Interesting info from FYI section via The New York Times - 1) "Love" sculpture, 2) The Fourth Ward and 3) parking ticket.
A Whole Lot of ‘Love’
Q. I’m from Philadelphia, and every time I pass the “Love” sculpture on the Avenue of the Americas and 55th Street, I ask myself how this one relates to the one in my hometown.
A. You may as well ask: Where isn’t there one? Besides New York City and Philadelphia, public copies of the sculpture, by the pop artist Robert Indiana, can also be found in Scottsdale, Ariz., Wichita, Kan., Middlebury, Vt. (on the campus of Middlebury College), Indianapolis, Singapore and other places.
The design graced highly popular Christmas cards for the Museum of Modern Art in the 1960’s, and 330 million postage stamps in the 1970’s, and let’s not go into the unauthorized mugs, T-shirts and other memorabilia. (Mr. Indiana did not copyright his logo.)
“It was inspired by a sign at a gas station,” Mr. Indiana said in 2002. “During the Depression, my father worked for Phillips 66, which had a huge sign up in the sky. I can still see that red and green sign against the blue Indiana sky. My first ‘Love’ was red, green and blue.”
The first “Love” sculpture was carved out of a solid block of unpolished aluminum that Mr. Indiana had made for a show at the Stable Gallery in Manhattan in 1966. As for the word, in his childhood, he attended a Christian Science church in Indianapolis, where he was moved by the sole inscription on the wall: “God is Love.”
Ward of the Happy Warrior
Q. History tells us that Gov. Al Smith was from the Fourth Ward. Where and what is the Fourth Ward?
A. Alfred Emanuel Smith (1873-1944) was a child of the Lower East Side, specifically an old tenement at 174 South Street. The Fourth Ward was a working-class district bordering the East River, now split by approaches to the Brooklyn Bridge. It was bounded by Chatham, Catharine (Catherine) and South Streets, Peck Slip, and Ferry and Spruce Streets. In the mid-19th century, more than 70 percent of its population was foreign-born.
Although wards date from the city’s earliest days, they became politically marginal after charters in 1853 and 1857 replaced them with state legislative and City Council districts. The wards maintained their boundaries under the City Charter, though, and they were never formally abolished, according to The Encyclopedia of New York City.
The Fourth Ward’s personality stood out, however.
“It is but a short distance from the fashionable quarter of the Fifth Avenue, and other refined abodes of wealth and luxury, to the opposite extreme of human misery, depravity and crime,” read an 1873 article in The New York Times under the heading “The Fourth Ward.” It went on to mention “an army of ragged and noisy juveniles” and five-story tenements, labeled “loathsome abodes,” where the sunlight never penetrated and children were neglected.
Got a Ticket? Here’s Another
Q. I often see service vehicles pulling into illegal parking spots in Manhattan, already with parking citations on their windshields. Apparently, the drivers use old tickets to ward off new ones. Does this ploy work?
A. “Nice try,” Paul J. Browne, the spokesman for the New York Police Department, wrote in an e-mail message. Ticket officers are well aware of the ploy, he added. If a driver happens to escape a ticket for illegal parking, it’s a coincidence, not because he has another ticket on his windshield.
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