Houston Astrodome

Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record. Houston Astrodome, 8400 Kirby Drive, Houston, Harris County, TX. HAER TX-108, Larger reference image (JPEG - 145K bytes) Highest resolution image (TIFF - 19242K bytes).

The records in HABS/HAER were created for the U.S. Government and are considered to be in the public domain. the Library of Congress is not aware of any U.S. copyright protection (see Title 17 U.S.C.) or any other restrictions in the HABS/HAER materials Rights and Reproductions

Survey number HAER TX-108, Building/structure dates: 1964 initial construction. Significance: Originally called the Harris County Domed Stadium, the Astrodome was completed in 1964. Conceived as the home of the Houston Colts and Houston Oilers, it was termed by many as the Eighth Wonder of the World.

It was the first time that a stadium was built for both baseball and football that was totally enclosed and fully air-conditioned. The building covers 9.14 acres of land. Circular in shape, the outer diameter of the Astrodome is 710' and the clear span of the dome roof is 642'.

Collection: Historic American Engineering Record (Library of Congress) Repository: Library of Congress, Prints and Photograph Division, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA. DIGID: hdl.loc.gov/hhh.tx1045

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Summary: Reliant Astrodome, taken Dec. 31, 2005. High Resolution Image (2048 × 1536 pixel, file size: 850 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg)

Reliant Astrodome From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Reliant Astrodome, also known as the Houston Astrodome or simply the Astrodome, is a domed sports stadium, the first of its kind, located in Houston, Texas. The stadium is part of the Reliant Park complex. It opened in 1965 as Harris County Domed Stadium and was nicknamed the "Eighth Wonder of the World".

Major League Baseball expanded to Houston in 1962 with the Houston Colt .45s, who were later renamed the Astros. Houston's unpredictable subtropical weather made outdoor baseball difficult for players and spectators alike. Several baseball franchises had toyed with the idea of building enclosed, air-conditioned stadiums. Former Houston mayor Judge Roy Hofheinz claimed inspiration for what would eventually become the Astrodome when he was on a tour of Rome, where he learned that the builders of the ancient Colosseum installed giant velaria to shield spectators from the Roman sun.

The world's first domed stadium was conceived by Hofheinz, and designed by architects Hermon Lloyd & W.B. Morgan, and Wislon, Morris, Crain and Anderson. Structural engineering and structural design was performed by Walter P Moore Engineers and Consultants of Houston. It was constructed by H.A. Lott, Inc. for Harris County, Texas. It stands 18 stories tall, covering 9½ acres. The dome is 710 feet (216.4 m) in diameter and the ceiling is 208 feet (63.4 m) above the playing surface, which itself sits 25 feet (7.6 m) below street level.

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Western Wall Wailing Wall

Western Wall Wailing Wall TITLE: The Temple area. Jerusalem. The western wall of the Temple area. (The Jews' Wailing Wall). CALL NUMBER: LC-M32- P-46[P&P] REPRODUCTION NUMBER: LC-DIG-matpc-05899 (digital file from original photo) RIGHTS INFORMATION: No known restrictions on publication. MEDIUM: 1 negative : glass, dry plate ; 5 x 7 in.

CREATED, PUBLISHED: [between 1898 and 1946] NOTES: Title from: list, Photographic subjects of Bible Lands. Taken either by the American Colony Photo Department or its successor the Matson Photo Service. Gift; Episcopal Home; 1978.

PART OF: G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection. REPOSITORY: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA. DIGITAL ID: (digital file from original photo) matpc 05899 hdl.loc.gov/matpc.05899 CONTROL #: mpc2004005789/PP

Credit Line: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, [reproduction number, LC-DIG-matpc-05899]

MARC Record Line 540 - No known restrictions on publication.

Digital ID: matpc 05899 Source: digital file from original photo Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-matpc-05899 (digital file from original photo) Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA Retrieve higher resolution JPEG version (198 kilobytes) .

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birkhat cohanim at the Western Wall during Passover 2004 High Resolution Image (1280 × 960 pixel, file size: 313 KB, MIME type: image.

The Western Wall (Hebrew: הכותל המערבי, translit.: HaKotel HaMa'aravi), or simply The Kotel, is a retaining wall in Jerusalem that dates from the time of the Jewish Second Temple (516 BCE - 70 CE). It is sometimes referred to as the Wailing Wall (Arabic: il-Mabka), referring to Jews mourning the destruction of the Temple. The Western Wall is part of the bigger religious site in the Old City of Jerusalem called Har ha-Bayit (the Temple Mount) to Jews and Christians, or Al-Haram al-Qudsi al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary) to Muslims.

