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Cement mixer kaleidoscope (downtown Norfolk)

Norfolk, Virginia, United States
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Listed, not yet checked · Oct 2026
This Big Thing is recorded as still being here.
The Cementiscope, a hand-cranked kaleidoscope housed in a cement-mixer drum, was made by the artist collective Glassitorium and unveiled in 2015. Downtown Norfolk lists it at The Plot, 776 Granby Street, in Norfolk's NEON Arts District, Virginia.
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Cement mixer kaleidoscope (downtown Norfolk)
This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 36.8547° N, 76.2874° W
FIELD GUIDE

The story

A cement-mixer drum that doubles as a kaleidoscope is listed by Downtown Norfolk at The Plot, a small park on Granby Street in Norfolk's NEON Arts District. The Cementiscope was made by Glassitorium, a collective of four glass artists, Joan Biddle, Hannah Kirkpatrick, Charlotte Potter and Kristi Totoritis, and unveiled at the first NEON Festival in 2015, according to NEON Norfolk. Norfolk Arts lists it as a sculpture of 31 October 2015.
The design joins the two things in its name. Norfolk Arts says a cement drum encases a fully working kaleidoscope, turned by a manual crank, so that coloured glass appears to tumble through mirrors; integrated LED lights enhance the shapes, and because of the random tumbling a viewer never sees the same images twice. NEON Norfolk says viewers look through either end and see refracted images reflected back on the billboard.
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WHAT TO EXPECT
A hand-cranked kaleidoscope in a cement-mixer drum. Turn the crank and look through either end to see tumbling coloured glass, lit by LEDs, according to Norfolk Arts and NEON Norfolk. It sits in The Plot, a small park that Downtown Norfolk describes as temporary.
ACCESS
The Plot, 776 Granby Street, at the corner of Granby Street and Olney Road in Norfolk's NEON Arts District. Downtown Norfolk's listing for The Plot gives hours of dawn to dusk.
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USS Antietam anchor (30,000 lb, Town Point Park)
Norfolk, Virginia
A surplus 30,000-pound anchor from the aircraft carrier USS Antietam (CV-36) -- measuring 146 inches along the shank and 116 inches across the flukes -- sits on a paved walkway leading into Town Point Park in downtown Norfolk, Virginia. Donated by the U.S. Navy's Naval Historical Center and dedicated to the citizens of Norfolk on October 16, 1983, the anchor commemorates the Antietam, commissioned in 1945, which served in the Pacific and earned two battle stars during the Korean War before being decommissioned in 1963.
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1.1 km away
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