27 March 2014

Chess Sightseeing

A few days ago, while working on Made in Manhattan, I discovered Waymarking.com ('share and discover unique and interesting locations'). Yes, the site has a search and, yes, the search returns chess related attractions -- over 250 of them.

While most of the chess locations involve giant public chess boards (has Bill Wall ever cataloged them?), there are some notable exceptions. One of them, itself a giant board, is shown below: Yoko Ono's white chess set at LongHouse; that's LongHouse, East Hampton, LI, NY.

The Waymarking description says,

This is a political statement for Yoko Ono -- not suprising -- all white pieces on all white squares. During the Cold War both "superpowers" used games, particularly chess, in order to construct an ideology of complete conflict and irreconcilable division between East and West.

You can also see a white chess set on Youtube: Yoko Ono and John Lennon playing chess (1972). I think they were making up the rules as they played.

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