“The kids can’t read anymore, they’re a bunch of morons, so what are you gonna do?” And that pretty much sums up the legend that is Joe Leisner, the no-bullsh*t owner of Comic Book Heaven, formerly located in Sunnyside, Queens NY. Let’s meet him…
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…
When you think of serious classic car collections, you picture vast, well-lit storage facilities on wealthy estates, not something that resembles an old-fashioned local mechanic shop, hidden away behind unmarked metal shutters in a dog-eared industrial neighbourhood in Brooklyn. But that’s what makes Lenny’s collection so much more special… There’s a few things that are unexpected about Lenny’s Garage. For one, Lenny Shiller himself…
This is not Photoshop. I repeat, this is not Photohop. Ever heard of “duplitecture”? It’s the term that’s been coined to describe replica architecture which has been popping up all over China since the 1990s (and let’s not forget Las Vegas either), where iconic landmarks and entire towns are constructed using lower-quality building materials to clone centuries…
In history, she is only known as Sarah Forbes Bonetta, but this was not the birth name given to the girl who was sold into slavery at the age of 4, and in a remarkable twist of events, became a goddaughter to the Queen of England. This beautiful young black woman, dressed in full Victorian costume,…
Welcome to the greatest (and first) ever collection of no-frills bars. Picture an ‘old-man’ bar but frequented by elderly ladies and young things too. Now, add a sturdy base of uniformed waiters, a layer of mid-century modernist furnishings, and an uneven icing of clamour and chaos. To all of that, add a coating of fluorescent…
The year was 1969 and The Doors were gearing up for the release of their fifth album, Morrison Hotel. Driving around Los Angeles in a VW van, as only Jim Morrison would, the band and their photographer were location scouting for the album’s cover shoot when they came upon the Morrison Hotel at 1246 South Hope Street…
One of my all-time favourite photographs of “vieux Paris” is this curious snap of a gentlemen emerging from the metro in 1935 wearing a set of mechanical wings. I decided to do a little digging behind the photograph and found that our winged-gentleman was on his way to the Lépine contest, an inventor’s competition founded…
In 2018, MessyNessyChic became a tale of two cities. We’ll always have Paris, but now we have New York too. In preparation for Don’t Be a Tourist in New York, book number 2 (touching down in 2019), this year our rabbit hole led us across the pond in search of a sleepless city’s secrets. Armed with a…
Because why bake a gingerbread house this holiday season, when a real-life abandoned one can haunt your dreams? Let’s head out to Hamburg, New Jersey, where a local landmark is in dire need of a little TLC from Hansel & Gretel. Since the late 1920s, the now-crumbling structure was known as The Gingerbread Castle, a…