Toynbee tile, West Broadway and 6th Avenue, New York City
In NYC to celebrate her fiftieth birthday, my mom and I saw Manhattan the right way: on foot. One unseasonably warm afternoon, we were walking up 6th Avenue near Broadway and noticed this odd plaque embedded in the sidewalk.
Though we knew Kubrick’s name, we had no idea what “Toynbee idea” meant and couldn’t fathom how Jupiter figured into things. I snapped the above photograph and chalked the whole thing up to eccentric NYC graffiti.
Wikipedia now also presents thorough coverage. The most plausible explanation for the tiles? Toynbee likely refers to Arnold...