Construction of the complex began in 1990, and was completed in 1992 with 18 floors and a maximum height of 82 m (270 ft). Architects Terry Farrell and Partners sought to bridge the urban barrier of London Wall by utilising the air rights over the roadway. The complex is composed of two twin towers, set at a 90-degree angle to each other, with one straddling London Wall itself and offering pedestrian passage via an arcade housing shops and restaurants suspended over the road.
The other tower sits on a heavily modelled podium meant to repair the urban fabric, countering the "agoraphobia" and poor pedestrian circulation of the earlier 1960s modernist schemes. The tower plinth and adjacent low romanesque block relate to the scale of surrounding buildings as well as shielding Monkwell Square, which had become a "service yard", from the motorway. Monkwell Square was redesigned and landscaped.
Though the towers are visually distinct, their floorplates are actually connected and share a central service core. The 18th floor of one tower houses a special meeting suite.


The building is well known as the former UK headquarters of JPMorgan Chase, one of the world's leading investment banks. Nabarro LLP leased 138,000 sq ft (12,800 m²) in 2012.
Most of the building now holds Lloyds Banking Group offices.


In 2000, MEPC plc sold the building for around £160 million. In July 2010, it was part of a group of six landmark London properties sold to the Carlyle Group for £671 million following the default of Simon Halabi's property companies. In 2014, the building was purchased by Blackstone for £300 million.


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Sudjic, Deyan (2 May 2004). "Peace in our time". The Observer. Retrieved 19 August 2010.
Marmot, Alexi Ferster; Worthington, John (1986). "Great Fire to Big Bang: Private and Public Designs on the City of London". Built Environment. 12 (4): 216–233. ISSN 0263-7960.
Davies 2013, p. 103.
Yau, Wilson (17 October 2011). "Terry Farrell: Postmodernism and its Legacy". RIBA. Archived from the original on 14 April 2015. Retrieved 14 April 2015.
"125 London Wall, London". Emporis. Retrieved 19 August 2010.
Davies 2013, p. 105.
Davies 2013, p. 107.
"Notice regarding EU e-commerce information and UK Companies Act 2006 requirements". JPMorgan Chase. Archived from the original on 5 January 2009. Retrieved 19 August 2010.
MacGregor, Kristy (10 April 2014). "Blackstone to buy City of London office Alban Gate for £300m". DeVono. Archived from the original on 23 September 2015. Retrieved 14 April 2015.
Simpkins, Edward (22 April 2001). "MEPC sells £285m Bedfont Lakes". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 19 August 2010.
Likus, Anita; Ainsley Thomson (8 July 2010). "Carlyle Group Buys Six 'White Tower' Assets For GBP671M". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 19 August 2010.
Brenton, Hannah (4 July 2014). "Carlyle completes £300m Alban Gate sale". Property Week.
Bibliography
Davies, Emma, ed. (2013). Collage and Context. London: Laurence King. ISBN 9781780672755.


The 2017 Malaysian Grand Prix (formally known as the 2017 Formula 1 Petronas Malaysia Grand Prix) was a Formula One motor race that was held on 1 October 2017 at the Sepang International Circuit in Selangor, Malaysia. The race marked the 37th running of the Malaysian Grand Prix, and the 19th time that the race had been run as a World Championship event since the championship's inception in 1950, all World Championship events having been held at the Sepang International Circuit. This was also the last Malaysian Grand Prix, as the race had not been contracted for the 2018 season and beyond.
Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton entered the round with a 28-point lead over Ferrari's Sebastian Vettel in the World Drivers' Championship. Hamilton's teammate Valtteri Bottas was third, a further 23 points behind. In the World Constructors' Championship, Mercedes held a lead of 102 points over Ferrari, with Red Bull Racing a further 143 points behind in third place.


Reigning GP2 Series champion Pierre Gasly made his Formula One debut, replacing Daniil Kvyat at Toro Rosso. The first free practice session saw several substitute drivers take part, including Sergey Sirotkin filling in for Nico Hülkenberg at Renault, Charles Leclerc replacing Marcus Ericsson at Sauber, Antonio Giovinazzi replacing Kevin Magnussen at Haas, and Sean Gelael taking the place of Carlos Sainz, Jr. at Toro Rosso.


The second free practice was red-flagged after Romain Grosjean crashed heavily at Turn 14. Valtteri Bottas and Kimi Räikkönen dislodged a drain cover embedded in the apex of Turn 13. Grosjean, the next driver through, struck the cover which sliced into his rear wheel. This caused the rear tyre to immediately deflate as Grosjean put load onto the steering wheel, causing him to spin into the barrier on the outside of Turn 14. The third practice session was concluded with Kimi Räikkönen fastest but his teammate Sebastian Vettel had an engine problem that required a replacement.


Notes
 – Sebastian Vettel failed to set a time within the 107% requirement, but received permission from the stewards to start the race; he also received a 20-place grid penalty for exceeding his quota of power unit components.


2 Broadway is an office building at the south end of Broadway, near Bowling Green Park, in the Financial District of Manhattan in New York City. The 32-story building, designed by Emery Roth & Sons and constructed from 1958 to 1959, contains offices for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). 2 Broadway serves as the headquarters for some of the MTA's subsidiary agencies.
The building is on a site bounded by Broadway and Whitehall Street to the west, Beaver Street to the north, and Stone Street to the south. It fills most of the lot, with the building rising in triple setbacks. The facade is covered in blue-green tinted glass, which dates from a 1999 redesign by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
The site was previously occupied by George B. Post's New York Produce Exchange building, which was completed in 1884. Plans for the skyscraper date to 1953, when William Lescaze devised plans to replace the Produce Exchange Building. Emery Roth & Sons were selected to be the architects when Uris Buildings Corporation took over the project. The original tenants were largely financial firms, while the Produce Exchange owned the land under the building and occupied some lower floors. Olympia and York acquired 2 Broadway in 1976 and the underlying land in 1983. After the building became mostly vacant during the early 1990s, Tamir Sapir purchased 2 Broadway in 1995. The building was renovated after the MTA leased all the space in 1998, although the project encountered high costs and several delays.


2 Broadway is in the Financial District of Manhattan in New York City, along the eastern side of Bowling Green. The land lot is shaped irregularly, with frontage on seven streets: Stone Street to the south; Broadway and Whitehall Street, along Bowling Green, to the west; Beaver Street and Marketfield Street to the north; and New Street and Broad Street to the east. The building also wraps around other structures at the city block's northeast corner, at Marketfield and Broad Streets, and at the block's southeast corner, at Broad and Stone Streets.
The building is adjacent to 26 Broadway to the north, the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House to the west, and the American Bank Note Company Building to the northeast. The Whitehall Street station of the New York City Subway, serving the 1, R, and W trains, contains entrances directly outside 2 Broadway.
Much of the site was previously occupied by George B. Post's ten-story New York Produce Exchange headquarters, erected between 1881 and 1884. The structure had been built at a time when the Produce Exchange was in high demand; in 1900, the exchange performed $15 million of business every day. By the 1950s, membership at the Produce Exchange had declined to five hundred from its peak membership of three thousand. The site was also occupied by three smaller buildings, including a five-story structure at 76 Broad Street.


2 Broadway was designed by Emery Roth & Sons and completed in 1959. It was one of several large post-World War II buildings the firm erected in Manhattan, besides the Pan Am Building, 1290 Avenue of the Americas, and the Chemical New York Trust Building. The current exterior dates to 1999, when Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) installed new cladding on the building.
The structure consists of 32 stories, with a height of 421 feet (128.32 m). The design fills most of the lot, with the building rising in triple setbacks. The building was designed so it occupied the maximum volume and massing allowed under zoning regulations at the time. Under a subsequent change to the zoning code, proposed one year after 2 Broadway was completed, the building would have exceeded the maximum shape of that code.


Originally, 2 Broadway's facade was clad with full-height glass windows between black horizontal spandrels. The glass windows were separated by gray vertical mullions. Gray horizontal bars alternately ran atop the bottom or top of each spandrel, resulting in a staggered pattern. A similar pattern is employed in the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building. Carter B. Horsley wrote for The New York Times in 1977 that the facade pattern did not relate to the building's structural system, unlike most other structures built in New York City at the time. Following SOM's renovation, the facade was covered in blue-green tinted glass.
Above the main entrance at Broadway is a mosaic mural by Lee Krasner and Ronald Stein, measuring 86 feet (26 m) wide and 12 feet (3.7 m) tall. The mosaic is composed of multicolored glass tiles in green, gold, black, and crimson hues. Another mosaic by the same artists is installed over the entrance on Broad Street but measures 15 by 15 feet (4.6 by 4.6 m). The works were installed on the suggestion of B. H. Friedman, an executive at Uris Brothers, the company that developed 2 Broadway. These artworks were never given a title.


The building contains about 1,600,000 square feet (150,000 m²) of total interior space. It was built with 1,390,000 square feet (129,000 m²) of leasable space, with about 59,000 square feet (5,500 m²) of office space on each floor. This made 2 Broadway the second largest skyscraper in the Financial District at the time of its completion, behind One Chase Manhattan Plaza (now 28 Liberty Street). As of 2021, the building houses offices of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). Some of the MTA's subsidiaries are headquartered at 2 Broadway, including the New York City Transit Authority, MTA Bridges and Tunnels, and MTA Capital Construction.
2 Broadway's lobby was originally accessed by three entrances at Broadway, Broad Street, and New Street, which were open to the public and internally connected. The entrance concourse at Broad Street, measuring 100 by 20 feet (30.5 by 6.1 m), was planted with flowers, shrubs, and trees when the building was completed. Other features of the lobby included a gray marble panel on the wall, embedded with a fossilized coral reef estimated to be 360 million years old.


