When something happened over 500 years ago, it can be tricky to parse out fact from legend. Take the first ever Christmas tree. The custom of a decorated tree at Yuletide dates back centuries, to at least the 15th or 16th century. That much is fact, the very first one? The Christmas tree that started it all? That might be more a matter of legend.
A likely candidate was in the medieval city of Riga, the capital of Latvia. Riga’s City Center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, including the Town Hall Square. Flanking the south side of the Square is the House of the Brotherhood of the Blackheads, and it’s here where the Christmas tree story takes shape.
Near the northwest corner of the ornate building is a slightly domed stone marker embedded in the cobblestones, staking its claim—in eight languages—as the spot of the first public Christmas tree.
The Brotherhood of the Blackheads was a guild of professional merchants and traders that banded together in the 14th century, and remained active in Latvia and Estonia right up through the middle of the 20th century. They were known for their twice-yearly holiday celebrations, including the Christmas to New Years season. It’s said that the Brotherhood put a fir tree in the square, festooned it with paper flowers, sang and danced and cheered the season, then lit the whole thing on fire. (Needless to say, it is also said that more than a few glasses were raised by the Brothers during the celebration.).
The Brotherhood has documentation showing that this all happened for the first time in 1510, and it just might be the very first documented Christmas tree. The chapter in Tallin, 175 miles to the north in Estonia, makes the same claim for the same Christmas. Given the chummy relationship between the two chapters, it’s not inconceivable that they lit up their trees simultaneously. A Christmas tree still goes up in Riga’s Town Hall Square, in the same spot, in front of the same Brotherhood, but with a whole lot more lights and decorations. And that much is fact.
John Burroughs, one of the great 19th century conservationists, wrote about his cabin in the woods, "Life has a different flavor here… It is reduced to simpler terms; its complex equations all disappear."
"Slabsides" is a log cabin built in 1895 by the famed conservationist and his son, in the Marlborough Mountains of West Park, New York. The small cottage is in a thick forest, and was named for the rough-hewed bark strips that clad its log frame. It’s a mile or so from "Riverby," Burroughs' forlorn former estate on the Hudson, which, unlike Slabsides, has fallen into some neglect and disrepair.
The snug little cabin is maintained by the John Burroughs Association, originally a place for Burroughs to write and think. Over the years he received all kinds of visitors and dignitaries here, from nearby Vassar College students, to Teddy Roosevelt and Henry Ford.
The cabin is on the west side of a hill in what is now the John Burroughs Nature Sanctuary. The downstairs is an open floor plan with a partitioned bedroom, and there are steep stairs that lead to a second floor sleeping area. If you visit today, it’s all exactly as Burroughs left it—as though he just stepped out for a walk and will be back soon.
After Burroughs died in 1921, the property was deeded to the John Burroughs Association, a non-profit that serves to preserve the naturalist's legacy, as well encourage all to appreciate nature as Burroughs did. Slabsides received National Historic Landmark status in 1968, and is part of the 170-acre reserve of pristine forest, ponds, streams and waterfalls.
In a small Colombian town 30 minutes outside of Bogotá lies a giant, full-scale replica of the Taj Mahal, finished with four towering spires and a white bulb at the top. Virtually unknown to all tourists, this replica is part of Jaime Duque Park, a locally renowned agglomeration of history and culture of epic proportions.
In 1983, chief pilot of Avianca Airlines Jaime Duque Grisales decided to dedicate his life to philanthropy by creating an atmosphere of education and family fun for the children of Colombia. To do so, Grisales constructed Jaime Duque Park, a 70-acre family-themed amusement park near the town of Briceno.
One of Grisales’ aims was to bring the entire world to Colombia, and just that he did. In addition to the Taj Mahal, Jaime Duque Park features each of the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World, including replicas of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Moscow’s Red Square, and the Egyptian Pyramids.
