The Castaway Collector of Brooklyn

In Boerum Place, Brooklyn, New York lives a man in an apartment with many things. Chong Gon Byun is his name and he arrived in New York City from Korea 25 years ago. Your initial thoughts on Byun might be that he is an obsessive vintage gatherer, a flea market bargain hunter, a hoarder. But a closer…

The Real-life Film Actors Who Inspired Iconic Disney Cartoon Characters

It’s hard to imagine our favorite Disney films any other way, but some of the most popular animated characters of our childhoods started out as real as you and I. These rare images of live-action scenes spliced with Disney animations, reveal how the creative studio used real people to reference or even directly trace their…

So There Was a Secret Government Torture Facility on London’s Billionaires Row

Princess Diana lived next door in Kensington Palace, thousands flock to bustling Portobello market in search of past treasures just down the road, but this one has been left out of the guide books. The “London Cage”, a hidden WWII Guantanamo-esque compound on the most expensive street in London, Kensington Palace Gardens, was kept secret…

Summers of the Retro Rich by Slim Aarons

I recently came upon an archive of Slim Aarons, the photographer who made his career out of photographing rich (white) people on holiday, or as he liked to call it, capturing “attractive people who were doing attractive things in attractive places.” A contributor to Life and Holiday, Aarons was noted for photographing socialites, jet-setters and celebrities, many of which he had genuine…

The Merriest Cemetery in the World

They say everyone has their own way of grieving, and in the village of Săpânţa in Romania, this couldn’t be more true. In this rural farming commune lies a cemetery, known as the “merry cemetery”, that looks unlike any other you’ve ever seen. Here, you won’t find the usual dark and doomful gravestones, but instead, a…

Through the Eyes of a Boat

I came across this photographer, there’s no hidden story, no lost secret as you might have come to expect from this blog, just pure appreciation for the habit of looking out of windows, especially round ones, on boats. Photographer Luke Casey has traveled the world by sea and found it looked very different through the…

10 Things you Probably didn’t know about Ernest Hemingway (like he was a KGB Spy)

1. He was a failed KGB Spy In the last few years of his life, Ernest Hemingway grew paranoid and talked about FBI spying on him. He was even treated with electroshock therapy as many as 15 times at the recommendation of his physician in 1960. It was later revealed that he was in fact…

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol.XXVI)

1. A Payphone Graveyard in New York Payphones are disappearing little by little, but where are they going? Photographer Dave Bledsoe found a veritable payphone graveyard underneath the elevated West Side Highway at 135th and 12th Avenue: “At least one hundred old, battered pay phones were locked behind a fence near the Park’s Department building.” [Upper…

A Walk along the Paris inner city Railway, abandoned since 1934

I spent my Saturday afternoon, avoiding the Parisian summer crowds and tiptoeing along the train tracks of the “Little Belt” railroad (La Petite Ceinture), a surviving relic of a bygone era, closed since 1934; open for pleasant summer strolls if you look hard enough for a way in … Built in 1862, the Petite Ceinture…

A Trip down Memory Lane with the NSA Vintage Photo Album

Everybody loves a good photo album, even the NSA! For their 60th anniversary last year, they put together this heart-warming album of top secret snaps dating all the way back to the 1930s when the nation’s most secretive intelligence agency was just a baby spy agency. So with the NSA being such a buzzword as…