In October 1953, the Produce Exchange leased the site of its headquarters to developers Jack D. Weiler and Benjamin H. Swig for up to 100 years. The developers planned to construct a 30-story building on the Produce Exchange's site at 2 Broadway for $25 million. In the original design by William Lescaze, the first and second stories would have occupied the whole lot, with a ground-level arcade, a two-story lobby, and a tenants' garage with 300 spots. The 3rd to 11th floors would have contained shallow setbacks from the street. The 12th to 30th floors would have comprised the tower slab measuring 72 feet (22 m) parallel to Broadway and 250 feet (76 m) deep. The tower slab was to be slightly hexagonal with concave bulges on the north and south. The facade of the third through 11th stories on Bowling Green would have been a grid, while the other facades would have been "horizontal strip" windows, horizontally spaced between balconies. The building would have had 1 million square feet of space, with 50,000 square feet (4,600 m²) on each of the 3rd to 11th floors and 18,000 square feet (1,700 m²) on each of the tower floors. Tenants of the existing Produce Exchange Building would have been able to rent space in 2 Broadway.
After the original plan stalled, the Charles F. Noyes Company subsequently took over the development project. The development had stalled until plans for One Chase Manhattan Plaza had been announced in 1956. As part of an agreement finalized that May, the exchange was allowed to retain ownership of the land under the new building. The Charles F. Noyes Company, which was funding the project, announced that August that Lescaze and Kahn & Jacobs had revised the plans. The building was then planned to be 33 stories with 1,069,000 square feet (99,300 m²) of rentable office space, making it the fourth-largest office building in New York City by rentable area.
The Uris Buildings Corporation took over the project in January 1957 and hired Emery Roth & Sons to redesign the skyscraper. The Roth design was also to be thirty stories but contained an additional 200,000 square feet (19,000 m²). The Produce Exchange moved to temporary quarters the same month and demolition began that February. The final designs provided for a 32-story tower, the largest skyscraper to be developed in Lower Manhattan after World War II. Half of the planned 1,300,000 square feet (120,000 m²) of office space was rented by July 1957, even though the Produce Exchange Building was still being demolished. Facade installation was underway by early 1959. The structure was completed that June; the space was fully leased by the time it was completed.


The Produce Exchange moved to 2 Broadway, the site of its old building, in November 1959. The land under 2 Broadway was leased from the Produce Exchange, which earned $275,000 per year. The other original tenants were largely financial firms, including sixteen brokerage firms. Leases at the building were originally handled by Cushman & Wakefield, which itself occupied some space in the building from 1959 to 1962. The leases included four stories for the City Bank/Farmers Trust Company, three stories for American Electric Power, two stories for Haskins and Sells, two stories for Continental Grain, parts of two stories for steamship operator Moore-McCormack, and some space for IBM. The large number of visitors to the building's financial firms, as well as the fact that the main lobby was used as a public pedestrian shortcut, resulted in extremely high visitor traffic, thereby increasing maintenance costs.
In 1973, the Produce Exchange was converted into a real estate investment trust called the Produce Exchange Realty Trust (PERT). The trust's main property was the land ownership of 2 Broadway. The same year, Uris Buildings was sold to National Kinney Corporation, which shortly afterward placed 2 Broadway and ten other Uris properties for sale. Samuel J. LeFrak expressed interest in buying 2 Broadway and most of the other Uris structures in 1976.


Olympia and York (O&Y) bought 2 Broadway in 1977 as part of a $50 million transaction involving several Uris properties. The transactions made the firm the largest commercial landlord in Manhattan. By 1980, the building was again fully occupied. With its purchase of the building, O&Y took over the $275,000-per-year lease of the land under 2 Broadway, which was scheduled to be renewed in 1981. Upon the lease's expiration, PERT proposed to raise the annual rental to $2.01 million, based on a clause in the lease that set the annual rental as five percent of the land value, as if the land had been vacant and unimproved. While two appraisers agreed the land was worth $40.2 million,  O&Y objected that the value had been incorrectly derived. The dispute was brought to the New York Supreme Court, which in May 1983 ruled in favor of PERT. Later that year, PERT's trustees proposed and approved a plan to sell off its ownership in 2 Broadway, its only large asset, to  O&Y for $26 million. In early 1984, O&Y secured a $970 million floating-rate mortgage for 2 Broadway and two other Manhattan properties.
As the 1990s recession affected O&Y's finances, the vacancy rate at 2 Broadway reached 60 percent by 1992. The structure was described in The New York Times as "a stark illustration of the neighborhood's struggling office market". O&Y, struggling to pay $60 million of property taxes, attempted to persuade the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development to lease about 500,000 square feet (46,000 m²). Around the same time, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority rented space at 2 Broadway, moving some of its operations from its former headquarters at 370 Jay Street in Downtown Brooklyn. O&Y subsequently restructured its $970 million mortgage notes, and Apollo Investors became the majority owner of the notes. Accordingly, the note-holders became the owners of 2 Broadway. O&Y announced in July 1994 that it would sell 2 Broadway to raise money for the two other properties.


In August 1995, the media announced that 2 Broadway had been purchased for $20.5 million. The buyer was Tamir Sapir, a Soviet immigrant and cab driver turned real-estate investor, who acquired the building through his firm, ZAR Realty, that October. At the time, the MTA was the only tenant of 2 Broadway. While other developers saw the building as a white elephant, the building's brokers expressed optimism that the vacant space would be attractive to a large tenant. ZAR hired SOM in mid-1997 to upgrade the building's mechanical systems and renovating its lobby. By then, ZAR received offers of $80 million for the property, but Sapir refused to sell. At the same time, the MTA was looking to consolidate its space, which then was split across several buildings.
The MTA signed a 49-year lease for the entire building in July 1998, with two 15-year renewal options, the day after it sold the New York Coliseum. The lease was one of the largest in city history at the time. The lease was worth $1.6 billion, or about $20 per square foot ($220/m²) per year for the 50-year term. Shortly after the MTA's lease was signed, ZAR and the MTA started renovating 2 Broadway, with the cost then estimated at $39 million. Credit Suisse First Boston gave Sapir a $150 million mortgage on the property in late 1998, and Carlton Advisory Services gave another $230.2 million in financing the next year. The MTA started moving additional personnel from the New York Coliseum into 2 Broadway in 1999. The MTA had initially named Sapir as the developer of its office space, offering to pay him $7 million in bonuses. The refurbishment of mechanical systems and interiors was then expected to cost $55 million while the offices would be furnished for $80 million.
The refurbishment encountered delays in part due to a high demand for skilled construction workers citywide. A dispute also arose when the MTA replaced Sapir with Frederick C. Contini, whom Sapir had fired for another reason. The change of developer led Sapir to sue the MTA. Project costs increased as well; the renovations were expected to cost $135 million by 2000 and about $430 million by 2003. Part of the budget increase was attributed to corruption by several parties involved in the renovation, including Contini, who was subsequently indicted for embezzling several million dollars. Investigations of Contini's activities found that some of the embezzled funds had gone to the Gambino and Genovese crime families. The cost of routine work rose ten times from normal levels, and the law firm which the MTA hired to negotiate the building's lease sent the agency invoices for $8 million in legal fees. Sapir and the MTA settled their suit in late 2003. The renovation was only about two-thirds complete at that time, leading one reporter to write, "2 Broadway stands as a monument to what's wrong with the MTA and how it handles the public's money." The total cost of the renovation ended up at $499 million, excluding an additional $346 million in interest costs.
Around 2003, the New York City Transit Authority assumed responsibility of the building. At that point, 2,700 workers were working in 2 Broadway and another two thousand were to be relocated by the end of the year. By 2011, the building had offices for 4,200 MTA employees, putting it at 87 percent occupancy. That year, the MTA announced plans to sell off its other office buildings at 341–347 Madison Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. As part of this plan, many of the 873 employees at Madison Avenue would be moved to 2 Broadway. In addition, the remaining employees at 370 Jay Street were moved to 2 Broadway around the same time. The Madison Avenue employees were relocated to 2 Broadway in 2014 and early 2015. The MTA moved its Business Service Center and Capital Project Management offices to 2 Broadway in 2020.


The design of 2 Broadway was criticized by Architectural Forum editor Douglas Haskell, who wrote in 1959 that the Roth firm's space-maximizing design was a "cubistic method of composition", due to the need to conform to zoning law. Haskell stated of the building's curtain wall facade, "From a distance the wall looks not unlike a great piece of magnified and glass-filled chain mail". Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in 1986 that, in comparison to the design for the Produce Exchange, "The successor at 2 Broadway, a legitimate descendant if one considers only the engineering drawings, looks as if it could be demolished with a can opener." After SOM renovated the facade, the AIA Guide to New York City wrote that the exterior was a "sleek glass and elegant metal" cladding on what had been a "banal" structure.
2 Broadway was shown in the American comedy-drama film The Apartment (1960), produced and directed by Billy Wilder, as the building in which the characters played by stars Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, and Fred MacMurray work. The building was also filming location in the thriller Mirage (1965), with Gregory Peck and Diane Baker.


The eastern side of Bowling Green is composed of Broadway (north of the former intersection of Marketfield Street) and Whitehall Street (south of that intersection).
Clockwise from south, the block runs for:
210 feet (64 m) on Stone Street
308 feet (94 m) on Bowling Green
154 feet (47 m) on Beaver Street
97 feet (30 m) on New Street
170 feet (52 m) on Marketfield Street
38 feet (12 m) on Broad Street
The structure would have been fourth largest after the Empire State Building, the Socony–Mobil Building, and the Equitable Building.
The increased cost included $180 million for system and interior renovations, $190 million for furnishings, and over $60 million for financing fees.


Aħrax Tower (Maltese: Torri tal-Aħrax), originally known as Torre di Lacras, and also known as Armier Tower (Maltese: Torri tal-Armier), Ta' Ħoslien Tower (Maltese: Torri ta' Ħoslien) or the White Tower (Maltese: Torri l-Abjad), is a small watchtower overlooking Armier Bay in the limits of Mellieħa, Malta. It was built in 1658 as the sixth of the De Redin towers. An artillery battery was built around it in 1715. Today, the tower and battery are intact. After receiving 3 years of restoration work the tower was reopened to the public on the 9th of June 2021.
Aħrax Tower is the northernmost fortification on the main island of Malta.


The area around the tower is now covered with concrete and the foundations of some walls of the battery have never been excavated. Over the years Aħrax Tower was heavily modified so it is now difficult to see which parts are original and which were added later. The battery remains largely intact, with the exception of one of the linking walls. In 2009, the tower was passed to the Mellieħa Local Council. It is in need of restoration.
In November 2016 the tower was granted to heritage NGO Din l-art Helwa for a loan period of 10 years, with the scope of this agreement being the conservation, restoration and rehabilitation of the building. The works were finished in June 2021 and the tower was reopened to the general public for educational purposes.