Along with its extraordinary worldly sights, the park also offers concerts, a zoo, a conservation area, a palace of mirrors, a playground of climbable, multi-story dinosaurs, and a 1:25000 scale topographical map of Colombia. The idea is to impart historical and geographical knowledge, with all proceeds going to charitable causes.
Grisales connected the different attractions in the park via a series of bridges, colorfully painted outdoor walkways, and monorail-mounted bikes. The park is surrounded by a wacky, multicolored castle. Another curiosity is the monument of a human hand hoisting up a sphere, dubbed "The Hand of God."
Also found in Jaime Duque Park are battleships, stone statues, and two museums: the “Outfits of the World” fashion museum and the “Museum of Mankind in the Universe,” featuring a collection of statues explaining important moments in human evolution.
Iceland is world famous for its glaciers, fjords, and beautiful landscapes, but few visitors to the Nordic island ever set foot underground. If you venture just 25 minutes outside of Iceland’s capital, however, to a village called Hafnarfjordur, you'll find a 3,000-foot-long lava tube that looks like you're entering the depths of a hardened lava hell.
Translating literally to “The End of the Road,” the Leiðarendi lava tube resembles the inside of an artery more than it does a typical geologic feature in Iceland, giving it the nickname of “volcanic veins.” At the length of over three football fields and easily walkable, the red lava tube of Leiðarendi serves as the perfect getaway for those intrigued by both natural history and adventure, requiring a modest amount of hunching and climbing to complete the caving journey.
Along the voyage, the tour guides bring visitors to “the world’s darkest place,” a section of the cave that couldn’t possibly be any more pitch black. Complete with drip stalagmites, shark tooth stalactites, lava flakes, and “lava hands,” Leiðarendi was created relatively recently at an estimated two thousand years ago. The lava tube was formed when the Stóri-Bolli (“Big Cup”) crater was ruptured in a volcanic eruption, causing lava to flow outward, molding out Leiðarendi.
Last March, scientists revealed they'd made an astonishing discovery: mysterious and, frankly, kind of terrifying sounds were coming from the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the world's oceans.
At the time, it was just another creepy, odd, vaguely frightening new fact that we learned about the world, with the sources of the sound ranging from ships to whales to dolphins.
But one sound was perhaps the most mysterious of all, three-and-a-half seconds of noise that no one could conclusively identify.
Recently, though, scientists at Oregon State University said they'd found the likely source: minke whales, the smallest of the baleen whales. And while other baleen whale calls had been heard down there, this one in particular was unique.
“It’s very distinct, with all these crazy parts,” Sharon Nieukirk, a researcher at Oregon State, said. “The low-frequency moaning part is typical of baleen whales, and it’s that kind of twangy sound that makes it really unique. We don’t find many new baleen whale calls.”
Baleen whales typically make the sounds when they mate, meaning that this latest one was likely about sex, too. But scientists won't be able to positively identify it without further evidence.
"Our hope is to mount an expedition to go out and do acoustic localization, find the animals, get biopsy samples and find out exactly what’s making the sound," said Nieukirk. "It really is an amazing, weird sound, and good science will explain it.”
It took five years but I finally found it: the very first advertisement for what became the Nintendo Entertainment System, from late 1984! pic.twitter.com/6r4sv7vSst
Frank Cifaldi is a game developer and video game archivist—he maintains a tumblr of "old video game things that are new to the Internet" and is starting a Video Game History Foundation—and for five years, one of the old video game things he has been looking for was the picture above, the original U.S. ad for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
The NES was first released in Japan in 1983 as the Family Computer, and at the end of 1984, Nintendo was preparing to release the system in the U.S. The ad above appeared in the January 1985 issue of Consumer Electronics; the game console was unveiled in June at the Consumer Electronics Show.
As Kotaku reports, it took Cifaldi five years to get a hold of this ad. This was only the second time in all those years he spotted a copy of this issue of the magazine on eBay, he said on Twitter.
