Douglas DC-8 Interiors

I didn't fly often during the 1960s -- only 11 times by jetliner, the rest being military aircraft. Of those eleven flights, eight were on United Airlines Douglas DC-8s.

That was in the days when the U.S. government strongly regulated the airline industry -- routes for airlines were largely fixed in place, fares were high, and airlines had to compete mostly in terms of passenger service. Passengers, in turn, usually dressed up when on an airplane journey, men wearing jackets and neckties.

As can be seen below, Douglas DC-8 airlines had large windows, one per row of seats, giving passengers a fine view if a view was available. But this amenity, which provided plenty of legroom, prevented operators from increasing the number of seating rows. That "error" was soon corrected on later aircraft, as those of us who usually fly in "steerage" well know.

Below are some views of DC-8s and their accommodations.

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Eastern Air Lines DC-8 in flight
This is an early photo showing Eastern's livery at the time it started flying DC-8s. Note how large the windows are.  DC-8s had one window per side for each row of seats. This amenity prevented the addition of rows of seats that was possible for rival Boeing's 707 that had many smaller windows, a feature found on later-generation airliners.

Delta Airlines advertisement
It took several years before ramps from terminal waiting rooms to airliner doors became common. Here passengers are depicted using roll-away stairways.

Half of United Airlines advertisement spread
This seems to be featuring the first-class section.

SAS interior
Although the DC-8 was designed to seat cabin-class passengers three-abreast on each side of the center aisle, SAS had three-and-two seating on a least some of its DC-8s. So the seats shown here might be a little wider than on planes used by United Airlines and other American lines.

SAS interior
Another publicity photo of cabin-class. Note the leg room, the window curtains and ... oh yes, the snack being served.

SAS interior
I'm not sure if this is the first-class section or the three-plus-two seating arrangement. What's noteworthy in this photo is the overhead compartment. Luggage, coats and such would usually be stowed (tossed, actually) there, but here we see mostly SAS-furnished blankets, pillows and such.

Bits of Fancy Florida Hotels

It can be fun to visit fancy hotels even if you don't (or can't) pay the fancy fare to stay. We were in Florida the first half of February and did some hotel-crawling while there. Although we didn't rent rooms, we did dine at each of those shown below.

So far as I'm concerned, the grandest of the lot is The Breakers in Palm Beach. Its Web site is here and the Wikipedia entry here.

Not so grand, but about as old and still pretty nice is the Don Cesar on St. Pete Beach in the Tampa Bay area. The Wikipedia entry is here.

In Coral Gables, near Miami, is another 1920s grand hotel, the Biltmore, whose Wikipedia write-up can be found here.

Below are some photos I took. No thorough studies here, just snippets to provide a taste.

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The Breakers main lobby

The Breakers, at one end of the lobby hall

The Breakers HMF bar
Originally this room was the main dining area, but has been a bar for years. It was recently redecorated, perhaps with too large a dash of contemporary feeling.

The Breakers HMF bar
A close-up of the bar itself. The illustration is mid 1950s, but I don't know who did it. Nor do I know if it dates back to then or is a retro piece.

Don Cesar from the beach

Don Cesar, poolside

Don Cesar interior

Biltmore Coral Gables pool
The Biltmore has a huge pool. This was taken from the bar area.

Biltmore Coral Gables
Another view of the pool and main hotel structure from not far from where the previous photo was taken.

A Somewhat Deceptive Exterior

What they say about judgments based on books and their covers can be applied to buildings -- in some cases, anyway. For instance, I get the feeling that many places in Italy where residential streets are lined with buildings with drab, fading stucco exterior surfaces actually camouflage totally modern interiors. I know that to be the case for a Mestre hotel I once stayed in.

The same applies in a more limited sense in Dublin at a place called The Burlington Hotel. It is a large structure beyond the Grand Canal that roughly marks the edge of the old southern part of the city. The exterior, as can be seen below, is nondescript t-square and triangle modernism common in the 1950s and 1960s. Our room was in need of renovation, but not drastically so. After all, the hotel caters to tour groups such as ours as well as to people in town on business or for conferences, so maybe we weren't assigned the snazziest digs. But it was okay; no complaints from a guy who spent three years of his life in army barracks and troop ships.

What interested me were the public areas that differed considerably from the drab exterior. I don't know if these were part of the original package or added in later years. They certainly have the appearance of having been re-done in recent times.

Let's look:

Here is how the hotel looks from the street. A large parking lot with room for large tour buses connects the street with the entrance. Note the exterior's hotel room floors. It was probably at its best in the architect's presentation rendering.

The lobby presents a contrast. The reception desk is at the rear to the right. The rest of the scene is occupied by a lounge area. Nice polished stone floors, carpets, wood trim and other touches of a warm variation on modernism. Not nearly as stark as the exterior.

Yet another contrast. This is the restaurant. Many of the larger hotels I've experienced in the British Isles feature traditional (Edwardian?) style restaurants, and so does the Burlington. This room makes me suspect that it wasn't part of the original modernist package.

