62,000 miles.”

When news of the discovery of gold in California traveled back east, the brawn and brains of a young nation came westward, where notions of Freedom waltzed hand-in-glove w/ greatness as well as greed.

| back |

WHAT HE SAID

Dr Mabuse

UNIVERSITY TOWN

⇞ CITY OF STUDENTS

Coimbra, a city in northern Portugal, is the see of a bishop, the capital of a province, and a center of learning. In 2013, UNESCO designated the University of Comibra as a University Town Recipient for its World Heritage Sites, “… an integrated university city, w/ a specific urban typology, as well as its own ceremonial and cultural traditions.” The property consists of two areas: a hilltop complex of buildings, University Hill , and a series of scattered structures which all played a part in the university’s history. There is a 12th century Augustinian monastery which was the first school, and the original library.	The Inquisition swept into Portugal in 1567, and Coimbra was one of the three local centers tasked to conduct it. Outlasting these strictures, the university bounced back, w/ strengthened statutes, a reorganized syllabus of studies, greater emphasis on education in the vernacular, and the re-establishment of freedom of research. The old castle on the hilltop was finally pulled down to make way for new buildings. A seal was then struck, a praxe, consisting of a spoon (symbol of punishment), scissors (symbol of unruliness), and a stick (symbol of self-defense).

Coimbra, a city in northern Portugal, is the see of a bishop, the capital of a province, and a center of learning. In 2013, UNESCO designated the University of Comibra as a University Town Recipient for its World Heritage Sites, “… an integrated university city, w/ a specific urban typology, as well as its own ceremonial and cultural traditions.”

University of Coimbra

Founded in 1290, the University of Coimbra is the second oldest continuous institution of higher learning in Europe (the University of Paris is older), and the first university town in the world. In this northern Portuguese city, a world treasure become sited inside a national treasure, the school moved into a former royal palace on the summit of the hill, and grew to become a gathering spot for academics, writers, artists, who nicknamed this the Lusitanian Athens, ‘Lusa Atenas’.

⇞ CAMPUS

An early champion of the new science of circumnavigation, an observatory was built to make spatial sense of the stars. Investitures and major events take place in the ‘Sala Grande dos Actos,‘ below portraits of kings and queens. A cathedral, already there when the university arrived, was gifted by Jesuits. The throne room is now used for PhD candidate examinations, and nothing else. The four rooms of the ‘Museu de Arte Sacra’ contain, among holy habits and chalices, books of early sacred music. There is a museum of natural history. A colonnaded walkway by the grand patio was added in the 18th century, the ‘Via Latina.’ The campus chapel, ‘Capela de Sao Miguel’, means that no student need run downhill to another one. A Botanical Garden blossomed in 1772, that delightful Victorian experiment of Eden on earth, sprouting wherever colonialism circled. Patio das Escolas Main gathering spot on campus, w/ its unparalleled vista view, the Great Courtyard, makes of the patio paving a virtual flying carpet, attitude mostly due to altitude.	The Bell Tower allows for vista views under cramped quarters, and can be seen from most anywhere in the city. The best known of its three bells is the goat (‘a cabra’), summoning generations to their studies since 1733. There are five faculties (‘theologia’, ‘direito’, ‘medicina’, ‘mathematica’, ‘philosophia’) w/ disciplines in judicial and European court systems, interdisciplinary nuclear science, and the arts. (The university had begun by teaching law, rhetoric, mathematics, theology, medicine, grammar and Greek.) The teaching staff consisits of some 70 professors and lecturers. Semester is from autumn to the start of summer, when two months of exams take place. The ordinary degree resulting in the title ‘licenciado’ lasts five years. The degree of ‘doutor’ takes another year and another examination. Medical students study eight years. The university has a digital repositorium inside a tech park involved in research and incubation. There is a repository for the project April 25, documenting the toppling of a dictatorship. Auxiliaries of the city-wide university system take on citizen practices such as sports, theater, and botany and preservation; there are several kindergartens and nurseries under its wing.

An early champion of the new science of circumnavigation, an observatory was built to make spatial sense of the stars.

⇞ LIBRARY

When the university outgrew the original city library, a second one was built in the 18th century, on University Hill, the ‘Biblioteca Joanina’, the oldest university library in continuous use in the world, and housed in three large and resplendent Baroque rooms w/ painted ceilings. The first room has a light green palette, the second a darker green, and the third room has a “… shade like that of orange Niger leather”; rich in gilt and exotic wood, lined w/ 300,000 volumes in galleries runing around the walls, incl. arguably the most valuable collection of Bibles in the world.	Main library on campus also acts as a zoo: in the wings there live a colony of bats, eating the grubs that eat its pages. There are unpublished manuscripts of Domenico Scarlatti, thought lost but rediscovered in the 20th century, because they were incorrectly catalogued. By the front door, a passageway can take one down to the river, the ‘Palacios Confusos’, by a series of steps posing as alleys, past houses of different styles and years.

