#@6sqft

"the map visually animates the development of this city’s infrastructure and street grid using geo-referenced road network data, historic maps, and geological surveys, highlighting the kind of organic growth spurts that drive development over time, providing an “abstract representation of urbanism.”"

— 6sqft (@6sqft) February 20, 2019

"Peggy and Mike O’Connor, who own Big Sky Balloons and Searchlights Inc., can be credited with designing the menacing looking rat. The Illinois-based company owners told Vice about the first time an organization called them seeking an inflatable rat. The idea first came from organizers Ken Lambert and Don Newton from District Council 1 of the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers. “Mike and the organizers were going back and forth, saying, ‘We need it more snarly,’” Peggy said. “They wanted a mean, ghastly looking kind of rat.” Since then, the design of Scabby remains the same."

"Hanukkah, in effect, emerged to serve almost as a counter-balance to Christmas. To many immigrants and their children, the celebration became a way of asserting Jewish identity in America. And as more and more Jews found economic success in New York, buying presents for children became a way to validate the risk they took in emigrating. Ultimately the Americanized holiday was the effort of those “who felt the complexities of American Jewish life most acutely,” as the Atlantic put it.

(via NYC may get its first landmark related to Chinese American history | 6sqft)

(via Inside Casey Rubber Stamps: How this tiny rubber stamp shop has survived for 41 years in NYC | 6sqft)

(via The Urban Lens: Capturing the final days of the Lower East Side's shuttered Streit's Matzo Factory | 6sqft)

— 6sqft (@6sqft) May 12, 2019