The same issue of the magazine also ran a picture of the gaming system, Cifaldi found:
They've got it under a cloth like it's a surprise but there was a picture of it like five pages ago. pic.twitter.com/HrQ93VRn1e
But Cifaldi says they're a little bit different. The image in New York is the cover of the brochure Nintendo handed out at CES. To the untrained eye, it might not make much difference, but for an archivist, it's an important distinction.
Albuquerque is known for a lot of things, but heaps of snow is not one of them. So every year, to celebrate the holiday season, the Albuquerque Metropolitan Arroyo Flood Control Authority builds an enormous snowman out of the city's ever-present tumbleweeds.
The tumbleweed snowman has been on display along the I-40 freeway outside the AMAFCA offices every year since 1995, steadily getting bigger and bigger. The 2016 snowman's tumbleweed bottom is 10 feet wide and he stands over 14 feet tall. It goes up the first Tuesday after Thanksgiving—dubbed "Tumbleweed Tuesday" by the AMAFCA and several local news outlets—and stays there greeting motorists until the first week of January.
While the tumbleweed snowman may have started as a joke, the AMAFCA is dead serious about it now. Flood control employees begin looking for suitable tumbleweeds as early as August, and once the giant-sized bushes are selected, they are bolstered with rebar and welded to a stand to protect the snowman from the fierce winds that have occasionally taken him out. Then the whole thing is spray-painted white and adorned with an AMAFCA hat.
While Albuquerque has more snow than a place like Chandler, Arizona (a town with their own twist on tumbleweeds), with an average seasonal total of less than a foot the tumbleweed snowman has become the unofficial mascot of the holiday season. (Sorry, Frosty.)
As the owner of Edmonton's Bearclaw Gallery, Jackie Bugera spends her days surrounded by stunning First Nations art.
But when she goes home at night, it's to a second, secret gallery: her basement showcases scores of works across a broad range of media, all focused on her late bulldog, Zsu Zsi.
At the CBC, Reporter Andrea Huncar provides a delightful walkthrough of The Hall of Zsu Zsi, as well as testimony from the contributors—many of them renowned Indigenous artists—who have made it possible. Leo Arcand, a Cree sculptor, carved a soapstone bust of Zsu Zsi, who died in 2012. He was particularly inspired by her twinkling eyes and flapping jowls, he tells Huncar.
"She was always charming, but also a little bit put offish, so you couldn't help but be drawn in," says Aaron Paquette, the first to paint Zsu Zsi and now a frequent contributor. His works include I'm a fool for you, which imagines Zsu Zsi as a queen gorging on venison, and Zsu Zsi of the Night, which shows her splayed, French-girl style, in a local dog park.
Perhaps the most touching work is by Linus Woods. Entitled To the Spirit World, it shows the beloved dog standing in the open door of a boxcar, feet planted and ready for the journey.
You can learn more about the gallery, and see more artworks, over at the CBC.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
Why is that orange speared with toothpick-candy-kebabs and a candle? It’s a Christingle. And it's intended to teach kids the importance of Jesus Christ.
The tradition of the Christingle dates back to the 18th century Moravian Church in Marienborn, Germany. During an advent service there in 1747, minister John de Watteville was preaching to the children of his congregation, telling them about the many virtues of Jesus and the happiness he can bring.
According to the website of the British Province Moravian Church, de Watteville gave each child a small candle with a red ribbon wrapped around it, saying that it was Jesus “who has kindled in each little heart a flame which keeps burning to their joy and our happiness.” The candle’s flame represented the joy in people’s hearts and the red ribbon symbolized the blood of Jesus.
From this initial service, the tradition of giving children the symbolic, ribbon-wrapped candle continued within the Moravian Church, usually taking place during an advent ceremony. As the church spread across Europe, it brought the tradition along with it.
