Erieview Tower Comes Back, Dark Matter Knocks in the Black Hills, and a Telescope Leaves Cape Canaveral

Four hats came out of one week that had almost nothing in common except that all of it was about looking at things. A tower in downtown Cleveland that nobody has really looked at in thirty years is about to be worth looking at again. A detector a mile under South Dakota looked at nothing for years and then, once, saw something. And a telescope built to look at more sky at once than anything before it left the Florida coast on a column of fire.

Here's what we made, and why.

Erieview Tower gets its $218 million back

Erieview Tower went up on East Ninth Street in 1964 — forty floors of flat-topped International Style optimism, the centrepiece of an urban renewal plan that was supposed to remake the east side of downtown Cleveland. The plan mostly didn't happen. The tower stayed, and for a long stretch it stood mostly empty, the kind of building people give directions by without ever going inside.

This month a $218 million financing package closed on a full conversion: the upper floors become a hotel flying a luxury flag for the first time in Ohio, with the rest reworked around it. The silhouette on the skyline is unchanged. Everything behind the windows is not.

We did it twice, because there are two ways to feel about a building like that. The metal version is the civic one — an arch-shaped brushed-nickel patch with the tower engraved over the lakefront, the sort of thing that would look right on a hard hat.

That's the Metal Tower Trucker Hat — Cleveland, on a Richardson 112 in six colorways.

Shop the Metal Tower Trucker Hat →

The leather one is warmer and a little more personal — a scalloped tan oval with the tower and three lake lines pressed into the hide, the way a maker's mark gets stamped into a wallet.

That one is the Leather Tower Trucker Hat — Cleveland.

Shop the Leather Tower Trucker Hat →

Something moved, a mile under the Black Hills

In the mined-out shafts of an old gold mine near Lead, South Dakota, about a mile of rock stands between the sky and ten tonnes of ultrapure liquid xenon. The rock is the point: it filters out the constant sleet of ordinary cosmic particles, so that anything the xenon does notice is worth noticing.

For years it noticed essentially nothing, which is what the experiment expected. This month the collaboration reported a single event that they cannot comfortably explain as ordinary matter. One event is one event, and the physicists are being careful to say so out loud — this is not a discovery announcement. It is the most compelling hint yet of a substance that makes up most of the mass in the universe and has never once been directly seen.

The patch is matte black carbon fibre with a silver starburst and a single orbit ring, which is about as much as anyone can honestly draw of something nobody has looked at yet.

It's the Carbon Fiber Starburst Trucker Hat — Black Hills.

Shop the Carbon Fiber Starburst Trucker Hat →

The widest eye we've ever launched

A $4 billion flagship observatory went up off the Florida Space Coast on a Falcon Heavy and is now coasting out to a station beyond the Moon. Its survey instrument sees a piece of sky roughly a hundred times wider than Hubble's in a single frame, and it is expected to end up cataloguing on the order of twenty billion stars. The individual images are so large that no television made can display one at full resolution.

Here is the thing about telescope merchandise: it is almost always a brass spyglass on a wooden tripod. That is a lovely object and it is not what launched from Florida. So this one is the actual machine — instrument barrel, angled sunshade, both solar wings — die-cut in gold-tone metal to the spacecraft's own outline, no border around it at all.

That's the Gold Space Telescope Trucker Hat — Cape Canaveral, and it is the most distinctive shape we've cut in a while.

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All four

Every one of these is pressed and stitched to order on a Richardson 112 in six colorways, including a ponytail cut: the Metal Tower Trucker Hat — Cleveland, the Leather Tower Trucker Hat — Cleveland, the Carbon Fiber Starburst Trucker Hat — Black Hills, and the Gold Space Telescope Trucker Hat — Cape Canaveral.