Dublin Nouveau

The Art Nouveau architectural/decorative movement of roughly 1890-1910 had considerable impact in several cities in the northern half of Europe: Prague, Riga, Brussels, Budapest and Paris quickly come to mind as boasting notable structures designed in that idiom.

One place Art Nouveau passed by was Dublin, Ireland. Now there might indeed be an Art Nouveau style building someplace in the town, but if there was, I missed it during three full days of traipsing around the city in August.

All was not lost! A helpful guidebook directed us to Dawson Street and the Café en Seine, a pub gloriously decorated with Art Nouveau style objects.

Take a look at some photos I took:

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Evolving Airport Terminals

I'm pretty sure it has been happening at a large airport near you. That's because airports for larger metropolitan areas seem to be continually under reconstruction. For this post, I'm referring to the evolution of the airport terminal.

Not all that many years ago terminals had waiting areas and a few news stands and a limited, "captive" (contracted out to a single supplier) set of restaurants and snack bars. Those restaurants and snack bars seemingly invariably had overpriced goods.

Then cracks in the system appeared. The one that impressed me was the appearance of a McDonald's hamburger stand in the Minneapolis terminal maybe 20 or more years ago. Now, in America, I don't notice any more of those single-contractor operations for food services (news stands still seem to be another story). Better yet, in many airports, the price of a McDonald's burger or a cup of Starbucks coffee is the same as it is off-site.

Behold the contrast with 60 years ago. My example is Seattle-Tacoma International Airport showing old photos found on the Web and a few I took recently.

These are views of waiting areas in the years before major changes occurred. The top photo shows a waiting area near the departure gates and the lower photo shows the main lounge. There was a restaurant with a view of the airplanes that was situated on the second floor beyond the far end of the main lounge.

A few years ago, the central part of the terminal including the main lounge (already re-done a time or two since the photo above was taken), was extensively rebuilt. The photos below indicate the result.

That sign in the background is both fairly recent and seriously tacky. I'm not sure that "captive" passengers within the security zone need to be prompted to spend, because they're likely to do so anyway.

Where the main lounge was is now a food court.

There's also a huge window where aircraft can be observed. Some airport amenities don't change.

Santa Barbara Biltmore: Inside Story

I sometimes wonder how many modernist hotels can be called lovable. Some are enjoyable because they function well or perhaps are in a really nice setting. But even though I might have fondness for them, I can't say I love them.

Certain older hotels are a different story, and it has to do with their architecture and interior decoration. One thing that was largely lost once modernism became the religion of architecture was a connection to deep levels of human psychology; pure geometric forms of glass and metal do not suggest comforting shelter to the extent traditional architecture does.

To illustrate the non-modernist side of this coin, consider the Santa Barbara Biltmore. Well, that's not its actual name: it is actually the Four Seasons Resort The Biltmore Santa Barbara. And it's not actually in Santa Barbara, but in Montecito, a ritzy town just east of there.

The hotel website is here and the Wikipedia entry here. As Wikipedia indicates, the hotel was renovated a few years ago with an eye to restoring the Spanish Colonial style building as reasonably as possible to its appearance at its 1927 opening.

Almost every time we drive into the Santa Barbara area, my wife insists that we stop by the Biltmore (most locals don't use the Four Seasons name), and I put up no resistance to the request.

Below are some photos I took of some of the the public areas during our latest visit.

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The guy you see is Yr Faithful Blogger, camera in firing position.

Here is a direct shot of the hallway shown in the mirror above. In the far distance is the check-in desk with a map mural behind it.

Through the lounge window is the main dining area. Originally it was a garden, but it was roofed over many years ago. The recent restoration resulted in changes to the dining area, but not reversion to garden status.

The same lounge from a different angle; the window to the dining area is at the right.

The two photos above show some of the objets d'art found in the lounge.

Objects at the end of the hall shown in the first photos. In the mirror can be glimpsed the concierge desk and a mural of early Santa Barbara.

Las Vegas Interiors, Mod and Trad

Once upon a time, the gambling center of the United States was Las Vegas. Alas for Vegas, there are now plenty of other places to find slot machines, gaming tables and such -- often in the form of casinos owned by Indian tribes. This means that Las Vegas has to offer more than gambling to survive.

Restaurants and live entertainment were in place long before serious competition for the gambling dollar emerged. To these were added fancy retailing (I've lost count of the number of Gucci shops in town) and flashy architecture and interiors in non-casino areas of major casino-hotels. Accepting it for what it is, Las Vegas can be an entertaining place to spend a week even though you don't gamble a cent.

Some properties feature themes such as pirates, desert oases, Italian palaces and more. A few are basically modernist, but jazz things up because that's what Vegas patrons have been trained to expect.

Let's take a peek at a few photos I shot recently:

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Entrance to retail passage at the Bellagio
I love the Bellagio and walk this passage a lot because it leads to valet parking and skybridges for crossing streets to Caesars or the Paris. The shops? Lovely to gaze at, but well beyond my price-point.

