Sampsonia Way and Google Maps art project

From: benjamin.kinsley@gmail.com
To: marzipan51724@hotmail.com
CC: robin.hewlett@gmail.com

Hi Mary,

Thank you for your email. I am very happy to know that you discovered our "Street With A View" project, and it was great to read your essay. Thank you for sending it! I only lived in Pittsburgh for 3 years (for Graduate school at Carnegie Mellon) but the Mexican War Streets was always my favorite area in the city. We saw Sampsonia Way as a place with lots of (visual) layers of history, which was one of the main reasons we chose this street for our project (we could have chosen any street in the city).

Thanks again, and best regards,
Ben

BIO SAMPSONIA WAY EB 10 2009 MARY PANNETON

Last week the Washington Post featured, as part of an Internet Google project, “Street with a View” Sampsonia Way in Pitsburgh. Residents staged a street parade, acted street activities, displayed residences and other “bizarre scenarios” and invited Google to display the results. Two Carnegie Mellon art graduates masterminded the scheme.

As a resident of Charles Street from l930 to 1945, I knew that narrow street. The Mexican War Streets would have included it, though I can’t recognize the name . The area of row homes developed in the late l800s, memorialized that War. Between North and Federal, residents had exotic Mexican addresses, though many, including the children, could not pronounce or spell --- Palo Alto, Reseca dela Palma, Buena Vista.

We lived a few blocks north on Charles Street, walked to school though the park or these streets choosing a different route each day, and had friends whom we accompanied home. We didn’t visit, merely left them at the door. Later, when I vacationed in Florida, I met one of these old friends, Theresa, whose family had sold the home just as the intrinsic and historic value of these homes became known. Now, these homes are upscale residences for young professionals.

The “Tea Lady” , Mrs. Armstrong, lived Sampson Way. My sister and I visited her to buy one pound of tea, in a brown a paper bag, for my mother. Mrs. Armstrong had a big home, furnished in Victorian style, which in those days was quite modern. It certainly was more elaborate than our two rooms, exclusive of bedrooms which housed six children. Ann and I, later Betty, sat and were polite for a time before we received the tea and paid for it. I suppose it was a good experience in developing social skills, but we were edgy and anxious to leave. Later, when the Tea Lady had retired or died, we bought tea at a specialty tea store in the center of Pittsburgh. When I was in college, a friend and I went there often to get tea for our Irish parents.

Sampson Way, had on the corner of Brighton Road, a business called the Mattress Factory. I suppose that denoted the original business, but it was then and still is, an art gallery. My sister and I toured it occasionally; she had a greater interest in art than I had. We were young, felt we were interlopers and moved cautiously. I meet people now who knew that gallery. Near it, a junk shop sold movie magazines for
2 cents each. I, enthralled with the movies, spent precious pennies and studied them seriously. My cousin often joked about my great knowledge of movies and movies stars. My school grades were excellent so I suppose they did me no harm I don’t exult over today’s movies, too much slash and burn mayhem.

Several stores down, Penn Bakery featured a donut making machine in the window. We stopped to watch that activity before entering the stores and buying a shopping bag, same size as we use today, full of day old rolls and buns for 5 cents. A business which sold ice for the home had a loading dock facing the street, provided a view of one of life’s necessities. Trucks loaded up ice to sell on the streets. Homeowners had a sign to place in the front window indicating when they needed ice, perhaps
25 cents per block, 2feet by 2 feet, and these drivers accommodated them. Sometimes, people purchased it at the dock and carried it home by hand in a blanket

And on the way home, we could stop at the Gulf Gas Station and get a free paper cone cup of ice water, a big treat. We never crossed to the other side of this main boulevard. My mother traveled with us on that street, crossing Sampson, to play in the park, swim and ride the boats in Lake Elizabeth. My mother watched the swimming, my father was the guide for boating. We walked to the Buhl Plantarium and Science Exhibits, the Library, the major department store and the 5&10 Cent stores, and often across the bridges to the city.

Sampsonia Way was half way to many of the interesting events in my early life.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
By Patricia Lowry, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Mattress Factory Milwaukee artist Nicolas Lampert drove his "Attention Chicken!" sculpture to Pittsburgh for the "Street With a View" shoot. It appears at the corner of Arch Street and Sampsonia Way.What's more fun than a giant chicken, a walking ham and a marching band? More fun than a mad scientist with a laser that makes people fall in love, and a snowstorm of confetti falling from the sky? More fun than a barrel of friends and neighbors wigging out in purple and blue hair?