When the university outgrew the original city library, a second one was built in the 18th century, on University Hill, the ‘Biblioteca Joanina’, the oldest university library in continuous use in the world, and housed in three large and resplendent Baroque rooms w/ painted ceilings.

⇞ STUDENT BODY

The student body numbers about 25,000, and the dress code is a black Prince Albert coat, worn w/ black trousers, black cape batina, black dress tie; generally students go bareheaded. A military hospital happens to be located nearby, because. Freshmen may not be on the street after the bell has rung at 6pm, on penalty of being shaved bald, if caught. Another form of punishment is to measure the long bridge over the Modego w/ a match, and it must be done w/ meticulous accuracy. Even a good and sinless freshman must be prepared to run errands whenever required to do so by a sophomore or junior, but he may be “protected,” and the errand countermanded, by a friendly senior (‘quartanista’). In turn a sophomore and a junior are known as a semi-harlot (‘mejo prostituo / prostituta’) and a total harlot (‘total prostituo / prostituta’) respectively.	These ‘estudantes’ make up about a third of the town’s inhabitants. Their graduation ceremonies take place in May. It’s then that a localized form of ‘fado’ is sung, by male students only, and only on the steps of the old cathedral when 10pm comes around, w/ lyrics more intellectual and romantic than the genre asks for, love songs tuned to the passions and sentiments of the students, who perfume the air w/ their lamentations until dawn. Fado ‘Ali, o lirio do scelestes vales, tendosen fim, terão a seu começo, para não mais findar, nossos amores.’ (Yonder, lily of celestial valleys, your end shall be their beginning, our loves ne’er more to perish.) — Antero de Quental

The student body numbers about 25,000, and the dress code is a black Prince Albert coat, worn w/ black trousers, black cape batina, black dress tie; generally students go bareheaded. A military hospital happens to be located nearby, because.

⇞ STUDENT REPUBLICS

In the mid-1950s there were eleven “republics” or student organizations, active in the university. One of them is ‘Pra-kys-tao‘ (Here We Are), a fraternity of ten students for the mutual benefit of themselves and their always-slender budgets, and to satisfy wants such as traditional evenings of wine and shrimps in town. Membership was open, upon unanimous favorable vote, to students of any race, color, religion or political creed except, during that period, communism. In the most pratical way, the student who had been a member longest is automatically president. Using a rotation system, two students, followed by two more then two more, serve as executive officers for fifteen days. They run the republic and must explain and justify all outlays of money, and a debate on this topic may be opened at any time, all decisions being made by majority vote, and to be taken at the dinner table. Freshmen may not vote on money matters but on anything else. This particular republic had only 13 electric light bulbs for 15 rooms, incl. the dining room, kitchen and hallway. Pin-up girls papered over every wallspace, the harem of the eye (‘Harem do Olho’). One wall had graffiti: “Artillery Exported to Pra-kys-tao for the Protection of the Marshall Plan.”	Certain campus traditions take place to mark the academic seasons, involving parades through the city, each rife w/ its own occult rituals. The noisy Latada - Festa das Latas (celebration of end of class), and the older Queima das Fitas (burning of the ribbons), which goes on for eight days, involving light blue ribbons for the Sciences, dark blue for Letters, yellow for Medicine and purple for Pharmacy. Rua de Quebra-Costas Arguably the steepest route to the academic world in the world, aka Backbreak Street.

In the mid-1950s there were eleven “republics” or student organizations, active in the university.

⇞ CITY OF CULTURE

The original footprint of Coimbra has spilled downhil, and locals distinguish between the older Upper Town and the Lower Town. Coimbra Upper Town surrounded by Lower Town and the banks of the Mondego. The area bordering the Modego River is Cicade Baixa, downtown, where commerce happens amid Romanesque, early Baroque, Rococco, and Gothic structures, sporting Moorish shadows and sucumbing to the nautical notions of the Manueline style. A Portuguese queen is buried downtown, in a silver tomb housed in the convent of ‘Santa Ciara-a-Nova’. The Fountain of Life, waiting for you since the 14th century, is behind this church.	Unto the 1920s Coimbra was all but inaccessible by road to travellers, not to mention damp beds and dangerous foods. Sacheverell Sitwell visited in the 1950s: “… At Coimbra not only has there been wanton and appalling destruction of what was old and beautiful, but new University buildings have been erected which are really shaming in their blatant ugliness. The sculptures, particularly, are of an insulting hideousness. … Not that there is anything in the least Portuguese about these abominable buildings of Coimbra. But it is sad, too, because, Coimbra being the university town of Portugal, so many Portuguese retain memories of Coimbra and an affection for it all through their lives, and those memories will now forever more be tinged and coloured by the ugly buildings. There is no possible excuse for hideousness upon this scale; but it might, at least, be practised elsewhere and not in Coimbra.”