Atrium at The Palazzo
This space, off the gambling floor, is surrounded by shops.

Shopping mall at Caesars Palace
There's a new atrium here, but this photo shows the older area, curved passages lined with shops and a fake-sky ceiling.

Palio coffee shop at the Bellagio
I grab a cuppa almost every morning that I find myself in the Bellagio. Prices are high, but the Siena atmosphere appeals even though I've never been in town when the horse races are held.

Bar in The Palazzo
As you noticed, The Palazzo is traditional. But this bar tucked at the side of the retail area is modernist, though in a decorated, non-purist way.

H&M store in the Caesars Palace shopping mall
This used to be a F.A.O. Schwarz toy store, but the Swedes selling inexpensive rags took over Schwarz's space in the older, passage-oriented part of the mall shown a few photos back. Up on the side wall is a DJ playing really loud rock music -- so loud I had to wait in the hall while my wife and daughter checked out the wares.

Crystals shopping mall at CityCenter
The huge, new CityCenter project is a collection of buildings designed by a bunch of well-known modernist architects. I consider it a failure in several ways, but will save that discussion for another post. Shown here is part of the interior of Crystals, the ritzy shopping area in the project. Like the Palazzo bar, modernism in its pure form had to be compromised in favor of increased detail to add visual interest to what otherwise would be a pretty dead space (imagine flat, white walls instead of the faceting seen here). Postmodern architecture often follows this same path of jazzing up purist forms without employing traditional decorative detailing.

Restaurant in Crystals
Another example of decorative postmodernism is this Crystals restaurant-bar. The use of wood and the enclosed feeling of the wooden elements make it more "organic" than geometric; I wonder if Mies van der Rohe would approve.

Floating Fifties Furniture

Last week I paid a brief visit to the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (Canada), mostly because I'd never gotten around to visiting the place on previous visits and thought it was high time I did so.

The museum is modest in scale because the Victoria metro area is not large. The main exhibit when I was there had to do with the art of Victoria native Emily Carr, but it too was of modest scope.

An exhibit that aroused enough interest to justify a blog post had to do with Canadian furniture and industrial design from the late 1940s into the 1960s. I'll skip over the hi-fi sets and tabletop radios to focus on the furniture style which I'd half forgotten. Although the objects were Canadian, the core style is close to what was being done in the United States and elsewhere at the time.

The photos above are of objects in rough chronological order (if my all-too-quick glance at the information plaques sank in correctly). The top photo deals with the late 1940s and early 50s, the middle with the mid-to-late fifties and the bottom one with the late 50s and early 1960s.

Judging by appearance alone and not any designers' statements of intent, the goal was an appearance of lightness. This was in contrast to "heavy," "substantial" styles of traditional furniture. Horizontal elements tend to be thin. legs and supports are often in the form of thin metal dowels painted black so as not to intrude on the "floating" effect created by the bright or light colored horizontal bits.

A popular contemporaneous style was Danish or Scandinavian modern. Such furniture usually featured wood and fabric (which material and to what degree depending on function). It too tended to be uncluttered, but usually seemed more substantial than the rather extreme look pictured above.

From an interior and furniture design standpoint, the 1950s seem to represent an extreme of the modernist movement in keeping with Abstract Expressionism in painting which peaked at the same time.

Taos Artist House-Museums

Taos, New Mexico became an artist colony beginning around the turn of the 20th century. Its start is generally reckoned as the breakdown of a wagon that illustrator Ernest Blumenschein (1874-1960) and a fellow artist were using while exploring the American southwest. Blumenschein stumbled into Taos, New Mexico, the nearest town, and became enthralled by the scenery and quality of light. As time went on, other artists, including Nicolai Fechin (1881-1955) came to spend all or part of their time in the Taos area. Santa Fe, about 70 miles distant, collected its own set of painters.

The residences of Blumenschein and Fechin still exist, but have been converted to museums. Both are only a short walk from the old Taos town square.

Fechin's place is now the Taos Art Museum. It began as an old adobe structure that he modified using touches of Spanish Colonial and Russian dacha styles.

Blumenschein's house has a 1797 structure at its core and was enlarged over time. It features the art of Blumenschein, his wife and daughter. Works of other artists are rotated in, but tend to be restricted to one room so as not to crowd out the Blumenschein art. The same can't said of the museum at Fechin's; when I was there, only one room contained Fechin's works, most of the wall space being devoted to an exhibit by a currently active local painter.

Let's take a look:
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This is the Fechin house as viewed when approaching from the street; the museum entrance is at the rear.

Here is a cardboard model Fechin used when working out his modifications.

The dining room was the only one displaying Fechin's work the day I visited.

At least they left a self-portrait on the wall.

These are views of the living room.

Fechin's studio was in a separate building to the rear of the house. Here is an interior view, but the paintings are by the local artist, not Fechin.

This is a bedroom in the Blumenschein house. The artwork between the beds is by Blumenschein's wife, Mary Sheppard Greene.

Here is the Blumenschein living or perhaps dining room. Again, the main piece of art is by Greene.