Neighborhood Series: Grand Concourse
Each week we’ll talk about some of the inspiration behind our neighborhood series designs. We started this series in early 2017 because we wanted people to have a greater connection to home. Being able to rep your city is huge, and going block by block would be a near impossible task with all of the streets in The Bronx, so being able to create designs that could remind people of the neighborhood they grew up in (or are currently living in) was a huge goal of ours.
We create designs to remind people of the neighborhood they grew up in, or are currently living in.
Our initial in-house design approach has been to have designs reduced to 1 or 2 colors. For us, being able to communicate a feeling with the least amount of colors let’s us know that the design is doing the heavy lifting rather than the colors immediately invoking a certain emotion. It also allows us to either remix the design or have different colorways, with the tees, hoodies and sweatshirts serving as the canvas for the artwork as well as the color of the garment itself giving some depth to the piece. This, however, does not factor into our collaborations. For collabs, the artists we work with drive the design process, and we’ll tweak elements here and there but won’t keep an artist from representing themselves through color.
About Our Design
This week, we’re looking at the Grand Concourse design, one of our personal favorites.
The Grand Concourse was the work of French immigrant Louis Aloys Risse in the late 1890s as a means of connecting Manhattan to the Bronx, which was then mostly farmland and an oasis for the wealthy. Inspired by the beautiful, intricate details of French architecture, especially the Champs-Élysées in central Paris. Risse’s vision for the Grand Concourse, which has been known affectionately as the Boulevard of Dreams, included pedestrian and bike paths, and intricate landscaping.
Construction started on the Grand Concourse in 1894, at the height of the City Beautiful Movement.
The City Beautiful Movement was a philosophy adopted by many architects, designers, and urban planners, who believed that beautification and grandeur in cities would lead to social reform by creating civic and moral virtue by denizens.
Through elaborate (and expensive!) projects, proponents believed quality of life would improve. This ideology helps explain the opulence and breadth of the project, which at the time seemed disjointed with other construction projects in The Bronx.
The Grand Concourse barriers, divisions, and layout itself was modeled on French city planing but the project was completed at the height of the Art Deco movement which inspired the design style of the surrounding buildings. Art Deco is a distinct style converging Cubism, Vienna Secession, with French craftsmanship and details. By the 1930s, the hundreds of buildings built along the Concourse mimicked Art Deco and Art Moderne elements resulting in some of the most intricate, ornate, and embellished entrances in The Bronx.
These Art Deco facade lements – geometrical forms, zig zags, chevrons, reeding and fluting, recessed panels, and repetitious curves – was the inspiration for the Grand Concourse Neighborhood Series t-shirt design. GRAND CONCOURSE is in a 1930s inspired type, anchored by a step-and-repeat and straight lines. The upper left and right corners provide symmetry with a design pulled from building entrances along the historic street.
What do you think of this design? What colorways or other garments should we print this on? Let us know in the comments below.
