Ultra Swank - Retro Adventures

new york

A Tour of the Time & Life Building in the 1960s

The Time & Life Building, located at 1271 Avenue of the Americas, were designed by the Rockefeller family’s architects, Harrison & Abramowitz & Harris. The iconic building was completed in 1959, and actually serves as base of operations for fictional ad-agency Sterling Draper & Partners. Let’s explore further. It is evident by looking at these photos that the set designers of AMC’s Mad Men took...

Kill Your Darlings
Written by Koop Kooper in Film

Kill Your Darlings

Kill Your Darlings begins in the early 1940s, with Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe) surprising his poet father with the news that he has been accepted into New York’s Columbia University. His mother’s mental issues have forced him to grow up fast but Ginsberg is still unworldly, and a chance meeting with fellow student Lucien Carr opens his eyes to a world of strong drugs, freeform...

Save the Worldport – A Piece of Pan Am History
Written by Baron von Swankenstein in Travel

Save the Worldport – A Piece of Pan Am History

Every mid-century maven knows Pan Am. All swank jet-setting dreams began with the famed airline. The first to employ luxury jetliners (Boeing 707s in 1958 and Boeing 747s in 1970), Pan Am was one of the founders of the commercial Jet Age. With 86 destination countries on all six major continents at its peak in 1968, the Pan Am name was synonymous with style, luxury,...

Why Don Draper must remain a swinging New York Bachelor

When it comes to lounge culture there is a man who really does epitomize the culture through and through. Don Draper. The characteristics of Don Draper is that he that guy that looks great in formal wear, business wear and casual wear. He has great taste in clothes and has great taste in women, he has money, is successful, confident, well groomed and looks a...

Video

Home video shot in 1962 that depicts some quite amazing piece of silent film history. We start with a early departure at Boston Airport and then take to the skies and land at New York City and Idlewild airport (now JFK) where we first take a look at a legendary Pan Am Boeing 707 and then tour the Googie designed Eero Saarinen TWA flight center...

The Unofficial Mad Men Cookbook – Inside The Kitchens, Bars, and Restaurants of Mad Men

Paradigm shift. If you could boil down into a phrase what Mad Men is about, it would be “mid-century paradigm shift.” Mad Men explores it on the large scale: Clueless about how to sell coffee to young adults, the men of Sterling Cooper attempted to shoehorn the Port Huron Statement into their ad campaign. They completely missed the point because the cultural paradigm was changing....

The Best of Everything – The Original Sex & The City

A publishing house typing pool is the seething heart of the aspirations of a cadre of working girls, marking time until they marry Mr. Right and settle down. Caroline Bender (Lange) battles her career aspirations and fear that she will morph into scary book editor Joan Crawford. It’s the original Sex in the City. Rona Jaffe’s novel, The Best of Everything, is about four girls (and their...

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