Life, luck and iron

So over the weekend, I got this great picture of our niece Danielle as she was about to go to her first homecoming in high school with a bunch of girl friends. This young woman is 14 and looks like a million dollars in her homecoming dress. Back in my day, you had to be asked by a boy to be able to go the homecoming and if you weren't asked, you just could not go. It was horrible when I think about it now. Girls were pretty repressed back then. It wasn't until the 1970s that we began to demand our rights and think differently. Society pretty much forced us into a model that would not work at all today and thank goodness for that. Danielle and her friends probably just had a fine time and enjoyed themselves with no thought about dates.

When the workers were cleaning off the ironwork on the front of our building to ready it to paint this week, they discovered that the detail in the iron was extraordinary but had been covered for probably 100+ years with layers and layers of paint. A few pieces are missing from these pictures but will be back on when the place gets its painting done. The interesting part is that the work was made by L. Schreiber and Sons from 521 & 523 Walnut Street in Cincinnati. That would be roughly at Walnut and 5th which is the corner of Fountain Square. The company was there from 1854 to 1887 when it moved to larger spaces on Eggleston Ave with access to the railway. Our bases have the early stamp of the company rather than the logo stamp found on later castings.

You can see in the images where there is paint still on the ornate parts that so much of the detail was covered up and we had no idea how really beautiful it was. I am so anxious to see it when they complete the paint removal and repaint it to show off its details. The background on the iron will be a very dark charcoal grey and the recessed area will be a color called stolen kiss, a beautiful rich dark red.

This building keeps getting better and better. The neighbor directly east of us removed the ironwork at some point in the years that followed its installation. The front on that building looks like the 1950s but the one just beyond has a similar ironwork front although not as much as ours since ours goes around a corner.

Our FotoFocus exhibitions continue to throw us curves. Chloe did not send the movie and I had to remind her to get it to me. She uploaded it and it took overnight to download it. I attempted to put the movie for Nick's show onto the mac mini that I brought home over the weekend. However, I could not do that because the thing would not recognize my bluetooth keyboard, and mouse and I did not have the password to open it up in the first place. So that foiled me and then David discovered we did not have the correct size poles to hang the show. We figured out an alternative method to replace the missing poles. However, the folks at Look3 continue to frustrate me. We did print a beautiful Sartore elephant print this morning for the back wall of his gallery. The show will look great but never do I want to do something like this again when the logistics are so complicated by snotty folks who think they are doing us a favor to cooperate.