Twee Magazine

Scouting New York: Sometimes finding buildings that might have been built by cult leader Ivo Shandor.

 Nick Carr's blog "Scouting New York" would be worth reading were it simply a document of his profession: He is a film scout in New York, and so spends his day searching for locations for film shoots and events. And so Carr can speak authoritatively about the fact that it's almost impossible to find the ruined and barrel fire-lit New York alley that every filmmaker seems to want (he wrote in the Guardian than Manhattan actually only has three or four of the sorts of alleys filmmakers want). Also impossible to find: The sorts of Chinese restaurants seen in movies."[W]hile I really wish just one holdover from the 1940s or 1950s had survived into the modern age as a historical relic, they’re kaput," Carr writes, "and no amount of scouting will bring them back."

Carr also has a very enjoyable habit of tracking down where old films were lensed in New York and what the same location looks like now: His research on "The Godfather's" locations is as epic as the movie itself. Carr is obviously a man who takes his job seriously, not simply by investigating possible NY locations, but also by being a cineaste.

And all that would make for an outstanding blog anyway, but we mention it here because Carr is one more thing: He's a bit of an obsessive amateur detective. If there is a door that has been left open, he will peek inside it, and if he discovers something unexpected, he will investigate. New York is filled with the eccentric, the unexpected, and the occasionally inexplicable, and Carr is dogged about finding as much of it as he can and telling its story.

So while there is nothing inherently twee about location scouting, or movies, or New York, when it tips over into blog posts that retrace the route of Ichabod Crane through Sleepy Hollow, or detail a very strange lawn zoo on Staten Island, or a mouse hole with a bright red door across it, we now have an author with a taste for surprise, whimsy, wonder, and delight, and where these things hide themselves in one of the world's greatest cities.

Best still, because Carr has the impulses of a detective, he doesn't just find astonishing locations, but often the astonishing stories behind them. So a gorgeous lobby turns out not merely to be gorgeous, but the building it is on turns out to have been built by Freemasons in 1927 that was intended as a "true-to-size rendering of King Solomon’s Temple."

One of Carr's most heartbreaking stories was the result of him discovering a plaque embedded with spare change. As it turned out, the change was from the pocket of a small boy named Stephen Baltz, who had been in an airplane that crashed into another airplane above a building in Park Slope. Everyone else was killed in the crash, but Baltz plummeted 5,000 feet but somehow managed to survive, but died the next day. Before dying, Stephen described his view from the airplane, looking out at New York: "It looked like a picture of a fairy book. It was a beautiful sight."

The change embedded into the plaque was the pocket change Stephen had carried onto the plane, still in his pocket when he tumbled to the ground.

Nessy. Photo from MessyNessyChic.

Vanessa Grall, who calls herself Messy Nessy and is responsible for the website MessyNessyChic, has an aesthetic that is at once ill-defined and immediately recognizable. Her site acts as a sort of warehouse for anything that interests or delights her, and that covers a broad range of things, but they all tend to be hidden, secret, forgotten, precious, somehow glamorous, and decidedly twee.

Nessy's story, from what I have read, is of a somewhat discombobulated young woman from Notting Hill who relocated to Paris, spent a year knocking around and skint, and then started a website about things that made her curious and excited, which now supports her. She passionately loves Paris, and has an explorer's sense of the city's hidden nooks and crannies -- she has an entire section of her blog called My Secret Paris.

It is a bit surprising to me that she had to leave one of the most fascinating cities in the world and relocate to another of the world's most fascinating cities, but, then, it is very hard to be a tourist in your hometown. From Paris, she seems to be rediscovering London: Her site has featured stories on a London store where all the mechanize was actually fluffy felt reproductions, the interior of the Battersea Power Station and other hidden London treasures, and secret members clubs from the Swinging London of the 60s.

Nessy's blog is exciting in part because it provides readers with a sense of the world as an adventure, and that adventures can be discovered in your home town, in the pages of history books, in online photo archives, down hidden alleys and under paving stones. Further, Nessy encourages her readers to be explorers, and shows how others have adventured, and made something new as a result of their adventures. She has documented people who photograph ghost signs, turned abandoned Detroit homes into makeshift gardens, and filled their town with tiny, secret doors.

It's hard not to be infected by her worldview. Since I started reading her blog, I have been keeping a list of secrets I have discovered in the town I live in, including a hidden bootlegger hole between floors in one of the city's most exclusive hotels, a stereo formerly owned by Karen Carpenter in a local bar, a fallout shelter for cows, and Roy Roger's stuffed horse and dog, kept in a secret storage space in town. If I can find these things in Omaha, there are discoveries waiting everywhere.