The original footprint of Coimbra has spilled downhil, and locals distinguish between the older Upper Town and the Lower Town.

Luis de Camões

⇞ The Lusiads

Arguably the most famous student of the University of Coimbra is Luis de Camões, who (might have been) born in Coimbra in 1524 but known to have passed age 56 in Lisbon. His fame is partly based on supreme mastery of the Portuguese language and is its lyric poet, and his most famous work is a tour de force recounting the tragedy of Indes de Castro of Spain and her love Prince Pedro of Portugal, and her murder by jealous courtiers. She was killed by a fountain in the Garden of Tears (‘Quinta das Lagrimas’) in the convent of Santa Clara; where pond lilies are have been known to flower red. A stone slab by the fountain bears the following verse by Luís Vaz de Camões (Lusiads, Ill, 135), here in a translation by Lord Byron:	Tomb of Luis de Camões in Lisbon. Mondego’s Daughter-Nymphs the death obscure Wept many a year, with wails of woe exceeding; And for long memory changed to fountain pure, The floods of grief their eyes were ever feeding; The name they gave it, which doth still endure, Revived Ignez, whose murdered love lies bleeding. See yon fresh fountain flowing ‘mid the flowers, Tears are its water, and its name ‘Amores.’

Manueline Style

⇞ Maritime Motif

Flush w/ wealth from the Spice Trade, Portugal experienced a brief period where money became as abundant as sea water, and lavished it on an indigenous artform. The discoveries brought back by the sea voyages Pedro Alvares Cabral and Vasco da Gama aroused the already composite Portuguese style, toying w/ Flemish, Italian and Late Gothic elements. The newly rich gathered the bounties of the sea trade and repurposed them an architectural vocabulary in churches, monasteries, palaces and castles, and a maritime motif applied to furniture, sculpture and painting. The style was given a name in 1842 by the Viscount Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen, in his description of the Jeronimos Monastery. The characteristics of this Manueline style, named for King Manuel I (1495-1521), resulted in ornate portals, bevelled crenellations, conical pinnacles, and eight-sided capitals.	There were semicircular arches on doors and windows, columns of carved rope, and a wanton disregard for symmetry. There were symbols of Christianity and latter-day Templars, botanical flourishes, artifacts found on ships, all garlanded by Islamic filigree work and Moorish traceries. Davy Jones’s locker Detail of the Triton Gate, standing guard in Sintra. Nautical wonders like seaweed and barnacles added to the dense ornamentation. More.

Flush w/ wealth from the Spice Trade, Portugal experienced a brief period where money became as abundant as sea water, and lavished it on an indigenous artform.

Aeminium

⇞ Roman Footprint

The most important remains in Coimbra is an underground gallery of arches that once supported the Roman forum, and brimming w/ Visigothic artifacts, the Cryptoporticus da Anemium. For protection a tower, the Montemor, was built closer to the sea, allowing guarded access to estuary of the oxbow shape of the Mondego river, as well as nearby vineyards.	The original footprint of the city of Coimbra can be seen in map, top right. When Gaius Sevius Lupus was sent from Rome, he followed the common cruciform rule of Roman towns and cities, locating the cardo maximus where it crosses the decumanus maximus, and where this cruciform intersected he built the forum. This was a outpost fort, on the spurs of a hilly range, the Serra de Lavrao. An aqueduct was a standard feature, and it ruins can still be found.

Sources

Street names

[ 3 ] Complete list of 2013 UNESCO World Heritage Sites’ New Inscribed Properties.

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WHAT HE SAID

Nicolas Roeg

HISTORIC CENTER RECIPIENT

Agadez, Niger

Starting point for a journey across the Sahara, taking in “ports of call” to Timbuktu, Ghat, then Ghadames, and finally Tripoli, on the shores of the Mediterranean. Seat of a Tuareg sultanate which was established in 1449. Occupied by the French since the early 1900s, and known of rebellion ever since. The Tuareg people are the original Canaanites from the Bible, inhabiting ancient Palestine and Phoenicia, and its lingua franca is the Hausa language, a subgroup of the Chadic languages group, and therefore a part of the Afroasiatic language family.	Started in the 1400s to serve as the south gateway into the Sahara, the Historic Centre of Agadez in Niger is now a Historic Center Recipient and a 2013 UNESCO World Heritage Site. This desert town was founded to become a center of commerce for the trans-Saharan trade, and by the 1500s the populace was 30,000. In 1976, area mining for uranium allowed the local economy to established a school, the Ecole des Mines de l'Air.	The 2011 census counted a total of 124,324 people living in Agadez and the European language they speak is French. There is an international airport named after a Tuareg leader, Mano Dayak, but due to the ongoing Tuareg rebellion in the region, Agadez is unsafe for travel. A mosque made of clay, built in 1515, still stands. It was restored in 1814 and is the world’s tallest mud minaret, at 88.5-ft. Chinese scroll depicting the first camel to enter Cathay.