The Western Wall is revered for its proximity to the sacred Holy of Holies on the Temple Mount, which is the Most Holy Place in Judaism. This means that for Jews the Western Wall is the holiest location that is currently generally accessible to the Jewish people for prayer. There is a small area below ground level, called "The Cave", in the Western Wall Tunnel, that is closest to the site of the Holy of Holies. However, as this area is not amenable to the large groups that frequent the wall, most people limit their visits to the outdoor plaza.

At any hour, Jewish men and women can be found praying at the wall, which is actually a large outdoor synagogue. As is traditional in Jewish synagogues, there are a number of holy arks containing Torah scrolls, tables for reading of the law and a mechitza, or divider, separating the men's and women's sections of the wall.

Bar mitzvah celebrations are frequently held here, and people of various ages travel from all over the world to have their ceremonies at the Kotel. It is also a tradition to deposit slips of paper with wishes or prayers on them in the crevices and crannies of the wall. Looking closely, one can see hundreds of tiny, folded papers stuffed inside every space that will hold them.

The Temple in Jerusalem was the most sacred building in Judaism. Herod the Great built vast retaining walls around Mount Moriah, expanding the small, quasi-natural plateau on which the First and Second Temples stood into the wide open spaces of the Temple Mount seen today.

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St. Peter's Basilica

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High Resolution Image (1600 × 1200 pixel, file size: 579 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg)

St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican is the largest church in the world. The square in front of the facade of St. Peter's is called St. Peter's square.

Vatican City From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Vatican City, officially State of the Vatican City (Latin: Status Civitatis Vaticanae; Italian: Stato della Città del Vaticano), is a landlocked sovereign city-state whose territory consists of a walled enclave within the city of Rome. At approximately 44 hectares (108.7 acres), it is the smallest independent state in the world.

The state came into existence by virtue of the Lateran Treaty in 1929, which speaks of it as a new creation (Preamble and Article III), not as a vestige of the much larger Papal States (756 to 1870) that had previously encompassed central Italy, most of which was absorbed into the Kingdom of Italy in 1860, and the final part, the city of Rome and a small area close to it, ten years later.

Vatican City is a non-hereditary, elected monarchy that is ruled by the Bishop of Rome — the Pope. The highest state functionaries are all clergymen of the Catholic Church. It is the sovereign territory of the Holy See (Latin:Sancta Sedes) and the location of the Apostolic Palace — the Pope's official residence — and of much of the Roman Curia.

For almost 1000 years (324-1309) the Popes lived at the Lateran Palace on the Caelian Hill in the east of Rome. Only because the Lateran building was out of repair on their return from 68 years in Avignon have they since 1377 lived in the Vatican or, for a while, at the Quirinal, now the residence of the president of Italy. The Lateran Treaty by which the Vatican City State was set up is so called because it was signed in the restored Lateran building, which is now the residence of the Pope's Cardinal Vicar for the City of Rome. There have been two Vatican Councils, but five Lateran Councils. The Basilica of St. John Lateran, not the St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, remains the Pope's cathedral.

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Dome of the Rock

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Dome of the Rock, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Dome of the Rock (Arabic: مسجد قبة الصخرة, translit.: Masjid Qubbat As-Sakhrah, Hebrew: כיפת הסלע, translit.: Kipat Hasela, Turkish: Kubbetüs Sahra) is an Islamic shrine in what Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary (al-Haram al-Qudsi al-Sharif, Arabic: الحرم القدسي الشريف) — which Jews and Christians call Har ha-Bayit (Hebrew: הר הבית) or the Temple Mount — it remains one of the best known landmarks of Jerusalem. It was built between 687 and 691 by the 9th Caliph, Abd al-Malik, making it the oldest extant Islamic building in the world.

