Film Screening: Urbanized by Gary Hustwit: Monday night at the Contemporary Arts Center in downtown Cincinnati.

The King Street Lots in Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York: the history of a community garden in Brooklyn.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Heller House Hits the Market Today: only $2.5 million for a well-maintained 1897 beauty in Chicago.

Deciduous Lampposts by luzinterruptus: an amazing temporary public art installation in Madrid.

SOM Chicago Wins Competition to Design the Wujiang Greenland Tower: insanity featuring a 30-story tall operable window.

Brokelandia — Did You Eat It?: for fans of Portlandia, this definitely counts as meta humor, but it’s well done.

Here’s a fun new game: I show you something I’ve recently come across, and you try to tell me what it is. What exactly is “coming soon” to the former Fashion ¢ents & Plus at 6th and Race in downtown Cincinnati? Anyone know?

& Plus:

This ghost sign is located on Bedford Ave., just a hop and a skip from Roebling Playground named after your friend and mine, the civil engineer John A. Roebling, whose Brooklyn Bridge is modeled after his earlier Roebling Bridge in Cincinnati. But what exactly does the ghost sign say?

Inspired by the work of M.C. Escher, Amsterdam-based paper artist Ingrid Siliakus creates highly complex buildings and even entire cityscapes, each out of a single piece of cut and folded paper.

See more of the artist’s work on her site. Via My Modern Metropolis.

Have you noticed these directional signs in downtown Cincinnati? I’ve been seeing them for the last few months. At first, I thought this was some sort of prank: the signs are almost too official-looking with their Modern pedestrian icons, arrows and distances. So, basically these are instructions for how to use the sidewalk, right?

I couldn’t tell if the sign signified that the walking route lasts for 3 miles or begins in 3 miles. So strange… Then I saw this pair of signs at the corner of 8th and Race:

What the what? Which way do I go?

Next to Fountain Square, I finally found an answer of sorts, in the form of a larger map showing three walking routes:

So, let me get this straight. People should be getting more exercise, and walking is an easy way to do it. I certainly can’t argue with that. But three distinct walking routes? Through a small downtown business district? Which features a straightforward grid and East and West numbered streets? Is this for real?

As a graphic designer, I love to think about how important, pervasive and persuasive my field is, but this scheme is basically a Rube Goldberg machine rendered in gratuitous signage. Am I wrong?

What kind of urban environment encourages walking? For starters, you need maintained sidewalks, appropriate lighting, interesting architecture, storefront businesses, places to stop [sidewalk benches and parks] and places to get out of the elements [arcades and awnings]. You need things to walk to and also things to walk past. You also need a perception of safety, and seeing other pedestrians helps in that regard. Understanding your physical surroundings is an issue but, as I mentioned, downtown Cincinnati is easy to understand.

As someone who walks through downtown all the time, I can attest to the fact that it’s walkable regardless of this signage. It can be unpleasant, though, and these signs don’t fix that. It’s pretty obvious that Cincinnati is not a pedestrian-friendly town, even downtown. NYC is famous for its aggressive drivers, but Cincinnati’s drivers are aggressive and clueless.

I’m reminded of the “love tap” I received from an SUV backing out of a parking lot at full speed, and also of the gentleman who called me a “fucking whore” because he almost hit me while running a red light. I’ve seen drivers go half a block in the wrong direction on a one-way street as a shortcut to a parking lot. It seems like everybody runs red lights — not just regular schmucks, but school buses, cop cars, mail trucks, and Metro buses.

If I were in charge of an initiative to encourage walking, I would just send all the drivers in for a refresher course, to unlearn that a yellow light means “speed up” and a red light means “gun it.”

Charley Harper: A Birds Eye View: a retrospective of the work of Cincinnati’s own Minimal Realist, now on display at DAAP.

Lessons from the Front Lines of Social Design: written from the fringes of contemporary architectural practice.

The Commuters of 1982: Jeremiah Moss waxes nostalgic about the ghosts of Port Authority commuters past.

Questioning the Rust-Belt-Cities-as-Laboratories Concept: a counterpoint to conventional wisdom as it’s applied to Detroit, Pittsburgh and the rest of the Rust Belt.

Detroit Re-Photography: an antidote to Detroit ruin porn [if you don't have time to check out the entire slideshow, just look at this].

UR New York’s Own Art Cards: a harmless little subway prank.

Marisa Seguin was born in Vancouver, BC and now lives in Milwaukee, where she’s studying illustration. Her series of illustrated city maps is very sweet and includes Milwaukee, Vancouver, Paris, Venice, and San Francisco [I love that Milwaukee is part of a series that includes a couple of grand European cities].