Starting point for a journey across the Sahara, taking in “ports of call” to Timbuktu, Ghat, then Ghadames, and finally Tripoli, on the shores of the Mediterranean.

| back |

TYPOGRAPHY

de Vera

-| January 2020 |-

♣ | Rey Ray

♣ | Reece Metzger

♠ | Nathan Cordero

♣ | Eric Bradner

♠ | Lori Schafer Paintings

♦ | Judy Sisneros

♠ | Laszlo Zauberer

♥ | Angela Oates+ ♦ | Isabel Melo

Ghosts of Route 66 ||||||

♦ | Ruth Asawa

♠ | Carina Mui

♥ | Kota Ezawa

♥ | Randy Colosky

♠ | Ruth Guston

♦ | Kevin Leung

♣|Seward Johnson

♦ | Satyajit Ray

— | Forest Hill

✈¦ The Mission

Old-world film and independent cinema experience.

♫| Mission Bay

—| Alcatraz

—| Angel Island

— | Nihonmachi

—| Union Square

— | Rincon Hill

—| Mount Tamalpais

—| SoMA

How San Francisco’s cable car came to be built will require more than one stop on its telling, wending this way and that, and passing landmarks of wealth and waste.

The original cable cars were tiny trams powered by a patented grip that alternately holds, and releases, a continuously moving steel cable running under the street. Power is supplied by huge drums housed at nearby power stations along the route.

When news of the discovery of gold in California traveled back east, the brawn and brains of a young nation came westward, where notions of Freedom waltzed hand-in-glove w/ greatness as well as greed.

♣ | Rey Ray

♣ | Reece Metzger

♠ | Nathan Cordero

♣ | Eric Bradner

♠ | Lori Schafer Paintings

♦ | Judy Sisneros

♠ | Laszlo Zauberer

♥ | Angela Oates+ ♦ | Isabel Melo

Ghosts of Route 66 ||||||

♦ | Ruth Asawa

♠ | Carina Mui

♥ | Kota Ezawa

♥ | Randy Colosky

♠ | Ruth Guston

♦ | Kevin Leung

♣|Seward Johnson

♦ | Satyajit Ray

— | Forest Hill

✈¦ The Mission

Old-world film and independent cinema experience.

♫| Mission Bay

—| Alcatraz

—| Angel Island

— | Nihonmachi

—| Union Square

— | Rincon Hill

—| Mount Tamalpais

—| SoMA

—|1905

—|1965

—|1956

—|1920

—|2016

—|1976

—|1977

-¦ January 2020 ¦-

How San Francisco’s cable car came to be built will require more than one stop on its telling, wending this way and that, and passing landmarks of wealth and waste.

The original cable cars were tiny trams powered by a patented grip that alternately holds, and releases, a continuously moving steel cable running under the street. Power is supplied by huge drums housed at nearby power stations along the route.

When news of the discovery of gold in California traveled back east, the brawn and brains of a young nation came westward, where notions of Freedom waltzed hand-in-glove w/ greatness as well as greed.

University of Coimbra

An early champion of the new science of circumnavigation, an observatory was built to make spatial sense of the stars.

When the university outgrew the original city library, a second one was built in the 18th century, on University Hill, the ‘Biblioteca Joanina’, the oldest university library in continuous use in the world, and housed in three large and resplendent Baroque rooms w/ painted ceilings.

The student body numbers about 25,000, and the dress code is a black Prince Albert coat, worn w/ black trousers, black cape batina, black dress tie; generally students go bareheaded. A military hospital happens to be located nearby, because.

In the mid-1950s there were eleven “republics” or student organizations, active in the university.

The original footprint of Coimbra has spilled downhil, and locals distinguish between the older Upper Town and the Lower Town.

Flush w/ wealth from the Spice Trade, Portugal experienced a brief period where money became as abundant as sea water, and lavished it on an indigenous artform.

Agadez, Niger

Starting point for a journey across the Sahara, taking in “ports of call” to Timbuktu, Ghat, then Ghadames, and finally Tripoli, on the shores of the Mediterranean.

♠ | Lori Schafer

Paintings

♥ | Angela Oates
+
♦ | Isabel Melo

Ghosts of Route 66
||||||

♠ | Lori Schafer

Paintings

♥ | Angela Oates
+
♦ | Isabel Melo

Ghosts of Route 66
||||||

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