This is going to be my personal challenge to see if, indeed, “everything” can be found on the web.
Who knows how I remember this stuff?
The first Secret City
Back in the 1950s or 1960s, (I’m thinking it was about 1960), a drawing started getting passed around the schoolyard called “Secret City.” It appeared to be just a simple pencil or pen sketch. It was a aerial isometric view of a city composed of geometrical forms; stairways that led off to invisible places, mysterious doorways, etc. My guess would be that someone saw M. C. Escher’s artwork and went off from there: it resembled his pieces “Convex and Concave” and “Waterfall” which date from the 50s and 60s.
Here are the pieces (snarfed from the M. C. Escher website; see the link to the right under “Art”.)
"Convex and Concave" (1955) by M. C. Escher
""Waterfall" (1961) by M. C. Escher
The second Secret City
Sometime around 1970, I used to go for long walks with my camera looking for interesting things to photograph. I was all into the darkroom thing and processed and printed my own black and white photos (later I dabbled in Ektachrome processing and even wanted to attempt dye transfer [this was before Cibachrome] but that story will have to wait until some other time.