The name of the little gift sounds a bit goofy to modern ears, and the church seems unsure exactly when the term “Christingle” first came into fashion, but they suggest that it is some kind of modern evolution of a German term meaning “Christ light” or “Christ child.” Wherever it comes from, it’s pretty delightful.
While candle-lighting ceremonies have been observed by Christian churches since the beginning of time, the Christingle festivities remained within the Moravian faith until 1968. According to a 2014 article from the BBC, it wasn’t until then that a man named John Pensom brought the tradition to the world by organizing a non-Moravian-Church-sponsored Christingle celebration as a fundraiser for an English youth charity, The Children’s Society.
Held on December 7 at the Lincoln Cathedral in the East Midlands of England, the ceremony was only expected to attract around 300 people, but close to 1,500 showed up. The next year, the Society held seven Christingle services, and more than twice that the next year. By the time Pensom passed away in 2006, he was known as “Mr. Christingle.”
The popularity of the Christingle has only grown since The Children’s Society introduced it to England. Today, thousands of Christingle ceremonies take place each year in schools and churches all over the world. However, both the Christingle and the event surrounding them have changed quite a bit since the 1700s.
A far cry from the simple candle and ribbon de Watteville gave children, the modern Christingle is a more complicated and abstractly symbolic item. The main component of today’s Christingle is an orange, which is meant to represent the world. The candle signaling life’s flame sticks out of the top of the orange, although in light of fire safety concerns, this is sometimes replaced with a glowstick. The red ribbon symbolizing Christ’s blood is also still there, usually wrapped around the orange or the candle. Finally, the Christingle now features four toothpicks poked into the orange representing the four cardinal directions, and these spears are adorned with nuts, candy, and/or fruit, representing the bounty God provides.
Altogether, the modern Christingle is a festive, colorful little oddity that drums up warm holiday feelings for those who have grown up with them as a tradition, and puzzled looks from those outside the bubble.
The ceremonies in which Christingles are given out are usually a mix of charity event and religious service. Christingle ceremonies still tend to take place on advent holidays, or Christmas Eve, when children will hand over a donation to a church or charity in exchange for their Christingle. Then they are all lit, carols are sung, and a festive atmosphere ensues.
Christingles have become a fairly common sight in UK holiday traditions, but have yet to really make a splash in the U.S. But how long can America ignore something that’s just so fun to say? Christingle!
Object of Intrigue is a weekly column in which we investigate the story behind a curious item. Is there an object you want to see covered? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
Imagine it's 1942, and you're a member of Britain's Royal Air Force. In a skirmish above Germany, your plane was shot out of the sky, and since then you've been hunkered down in a Prisoner of War camp. Your officers have told you it's your duty to escape as soon as you can, but you can't quite figure out how—you've got no tools and no spare rations, and you don't even know where you are.
One day, though, you're playing Monopoly with your fellow prisoners when you notice a strange seam in the board. You pry it open—and find a secret compartment with a file inside. In other compartments, other surprises: a compass, a wire saw, and a map, printed on luxurious, easily foldable silk and showing you exactly where you are, and where safety is. You've received a package from Christopher Clayton Hutton—which means you're set to go.
Hutton—"Clutty" to his friends—was not a typical intelligence officer, moving up the ranks in a predetermined fashion. He had followed his interests rather than any set career path, working as a journalist, a film marketer, and a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps. When war broke out, and he decided he wanted to join up again, he sent dozens of letters and telegrams to various branches of the War Office—all worded, he later wrote, such that "they could not possibly be pushed into a 'Pending' tray and discreetly forgotten."
His gambit was successful. Finally called in for an interview, Hutton told the top brass about how, as a young boy, he had dared a touring Harry Houdini to forego his standard props and escape from a brand new box, constructed in front of a live audience. (Houdini accepted the challenge—and escaped anyway, by bribing the box's onstage carpenter to use trick nails.)
In the end, it was this anecdote that convinced the head of MI9, Major Norman Crockatt, to hire him. "Old ideas are no good at all," Crockatt apparently told the 44-year-old polymath. "We want new ones."
