does what it says on the curb

January 13, 2023 12:59 PM

Written In Stone: a collection of photographs of maker's marks in sidewalks.
posted by cortex (14 comments total)

Nice! There is an alley in my neighborhood where the street name is spelled wrong in the concrete curb mark and it gives me the giggles every time.
posted by janell at 1:01 PM on January 13, 2023

Curb: Your Enthusiasm
posted by zamboni at 1:20 PM on January 13, 2023 [17 favorites]

Nice! There is an alley in my neighborhood where the street name is spelled wrong in the concrete curb mark and it gives me the giggles every time.

Did you know we have City code that requires these to be put back as-is? They considered historical markers. I always have fun (because I'm that kind of nerd) keeping an eye out when I'm walking around, especially looking for streets whose names have changed.

Curb: Your Enthusiasm

cortex is kicking himself a little bit right now I think, this is pretty good.
posted by curious nu at 1:25 PM on January 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Well, that was lovely and reminds me of a mystical long passed time when the Internet was filled with single purpose delights. Have they declined or am I just biased now by my belief the internet has changed for the worse?
posted by onetime dormouse at 2:04 PM on January 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I have a slew of these from around Pasadena though I don't think I've ever seen one post 1950ish. It's interesting to see when a whole neighborhood was laid down at once with the same marker stretching for a few blocks around and when things were done piecemeal.

Wonder when this stopped being a thing
posted by drewbage1847 at 2:06 PM on January 13, 2023

My favorite kind of thing, thank you!
posted by tiny frying pan at 2:13 PM on January 13, 2023

Adjacent, literally and metaphorically: manhole covers as collected by Sidewalk Candy.
posted by twsf at 2:13 PM on January 13, 2023

I cried the last time my Maker's Mark decorated a curb.
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:10 PM on January 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

cortex is kicking himself a little bit right now I think, this is pretty good.

come now, you know me well enough to know that I consider tricking other people into making puns a monumental success
posted by cortex at 3:20 PM on January 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

These are great. My real favorites, though, are when people press in children's handprints, paw prints, or scratch in a date. At our old house I had to break out a section of 50 year old concrete that had a hand-writtendate, and when I poured new concrete I put in a dog paw print. It makes me happy to think that 50 years from now someone might see my old dog's paw print there.
posted by Dip Flash at 3:29 PM on January 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Nice! A local geologist, Andrew Alden, has been documenting Oakland (and now other East Bay) sidewalk stamps for a number of years now.
posted by latkes at 3:51 PM on January 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Wow, so many from Denver (my home town). I do remember seeing these, but I mostly remember the flagstone sidewalks, often heaved by tree roots.
posted by dbmcd at 12:07 AM on January 14, 2023

> Have they declined or am I just biased now by my belief the internet has changed for the worse?

I wonder the same thing. Are there fewer amazing websites like this one, or is it that Google thinks all I'm interested in is shopping sites?
posted by The corpse in the library at 10:07 AM on January 14, 2023

I think the main problem is a combination of the fact that the web just keeps getting more and more stuffed to the gills by content farm strategy shit, and that weird one-off obsession pages are rarely doing the kind of aggressive SEO optimization that would even get them on parity with the everything else. Like there's probably also been a fall-off in the rate single serving sites come along because blogging per se has receded so far and collecting weird/niche/whatever stuff probably falls more into the FB group and subreddit mode, but there's still stuff out there. It just doesn't surface well when it's not being built by someone with the specific goal of surfacing stuff.

I still find plenty of lofi websites about e.g. math stuff, where there's kind of a good academic/recreational value in maintaining and growing it beyond just a shot at Cheezeburger-era virality etc. But a lot of that stuff turns out to have rotted too for one reason or another.
posted by cortex at 10:57 AM on January 14, 2023 [1 favorite]