The A. K. Smiley Public Library is a public library located at 125 W. Vine St. in Redlands, California. Built in 1898, the library was donated to Redlands by philanthropist Albert K. Smiley. Architect T.R. Griffith designed the library in a style which has alternately been described as Mission Revival and Moorish Revival and includes a variety of elements from additional styles. The building has a tile roof and parapets topping arcades on its sides, which suggest a Mission Revival influence; however, the battlement and the curves in the parapet are Moorish Revival elements. In addition, elements of the arches in the arcade, the windows, and the roof ridge were borrowed from classical, Gothic, Spanish Romanesque, and Oriental themens. The library still serves as the Redlands public library. In addition, it houses a collection of materials on native tribes in California donated by Andrew Carnegie, as well as a collection of rare materials about Southern California and local history.
The library was added to the National Register of Historic Places on December 12, 1976. It was designated a California Historical Landmark on August 17, 1990.


A Christmas Story House is an attraction and museum in Cleveland, Ohio's Tremont neighborhood. The 19th-century Victorian, which was used in the exterior and some interior scenes of Ralphie Parker's house in the 1983 film A Christmas Story, was purchased by a private developer in 2004 and has been restored and renovated to appear as it did both inside and outside in the film. The museum is part of a complex of four buildings devoted to the film, and is open to the public year-round.


The screenplay for A Christmas Story is based on material from author Jean Shepherd's collection of short stories, In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash. The house that appears in the film is located at 3159 W 11th Street, Cleveland, Ohio. For the film adaptation of these stories, director Bob Clark reportedly sent scouts to twenty cities before selecting Cleveland for exterior filming. Cleveland was chosen because of Higbee's Department Store. Vice-president Bruce Campbell took on the project hoping to get a boost in sales from the attention the filming would create. Higbee's is ultimately featured in three scenes in the film. Appropriately, the fictional boyhood home of Ralphie Parker is on Cleveland Street, the name of the actual street where Shepherd grew up. The exterior shots and some interior shots of the house and neighborhood where Ralphie lives were filmed in the Tremont section of Cleveland's West Side. Producers chose the home because of its proximity to downtown and it bordered the Cuyahoga River Valley offering views of the steel mills in the valley.


In December 2004, Brian Jones, a San Diego entrepreneur and fan of the film since childhood, bought the house on eBay for $150,000. Jones used revenue from his business, the Red Rider Leg Lamp Company, which manufactures replicas of the "major award" Ralphie's father won in the film, for the down payment. The previous owners had reconfigured the house, installing modern windows and covering the original wood siding with blue vinyl. Watching the movie frame by frame, Jones drew detailed plans of the interiors, which had originally been filmed on a Toronto sound stage, and spent $240,000 to gut the structure, reconfigure it to a single-family dwelling, transform it into a near-replica of the movie set, and restore the exterior to its appearance in the film.


Jones also purchased the house across the street from the Christmas Story House and converted it into A Christmas Story House Museum, which contains some of the props from the film, including Randy's snow suit, the Higbee's window toys, the chalk board from Miss Shields classroom, an original Red Ryder bb-gun used in the filming and hundreds of behind-the-scenes photos. In addition, the house to the left of the museum features a gift shop with movie memorabilia and souvenirs.
The house and museum opened to the public on November 25, 2006, with original cast members attending the grand opening, and the site drew 4,300 visitors during its opening weekend.
Both the house and the Bumpus house next door, renovated in 2018, are available for overnight stays.


Although regular attendants at the Glenorchy Chapel in Exmouth, as the two ladies got older they found the journey to worship increasingly difficult. They therefore decided to commission a chapel on their own estate.  Jane Parminter died in 1811, and was buried beneath the chapel, but the work continued and the buildings were completed later that year. Inside the chapel are the words "Some point in view – We all pursue". Surrounding the chapel was a small school for six girls and almshouses for four maiden ladies of at least 50 years of age. There was also accommodation for a minister.
The two ladies took a keen interest in the conversion of Jews to Christianity. The deeds for the almshouses expressly stated that any Jewess who had embraced Christianity would have preference over all others as a candidate for a place.  An apocryphal story popular among Christian Zionists in the 1800s was that Jane Parminter attached a codicil to her will that the oak trees at A La Ronde "shall remain standing and the hand of man shall not be lifted up against them till Israel returns and is restored to the land of promise."  This codicil then inspired Lewis Way to fund and re-invigorate the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews; Franz Delitzsch would write a pamphlet in 1877 on the Parminters called "The Oaks of A La Ronde".  However, a Society investigation in 1882 determined that no such codicil existed in Jane's will.  Despite the codicil not existing, the Parminters and Way were alike in believing that the conversion of the Jews to Christianity and their restoration to Israel were Biblically ordained prophecies and duties for Christian mission.  The connection to the oaks is less clear: the Parminters liked their trees and may have talked about them with Way, or it may have been a belief that the timber from the trees would be used to build ships for the return to the promised land.  When Mary Parminter died in 1849, she too was buried beneath the chapel.
Regular services are still held at the chapel and a Chaplain still lives in the Manse. Baptisms and weddings also remain part of the pattern of life at Point-in-View. There are also weekly classes based on old traditional art and craft techniques. These classes contribute to 'Parminter Art' a living art museum situated in the chapel.  The school closed in 1901. The Chapel and the Manse are listed Grade I and the 3-acre meadow in which they stand is listed Grade II in the National Register of Parks and Gardens. The chapel is open most days and welcomes visitors. At one time, the Trustees met annually and received one guinea for their attendance, as laid down by the Parminters.


Aberystwyth Castle (Welsh: Castell Aberystwyth) is a Grade I listed Edwardian fortress located in Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, Mid Wales. It was built in response to the First Welsh War in the late 13th century, replacing an earlier fortress located a mile to the south. During a national uprising by Owain Glyndŵr, the Welsh captured the castle in 1404, but it was recaptured by the English four years later. In 1637 it became a Royal mint by Charles I, and produced silver shillings. The castle was slighted by Oliver Cromwell in 1649.


Marcher lord Gilbert de Clare built an earlier Motte and bailey castle a mile south of the current site in around 1110. It was called Tan-y-castell, Aberrheidol Castle and Old Aberystwyth. In 1116 it was sieged by Gruffydd ap Rhys, King of Deheubarth, but his attempt to capture it proved fruitless. He was eventually successful in 1136, capturing it and burning it to the ground with the help of Owain Gwynedd and his brother, Cadwaladr ap Gruffydd, the sons of  Gruffudd ap Cynan, King of Gwynedd, since the Norman invaders had killed their sister, Gwenllian ferch Gruffydd, Gruffydd ap Rhys's wife. Owain Gwynedd gave it to Cadwaladr to rebuild, but Cadwaladr's later attempt to murder Anarawd ap Gruffydd, the new king of Deheubarth, resulted in Owain Gwynedd sending his son Hywel ab Owain Gwynedd to burn it in 1143. The castle was  rebuilt and later reinforced with stone. After a succession of at least three owners, it was taken by Welsh prince Llywelyn the Great in 1221. Llywelyn razed the castle and erected a new one in its place. The current castle was rebuilt in its current location by Edward I of England in 1277 after the end of the first war against Llywelyn ap Gruffydd Llywelyn the Great's grandson. The Welsh took the castle in 1282 at the start of the 1282 war and burned both the castle and the town. Under master mason James of St George, the castle was eventually completed in 1289, though it was sieged extensively during the revolt of Madog ap Llywelyn in 1294–5.
The town of Aberystwyth was flourishing by 1307; its Welsh name was Llanbadarn Gaerog (English: Fortified Llanbadarn).  However, by the time of the Black Prince in 1343 the castle was in a bad state of disrepair;  the main gateway and drawbridges, the king's hall and long chamber, the kitchen range, and the outer bailey were falling down.
In 1404, Owain Glyndŵr captured the castle during a national uprising against English occupation. There would be a treaty signed between Glyndŵr & the King of France at the Castle. Four years later, it was retaken by the English, and became an important seat of the government. In 1637 Charles I turned the castle into a Royal mint, and it became a producer of silver shillings. The mint's operator raised a regiment of Royalist soldiers during the English Civil War. The mint closed down during the Civil War, but served as a warehouse for storing silver and lead. Oliver Cromwell slighted the castle in 1649.


Building work started in 1277 at the time of the First Welsh War, the work begun during Edward I's first Welsh campaign at the same time as work started at Flint, Rhuddlan and Builth Wells. The inner ward was built in a diamond-shaped concentric castle, with a twin D-shaped gatehouse keep and mural towers at each corner. The outer ward is described as consisting of a "twin D-shaped gatehouse, a barbican, a rock-cut ditch and a large curtain wall with towers".


The Abu al-Abbas al-Mursi Mosque (Arabic: جامع أبو العباس المرسي) is an Egyptian mosque in the city of Alexandria. It is dedicated to the 13th century Murcian Andalusi Sufi saint Abul Abbas al-Mursi, whose tomb it contains.
It is located in the Anfoushi neighborhood of Alexandria, near the Citadel of Qaitbay.


Abul Abbas al-Mursi died in 1286 and was buried here. The mosque was first built in 1307.
The mosque was designed and built in today's current form by Eugenio Valzania and Mario Rossi in the years 1929/1945, and was highly influenced by Egypt's Old Cairo buildings and architecture.
It served in turn as a key source of inspiration for the much larger Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi, completed in 2007 after more than a decade of building work.


Acobamba or Aqupampa (Quechua aqu sand, pampa large plain, "sand plain") is a district in the middle of Tarma Province in Peru. It is bordered by districts of Tarma, La Unión  and Palcamayo on the west, Huasahuasi District on the north, districts of Palca and Tapo on the east, and  districts of Tapo and Tarma on the south.


Acton Vale station is a former railway station in Acton Vale, Quebec, Canada. The station was built in 1900 by the Grand Trunk Railway and is located at 960 Boulay Street.
It was recognized as a National Historic Site of Canada on June 11, 1976. Today it operates as a town tourism office and exhibition centre.