Hutton went straight to work. Over his six-year tenure as Technical Officer to the Escape Department, he would invent dozens of vital gizmos: ration packs squirreled into cigar boxes, miniature compasses hidden in buttons and cuff links, cigarette holders that doubled as tiny telescopes. But his first order of business was maps. In particular, he wanted to create maps to be included in "escape kits."
These maps would need to be thin enough to be snuck into a boot or coat lining, durable enough to survive wear and tear in the field—but detailed enough that escaping soldiers could use them to find their way through unfamiliar terrain.
Today, someone seeking accurate views of the world could turn to any number of satellite maps. But such amenities weren't available in 1939. According to his autobiography, Official Secret, Hutton began his map quest by charging directly into the War Office's Map Room—whereupon the major on duty gently told him that the British military did not own any maps of Germany at a scale that would be useful to escapees.
In the end, Hutton had to fly to Edinburgh, where he met up with mapmaker John Bartholomew, a decorated World War I veteran who was happy to aid the cause. He gave Hutton permission to use any and all of his maps, free of charge.
Now he just needed to figure out what to print the maps on. The necessary material had to fit a number of criteria: "It had to be so thin that it would take up next to no room when folded, and at the same time it had to be fairly durable and crease-resisting," Hutton wrote. It also had to be waterproof, easy to print on, and easy to read—and most importantly, when secreted within a flak jacket or combat boot, it couldn't rustle and give itself away.
Hutton talked to paper manufacturers across London, but none of their offerings worked out. The heavy papers were far too loud, revealing themselves at the slightest prodding. The thin papers—"no thicker than that of the finest toilet roll," Hutton wrote—were prone to disintegration. So Hutton turned to another substrate: silk.
After days of messy experimentation with different printing materials and methods, he came up with an ink-and-pectin mixture that sat perfectly on the silk's surface. Soon, his suppliers were churning out maps by the thousands, with frontiers, demarcation lines, and other vital information clearly marked.
Hutton didn't stop there. Expecting that the country's silk supplies might soon be reserved exclusively for parachutes, he kept his eyes open for other useful materials. Eventually, he heard about a boatload of mulberry leaf pulp, en route from Japan. Japanese forces made this pulp into paper, which they then used to craft balloons for aerial bombs, sent via the jet stream to the unsuspecting American West Coast.
Hutton was able to get his hands on the valuable shipment. According to Official Secret, the cargo was brought to Hutton by a War Department friend, Bravada, whose job was to stop jewel money from flowing into Nazi coffers by intercepting diamonds traveling from Germany. Bravada—who does not seem to show up in any other accounts of World War II—apparently operated out of a secret room in an office building, located, Hutton wrote, behind a "huge painting of a reclining nude."
The same qualities that made the mulberry paper perfect for weaponized balloons also made it ideal for maps. Hutton brought it to a group of paper scientists, who got to work. "I jigged about like an excited schoolboy as I watched test after test," Hutton wrote. "The results were sensational."
The paper was thin enough to see through, but could hold detailed charts printed in seven different colors. It could be dipped in water, crumpled up, and shoved down into a boot—and when it was retrieved hours later, it could be smoothed out with nary a rustle.
Hutton's next challenge was figuring out how the silk and mulberry leaf maps could be carried in a clandestine way. For soldiers not yet deployed, Hutton did as much as he could with flight boots: a silk map and compass were stuffed into cavity in the heel, a small knife was tucked into the cloth loop, and a long, thin wire saw was threaded into the laces. An escaping fighter could use the knife or saw to cut the boots' tops off, transforming them into much less conspicuous "civilian shoes."
But the fighters who needed the maps most—those who had already been captured—were trickier to access. Hutton came up with a plan for that, too. Thanks to the Geneva Convention, prisoners of war were allowed to receive packages from their families and other aid organizations. Parcels that contained games, sports equipment, and other fun pursuits were especially encouraged—not only by the POWs themselves, but by their captors, who figured hobbies would keep bored prisoners out of trouble.
