Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Able To Leap Tall Buildings In A Single Bound



I'm not sure even Superman could leap this one; it's awfully tall and it made me dizzy to take this picture. This is the new Comcast Center, currently the tallest building in town, at 17th & Arch where we went yesterday to see the Christmas show in the lobby. The show itself is all a video, but what a video! The screen is immense: 83 feet wide and 25 feet high. Comcast says it's the largest 4 millimeter LED screen the world, with 10 million pixels. It's five times brighter than the latest high-definition TV. You could swear that the people running around up there are really there dancing above the crowd and not merely projected on a screen. Just amazing. I tried to post a video I took, but I'm not having any luck. Will have to work on this.




Another thing that totally surprised me was to see the state of City Hall. I have never in all my life seen it this clean. I worked across the street from it at 2 Penn Center for several years and I've been in town over the years now and then, but this is something else. Go see it before it gets all grimy again. It's a wonder to behold. It almost looks beautiful.


Alexander Milne Calder spent 20 years creating some 250 sculptures for Philadelphia’s City Hall. Included in his creations is the 37-foot bronze statue of William Penn atop the tower, and the eight bronze sculptures that were installed from 1894-1896 above the clocks/clock level: four eagles (perched above each clock face); a Native American warrior with a dog; a Native American woman with a child; a Swedish man with a child; and a Swedish woman with a child and lamb. This is the first time the sculptures have been cleaned and treated since they were installed, so no wonder they were so dirty.

4 comments:

Brother Chris said...

Nice photos. We'd like to see more from your adventure in the Big City.

Amy said...

Why did they decide to clean it after all this time? I think that's great, but is there a reason?

I love that Chris is "Brother Chris" on here too. Shouldn't he be "Child loved Second Best?"
I'm kidding!!!
I know we all came after Mooshka. :)

Brother Chris said...

What happened to the moderator/blog-host being able to weed out the undesirables before they got published on here?

I say bring back the McCarthyistic style of editing and let's try to keep some of these crazies off of here.

Meredith said...

Now, now, children.