This is my bridge

This is the Sunshine Skyway Bridge.

It crosses the mouth of Tampa Bay and it separates the Bay from the Gulf of Mexico. The bridge connects St. Petersburg and Terra Ceia, the town immediately across the water from St. Pete.

The entire length of the bridge is five-and-a-half miles and I rely on my many crossings to serve as a kind of mini vacation. Mobile service cuts out about half way up the center span and doesn't kick back in until you cross to the Terra Ceia side. I used to find that to be irritating but these days it's one of my favorite things about that bridge. It's a five minute respite from being available.

It's the tallest thing around here and if memory serves, at 431 feet, it's the tallest bridge in Florida. As tall as it is, it's a singular thrill to be crossing it when a cruise ship squeezes underneath it.

Driving north and home to St. Pete never ceases to inspire me. It feels like I'm landing an airplane on the downside of the hump and no photo I've ever seen or taken has come close to capturing the azure-emerald clarity of the water of the south Bay. "I live in paradise" I say to myself every time I'm making that drive.

It's difficult to live here and be near the water and not see that bridge. It looms over everything and it serves as our visual anchor. No matter where you are on land, air or sea, seeing the Skyway is an automatic location beacon. It's the pivot point around which the entirety of south Pinellas and north Manatee counties rotate.

It frames the sunsets and reminds me of the vast expanse and possibility of the Gulf of Mexico on its west side. The whole world's out there, just waiting.

That steel and concrete can join together to form such sculptural utility gives me hope for humanity. It reminds me time and again that art can be anywhere and that beauty abounds, it's just a matter of taking the time to make it and to appreciate it.

More than just about any other feature of the the part of the country I call home, The Sunshine Skyway feels like it's mine. It feels like my retreat, my point of reference, my personal bridge. No matter what happens, no one can take that away from me.

I love you Delta Airlines

I've been a fan of Delta Airlines for quite some time but on Sunday they did something for me that I can't imagine any other airline doing.

I fly to New York between three and four times a year and Delta has a flight that leaves Tampa at 7am and lands at LaGuardia at 9:30. It''s like time travel that flight. I wake up in my own bed but can be walking down Fifth Avenue by ten in the morning. I loathe early morning flights as a rule but with that particular flight, I can fly up on a Friday morning, go to meetings all day and then have the weekend to just be in New York.

I have a speaking engagement in New York on April 30th. I'll be sitting in a roundtable discussion at the annual meeting of the American Society of Journalists and Authors at the Roosevelt Hotel (if you're in New York please come!) Sitting at that table with me will be Dominique Browning, former editor of  House and Garden, Michael Cannell from the New York Times House and Home section, David Farley from the New York Times, the Washington Post and National Geographic Traveler and Saxon Henry who's published more work than any of us combined. And oh yeah, then there's little old me, the internet guy from St. Pete. No pressure.

Anyhow, I went to go buy my airline tickets for this conference on Sunday after I paid my taxes. I'm a Delta frequent flyer so I went to their site immediately rather than deal with Expedia. I booked my ticket for a departure on 4/29 and a return on 5/2.

As soon as I approved of the transaction I realized that I have a meeting in New York on 5/2 and that I meant to fly home on 5/3. Crap!

Changing a flight after booking carries a $150 charge and I was already on edge from the fact that my TPA to LGA flight cost $50 more than it usually does.

Three minutes after I booked that flight I called Delta's customer service number and was connected with a human being immediately. On the other end of the line was Hilary, someone who deserves a raise and a commendation. I explained to Hilary that I'd just booked myself on a return flight for the wrong day and that I needed to change a three-minute-old transaction.

She told me not to worry, that she'd take care of everything. She waived the change fee with the wave of her hand and proceeded to cancel my old reservation. She booked me on a new return flight, seated me in the aisle both ways and saved me five dollars in the process.

I was already a fan of Delta Airlines but Hilary made me a raving, rabid fan. I cannot imagine another airline that would forgo a handful of fees to make a customer happy.

Thank you Delta, you saved my long weekend in New York and you've earned the distinction as the official domestic carrier of Kitchen and Residential Design.

Besides, they have a safety video that's actually worth watching:







Pay attention to when she warns the audience about smoking on the airplane. Priceless!

K+BB and Cosentino are looking for winners

If you're a kitchen and bath designer and you're really good at what you do, K+BB wants to salute you. K+BB is running a design contest and three lucky winners will go to Spain for a week as the guests of Silestone's parent company, Cosentino.

The deadline for entries is June 10th, 2011, so don't put this off. There's no limit to the number of rooms you can enter either. There's no requirement that the designs you enter use Silestone either.

Follow this link and submit your project. Not only will the winners got to Spain, they'll be accompanied by the amazing Alice Liao, the editor of K+BB.

I took a cooking class with Alice in Germany last January and the chance to hang out with her alone should be the impetus anybody needs to enter this contest. As big a draw as Alice is, the country of Spain puts the S in spectacular.

Nowhere else I've been weaves the glory of a storied history in with the inglory of daily life as elegantly as Spain does. Everything in Spain is an occasion and wonders await at every turn. And through all of it, the Spanish people are there to explain  all of it and to humanize the whole experience.

An amazing country peopled with the most accommodating people on the planet awaits the lucky winners of this contest.

So if you've been doing great work, K+BB wants to know about it. Here's the link to the entry form again. Enter! And think about the wonders that await.

