Two very different things happened this week, and they turn out to have the same shape. In Cleveland, a wall nobody looked at twice became 11,000 square feet of color. In New York Harbor, a species that was scraped out of the water a century ago came back by the hundred million. Both are cases of a city getting something back that it had written off — one on the side of a parking garage, one under the waterline.
Three patches came out of it. Here they are.
The guitar: Cleveland's Public Square mural
The mural went up on the parking-garage wall at 55 Public Square, in the middle of downtown Cleveland. It took three years. It runs 11,000 square feet of kaleidoscopic geometry, built as a tribute to the city's rock and roll history, and it is the largest work its Brazilian painter has made anywhere in the United States. The ribbon-cutting is September 15.
A wall that size does not go on a hat, but the thing the wall is about does. The Embroidered Guitar Trucker Hat — Cleveland takes the mural's color blocking and puts it inside a die-cut electric guitar: body, neck and headstock, no border, no frame. It is the only patch in the batch with the city's name stitched right into the face of it.
Shop the Embroidered Guitar Trucker Hat — Cleveland →
The arch: the wall itself, in brushed nickel
The guitar is what the mural is about. This one is what the mural looks like. The Metal Public Square Trucker Hat — Cleveland engraves the faceted garage wall into an arch badge in brushed nickel, with the downtown skyline standing behind it and PUBLIC SQUARE across the base.
An arch badge is stadium shorthand — it is the shape you put on something a city is proud of. Using it for a parking garage is either a joke or a compliment, and in Cleveland this month it is a compliment.
Shop the Metal Public Square Trucker Hat — Cleveland →
The shell: New York Harbor's reef comes back
New York ate its way to a reef. Restaurant oyster shells go out to Governors Island, cure in the open air for months, and then go back into the harbor as hard substrate — the surface a baby oyster needs to attach to. More than a hundred million live oysters are now filtering that water.
The scale of what was lost is the part that gets you: the reefs here were once so thick that ships had to steer around them. The Steel Oyster Shell Trucker Hat — New York Harbor is one shell and nothing else — die-cut to the ribbed fan in polished stainless steel, no border, no lettering. The shape did the work, so the shape is the whole patch.
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The batch
A guitar for a wall three years in the making, an arch badge for the wall itself, and a single shell for a harbor that is filtering itself clean again. All three are made to order on Richardson 112 caps in five colorways, plus a ponytail-opening Infinity Charlie in Dusty Rose.
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Cleveland's Two-Swing Afternoon and Goldstone's New Deep-Space Dish
Cleveland's Two-Swing Afternoon and Goldstone's New Deep-Space Dish