Addington Long Barrow is a chambered long barrow located near the village of Addington in the southeastern English county of Kent. Probably constructed in the fourth millennium BCE, during Britain's Early Neolithic period, today it survives only in a ruined state. Built of earth and about fifty local sarsen megaliths, the long barrow consisted of a sub-rectangular earthen tumulus enclosed by kerb-stones. Collapsed stones on the northeastern end of the chamber probably once formed a stone chamber in which human remains might have been deposited, though none have been discovered.
Archaeologists have established that the monument was built by pastoralist communities shortly after the introduction of agriculture to Britain from continental Europe. Although representing part of an architectural tradition of long barrow building that was widespread across Neolithic Europe, Addington Long Barrow belongs to a localised regional variant of barrows produced in the vicinity of the River Medway, now known as the Medway Megaliths. Of these, it lies near to both Chestnuts Long Barrow and Coldrum Long Barrow on the western side of the river. Two further surviving long barrows, Kit's Coty House and Little Kit's Coty House, as well as the destroyed Smythe's Megalith and possible survivals such as the Coffin Stone and White Horse Stone, are located on the Medway's eastern side.
After the Early Neolithic, the long barrow fell into ruins, with a small road being built through the centre of the monument by the 19th century at the latest. Local folklore grew up around the site, associating it with the countless stones motif. The ruin attracted the interest of antiquarians in the early 18th century, and was studied by local archaeologists in the 20th. Both it and the nearby Chestnuts Long Barrow are on private land and are no longer (as of October 2019) accessible to the public.


The monument lies approximately 250 metres (820 ft) north of Addington Parish Church. It is accessible from the A20 via two minor roads. The area in which the barrow is located is sometimes termed Addington Park. The site is privately owned, although it is visible from a road that cuts through the middle of the barrow. Geologically, it is located on the Lower Greensand.


Across Western Europe, the Early Neolithic marked the first period in which humans built monumental structures in the landscape. These structures included chambered long barrows: rectangular or oval earthen tumuli that had a chamber built into one end. Some of these chambers were constructed out of timber, while others were built using large stones, now known as "megaliths". These long barrows often served as tombs, housing the physical remains of the dead within their chamber. Individuals were rarely buried alone in the Early Neolithic, instead being interred in collective burials with other members of their community. These chambered tombs were built all along the Western European seaboard during the Early Neolithic, from southeastern Spain up to southern Sweden, including most of the British Isles; the architectural tradition was introduced to Britain from continental Europe in the first half of the fourth millennium BCE. While there are stone buildings—like Göbekli Tepe in modern Turkey—which predate them, the chambered long barrows constitute humanity's first widespread tradition of construction using stone.
Although now all in a ruinous state, at the time of construction the Medway Megaliths would have been some of the largest and most visually imposing Early Neolithic funerary monuments in Britain. Grouped along the River Medway as it cuts through the North Downs, they constitute the most southeasterly group of megalithic monuments in the British Isles, and the only megalithic group in eastern England. The Medway Megaliths can be divided into two clusters between 8 kilometres (5.0 miles) and 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) apart: one to the west of the River Medway and the other on Blue Bell Hill to the east. Addington Long Barrow is part of the western group, which also includes Coldrum Long Barrow and Chestnuts Long Barrow. The eastern group consists of Smythe's Megalith, Kit's Coty House, and Little Kit's Coty House, while various stones on the eastern side of the river, most notably the Coffin Stone and White Horse Stone, may also have been parts of such structures. It is not known if they were all built at the same time, or whether they were constructed in succession; nor is it known if they each served the same function or whether there was a hierarchy in their usage.
The Medway long barrows all conformed to the same general design plan, and are all aligned on an east to west axis. Each had a stone chamber at the eastern end of the mound, and they each probably had a stone facade flanking the entrance. They had internal heights of up to 3.0 metres (10 feet), making them taller than most other chambered long barrows in Britain. The chambers were constructed from sarsen, a dense, hard, and durable stone that occurs naturally throughout Kent, having formed out of sand from the Eocene epoch. Early Neolithic builders would have selected blocks from the local area, and then transported them to the site of the monument to be erected.
These common architectural features among the Medway Megaliths indicate a strong regional cohesion with no direct parallels elsewhere in the British Isles. Nevertheless, as with other regional groupings of Early Neolithic long barrows—such as the Cotswold-Severn group in south-western Britain—there are also various idiosyncrasies in the different monuments, such as Coldrum's rectilinear shape, the Chestnut Long Barrow's facade, and the long, thin mounds at Addington and Kit's Coty. These variations might have been caused by the tombs being altered and adapted over the course of their use; in this scenario, the monuments would be composite structures.
The Medway Megaliths' builders were probably influenced by pre-existing tomb-shrines elsewhere that they were aware of. Whether the builders had grown up locally, or moved into the Medway area from elsewhere is not known. Based on a stylistic analysis of their architectural designs, the archaeologist Stuart Piggott thought that the plan behind the Medway Megaliths had originated in the area around the Low Countries, while fellow archaeologist Glyn Daniel believed that the same evidence showed an influence from Scandinavia. John H. Evans instead suggested an origin in Germany, and Ronald F. Jessup thought that their origins could be seen in the Cotswold-Severn megalithic group. Alexander thought their closest similarities were with long barrows along the Atlantic coast, perhaps imitating those of either Ireland or Brittany. The archaeologist Paul Ashbee noted that their close clustering in the same area was reminiscent of the megalithic tomb-shrine traditions of continental Northern Europe, and emphasised that the Medway Megaliths were a regional manifestation of a tradition widespread across Early Neolithic Europe. He nevertheless stressed that a precise place of origin was "impossible to indicate" with the available evidence.


Rectangular in shape, Addington Long Barrow is on a northeast to southwest alignment. In 1950, Evans described the monument as having twenty-two sarsen stones, eight of which, at the northeast end, would have originally formed the burial chamber. In 1981, investigators from Kent Archaeological Rescue Unit expanded that number, identifying twenty-five sarsens in the monument. Given the dimensions of the chambered tomb, they suggested that it probably once included about fifty stones.
Upon construction, the barrow would have been about 60 metres (200 ft) long. The sides would have been straight but the monument tapered in width from 14 metres (46 ft) at its eastern end to 11 metres (36 ft) at its western end. It thus formed a "truncated wedge-shape". The earthen tumulus currently stands at about 1 metre (3 ft 3 in) in height, although would have been much taller when first created. Evans described the tumulus as having been "of immense size", believing that the long barrow would have been "a most imposing structure" when built. No evidence has been found of ditches formed by quarrying for the earth to form the mound.
A stone chamber was set within the northeastern end of the long barrow, although it had been pulled down at some point in the monument's history, while much of the mound was left standing. Jessup suggested that this chamber had been a false portal, an architectural feature resembling a doorway but which does not allow entry to the tomb, an idea supported by Daniel.


Britain's Early Neolithic communities placed greater emphasis on the ritual burial of the dead than their Mesolithic forebears. Archaeologists have suggested that this is because Early Neolithic Britons adhered to an ancestor cult that venerated the spirits of the dead, believing that they could intercede with the forces of nature for the benefit of their living descendants. The archaeologist Robin Holgate stressed that rather than simply being tombs, the Medway Megaliths were "communal monuments fulfilling a social function for the communities who built and used them". Thus, it has been suggested that Early Neolithic people entered Copythe tombs—which doubled as temples or shrines—to perform rituals honouring the dead and requesting their assistance. For this reason, the historian Ronald Hutton termed these monuments "tomb-shrines" to reflect their dual purpose.
In Britain, these tombs were typically located on prominent hills and slopes overlooking the landscape, perhaps at the junction between different territories. The archaeologist Caroline Malone noted that the tombs would have served as one of various landscape markers that conveyed information on "territory, political allegiance, ownership, and ancestors". Many archaeologists have subscribed to the idea that these tomb-shrines were territorial markers between different tribes; others have argued that such markers would be of little use to a nomadic herding society. Instead it has been suggested that they represent markers along herding pathways. The archaeologist Richard Bradley suggested that the construction of these monuments reflects an attempt to mark control and ownership over the land, thus reflecting a change in mindset brought about by the transition from the hunter-gatherer Mesolithic to the pastoralist Early Neolithic. Others have suggested that these monuments were built on sites already deemed sacred by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers.


All the surviving megalithic tombs from the Early Neolithic period have suffered from neglect and the ravages of agriculture. Following the demolition of the tomb's chamber, some of the sarsens around Addington Long Barrow had been buried, while others had been left visible. Various buildings in Addington are partly made of sarsen stone, some perhaps removed from the long barrow. Ashbee also suspected that sarsens from the monument had been broken up for use in the repairs and extensions to the local church in the nineteenth century. The barrow was further damaged by the construction of the small road running through the middle of it.
Claims that people in the Middle Ages deliberately dug into and damaged the long barrows have been made for other Medway Megaliths, including Smythe's Megalith, Chestnuts Long Barrow, Lower Kit's Coty House, Kit's Coty House, Coldrum Long Barrow, and Addington Long Barrow. Ashbee suggested that this destruction was probably due to iconoclasm, believing that the burial of the stones likely indicated that medieval Christian zealots had tried to deliberately destroy and defame the pre-Christian monument.
Conversely, the archaeologist John Alexander believed that this damage resulted from a robbery by medieval treasure hunters. Supporting this idea is comparative evidence, with the Close Roll of 1237 ordering the opening of barrows on the Isle of Wight in search for treasure, a practice that may have spread to Kent around the same time. Alexander believed that the destruction may have been brought about by a special commissioner, highlighting that the "expertness and thoroughness of the robbery"—as evidenced at Chestnuts—would have necessitated resources beyond that which a local community could likely produce.


When Thomas Wright investigated the site in about 1850, he was aided by a local man who believed that a crock of gold would be unearthed there.
In a 1946 paper published in the Folklore journal, John H. Evans recorded a Kentish folk belief which had been widespread "Up to the last generation"; this was that it was impossible for any human being to successfully count the number of stones in the Medway Megaliths. The countless stones motif is not unique to Kent but has been recorded at other megalithic monuments in Britain and Ireland. The earliest textual evidence for it is found in an early 16th-century document, where it applies to Stonehenge in Wiltshire, although an early 17th-century document also applied it to The Hurlers, a set of three stone circles in Cornwall. Later records reveal that it had gained widespread distribution in England, as well as a single occurrence each in Wales and Ireland. The folklorist S. P. Menefee suggested that it could be attributed to an animistic understanding that these megaliths had lives of their own.