The rock in the center of the dome is the spot from which, according to Islamic tradition, Muhammad (Peace be upon him) ascended for a night-long journey to Heaven in AD 621, accompanied by the angel Gabriel. There he met many prophets like Abraham and Moses and was given the (now obligatory) Islamic prayers before returning to Earth. A Qur'anic verse says that Muhammad (Peace be upon him) took an instantaneous night journey on Buraq from al-Masjid al-Haram ("the sacred mosque", interpreted as being in Mecca) to al-Masjid al-Aqsa ("the farthest mosque", interpreted as being in Jerusalem)

In Judaism the stone is the site where Abraham fulfilled God's test to see if he would be willing to sacrifice his son Isaac (Genesis 22:1-19). (Muslims believe that this event involved Abraham's other son Ishmael and occurred in the desert of Mina where millions of Muslims offer pilgrimage every year).

There is some controversy among secular scholars about equating Mount Moriah (where Isaac's binding occurred according to the Biblical narrative), the Temple Mount, and the rock where Jacob dreamed about angels ascending and descending on a ladder to heaven (Genesis 28:10-19); but for Orthodox Jews, there is no doubt that all these events occurred on this spot.

Situated inside the Holy of Holies, this was the rock upon which the Ark of the Covenant was placed in the First Temple. During the Second Temple, the stone was used by High Priest who offered up the incense and sprinkled the blood of the sacrifices on it during the Yom Kippur Service. Rabbinic legend also alleges that the entire world was created from this stone, hence the name אבן השתייה, Foundation Stone.

In Christianity, in addition to Jesus's actions in the temple, it is believed that during the time of the Byzantine Empire, the spot where the Dome was later constructed was where Constantine's mother built a small church, calling it the Church of St. Cyrus and St. John, later on enlarged and called the Church of the Holy Wisdom.

On the walls of the Dome of the Rock is an inscription in a mosaic frieze that includes the following words:

"Bless your envoy and your servant Jesus son of Mary and peace upon him on the day of birth and on the day of death and on the day he is raised up again. It is a word of truth in which they doubt. It is not for God to take a son. Glory be to him when he decrees a thing he only says be and it is."

This appears to be the earliest extant citation from the Qur'an, with the date recorded as 72 after the Hijra (or 691-692 AD), which historians view as the year of the Dome's construction.

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This work is in the public domain in the United States because it is a work of the United States Federal Government under the terms of Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105 of the US Code. High Resolution Image, (482 × 709 pixel, file size: 234 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg). El Sakhra (a.k.a el Sakhra, the Rock, and the rock beneath the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem).

This is half of a stereoscopic image in the Matson Collection of the Library of Congress. Originally, The Library of Congress horizontally flipped this online image (leading to multiple erroneous Wikipedia entries). The image has now been corrected.

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Seattle Space Needle

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Space Needle From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Space Needle is a tower in Seattle, Washington. It is a major landmark of the Pacific Northwest region of the United States and the symbol of Seattle. Located in Seattle Center, it was built for the 1962 World's Fair, during which time nearly 20,000 people a day used the elevators — 2.3 million visitors in all for the World Fair.

The Space Needle is 605 feet (184 m) high and 138 feet (42 m) wide at its widest point and weighs 9,550 tons. When it was completed it was the tallest building west of the Mississippi River. It is built to withstand winds of up to 200 mph (320 km/h) and earthquakes up to 9.5 magnitude (which would protect the structure against an earthquake as powerful as the 1700 Cascadia earthquake) and has 25 lightning rods on the roof to prevent lightning damage.

The Space Needle features an observation deck at 520 feet (160 m), the SkyCity restaurant at 500 feet (152 m), and a gift shop. From the top of the Needle, one can see not only the Downtown Seattle skyline, but also the Olympic and Cascade Mountains, Mount Rainier, Mount Baker, Elliott Bay and surrounding islands. Photographs of the Seattle skyline often show the Space Needle in a prominent position, even appearing sometimes to tower above the rest of the city's skyscrapers.

This occurs because the Space Needle sits roughly four-fifths of a mile (1.3 km) northwest of these skyscrapers, and photographers must capture the city with the Space Needle in the foreground in order to include both it and the rest of the tall buildings. (This angle offers the added bonus of affording a view of Mount Rainier in the background.) At 60 stories it is not remarkably tall, and it is not as close to the cluster of downtown skyscrapers as one might think judging only from the typical angle from which the skyline photographs are taken.

Visitors can reach the top via elevators that travel at 10 mph (16 km/h). This trip takes 43 seconds and some tourists wait in hour-long lines in order to ascend to the top of the tower. It was designated a historic landmark on April 19, 1999. It is now owned by the privately held Space Needle Corporation.

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