Vintage grails and deep-cut designers in a city all too slept 'pon
An "Erin's Hometown" Special. Plus inspo for the home & soul at a midcentury vibe mecca
Welcome back to Concorde, the Blackbird Spyplane “women’s vertical,” except it’s for everyone who is cool. The Concorde Cute Swag Index, a guide to everything we’ve covered, arranged by category, is here.
One thing people love about Blackbird Spyplane is that we go places these other internationally acclaimed sletters don’t, surfacing & spotlighting treasures for people to enjoy the globe over.
For instance? My (Erin’s) hometown of Philadelphia. It’s a great city that tends to sit in the shadow of NYC (Jonah’s hometown) in most media coverage — but you could flip that on its head and argue that, as a result of Philly’s illustrious attention-hog neighbor (not to mention Philly’s way lower rents) it’s less picked-over, avoids overexposure, and creates more-fertile soil for risk-taking and idiosyncrasy. In recent years, s**t in town has been popping off in world-class, extremely Spyplaney ways, to the degree that, circa 2024, Philly is not merely “rivaling” New York for character and sauce in some cases, but exceeding it!!
I grew up just outside of the city proper, and during a visit back home last month, I linked & built with insiders on the ground. I ate at great restaurants, including a, like, alternate-reality version of Russ & Daughters where the food is just as delicious and you don’t have to wait an hour in line with torched tourist hordes.
I got up close & personal with many great independent clothing lines, local and international, that are hard to find anywhere else, and I discovered incredible vintage troves, too — most of them with e-shops, in case you’re not visiting anytime soon. And it’s only an hour and change from Penn Station by train, so these steps are not hard to retrace!
Intel is marked by a “🥨” below, in a special PA twist ; )
Let’s get to it, youse guys.
First up —
Over the past few years I’ve started a new tradition where, when I go back and visit my parents, I book a design tour in the greater Philadelphia area. In the past 3 years we’ve visited tha woodworking god 🥨 George Nakashima’s home & studio in Bucks County, 🥨 Fonthill Castle, a 6-story reinforced concrete mansion whose vaulted ceilings, floors and walls are embedded with weird ‘n’ wonky ceramic tiles, and the mind-blowing home of craftsman-artist 🥨 Wharton Esherick, which inspired our last Home Goods guide, full of G.O.O.D. G.E.R.M.S. (Gangs Of Objects & Décor Giving Eclectic Refined Motley Spirit).
This year, we chose a singularly crazy vibe mecca in… nearby New Jersey!
This is the 🥨 James Rose Center in Ridgewood, NJ. Rose, a landscape architect, designed it for himself and his family in 1953, and lived there until his death in the ‘90s. It’s a beautifully rambling place that put me in mind of a treehouse heavily influenced by traditional Japanese homes and Frank Lloyd Wright geometries. There’s a rooftop deck that runs the length of the house, covered with its own geometrically-trussed roof, pictured middle right above: The roof has a roof!! It also has garden beds, a working fireplace and, because Rose was a committed Zen Buddhist, a meditation room. Above is a scale model he made of the home, which gives you a sense of the sprawl.
People at the Rose Center call him “the James Dean of landscape architecture” (OK bad boy!!) because he chafed at authority: He never graduated from high school, somehow got into Harvard’s landscape architecture program anyway, then was expelled for refusing to submit works in the requisite French Beaux-Arts style, which he found dated and corny. You gotta salute real ones for staying true to their vision.
Like Wharton Esherick, Rose mainly used salvaged materials for his home. There were a bunch of thrifty details my eye caught on, like sculptures made from scrap metal (see the amazing, molten-looking copper sconce, above center) and rocks anchored in the floor and cemented to the walls in decorative, zigzagging patterns (as in the pic with the paper lantern).
We love seeing design geniuses get loose in their own spaces like this, creating something that reflects a coherent vision but no tyrannical obsession with perfection. You can’t control nature, you can’t stop death. So, cement a d*mn rock to your wall, why don’t you?
Now let’s get proper Philly with it, starting with —
A clothing shop that (it’s no exaggeration to say) puts 99.9% of the world’s other clothing shops to SHAME!
They carry a bunch of great labels in the Concorde / Spyplane canon that cool people have heard of, and they also carry a bunch of great labels that even most cool people don’t know about, including, in cases, I will gladly confess, me.
The racks are so thick with gems that, for over an hour, the chill, kindvibed & plugged-in owners pulled out slappers to show me from a flotilla of sick deep-cut Japanese and European designers whose stuff I’d never had a chance to see in person before.