Hey Friends!
We hope everyone is well and had decent weather for springtime 2024! Let's get right into today's Shoot the Breeze.
Be Well! Stay Safe!
Mark & Patti
Asakusa Underground Street, Tokyo, Japan
by Atla Obscura
ASAKUSA IS ONE OF TOKYO’S most popular tourist destinations, known for the iconic Sensō-ji Temple complex and a network of quaint shopping streets leading up to it. Historically, it was also the center of pre-war cultural modernization, home to many of Japan’s firsts, such as the bar, cinema, amusement park and more.
Underneath this bustling district, only a staircase away from the throng of tourists, hides the oldest surviving subterranean shopping street in Japan: the Asakusa Underground Street.
The Mapparium Globe in Boston is a favorite spot I enjoyed when I needed time alone and a place to show visitors to Boston.
When designed and built in the 1930s, it was about competition with other newspaper headquarters. It seems like a great success, but I am biased, being from Boston.
If you get the chance, take the time to visit and enjoy the world above.
Mapparium Globe, Boston, MA
by Atlas Obscura
IN THE EARLY 1930S, BOSTON architect Chester Lindsay Churchill was commissioned to design the new Christian Science Publishing Society headquarters to compete with the other grand newspaper headquarters of the day. The New York Daily News building had its famous gigantic spinning globe, which inspired the Christian Science Monitor to create something on a similarly grand scale.
Enter the Mapparium globe, a three-story-tall, inside-out stained-glass globe that is bisected in the middle by a glass walkway. Once illuminated with hundreds of lamps, today it glows with the light of LEDs. It is part of an exhibit called How Do You See the World?