The antiquarian John Harris mentioned Addington Long Barow in his History of Kent, published posthumously in 1719. He noted that the area where the barrow stood was known locally as "the Warren", and that an "old clerk" informed him that an oak tree had formerly grown in the centre of the stones. The monument was next recorded by the antiquarian Josiah Colebrooke in a short article for Archaeologia, the journal of the Society of Antiquaries of London, in 1773. Aided by the minister of the parish, the Reverend Buttonshaw, Colebooke enquired among elderly locals as to whether they knew of the oak tree mentioned by Harris, but none had. Colebrooke believed that the Britons had retreated to near Addington after their defeat at the fifth-century Battle of Aylesford, and that it was here that they buried their military leader, Categern. The later archaeologist John H. Evans described Colebrooke's descriptions and drawings as "almost completely worthless" because the antiquarian mistook the rectangular chambered tomb for a stone circle. Colebrook's analysis was echoed in the 18th-century writings of Samuel Pegge, Edward Hasted, and John Thorpe.
In 1827, the road passing through the tomb was widened and deepened. To achieve this, workmen removed two of the sarsens from the revetment kerb and placed them in the corner of the wood to the south of the monument. In the early 1840s, the Reverend Beale Post conducted investigations into the Medway Megaliths, writing them up in a manuscript that was left unpublished; this included Addington Long Barrow and Chestnuts Long Barrow, which he collectively labelled the "Addington Circles". Thomas Wright recorded that in 1845 a local parson, the Reverend Lambert Blackwell Larking, dug into a chamber at Addington, discovering "fragments of rude pottery". From the context in which Wright wrote, it seems that Addington Long Barrow is referred to, although it remains possible that Chestnuts was the barrow in question. In the early 1860s, Charles Roach Smith visited the site alongside Charles Warne and Charles Moore Jessop, the latter of whom described it as a "Celtic" monument in a subsequent article for Gentleman's Magazine.
In 1871, Edwin Dunkin published a basic plan of the monument, noting that there were similar chambered tombs around Britain. In 1880, the archaeologist Flinders Petrie included the Addington stones in his list of Kentish earthworks; he commented that "with extraordinary perversity [they] have been hitherto described as forming a circle, though they appear to be very plainly in two lines". He published a small, basic plan of the monument. The barrow then received a mention in George Payne's Collectanea Cantiana, published in 1893. Payne noted a folk tradition that stone avenues connected Coldrum to the Addington Long Barrow, although he commented that he was unable to discover any evidence of this feature. The earliest published photographs of the monument, taken by George Clinch, appeared in a 1908 volume of the Victoria County History series. In his 1924 publication dealing with Kent, the archaeologist O. G. S. Crawford, then working as the archaeological officer for the Ordnance Survey, listed the Addington Long Barrow alongside the other Medway Megaliths.
Ronald Jessup included the Addington site in his 1970 book, South East England, there describing it as "mostly overgrown". In 1981, members of the Kent Archaeological Rescue Unit conducted a measured survey of the monument. In 2005, Ashbee noted that he had found evidence of recent metal detectoring activity at the site. In May 2007, the archaeologist Brian Philp was conducting his regular inspection of the monument when the current landowner pointed out to him an area where the road was subsiding. Philp alerted Kent County Council, who arranged for contractors to investigate the reason for the subsidence, which proved to be decades of rabbit burrowing beneath the tarmac. Archaeologists from Kent Archaeological Unit visited the site during the work, discovering a buried sarsen. Comparison with older records revealed that this stone had once been upright but had been buried where it stood in the 19th century by workmen who were replacing the trackway with a paved road.


The Adelaide Convention Centre is a large convention centre on North Terrace, Adelaide, South Australia. It was the first purpose-built convention centre to be built in Australia.


The convention centre was designed by John Andrews and constructed over part of the Adelaide railway station, together with the Hyatt Regency Hotel (now the InterContinental Hotel), Exhibition Hall and an office block in the 1980s as part of the Adelaide Station and Environs Redevelopment (ASER) project. It has been rebuilt and extended upon a few times since its original construction in 1987. In 1999 an extension was planned  and in late 2001 it was unveiled.  It was designed by Larry Oltmanns who was a design partner with SOM at the time.  The project won the Royal Australian Institute of Architects 2002 Awards of Merit: BHP Colourbond Steel Award, Interior Architecture and New Building.
SOM's expansion and renovation of Adelaide's Convention Centre reconnected historic parts of the city to the waterfront. Built on space assembled from air rights over a rail yard, the new facility shares a site with the Old and New South Australia State Parliament Houses, the Adelaide Exhibition Hall, the Festival Centre, and the Adelaide railway station - Casino. The SOM project, was completed with Adelaide architects Woods Bagot.,and conformed to the Adelaide Riverbank Master Plan. Its "rational cooking system", the largest of any convention centre in the world, is equipped to serve 4,000 dinners in 20 minutes. The centre's main Plenary Hall can house up to 3,500 people in full convention mode.
Looking over Torrens Lake, the centre is home to most of Adelaide's major conventions. It has also been the location of some significant commemorations of Australian icons. AVCon, an annual anime and video games convention was held at the Adelaide Convention Centre from 2009 until 2019, before it indefinitely went dormant in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic in South Australia
An expansion was announced in 2011. Making the announcement, the Premier of South Australia at the time, Mike Rann, said that work would begin that year on the first stage of the $350 million expansion abutting the Morphett Street Bridge and be completed in 2014. Stage 1 would include a 4,300-square-metre (46,000 sq ft) multi-purpose concert space, meeting spaces and a 1000-seat ballroom over the railway tracks. Rann said Stage 2, scheduled to be completed by mid 2017, would feature a distinctive high-tech glass "arrow" structure capable of seating 3,500 people. Woods Bagot and Larry Oltmanns of Vx3 Architects.Strategists.Urban Designers were appointed as the design team for the $350 million expansion in February 2011.


The Adelphi Theatre /əˈdɛlfi/ is a West End theatre, located on the Strand in the City of Westminster, central London. The present building is the fourth on the site. The theatre has specialised in comedy and musical theatre, and today it is a receiving house for a variety of productions, including many musicals. The theatre was Grade II listed for historical preservation on 1 December 1987.


It was founded in 1806 as the Sans Pareil ("Without Compare"), by merchant John Scott, and his daughter Jane (1770–1839).  Jane was a British theatre manager, performer, and playwright.  Together, they gathered a theatrical company and by 1809 the theatre was licensed for musical entertainments, pantomime, and burletta.  She wrote more than fifty stage pieces in an array of genres: melodramas, pantomimes, farces, comic operettas, historical dramas, and adaptations, as well as translations.  Jane Scott retired to Surrey in 1819, marrying John Davies Middleton (1790–1867).
On 18 October 1819, the theatre reopened under its present name, which was adopted from the Adelphi Buildings opposite.
In its early years, the theatre was known for melodrama, called Adelphi Screamers. Many stories by Charles Dickens were also adapted for the stage here, including John Baldwin Buckstone's The Christening, a comic burletta, which opened on 13 October 1834, based on the story The Bloomsbury Christening. This is notable for being thought the first Dickens adaption performed. This was the first of many of Dickens's early works adapted for the stage of the Adelphi, including The Pickwick Papers as William Leman Rede's The Peregrinations of Pickwick; or, Boz-i- a-na, a three-act burletta first performed on 3 April 1837, Frederick Henry Yates's production of Nicholas Nickleby; or, Doings at Do-The-Boys Hall in November and December 1838, and Edward Stirling's two-act burletta The Old Curiosity Shop; or, One Hour from Humphrey's Clock (November and December 1840, January 1841). The theatre itself makes a cameo appearance in The Pickwick Papers
The Adelphi came under the management of Madame Celeste and comedian Benjamin Webster, in 1844, and Buckstone was appointed its resident dramatist. Dramatisations of Dickens continued to be performed, including A Christmas Carol; or, Past, Present, and Future opening on 5 February; and Beckett's The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that rang an Old Year out and a New One In. In 1848, The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain was performed.
The old theatre was demolished, and on 26 December 1858, The New Adelphi was opened and was considered an improvement on the cramped circumstances of the original, which had been described as a "hasty conversion from a tavern hall, permanently kept in its provisional state". The new theatre could seat 1,500 people, with standing room for another 500. The interior was lighted by a Stroud's Patent Sun Lamp, a brilliant array of gas mantles passed through a chandelier of cut-glass.
In the mid-19th century, John Lawrence Toole established his comedic reputation at the Adelphi.  Also in the mid-19th century, the Adelphi hosted a number of French operettas, including La belle Hélène.  In 1867, however, the Adelphi gave English comic opera a boost by hosting the first public performance of Arthur Sullivan's first opera, Cox and Box.
The building was renovated in 1879 and again in 1887 when the house next door, along with The Hampshire Hog in The Strand and the Nell Gwynne Tavern in Bull Inn Court, were bought by the Gattis in order to enlarge the theatre. They also built a new enlarged facade and part of this can still be seen today above the Crystal Rooms next door to the present Adelphi Theatre.
An actor who performed regularly at the Adelphi in the latter half of the 19th century, William Terriss, was stabbed to death during the run of 'Secret Service' on 16 December 1897 whilst entering the Theatre by the royal entrance in Maiden Lane which he used as a private entrance.  This is now recorded on a plaque on the wall by the stage door.  Outside a neighbouring pub, a sign says that the killer was one of the theatre's stage hands, but Richard Archer Prince committed the murder.  It has been said that Terriss' ghost haunts the theatre.  Terriss' daughter was Ellaline Terriss, a famous actress, and her husband, actor-manager Seymour Hicks managed the Adelphi for some years at the end of the 19th century.  The stage door of the current Adelphi is in Maiden Lane but back then it was in Bull Inn Court. William Terriss would later have a Theatre named after him, the Terriss Theatre in Rotherhithe, later known as the Rotherhithe Hippodrome.
The adjacent, numbers 409 and 410 Strand, were built in 1886–87 by the Gatti Brothers as the Adelphi Restaurant. The frontage remains essentially the same, but with plate glass windows, and, like the theatre, is a Grade II listed building.


