Joseph Ades, the man who could sell anything — but especially vegetable peelers — died Sunday at the age of 75.
Born in England but with a voice that recalled Australia, Joseph Ades was a legend in New York City. He was featured in the Daily News, Vanity Fair and other publications which he displayed next to the little table where he sold vegetable peelers. The peelers flew out of his hands like magic.
The New York Times wrote a fitting obituary of this man who appeared to be many things to many people — “The white-haired man with the British accent, the expensive European suits and shirts — the man selling the peeler. For carrots. Or potatoes.”
According to the Times, he was a regular at expensive East Side restaurants, where no one believed his answer to the “So what do you do?” question: “I sell potato peelers on the street.”
The steep decline in worldwide car sales is causing automakers to stash over-produced cars in unlikely places, like on Nissan’s UK test track above. Below, a gallery of places other automakers are stashing un-sold cars.
Since the problems of over-productions are global, we’ve put together a selection of photos of cars stacking up around the world. Sometimes they’re being stacked in strange places like the above shot from Nissan’s test track. Usually, the location is more pedestrian with recently produced cars plopped out front of the factories they’re produced at. For instance, Land Rovers and Jaguars are now being stacked up outside a plant in Liverpool. Similarly, Ford F-150s are piling high in Detroit near their assembly facility.
Foreign cars, primarily from Japanese automakers, have filled the holding lots at the Port of Long Beach, waiting to be requested by dealers. The same is occurring in lots and ports in Valencia, Spain and central Britain.
Still, the best use of space has to go to Nissan for using the test track outside of their Sunderland plant in England. The sight of all those Nissan Micras lined up three-wide around the banks of the big turns and in the infield is both strange and kind of sad. It looks as though they’ve left enough room around the edge to still drive but doing so at high speed would probably be fairly discomforting. Thanks to Adil for the tip!
The April, 1957 issue of Mechanix Illustrated predicted that New York’s slum children would escape “gang wars, fiercely fought with knives and zip-guns” by moving to high rooftop baseball diamonds:
There, a few yards from the tenements where they live, on their very roofs, in fact, is a regulation-size baseball diamond with real springy turf! But the kids aren’t interested just now—they played ball all afternoon. Instead, they enter the locker room and in a few minutes are cavorting noisily in a big, broad and very cool swimming pool. Afterwards, they troop onto the ball field, where chairs have been set up, and watch a movie under the stars.
What’s it all about? “This magic land for kids doesn’t exist in my city,” you say. No, it doesn’t—yet!
But it darn well could! It could exist in your town and in hundreds of other communities throughout the nation. Every city could construct huge, all-encompassing playgrounds and recreation centers, using the enormous, readily available space now going completely to waste on the rooftops of their congested areas!
New York magazine, the bible of an entire class of affluent aspirationals, has already cut its masthead; now, it’s instituting widespread pay cuts. In the “All New”economy, its audience is fading away.
This is more than just the average, economic meltdown-induced spate of magazine cutbacks. Because New York magazine lives in its own, aspirational economy. Its readers are upwardly mobile, upper-middle class city types who feel like they could make it over the hump into official “Rich” territory if they could jussssst furnish their apartment with the proper designer doorknobs and boutique comforters and dine at the proper, overpriced new foodie establishments and occasionally foray into Bushwick for an avante-garde art show which would make for a scintillating story at their next dinner party, populated by others like them, who they hope to make jealous, thereby spurring an ever-escalating cycle of tasteful capitalist one-upmanship… [via Gawker]
Issue03.com is the personal meme of Sung H. Chang - GCD at Ogilvy & Mather worldwide, designer, architect, gadget-obsessed, hacker, foodie, father and New Yorker. This site represents all of these interests.