Putting them all together on Sampsonia Way when the Googlemobile drives by.
Actually, they don't call it the Googlemobile.

"It's just a regular car," said Ben Kinsley, but one equipped with a roof-mounted, 360-degree camera to photograph the buildings, streets and sidewalks that appear in the Street View function of Google's satellite maps.

Mr. Kinsley teamed up with fellow Carnegie Mellon University fine arts student Robin Hewlett to stage the "Street With a View" performance on the morning of May 3. It wasn't a guerrilla act; Google was in on the scheme. So were lots of folks whose homes or garages face the narrow North Side alley made famous by the Mattress Factory, which also was in on the fun.

The idea came to Mr. Kinsley and Ms. Hewlett, then housemates, when Pittsburgh came online in October 2007. After they found Street View images of their Bloomfield house, they began wondering what people might do if they knew in advance that the Googlemobile was coming.

Street View debuted in May 2007, showing the streets of Miami, San Francisco, New York, Denver and Las Vegas, and now documents about 100 cities worldwide, not without criticism and the occasional lawsuit from those who consider it an invasion of privacy. But travelers, architects, real estate agents, journalists, the homesick and others find it an invaluable tool, and countless more take virtual Street View tours just for a lark.

In its wake, Web sites have sprung up documenting quirky discoveries caught by Street View strollers. One of them is Googlesightseeing.com (Motto: "Why bother seeing the world for real?"), which currently highlights an abandoned mining town in Namibia, a curious sculpture in Germany and the Sampsonia Way project.

In a phone interview from Iceland, where he is spending a year doing artist residencies on a travel grant, Mr. Kinsley, who graduated in May, said he and Ms. Hewlett didn't want to focus on Street View's surveillance issues.

Not knowing if Google would play along, they plotted to interject staged scenes that blurred the boundaries between fiction and reality. It helped that in 2006, Google opened an office in a Carnegie Mellon building on Forbes Avenue.

"So there was an easy way to start this communication with them" through the intercession of key people, Mr. Kinsley said, and Google bit.

Then the planning began, with Mr. Kinsley spending many weekends knocking on doors in the neighborhood looking for participants.

The shoot was scheduled for the morning of the first Saturday in May, with fingers crossed for good weather because the Googlemobile camera can't shoot in the rain.

"It actually was pouring rain most of the day," Mr. Kinsley said. "We were hoping it would clear up, and it did for an hour. We got three good takes in there."

So three times the Langley High School band queued up and the mad scientist, the garage band, the woman unfurling knotted-together bedsheets from a third-floor window, the sword fighters dressed in 17th-century costumes, the movers unloading a U-Haul truck, the marathon runners, the firemen rescuing a (stuffed) cat from a tree and the woman dressed as a ham all took their places -- about 100 people in all.

"We were trying to create something that could have taken place," although highly unlikely to be happening all at the same time, making Sampsonia Way "the most exciting street in the world," as Mr. Kinsley says in Jeffrey Inscho's video on the project's Web site, streetwithaview.com.

"You eventually figure out this was a staged event. And we hope viewers, once they realize that, will start exploring [nearby streets] and then not be able to know" what is staged and what is real.

It doesn't hurt that one-way Sampsonia Way is not your typical Pittsburgh alley. Over the years, Mattress Factory art projects and City of Asylum/Pittsburgh have transformed the outsides of several houses along Sampsonia, adding another surreal layer to the intrigue. The event stretched seven blocks, from Buena Vista to Federal streets, with most of the action taking place in front of the Mattress Factory and the altered houses.

Google put it online on Election Day, Nov. 4, as Mr. Kinsley was preparing to watch the returns at the American embassy in Reykjavik. He and Ms. Hewlett expected it to be discovered over time, but by the next day it was posted on Googlesightseeing.com.

The project, which was Mr. Kinsley's master's thesis, is the first time Google has participated in a public art piece for Street View.

It "seemed like a very innovative, creative use of Street View, and it shows that you can discover and experience so many fascinating things" using it, said Google spokeswoman Elaine Filadelfo.

Now that it's spreading virally, "People have said, I didn't know that Google takes requests," Mr. Kinsley said. "It's not something that they're going to do for just anyone, I think."

To view selected scenes and Mr. Inscho's "Making of 'Street With a View'" video, visit streetwithaview.com or youtube.com. For instructions on using Street View, visit google.com and click "maps."