On 11 September 1901, the third theatre was opened as the Century Theatre, although the name reverted in 1904 under the management of Otho Stuart. This theatre was built by Frank Kirk to the design of Ernest Runtz. George Edwardes, the dean of London musical theatre, took over management of the theatre from Stuart in 1908.  In the early part of the 20th century, the Adelphi was home to a number of musical comedies, the most successful of which included The Earl and the Girl (1904), The Dairymaids (1907), The Quaker Girl (1910), The Boy (1917), Clowns in Clover (1927), and Mr. Cinders (1929).
The present Adelphi opened on 3 December 1930, redesigned in the Art Deco style by Ernest Schaufelberg.  It was named the 'Royal Adelphi Theatre' and re-opened with the hit musical Ever Green, by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers, based on the book Benn W. Levy.  Noël Coward's Words and Music premièred at the theatre in 1932.  The operetta Balalaika (a revised version of The Gay Hussars) played at the theatre in 1936, and in 1940 the theatre's name again reverted to 'The Adelphi'.  The theatre continued to host comedy and musicals, including Bless The Bride (1947), Maggie May (1964), and A Little Night Music (1975), as well as dramas (see below for a list beginning in 1979).
A proposed redevelopment of Covent Garden by the GLC in 1968 saw the theatre under threat, together with the nearby Vaudeville, Garrick, Lyceum and Duchess theatres. An active campaign by Equity, the Musicians' Union, and theatre owners under the auspices of the Save London Theatres Campaign led to the abandonment of the scheme.
On 27 February 1982, the Adelphi hosted the final night of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company for a concert performance of songs from all thirteen Savoy Operas as well as Cox and Box and Thespis.  In 1993, Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group purchased the theatre and completely refurbished it prior to the opening of his adaptation of Sunset Boulevard.  The 1998 video of Lloyd Webber's musical Cats was filmed at the theatre.


In November 1997, the London production of the popular American musical Chicago premiered at the Adelphi, becoming the venue's longest-ever production during its eight-and-a-half-year run (which also made it the longest running American musical in West End history).  In April 2006, Chicago transferred to the Cambridge Theatre (and later to the Garrick Theatre, where it closed in 2012.).
Michael Grandage's revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita replaced the show, beginning previews on 2 June 2006 before completing a twelve-month run on 26 May 2007.  Brian Wilson performed his album Pet Sounds for the last time in the UK at the Adelphi in November 2006.  From 6 July 2007, the Adelphi was home to another Lloyd Webber revival, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. The actor playing Joseph, Lee Mead, was cast by winning the BBC television show Any Dream Will Do, and starred alongside Preeya Kalidas and Dean Collinson.
9 March 2010 saw the premiere of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, Love Never Dies, which closed on Saturday 27 August 2011.  The National Theatre transferred their show One Man, Two Guvnors to the theatre from 8 November 2011. This production moved out of the theatre on 25 February 2012, transferring to the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London.
Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street began a limited season at the Adelphi from 10 March to 22 September 2012, transferring from the Chichester Festival Theatre, starring Michael Ball and Imelda Staunton.
In March 2019, Waitress opened at the Adelphi. It was set to close on 4 July 2020, but it closed on 16 March, when West End theatres shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic; the producers later announced the show will not re-open.
The theatre is currently owned and managed by the Adelphi Theatre Company Limited, a partnership between Andrew Lloyd Webber's LW Theatres and Nederlander International.


My Fair Lady (25 October 1979 – 31 October 1981)
The 1981–82 D'Oyly Carte Opera Company Season (11 November 1981 – 27 February 1982)
The American Dream Machine (20 October 1982 – 1 December 1982)
Marilyn! the Musical (17 March 1983 – 30 July 1983)
Poppy  (12 November 1983 – 4 February 1984)
Lena Horne – The Lady and Her Music (6 August 1984 – 29 September 1984)
The Jungle Book (4 December 1984 – 12 January 1985)
Me and My Girl (12 February 1985 – 16 January 1993)
Sunset Boulevard (12 July 1993 – April 1997)
Damn Yankees (4 June 1997 – 9 August 1997)
Chicago (19 November 1997 – 22 April 2006)
Evita (20 June 2006 – 26 May 2007)
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (6 July 2007 – 30 May 2009)
Derren Brown: Enigma (15 June 2009 – 23 July 2009)
The Rat Pack: Live from Las Vegas (24 September 2009 – 2 January 2010)
Love Never Dies (9 March 2010 – 27 August 2011)
One Man, Two Guvnors (21 November 2011 – 25 February 2012)
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (10 March 2012 – 22 September 2012)
The Bodyguard (6 November 2012 – 29 August 2014)
Made in Dagenham (5 November 2014 – 11 April 2015)
Kinky Boots (21 August 2015 – 12 January 2019)
Bumblescratch (4 September 2016)
Waitress (6 March 2019 – 16 March 2020)
Back to the Future: The Musical (20 August 2021 – present)


Adinath Temple, located on the summit of Mainak Hill on Maheshkhali Island off the coast of Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, is dedicated to the Hindu God, Shiva, who is worshipped as Adinath. The temple is famous for the annual fair held at the foot of Mainak Hill in the month of Phalgun as per the Bengali calendar. The fair, which lasts 13 days, draws thousands of Hindus from across Bangladesh.


Adlisberg, with an elevation of 701 metres (2,300 ft), is a wooded mountain in Switzerland overlooking Zürichsee (Lake Zürich) to the northwest near the Zürichberg.


Adlisberg mountain is located to the east of the city of Zürich, between the Glatt river valley and Lake Zürich. Its highest point is about  200 metres (656 ft) above the Lake Zürich. The mountain range is part of a chain of hills — among them Käferberg, Forch and Pfannenstiel — between Greifensee (Lake Greifen) and Lake Zürich.
On the southern and western flanks of the Adlisberg  are located the Zürich quarters Hottingen, Hirslanden and Witikon. The upper part of Hottingen is called Dolder and is a residential quarter of Zürich. On a terrace on the north side of the city of Zürich are situated the hamlets Tobelhof, Gockhausen and Geeren; the latter villages of the city of Dübendorf.


It is a picturesque location and the lower western side of the hill is now part of the residential district of Zürich. The Zürich Zoo and FIFA's headquarters are located to the northwest, on the plateau between Adlisberg and the Zürichberg respectively the latter one on the southern flank of the Zürichberg. It is also the location of restaurants, hotels, among them the high-levelled Grand Hotel Dolder. At the Grand Hotel Dolder, a small golf course was built. Nearby, on the hilltop, sport courts are situated, among them a popular wave pool (Wellenbad Dolder), a mini-golf course, a Curling hall, tennis clubs, a driving range, and the Dolder ice rink, built in 1930 and considered to be one of the largest artificial ice rinks in Europe. Waldschule Adlisberg aims at children, provided by the city of Zürich.
The upper part of the hill is mostly woodland and a popular recreational area for hiker and biker enthusiasts. On the eastern hilltop, 690 metres (2,264 ft) above sea level, is a 33 metres (108 ft) meter high observation tower located, Loorenkopf nearby Witikon, which offers a panorama over Lake Zürich, Pfannenstiel region and the Glatt Valley. On the northeastern side of the Adlisberg the ruins of the Dübelstein castle are situated; from 1487 to 1489 the home of Hans Waldmann, former mayor of the city of Zürich.


The Dolderbahn rack railway runs up to the hilltop, and buses provided by the Verkehrsbetriebe Zürich (VBZ) run between Zürich and the neighbouring communities of Dübendorf, Fällanden and Maur, as well as the Tobelhofstrasse connecting the southeastern parts of Zürich with Glatt Valley and Pfannenstiel region.


Sigmund Widmer, then Stadtpräsident (mayor) of the city of Zürich, in 1971 initiated the plans for the satellite town Waldstatt (also called Sigi-Ville) for about 100,000 inhabitants, comprising an area of about 4.5 square kilometres (2 sq mi) on the Adlisberg hill plateau. In addition to 30,000 relatively inexpensive housing, 230 classrooms, 10 double gyms, swimming pools, shops, cinemas, churches, a hospital, hotels, a convention center and theater, as well as a subway and underground motorway connections were planned. Thus a completely car-free settlement on the surface would have occurred, but the project was opposed, mainly for ecological reasons, and never realized.


The Adomi Bridge (originally the Volta Bridge) is a latticed steel arch suspension bridge crossing the Volta River at Atimpoku in Ghana in West Africa. It is the first permanent bridge to span the Volta River, which drains south into the Gulf of Guinea, and is Ghana's longest suspension bridge. It provides the main road passage, just south of the Akosombo Dam, between the Eastern Region and the Volta Region of Ghana. It was opened in 1957 by Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first president. The iconic crescent-shaped arch bridge is featured in Ghanaian stamps and currency.


In 1953 (before the independence of Ghana in 1956 from British colonial rule), the decision was made to build a bridge across the Volta River to replace the overloaded ferry service at Senchi where delays were occasionally up to a few days. Reconnaissance indicated a good site for a single-span crossing about 800 ft long at a narrow neck of the river at Adomi, about 2.5 miles upstream of the ferry and closer to the then-projected dam and power station in the Volta River Project. Several sketch designs for an arch bridge or a suspension bridge at Adomi and other sites were drawn and cost estimates were developed.  The Standing Development Committee chose the single-span arch at Adomi.
Aesthetically the arch was the perfect complement to the trough of the valley... and the silver colour proposed for the steelwork would offset the green of the hills against which it would be seen.  --Scott and Roberts (1958)
In Fall 1953 the consulting engineers were appointed: Sir William Halcrow & Partners were the project administrators and designed all approach roads and spans, while Freeman Fox & Partners were to design the single-span arch bridge.  A year later, tenders were invited for the complete project, include approach roads, the arch bridge and approach spans. By January 1955, the contracts were settled and some construction staff began to arrive on site.  Dorman Long (Bridge and Engineering) Ltd was the main construction contractor and Cleveland Bridge & Engineering Company was the steelwork fabricator. Work on the bridge began in March 1955, with the steel parts being prefabricated in the United Kingdom, while concrete works for the approach spans and the bridge abutments were carried out on site. The prefabricated parts were fully welded, but almost all on-site steelwork erections were designed as bolted connections, including those of the upper and lower chord of the crescent-shaped arch. After the steelwork was completed for the arch and the deck, the concrete carriageway was built. By January 1957 the project was substantially completed. The total cost of the completed project was 682 thousand British pounds.


The single-span arch bridge was designed by William Brown of the engineers Freeman Fox & Partners. It is a two-hinged silver latticed steel crescent-shaped arch bridge with a two-lane road deck suspended by cables. The lower-chord arch rises 158.5 ft (48.3 m) above the hinges and the main span is 805 ft (245 m) long. To make an aesthetically pleasing crescent-shaped arch, the lower curve formed by the lower chords is a parabola, and the upper curve is derived from it by offsets decreasing logarithmically from the center to the hinges.
As the roadbed is suspended by means of vertical cable stays (hangers) connected to the steel truss arch, the bridge can be considered as a hybrid arch suspension type. Pairs of vertical cables or hangers are attached at 35-ft intervals to the deck transverse beams, which, along with six longitudinal stringer beams and bracers in between the transverse beams, support the weight of the roadway and its load.
The bridge was officially opened on 25 January 1957 by Kwame Nkrumah, then Prime Minister of the Gold Coast and first President of Ghana.  It carries the National Route N2 and has been of tremendous help to travellers and traders who use the road to access the east and north regions of Ghana.


