A weekly round-up of oddities has delivered an unusually travel-friendly haul this time, with Paris front and centre. The standout for anyone with a property habit and a fat wallet: a glass-walled loft for sale in Montmartre, listed with the specialist agency Espaces Atypique at €1.48 million. It is exactly the sort of listing that reminds you Paris real estate is its own genre of entertainment — even window-shopping costs nothing.
The Paris theme continues with rarely seen photographs of Josephine Baker performing with the Ziegfeld Follies in New York in 1936. By then Baker was one of France's biggest stars, having crossed the Atlantic on the liner Normandie in August 1935 for rehearsals. The American run was a bitter one: she was refused a room at her reserved hotel, critics dismissed her voice as too thin for the Winter Garden Theatre, and one Time magazine write-up was openly racist. When Fanny Brice — the show's real headliner — fell ill in May 1936, the production collapsed and Baker tore up her contract. She returned to France heartbroken, became a French citizen after marrying an industrialist in October 1937, and never spoke of the Follies again. For travellers, it is a sharp reminder that the Paris which embraced Baker was, for a Black American performer, the opposite of everything she faced back home.
There are other detours worth your time. Photographer Noah Kalina has been shooting interiors of Pizza Huts being remodelled back toward their 1990s heyday — a nostalgia wave he ties to frustration with how corporations have flattened everything people once loved. Meanwhile, a digitised ride along the New York subway to Coney Island in 1987 offers a free time machine for anyone planning a Brooklyn trip.
Art lovers get a couple of goodies too. A piece on Ironic Sans asks museums what they consider their own Mona Lisa, and surfaces a fact worth knowing before your next trip to Washington: the only Leonardo da Vinci painting on public view in all of America is Ginevra de' Benci, a portrait of a teenage Florentine aristocrat, possibly commissioned for her wedding, held at the National Gallery of Art. Elsewhere there is the curious history of 'glass delusion' — an early modern European affliction in which patients genuinely believed they were made of glass — plus patchwork stained glass from a New Jersey studio, soft sculptures from the Haus of Hands, and a whimsical 1550s German manuscript you can zoom through online.
Why care? Because this is the kind of browsing that quietly shapes trips. The Montmartre loft tells you what quirky Paris looks like when it hits the market; the Baker story adds depth to any walk through the city's Black American expat history; Ginevra gives you a genuinely rare reason to visit the National Gallery beyond the usual Washington sights. And the Coney Island footage might just talk you into taking the subway all the way to the boardwalk.
Story via Messy Nessy Chic.