Someday These Walls Will Talk (Again)
Planned obsolescence now influences not just how we buy, but also how we build. The Uptown Bar was there for almost eighty years, but it’s a safe bet the cinder-block box that took its place won’t last half as long. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, the owners had every right to sell and no one wanted the original building. But part of the shared experience of living in Minneapolis are the stories we tell about the places we dwell. And believe me, I have STORIES to tell about the Uptown Bar. And those stories were usually triggered on location with a pitcher of Premium with my hooligan friends. So when these shared structures are torn down, where do the stories go? As with practically everything, Google might have the answer.
Recently Google added an “overlay” feature to Street View called Panoramio. This allows a user to overlay more detailed images on top of the pixelated fish-eye images from its database. So far, it’s mostly used to add detail to historically or culturally significant locations like the Cathedral at Notre Dame. But what about the street view of 31st and Hennepin? Why not overlay thumbnails of the Uptown bar on top of Columbia Sportswear? And if anyone has images of the street from the 1920’s it would be interesting to see what preceded the bar. And why stop there? If users could add stories, images and artifacts the overlay would become a location based wiki. Once something like this scales every street could share it’s secrets.
So even though the Uptown is gone it’s memories could someday have a home.
posted by Jay Miller on July 24th, 2010 at 8:05 pm Permanent link to this post