The Adomi bridge is located in Atimpoku in the Eastern Region of Ghana, which is along the Volta River. The bridge carries National Route N2 and connects parts of the Eastern Region and Juapong in the North Tongu District, Ho, Hohoe and other towns in the Volta Region. A trip from the north regions of Ghana on N2 would go through the eastern corridor and finally use the Adomi Bridge to cross the Volta River. The bridge is about 87 km (54 mi) northeast of Accra, the capital of Ghana, and about 75 km (47 mi) north of the port of Tema.


2008: Some serious cracks, possibly due to fatigue fracture, on the bridge deck's traverse beam at mid-span were discovered. Following these findings, the Government of Ghana imposed a load limit on the bridge in an attempt to slow down the rate of damage. The cracked girders were locally strengthened by the installation of additional steel plates at the affected areas. The continued use of the bridge by overloaded trucks however, further compromised the deck's safety and stability.
2009: More cracks developed, mainly around the same area as the earlier ones were discovered; this necessitated major rehabilitation works on the suspension bridge deck.
2011: A full bridge inspection was completed in April 2011. Overall, the arch was found to be in good condition, but the bridge deck was structurally much worse than expected, which was attributed to high traffic loads and lack of maintenance, and should be replaced.
2014: The bridge was closed to traffic on 10 March 2014 for the replacement of the entire suspended road deck and all hangers, by engineers of Bilfinger MCE GmbH of Austria for 13 million euros. The old concrete deck was replaced by a lighter, stronger orthotropic deck with a double spine: a steel plate with two continuous longitudinal girders, running under roadway/walkway curbs, along the entire suspended span.
2015: Newly rehabilitated bridge opened to traffic in December 2015.


In April 2019, Adomi Bridge was classified as a tourist site after a consensus between the Asuogyaman District Assembly, Ghana Highway Authority and Ghana Tourism Development Company (GTDC).


Verein der Freunde der Kartause Aggsbach (Friends of Aggsbach Charterhouse) (in German)
Aggsbach Dorf parish website: photos of the former Carthusian church (in German)
Aggsbach Dorf parish website: further information (in German)
Monasterium.net: Kartause Aggsbach (in German)


The Agora Theatre and Ballroom (commonly known as the Cleveland Agora, or simply, the Agora) is a music venue located in Cleveland, Ohio, founded by Henry "Hank" LoConti Sr.  The Agora name was used by two other Cleveland venues in succession, the latter of which was damaged by fire in 1984.  The current Agora venue, known as such since 1986, first opened in 1913 as the Metropolitan Theatre.
On December 29, 2011, the LoConti family donated the Agora to MidTown Cleveland Inc., a nonprofit organization.


The first Agora in Cleveland, informally referred to as Agora Alpha, opened on February 26, 1966, at 2175 Cornell Road in Little Italy near the campus of Case Western Reserve University.


In 1967, the Agora moved to a second building on East 24th Street near the campus of Cleveland State University. Once settled in their new location, the new Agora Ballroom, informally referred to as Agora Beta, played a role in giving exposure to many bands, both from the Cleveland area and abroad. Many artists such as Peter Frampton, Bruce Springsteen, Boston, Grand Funk Railroad, ZZ Top, Kiss and many others received much exposure after playing the Agora. The Agora Ballroom was also the setting of the concert by Paul Simon's character in the opening minutes of the 1980 movie One-Trick Pony. The front facade of the Agora Ballroom was temporarily swapped for the one shown in the movie. It is also one of three locations used to record Todd Rundgren's live album Back to the Bars in 1978.
The East 24th Street building also housed Agency Recording Studios, located above the Agora. The onsite recording studio and the close proximity to radio station WMMS allowed for high-quality live concert broadcasts from the Agora. Some of these concerts were later released commercially, including Bruce Springsteen's The Agora, Cleveland 1978, the Cars' Live at the Agora 1978, Ian Hunter's You're Never Alone with a Schizophrenic Deluxe Edition and Dwight Twilley Band's Live From Agora.
The popularity of the club led the Agora to expand during the 1970s and 1980s, opening 12 other clubs in the cities of Columbus, Toledo, Youngstown, Painesville, Akron,  Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Tampa, Hallandale, Hartford, and New Haven. However, the Cleveland location is the only one still in existence today.
On May 3, 1982, the attendees at the Huey Lewis and the News concert inspired Huey Lewis to write the song, "The Heart of Rock & Roll."  Lewis was skeptical that the Cleveland rock scene was better than his home area of San Francisco, but the appreciation of the show and participation of the fans caused him to realize it was the heart of rock & roll.
In 1984, the Agora was damaged by a fire and closed. Two years later, the Agora reopened in a new location on Euclid Avenue, east of Downtown Cleveland. It has remained there since then, and today is still a popular concert club, with many national acts playing there when they stop in Cleveland.


The building currently known as the Agora first opened on March 31, 1913, with an English performance of Aida as the Metropolitan Theatre. It was the brainchild of Max Faetkenheuer, an opera promoter and conductor who had also been involved in the construction of the monumental Hippodrome Theatre on Euclid Avenue five years earlier. The new opera house was well received and did well early on, but later struggled to stay profitable. Among various uses, the Metropolitan was home to a Cleveland's Yiddish theatre troupe in 1927. This brief episode in its history came to an end a few months later in 1928 after the troupe was involved in a bus accident on the way to a performance in Youngstown; the actors were too injured to perform and the venture went bankrupt. By 1932, the venue had turned into a vaudeville/burlesque house called "The Gayety," hosting "hoofers, comics and strippers." The Metropolitan returned to its original use for a short time during the mid-1940s staging comedic musicals, but by the end of the decade stage productions had ceased and the theatre became a full-time movie house. From 1951–78, the theater offices were home to radio stations WHK (1420 AM) and WMMS (100.7 FM); the theater itself was known as the WHK Auditorium.  In 1968–69 the theater was known as the Cleveland Grande. In the early 1980s, it briefly re-opened as the New Hippodrome Theatre showing movies.
Following the fire which damaged the Agora Ballroom on East 24th Street, club owner Henry LoConti, Sr. decided to move to the 5000 Euclid Avenue location.  Following extensive renovations, the new Agora Metropolitan Theater, the third Cleveland venue to bear the Agora name, opened in October 1986. The Agora has two rooms: a 500-person capacity, standing-room-only ballroom with adjoining bar, and an 1800-seat theater. It is available for rentals and hosts nationally touring acts. Plans are underway to reopen the Backstage Cafe.
The Agora is the host of Cleveland-based band Mushroomhead's annual Halloween show.
Henry LoConti Sr. died on July 8, 2014, at age 85.


These piles of stone from the 5th century are located on the eastern side of the island. They are speculated to mark ancient graves.


Shingū Municipal Ferry Service (新宮町営渡船, Shingū Chō-ei Tosen)
Shingū Port (Shingū Fishing Port) - Ainoshima Port : Required time and fare: approx.17 minutes, 480 JPY
Shingū Port is a twenty-minute walk from Nishitetsu Shingū Station.


The Aisha-Bibi (Kazakh: Айша бибі) is an 11th or 12th-century mausoleum for a noble woman located in the village of Aisha Bibi, 18 km (11 mi) west of Taraz, Kazakhstan on the Silk Road. It is locally famous as a monument to love and faithfulness.


According to legend, the mausoleum was built by a Karakhanid Dynasty ruler for his beautiful fiancée Aisha-Bibi, a daughter of Sufi poet Khakim-Ata.  The mausoleum's architectural forms and decoration are reminiscent of fine lace. The whole building is covered with carved terracotta tiles using 60 different floral geometric patterns and stylized calligraphy. Aisha Bibi is a direct stylistic descendant of Samanid Mausoleum in Bukhara.


Aisha Bibi is part of a larger complex.  Ten meters away is a second mausoleum called Babaji Khatun ("wise queen"), and across the road is a sacred limestone cavern.  Together with a garden area and parking lot they form the national monument.
The complex is sited on a ridge overlooking the Taraz oasis from the west.


The entire mausoleum is covered with terracotta panels which help to create the illusion of masslessness typical in Islamic architecture.  The terracotta decoration also uses light and shadow rather than color, a pre-Mongol style. Functionally, this type of decoration scatters the light so the viewer is not blinded as he might be from a smooth light colored wall in full sun. The Columns on the corner are shaped after wooden columns used extensively in Soghdian pre-Islamic architecture.  There is a band of calligraphy at the point of constriction in each column.  In general they describe the beauty of Aisha Bibi and of love in general. One of the old distichs reads: "Autumn... Clouds... The Earth is beautiful".


Sauran clay was used to make the bricks in both the original and restored Aisha Bibi.


The 16-year-old beauty, Aisha-bibi, was just an hour away from meeting her lover. She was in love with the Emir of Taraz and wanted to marry him, against the wishes of her father, so, she left her home Otrar with her wet nurse.  Towards the end of their journey, the two women stopped at the shore of the Assa River to bathe.  When she was emerging from the river, she reached for her clothes and was bitten by a snake that had slithered into her clothes, while she was in the water. The bite was fatal and she died soon after. The Emir was returning from a military mission to meet her but was too late. He ordered the construction of the tomb to commemorate her and their love for eternity.
— Oral History, as Recorded from a Kazakh of Taraz


The site has been venerated since the Middle Ages. Local women from the Taraz Oasis still pray for children and a happy family. It is customary for newlyweds in Taraz to have their union blessed by the dead lovers. Their ritual reenacts the myth. After the ceremony the wedding party retraces Karakhan's journey from Taraz to the site of his fiancée's death. The journey begins at Karakhan Mausoleum in Taraz and ends at the Aisha Bibi, at each location the bride and groom venerate the dead lovers and ask for their blessing.
Russian archeologist V. V. Bartold was the first scientist to record and study the ruins in 1893.  The Soviet Union built a protective glass shell to preserve the monument (c 1960) and used it for the education of students in Taraz and tourism. In 2002, the Republic of Kazakhstan paid Nishan Rameto to restore the Aisha Bibi and built the park infrastructure around it. Shoqan Walikhanov painted monument in his work in 1856.