It's a dark day in Philly now too

The Philadelphia Orchestra's Board of Directors voted to file for chapter 11 bankruptcy on Friday. It's an effort to reorganize in the face of a five million dollar operating deficit. The current season will continue as scheduled for the time being, but this filing bodes ill for the arts in the United States.

The Philadelphia Orchestra at the US premiere of Mahler's Eighth Symphony in 1916.

The Philadelphia Orchestra is one of world's most renowned and respected arts organizations. Over the course of its 110-year history, names that loom over the world of classical music have assumed its helm. Names like Wolfgang Sawallisch, Leopold Stokowski, Eugene Ormandy, Riccardo Muti, Charles Dutoit and Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

Charles Dutoit

The Philadelphia Orchestra was the first orchestra in the world to start recording its work (in 1917) and was the first to appear regularly on the radio (in 1925). Under the baton of Leopold Stokowski, the Philadelphia Orchestra recorded the first-ever multi-track, stereophonic soundtrack for Disney's Fantasia in 1940.

The Philadelphia Orchestra was the world's first symphony to sell recordings of their work via downloads from their website in 2006 and later through iTunes.

The Kimmel Center, Philadelphia

From its original home in Philly's Academy of Music to its spectacular digs in the Kimmel Center today, the Phildelphia Orchestra has been at the forefront of adopting new technologies and appealing to new audiences. It's one of Philadelphia's (and the US's, and the world's) great cultural institutions and now all of that is in peril.

Interior shot of the Kimmel Center, Philadelphia, PA

Symphony orchestras aren't the sole province of the blue-haired and the idly wealthy. Arts organizations like the Philly Orchestra preserve and pass along the best of western civilization. Our very culture is at stake here. Arts organizations in general, and orchestras in particular, are community assets of the highest order. Keeping them alive needs to become a national priority.

This is the result of decades of slashing arts funding in schools, arts funding locally and arts funding nationally. You cannot have a great nation without great art. Repeat that often enough until it sticks.

If you live in an area with an orchestra, please go see a performance. Then keep going back. Make a donation while you're there.

This is Eugene Ormandy at the helm in 1975 as he conducts Gustav Holst's The Planets, Opus 32: Jupiter the bringer of jollity.

Bring home the Trevi Fountain

The Trevi Fountain is the largest Baroque fountain in the city of Rome. In a city brimming with architectural wonders, the Trevi Fountain stands out.

As massive as the fountain is, the piazza where it's located is relatively small. So small that it's nearly impossible to photograph the entire fountain without a super wide angle lens. My regular wide angle could only capture this much of it as I was standing in front of it.

This shot is from Wikimedia Commons and it's been electronically manipulated to remove the distortion. It's the clearest shot of the fountain I've ever seen.

Though you can definitely see the whole thing, photographing it is another matter all together. It's 85 feet high and 65 feet wide and by any measure, that's a big fountain.

Like everything in Rome, the Trevi Fountain has a story behind it that weaves together threads of Ancient Roman history, the Papacy and Roman identity. There's absolutely nothing subtle about the fountain itself or the story of how it came to be.

In 19 B.C., Roman engineers finished the Aqua Virgo, one of the aqueducts that made life in Ancient Rome possible. The Aqua Virgo terminated where the Trevi Fountain stands now and it supplied Rome with fresh water for 400 years. During the sieges of the Goths in the 500s, the Goths drove Rome to its knees and delivered a death blow when they broke all of the aqueducts in Rome.

Fast forward to the 1450s when Pope Nicholas V repaired the Aqua Virgo (now called the Acqua Vergine) and commissioned a fountain. The original fountain was a pretty basic affair, little more than a basin that collected the water from the aqueduct.

In 1629, Pope Urban VIII found the fountain to be too plain and commissioned no less than Gian Lorenzo Bernini to draw up a new fountain. The pope died before construction could start and the project died with Pope Urban VIII.

In 1730, Pope Clement XII held a contest to see who could design a fountain grand enough to mark the triumph of the repaired aqueduct. Clement XII was a Florentine and he chose the Florentine architect Alessandro Galilei's design over the Roman architect Nicola Salvi. The outcry from the streets of Rome was as instant as it was intense. No Florentine was going to build anything in Rome in the 1700s, thank you very much. Bowing to public pressure, Clement XII awarded the commission to Salvi and the fountain you can see today looks exactly like it did when Salvi designed it.

Knock offs of it at Epcot Center and Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas do it a supreme disservice. The original is a glorious pile of travertine, one well worth the effort it takes to stand in front of. When I heard that Top Knobs had released a new series of cabinet knobs and pulls that paid homage to the Trevi Fountain I was suspicious.

Once I saw them I dropped my suspicions immediately.

Top Knobs Passport series manages to invoke the details of the fountain without going overboard. As soon as I saw that cup pull I went back through my photos of the Trevi Fountain and found this detail shot I took in Rome.

Nice job Top Knobs.

The Trevi Fountain-inspired hardware is but a part of the entire Passport series from Top Knobs. Other collections in the Passport series pay tribute to such iconic locations the Great Wall of China, the Sydney Opera House, the Tower Bridge in London, the ancient temple complex at Luxor and Victoria Falls. I haven't seen any of the rest of collections, but they'll be debuting at KBIS in a few weeks. You can find the rest of Top Knobs' extensive offerings on their website.