"These voluntary gifts, designed for the comfort and entertainment of the prisoners, were flooding the camps from hundreds of sources," Hutton wrote. "There was no valid reason why we should not take cover behind this multiplicity of well-wishers."
Hutton and his team went to work setting up a number of fake organizations, each with their own letterhead, slogan, and address (often that of a recently blitzed building). The "Prisoner's Leisure Hours Fund" got scores of books past the German censors, who were too focused on the stories' content to notice the maps and hacksaw blades stuffed inside their covers. If a table tennis kit came in from the "Licensed Victualers Sports Association," prisoners would look for contraband maps and compasses secreted within the paddles.
Hutton laid intelligence groundwork to alert captured soldiers of these options: most of the prison camps eventually had "escape committees," made up of the few soldiers from every squadron who Hutton had let in on his methods and taught to communicate in code. A month into what Hutton was calling Operation Post-Box, the rate of attempted escapes by British POWs had more than tripled.
As guards and censors cottoned onto his methods, Hutton became more ingenious. He hid maps inside gramophone records (as recipients would break the records open to get at the maps, Hutton called this "Operation Smash-Hit"). He cut a country's map up into 52 squares, took a pack of playing cards, and hid one square inside each card (the Joker held the map key). He stuck maps into each side of a wooden chessbox, and a small wireless set inside the base of the king.
But the enemy, of course, wasn't stupid. "By the end of the war, the German security experts must have been in possession of the full story of my inventions," wrote Hutton. There was only one trick they never figured out: the clandestine Monopoly boards.
As Erin McCarthy details in Mental Floss, the company that printed Hutton's silk maps for him, John Waddington Ltd., also manufactured all of the country's Monopoly boards. After Hutton approached them, the Waddingtons set up a secret room in their factory, where a select cadre of employees rejiggered the game boards—punching small compartments into them, hiding the tiny tools, and covering the hole with a game space decal.
"When their job was done," McCarthy writes, "the board was indistinguishable from one a regular citizen might buy in a store." No one who wasn't directly involved knew about this trick until the relevant documents were declassified in 1985.
Hutton's gadgets eventually numbered in the dozens—and they were so nifty, he wrote, that his most aggravating security risk was when people who visited his offices pocketed them to show their friends. Hutton shared many of his creations with America's Escape and Evasion Section, which duly began printing maps on rayon and carving up Monopoly boards. All told, the British and American military produced 3.5 million silk and rayon maps.
By the end of the war, expert Philip E. Orbanes says, 744 captured airmen had freed themselves using tools designed by Hutton. Thousands more who escaped without tools, or were shot down and evaded capture, may have benefited greatly from MI9's overall philosophy of "escape-mindedness."
In the aftermath of the war, many of Hutton's secrets were publicized by German and British newspapers. The silk maps were declassified, and leftovers went on sale across Europe, as the same demureness and foldability that made them great escape aids made them even better scarves and handkerchiefs.
These days, the maps are a rare collectible, suggesting that many soldiers hung onto theirs as souvenirs. This makes a certain amount of sense. Soldiers may eventually get rid of uniforms. But who wouldn't want to keep the bit of silk that came to you in a game box, folded up small, and—with nary a rustle—showed you how to make it back home?
"In 1949, in a French antique shop, I bought one," Hutton wrote. "It cost me four pounds"—a 2,000 percent markup.
In the winding Tangletown neighborhood of Minneapolis, you might stumble upon an imposing cement structure, bedecked with eagles and sword-wielding knights. This 110-foot-tall dome, easily visible from the air, often serves as an unofficial beacon for planes coming in for landing. This is no fortress or bunker; it's a water tower.
