Taiwan 2024 - Northeast Coast, Fancy Brickwork / My Second Experience in New Orleans

Never saw anything like this, so thought it was very interesting, this "brickwork".  Found out that it's nothing more than molded and painted cement, but a fair piece of artwork nevertheless.

The installation below was a little further down the street.  The building featured as the first pic in this series can be seen to the left at bottom:

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As for my second time in the Big Easy, this happened a little later, when I was barely a teenager.  I had a friend in Orange named Nick Schriber who's father, Charles, worked for Pelto Oil, and he was transferred to New Orleans.  For two summers in a row I spent a week or two at their house in a brand-new neighborhood in Gretna, which at the time was some distance from downtown where his dad worked.  So on some days he would drive the three of us - Nick, his little brother Danny, and me - into town, dropping us off in the French Quarter so we could spend the day there until he headed home after work.  It seems amazing today to think that kids were allowed that kind of freedom, but that's how it was then and no one, parent or child, had any second thoughts.  Thus, we were left to roam and take advantage of any adventures that were to be had.  Nick already knew the area pretty well, so he and his brother would show me around the places they were familiar with, then we created some new adventures and mischief of our own.  I was an avid matchbook collector at the time, so went into as many establishments as possible - even some strip clubs (if we were lucky) - to get new ones for my collection.

Somehow they knew an older teenager named Danny Von Tempo who worked at a print shop there in the Quarter.  We spent some time there just hanging around, and that is where I became interested in the process of typesetting.  As Danny was showing me how things worked it occurred to me that my dad's birthday was coming up, and I asked him, Would be possible to create a lead plate with his name in 36-point type?  So Danny created one for me, and I was able to give it to Dad when I got back home; it said "Robert F. Mahood" and the letters were reversed since it was made for typesetting.  This is an item that I still have, as I took possession of it at Dad's passing in 2007.

One day Nick's dad took us up into the building where he worked downtown.  He was pretty high up in the company, so had this magnificent, spacious penthouse office on about the 25th floor overlooking downtown New Orleans.  I shall never forget his description of a shooting that took place from one of the other buildings, where a Vietnam vet took potshots at passersby below, killing a total of nine and wounding twelve others.  Mr. Schriber was there at the window pointing out for us where this and that happened.  The emotions were still strong in his voice as he described seeing the entire event unfold before his eyes.  The perpetrator was black, and targeted whites, blaming his actions on racism that he'd experienced in the military.  The story of Mark Essex and what he did can be found in a Wikipedia article written about the incident:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Essex

One of those summers I didn't have a ride back to Orange when the visit was over, so Nick's dad drove me over to the Greyhound station so that I could take a bus home by myself.  This is something else that would be unimaginable today, but again, this is another time and no one thought a thing of it.  In fact I had a great time on the ride and made a new friend about my age along the way.