Two of my great loves — pre-Modern interiors and flea markets — join forces in one fantastic mashup: The Brooklyn Flea’s temporary digs at One Hanson Place.

View looking over the mezzanine rail.

During the colder months (till March 28), The Brooklyn Flea is movin’ on up, from its standard location in an empty asphalt lot to the palatial lobby, mezzanine, and underground vault of the former Williamsburg Savings Bank.

If you’re into this sort of thing, it is quite a special experience. The mosaics on the walls and ceiling are spectacular. The food court can be found behind a 6′-thick metal door in the old vault. Vendors populate the old teller booths. The light streaming through the Gothic windows makes the wares seem to glow with their nostalgia.

No need to spend a dime, even. The space is enough of a treasure.

Detail of the mosaic on the back wall of the lobby (seen at a distance in the photo at top).

I’m curious: How do y’all feel about “fun type?” You know—typography that feels ‘bouncy’ or ‘playful,’or like what it really wants to say is  Party Time!!? Well. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

The thing is, I’ve been kicking around an idea for a personal project, and the last time I paid a visit to Momma’s house I hit upon a fitting title: Carter’s. (Not ready to tell you yet what the project is exactly, but that’s beside the larger point; you’ll just have to bear with me.) Title inspiration struck when I unearthed this old photo of my grandmother, Mary, with a couple other gals in Milan, Tennessee, in 1962, next to grandpa’s pickup, emblazoned with the name of the gas station he used to run: Carter’s DX. See—that was their last name. Carter.

[side note: DX was a midwestern brand of the Tulsa-based of Sunray DX Oil Co., which merged with Sun Oil in 1968. In the late ’80s, Sun began rebranding the DX stations under the Sunoco name.]

Anyway, I thought Carter’s would be a fitting name for my project. So I set about thinking up a logo. I was originally going to lift the type treatment right off the hand-lettering on the side of the truck, but as you can see, whoever scrawled that on there wasn’t exactly a wiz in the aesthetics department.

As I played with the letters of the name, it seemed it wanted to be a bit off kilter. The letterforms just didn’t fit snugly enough when they were all in alignment. A page from my sketchbook below:

Which brings us back to my original quandry: It looks so damn playful!

I think what it is is that type that doesn’t share the same baseline with the adjacent letters automatically looks like it’s having a good ’ol time. Why is this? Is it some residual effect of epic 20th century branding efforts (on the part of kids’ products, toys, cereal, etc.), now ingrained in our visual-cultural mental library? I mean, why does it automatically scream out, “I’m having fun!,” and not “I’m drunk!”?

To get to the bottom of this, I investigated other venerable brands that use a similar treatment. There’s Playskool [Won’t be getting into all the questions the spelling raises, in this post]—

—Obviously, they’re just doin’ it for the kids.

But then there’s the inexplicable PriceWaterhouseCoopers logotype:

Um, please explain? Is this solution just to horizontally compress such an incredibly long name? ’Cause it looks pretty fun to me, and I don’t see how that could be what they’re going for.

The last witness I’ll call to the stand is the title treatment for the play/film Alfie, which kept the “playfulness” intact from the Michael Cane version all the way through to Jude Law’s interpretation of the role.

And here’s Jude, for good measure:

(Alfie was [is], like, a playboy, I think. Which must explain all the playfulness going on.)

All of this to say that perhaps I’m okay with Carter’s sans consistent baseline? Or maybe I’m venturing into treacherous waters, and should just stick with the truck type? (The more I investigate this question, the more I think the latter might be the way to go.)

Watch for it…

A friend who lives nearby sent along this lovely photo of Metropolitan Avenue at Graham—our closest subway stop (Graham Avenue on the L line). It was taken in the summer of 1937 by Berenice Abbott (available from the New York Public Library digital archives here).

Curious, I went out and snapped my own, from the same spot:

The differences and similarities are equally striking! 72 years did quite a number, but to my eyes it appears that not a single building has been razed. Altered considerably, sure, but the structures still stand—people still pass them everyday, climb their stairs, and call them home.

The intersection was unquestionably more beautiful in 1937. I don’t think I need to tell anyone here how unspeakably tacky vinyl siding is (Unless—landlords? Y’all listening?) compared to the facades of the thirties: the Victorian cupola on top of the corner building anchoring the intersecting avenues, with rounded pediments on either side giving balance and proportion. The ornate cornices along the tops of all the buildings have been lopped off, leaving them no better crown than a fence. Where the windows have not been bricked (or sided) over, they’ve lost all the framing that made them make sense in the larger structure—eaves, ledges, sills, gone. The wide friezes separating the storefronts on the ground floor from the residences above have given way to bulbous prefabricated awnings and roll-down metal gates. Charming.

Interestingly, the cast-iron subway entrance hasn’t changed one bit. Evoking Industrial-Age New York (Ms. Abbott captured her photo the same decade the Empire State Building went up), the chunky balustrade around the stairs is supported by thick, tightly spaced posts (I wonder if they were forest green back then?) and lanterns signal the entrance.

There was a beer ad (and Coca-Cola too, of course) spanning the south face of the corner building in ’37, so I can’t rail at that in the modern world. But look at that poor lamppost littered with paper scraps and tape gunk from flyers and solicitations—in the age of Craigslist, no less! The streetcar tracks laid into the cobblestone have presumably had black asphalt poured over them. One thing we do have, mercifully, on the streets these days, that was missing back then: trees.