The Washburn Park Water Tower was built in 1932 to replace a much older water tower. Three prominent Minneapolis businessmen were tasked with the job: architect Harry Wild Jones, sculptor John K. Daniels, and engineer William S. Hewett. Because the water tower was to be in a developing neighborhood, they wanted it to be beautiful.
The design began with eight pilasters and a domed top, all made from reinforced concrete. These didn't draw much attention, but when the plaster casts were trucked in, people gathered to watch.
As the story goes, some years earlier Harry Wild Jones was clearing brush to build his home in Tangletown when he was attacked by an eagle. After a struggle the eagle was injured. The architect brought it into town, where its wingspan was measured at a whopping 7 feet. Possibly as an homage to that bird, the Washburn Water Tower is topped with eight eagles, looking over the homes of the surrounding neighborhood.
Perhaps more noticeable are the eight hooded knights adorning the buttresses of the tower. They are known as the "Guardians of Health," and are symbolic protectors of the water supply. Minnesota was experiencing a deathly typhoid outbreak at the time of construction. The eight-ton sculptures were affixed to the tower to assure residents of its cleanliness.
Washburn Water Tower still stands on its hilltop, though more as a Minneapolis landmark than as a municipal service. It no longer provides water, though it does help to maintain the city's water pressure. The tower was placed on the Register of National Historic Places in 1983.
While exact numbers are not available, an estimated 100,000 people lie buried within the 0.86 square kilometers (212 acres) that comprise Bukit Brown Cemetery. However, final resting places are not so final in this crowded city-state, and now this unique cemetery set aside for Singapore's Chinese residents faces disruption to meet the relentless demands of development.
Originally owned by private Chinese clans for burials, the site became an official municipal cemetery in 1922. However, the new plots sat dormant for months despite the pressing need for burial grounds, as the Europeans that laid out the cemetery did not take into account the feng shui requirements of Chinese burial plots and thus had to re-plot much of the land.
As several million Chinese migrants either passed through or settled in Singapore, Bukit Brown Cemetery is a significant feature of the city's cultural history. Many famous Singaporeans (of all classes and statuses) are buried there, drawing from very diverse origins including Hokkien, Hainanese, Cantonese, Hakka, and Teochew. The tombs range from the tiny to the impressively grand. Beautiful, unique Peranakan tiles adorn many of the graves, attracting attention and study from ceramic experts from around the world.
Laying largely dormant since 1973, Bukit Brown Cemetery has become overgrown and forgotten. Now that construction of an eight-lane highway promises to necessitate the exhumation and relocation of thousands of bodies, efforts are underway to plot and record all of the cemetery's residents. This is, however, a difficult task, as documentation is very limited, and new tombs are still being discovered. The Friends of Bukit Brown (aka the "Brownies") are working hard to raise awareness about this precious cultural heritage site.
Roman Fedortsov is a deep-sea fisherman, working on a trawler based near the Barents Sea, according to the Moscow Times, and he has Twitter. As the Russian website Ruposters discovered, that combination of skills has led Fedortsov to post pictures of the very real, terrifying, and often sharp-toothed creatures his boat pulls out of the depths of the ocean.
These creatures live deep in the ocean, where it's normal to have giant eyes and sharp teeth. They're adapted to their environment, just like the blobfish, which under the pressure of all the water it lives under actually looks much more like a normal fish.
That being said, to human eyes, these fish are still monstrous—or, as Gizmodo puts it, "ocean creatures that look like they’re from the most twisted Jim Henson movie ever produced."
In conclusion, all points to the "oceans are terrifying never go there" faction of humanity. Respect the diversity of living things and the magic of evolution, but these are creatures that will give children nightmares. Then there’s the view espoused by Atlas Obscura co-founder Dylan Thuras: “I would love to see the Russian version of Finding Nemo starring photorealistic CGI versions of these, and about how life is also suffering.”