The mosque dates back to the Ottoman era in 1567 during the administration of Mahmud Pasha who is buried in the mosque. The name of the mosque is derived from him. The mosque is attached with the mausoleum of Mahmud Pasha which is accessible through the door on the mihrab wall. Mahmud Pasha was shot dead near the mosque after being accused of oppressing the Egyptian people.
The design of the mosque is unique in its architectural style which follows the Mamluk tradition for the main building and partly based on the Ottoman architecture for the minaret in particular. The minaret is decorated with a ring with muqarnas and a cone shaped obelisk on top. It is noted to be smaller than the other mosques in the same area, and it is partly due to the building was built on top of the pile of stones, and it is required to climb up stairs to the mosque. The mosque has four sides, and two of them have entrance gate on it. The gates are ornamented with two lines of windows filled with plasters and maroon glass works, with muqarnas on top of them facing toward the balconies.


The mosque was restored by Farouk I in 1940. The restoration reinforced the vaults and fixed the ceiling.
In 2015, the Ministry of Antiquity reported that the minaret of the mosque is in danger of collapsing any moment if there’s no adequate measure to be implemented. The picture released by the Youm 7 paper showed the cracks on the wall behind the minaret.


Al Zubara Fort was originally built by Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim Al Thani in 1938 to serve as a Coast Guard station, although some utter that it was built to serve as a police station. It was later renovated into a museum to display diverse exhibits and artworks, most especially for contemporarily topical archaeological findings.


Al Zubara Fort is situated in the ancient town of Zubarah, which in turn is located on the northwestern coast of the Qatar peninsula in the Al Shamal municipality, and is about 105 km from the Capital of Qatar .


Zubarah (Arabic: الزبارة "Zubarah"), also known as Al Zubarah or Az Zubarah, the town in which Al Zubara Fort is situated, is a deserted town located on the northwestern coast of the Qatari Peninsula, in the municipality of Al Shamal, which in turn, is about 105 km from Doha, the capital city and state of Qatar (The geography of both Zubarah and Al Zubara Fort are the same since the latter is located in Zubarah). Zubarah covers an area of approximately 400 hectares and about 60 hectares inside the outer town wall. Zubarah as a whole is the largest archaeological site in the whole Qatari Peninsula.
It was once a thriving pearl fishing and trading port positioned midway between the Strait of Hormuz and the west arm of the Persian Gulf. It is one of the largest and best preserved examples of an 18th-19th century merchant town in the Persian Gulf region. The entire layout and urban fabric of a settlement dating to this formative period in the region have been preserved. The Zubarah archaeological site provides an important insight into urban life, spatial organization, and the social and economic history of the Persian Gulf before the discovery of oil and gas in the 20th century.


Lofty, compact walls, substantial and profuse in broadness, swathe this eminent fort which are one meter in length and bulk. It was said that the walls of the fort were fabricated and were put together by merging and blending overlapping raw pieces of coral stones, specifically limestone, with a mortar and a pestle specifically conceived for grinding mud. The fort has a protective roof that was jury-rigged by utilizing compressed mud. The roof endows shade and coolness for the ones inside the fort. The fort's roof was also erected for the soldiers who would patrol and traverse the surrounding areas for enemies. The fort has three, gargantuan yet superbly conceived corners, each having massive, circular towers on top, which are geared with diverse varieties of Qatari-style defenses, with the fourth one as the most picturesque corner, as it has a rectangular tower with exquisite triangular-based ledges with slits that are called machicolations. Of course, the soldiers themselves had their own respective rooms. Eight rooms were constructed to accommodate such valiant and patriotic soldiers which are situated in the ground floor. These rooms were just converted recently to house exhibits, artworks and other archaeological findings. The fort has external staircases which were used to climb up to the fort's floors and roof.
For more information about the Al Zubara Fort's structure, see the table below.


The well once provided fresh drinking water all year round, but today, like other wells in the area it is completely dry. Dug by hand through the hard dammam limestone the well reached down to a thin band of fresh water. If it were dug too deep the water would become salty. Rubble in the bottom means we do not know exactly how deep this well is, but it goes down at least ten metres.


Today, Al Zubara Fort serves as a museum and a famous landmark. As a result, a schedule for opening and closing the fort for visitors and tourists is needed. The fort is open regularly from 8 a.m. until 6 p.m. except for early Friday mornings and Saturdays.


The Alabama Theatre is a movie palace in Birmingham, Alabama.  It was built in 1927 by Paramount's Publix Theatre chain as its flagship theater for the southeastern region of the United States. Seating 2,500 people at the time, it was the largest in the Birmingham Theatre district. The district was once home to a myriad of large theaters that featured vaudeville, performing arts, nickelodeons, and large first-run movie palaces.  The Alabama is the only district theater still operating today. Built to show silent films, the Alabama still features its original Wurlitzer theater organ.  Other than the Alabama, the Lyric Theatre is the only theater still standing in the district.
The Alabama and its historic organ were added to the Alabama Register of Landmarks and Heritage on February 15, 1977, and to the  National Register of Historic Places on November 13, 1979.  The theater has been surveyed by the Historic American Buildings Survey on several occasions, the last time being in 1996. It was designated as the state's historic theater in 1993.


Construction plans for the Alabama were announced in 1926, but ground breaking was delayed until April 1, 1927. The grand opening was held as originally scheduled on December 26, 1927. Construction of the concrete and steel building cost approximately $1.5 million.
In 1934, the Loveman's of Alabama department store next door burned to the ground. Thanks to a thick firewall on that side of the Alabama, the theater was unharmed aside from some smoke damage around air vents in the auditorium.  These smoke stains would remain until the 1998 theater restoration, in concert with the conversion of the 1935 Loveman's building into the McWane Science Center.
One of the things the Alabama Theatre was known for in its early days was its Mickey Mouse Club, which was formed in 1933. Meetings were held every Saturday, where the children would perform for each other, watch Mickey Mouse cartoons, and participate in other activities. The Club also sponsored food and toy drives for the underprivileged. By 1935, the Club had over 7,000 members, making it the biggest Mickey Mouse Club in the world. Membership eventually peaked at over 18,000 before the Club closed almost ten years after it was formed.
Another regular event at the Alabama Theatre was the Miss Alabama Pageant.  From 1935 to 1948, the rules of the Miss America Pageant allowed multiple contestants per state. The Alabama Theatre hosted the Miss Birmingham Pageant in those years. When the rules were changed in 1949, the Alabama Theatre became host to the Miss Alabama Pageant and continued to do so through 1966.
The decline of downtown Birmingham through the 1960s and 1970s saw the closing of most of the downtown's movie theatres. In 1981, Plitt Theatres of Chicago closed the Alabama and sold it to Cobb Theaters of Birmingham. Cobb attempted to reopen the Alabama several times, but was unsuccessful. Cobb eventually sold the Alabama to Costa and Head, developers working to revitalize the downtown area. Costa and Head initiated series of classic movies at the Alabama with some success, but ultimately filed for bankruptcy in 1986.
The Alabama Chapter of the American Theatre Organ Society (ATOS) had been maintaining the Alabama's organ starting in the 1970s. They sought permission to remove the organ from the Alabama to save it, but Costa and Head's creditors deemed it the single most valuable item in the building and forbade its removal. In response the Alabama Chapter of ATOS began a fund-raising effort to buy the Alabama. It was purchased by Birmingham Landmarks, Inc. in 1987.  The non-profit organization was originally started with the sole purpose of saving the theater. With the purchase, the theater was renamed the Alabama Theatre for the Performing Arts. In 1993, the Alabama was designated the official state historic theater of Alabama.
In 1998, the Alabama Theatre underwent a complete restoration, in which gold leaf and other paint was cleaned or replaced, seats were replaced or recovered, and some carpet and drapes were replaced.  Birmingham Landmarks continues to own the theater and has also purchased the Lyric Theatre, a 1914 vaudeville theater located across the street from the Alabama.  The Alabama hosts roughly 250 entertainment events every year. It attracts more than 400,000 people a year to a variety of performances, including Broadway-type theatre, ballet, opera, music concerts, and film.
The Alabama Theatre has hosted American Idol winner Taylor Hicks (from Birmingham) in '07, Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit (from north AL) in '14, and St. Paul & the Broken Bones (from Birmingham) in '14. It hosted the Black Crowes from Atlanta in '91, and the late B.B. King from MS in '03. It hosted Nashville's Kings of Leon in '07. It hosted Birmingham/Nashville's Moon Taxi band in '16. Harry Connick Jr. (from New Orleans) played there in 2010.


When the Alabama was built in 1927, films were silent and required a musical accompaniment. This was typically provided by an orchestra or theater pipe organ. The Alabama's organ is a Crawford Special-Publix One Mighty Wurlitzer. Only seventeen examples of this model were built, and the Alabama's is one of only three still installed at their original sites.
Nicknamed Big Bertha, the Alabama's organ is a four-manual (keyboard) organ. It was originally installed with 20 ranks (sets of pipes), but has been expanded to 32. It also features numerous percussion instruments and sound effects to accompany silent movies.


Alameda Central is a public urban park in downtown Mexico City. Created in 1592, the Alameda Central is the oldest public park in the Americas. It is located in Cuauhtémoc borough, adjacent to the Palacio de Bellas Artes, between Juárez Avenue and Hidalgo Avenue. Alameda Central can be accessed by Metro Bellas Artes.


The Alameda Central park is a green garden with paved paths and decorative fountains and statues, and is frequently the center of civic events. The area used to be an Aztec marketplace. On 11 January 1592, Viceroy Luis de Velasco II ordered the creation of a public green space for the city's residents. The name comes from the Spanish word álamo, which means poplar tree, that were planted here. This park was part of the viceroy's plan to develop what was, at that time, the western edge of the city. It has become a symbol of a traditional Mexican park and many other parks in the country take on the name "Alameda" as well.


Fountains and statues in the park include:
Beethoven Monument
Benito Juárez Hemicycle
Désespoire
Fountain of Mercury
Fountain of Neptune
Fountain of Venus
Fountain of Virgin (central fountain)
Gladiador frigio
Gladiador romano
La Primavera
Las Danaides
Malgré Tout
Statue of Alexander von Humboldt