Check out Seguin’s portfolio and online shop; via design work life.

In what seems to be turning into a tradition for us, we took a long-ass walk through Brooklyn on Christmas morning, exploring with relatively few other people around. Our destination was Love Letter to Brooklyn by Stephen Powers a.k.a. ESPO, which went up a few months ago on the Macy’s parking garage in downtown Brooklyn.

I had seen photos of it on the always amazing Vernacular Typography and just had to check it out for myself. Wow! The block lettering is chunky and utilitarian, its aesthetic wholly appropriate for its drab concrete surface. At first glance, it may appear to be advertising, but the language is based on conversations with area residents. It’s such a massive piece that it’s difficult to photograph more than a brief phrase at a time.

Just down the street is ICY Signs, a storefront that was the staging area during painting and also a temporary gallery named Livingston Street Market, showing selected works by Stephen Powers [ESPO] and Todd James [REAS]. Unfortunately, it’s only open by appointment:

Apparently, this exhibit contains work from Art in the Streets, which was at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles last year. The exhibit was scheduled to travel to the Brooklyn Museum, but that was cancelled. Check out more about all this at Arrested Motion.

Just a few blocks away on Fulton Mall is another Powers project. According to WNYC Culture, he hopes to obtain permission to paint more pieces like this in the neighborhood:

In case you’re not familiar, Powers is a former graffiti artist whose work has “grown up” over the years largely in the public sphere, becoming more informed by commercial lettering and conceptually more sophisticated. He is the author of the classic The Art of Getting Over: Graffiti at the Millennium. In recent years, he has spent time in Ireland as a Fulbright scholar and shown work in group and solo exhibits including the Venice Biennale. In other words, the man has street cred and art world cred.

It’s an honor to have our work included in Just Design: Socially Conscious Design for Critical Causes by Christopher Simmons of San Francisco-based MINE™, which has just been published by How Books.

Because putting together a book is such a long process, our inclusion is actually our first seed bomb iteration, before Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Martha Stewart Living, and all the other VL craziness of the past two and a half years. You can see part of the first-ever product photo in the upper left corner of this spread:

Our other project in the book is the “While You Were Out” template, which I developed a few years ago as a way to communicate with area businesses about their hours of operation. It was an attempt to show that people do live downtown and in Over-the-Rhine, and that businesses would tangibly benefit from being open longer hours and on the weekends. That no longer seems as big an issue as it did then but, if you’d like to make yourself heard using this tool, download the free PDF template.

Above on the left left are some photos of the Urban Forest Project in Times Square, NYC, initiated by Worldstudio. Below is our banner, which was part of the installation. It’s hard to believe that we created this over five years ago, back when we were still living in Boston, before Cincinnati was even within the realm of possibility for us:

But, back to the book. It also includes work by Stefan Sagmeister, Office, Frank Chimero, and my friends Arjen and Christie at Elasticbrand. Tons of good stuff and, unlike a lot of graphic design books out there, this one’s not just about the eye candy.

John Breiner was born in Austria-Hungary in 1880. He was a tailor by trade. With his wife Anna and their young daughter Frances, he came to the US in 1904, settling in Over-the-Rhine. By 1915, the family was living above Breiner’s Dry Goods, their store at 126 Elder St. between Race and Elm, shown here.

Here’s a photo of John Breiner standing in front of his store. According to his grandson, “He sold the first Victrola Record player in Cincinnati and became very wealthy before the Great Depression.”

After Frances, John and Anna had two more children: Gladys and John M. When John passed away in 1941, Anna and Gladys took over the running of the store until it closed in 1957, a year after Anna’s death.

In the words of John Breiner’s grandson, “He helped thousands of immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian empire (Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and other Eastern European nations) settle in the Over the Rhine area by speaking 7 different languages fluently. Many children were named after grandpa (John or Johann) in honor of him helping them.”

As evidenced in Gladys’ obituary below, after World War II, she also “worked with her mother, Anna Breiner, to help hundreds of immigrants from the former Austro-Hungarian empire settle in the Over-the-Rhine area [...] Mrs. Deak helped the immigrants by finding shelter, mailing packages to Europe, providing moral and financial support.”

If this ghost tile looks familiar, that’s because I initially posted my photos a month ago, in a post that was interesting but all kinds of wrong. As a result of that post, I was contacted by John Breiner’s grandson with these photos and additional information. Thank you, Internet Gods, for making that connection possible!