On November 3, 1955, anyone observing the east branch of the Delaware River, about two miles downstream from the New York town of Dunraven, would have been treated to an unusual sight: Katheryn Dickson’s stately 12-room home sailing across the water with the aplomb of a steamship. Dickson’s two-story house was once a showstopper on the main street of Arena, the tiny upstate New York town where she was postmaster for 32 years.
Soon the valley hamlet, nestled in the Catskill mountains, would be under about 200 feet of water. The Dickson home escaped this fate: It was loaded onto a 21-wheel trailer, hauled by two Caterpillar tractors across the river, up the east bank, and transplanted in Dunraven. These are the sorts of improbable things that can happen when you have several years to prepare for a flood.
New York City is famous for its tap water. In July it scored the top prize (again) in a regional tap water taste test sponsored by the EPA. And this water is hard won; it arrives in Manhattan via a massive network of aqueducts, dams and reservoirs. Parts of this system, which comprise one of the world’s largest water supply networks, are more than a century old and were carved into being through feats of engineering astounding for their time. Sometimes, of course, the march of forward progress marches over people’s lives. This is one of those instances.
The city of New York started designing its Catskill water network in 1905; the Catskill Aqueduct System was finished by 1924, and by 1931 the city of New York had won the blessing of the Supreme Court to expand its upstate infrastructure. It was accepted that rural towns who stood in the way of the city’s water supply would be submerged. Pepacton, Union Grove, Shavertown and Arena were the four hamlets that resided in a valley slated to be transformed into the Pepacton Reservoir, the largest ever built by the city.
The lush, rural towns could have been plucked from a Hollywood backlot. Farmers paused their tractors in the road to confer over town business. Fisherman piloted rowboats through their stretch of the Delaware, overhung with trees and spanned by covered bridges. There was Sam’s Place, a formerly run down shack that its proprietor had transformed over three decades into a shop, barber and snack bar encircled by a white picket fence. One longtime Shavertown resident, Amanda Fletcher, was known to locals simply as “Aunt Mandy”. Stan’s Tavern had been serving up beers, Cokes, and food since 1939.
Reservoir construction had been underway for two years when a crowd of townspeople gathered at Shavertown’s general store in 1949. Every day the work inched closer to completion, and so did the time they would have to leave the idyllic village where their families had lived for generations. The city of New York would dole out compensation for their homes and relocation, but this was a small comfort to some, who didn’t even know when moving day would arrive.
“We are pushing construction as fast as the weather and the good Lord will permit us,” Irving Hite, president of the Board of Water Supply told the New York Times. They hoped to finish the project by 1955 and promised not to “take a single acre of land until it is absolutely necessary.”
Meanwhile, the villages lived on borrowed time; farmers hesitated to plant or expand their herds.
“The city has no sentiment,” said Inez Atkins, postmaster and owner of the general store, where bespectacled men, women in ankle-length skirts and little kids gathered among walls crowded with drygoods and farming equipment. Atkins, who the Times described as a “short, alert woman of 62,” said, “This has been my home for thirty-seven years. I have friends and know my community. When they transplant me, it will be difficult. There’s no room for newcomers, especially old folks, in a new community.”
The city had already purchased Jack Bouw’s 600-acre Shavertown farm for $30,000 in 1947. ”When the city first came up,” said Bouw, “I realized that we would have to go. I made what I thought were the best possible arrangements. They were fair and they treated me well. Now, as quitting time gets closer, the thought of leaving my home, the buildings I built and the place I raised my family makes me sick.”
Others at the meeting bitterly declared the circumstances “the pestilence that has come down through the valley.”
As men hacked through the nearby earth and poured concrete to form massive tunnels, residents of the doomed towns were documented by the media as they wound down their daily lives.
“The inhabitants of the little village of Arena are decorating their homes and putting up Christmas lights for the last time,” reported the Oneonta Star in December 1953. That same month the paper recorded that the final New Year’s Eve party of Shavertown would be held in Fletchers Hall. After a night of square dancing, the building would be torn down immediately on January 1st.
Resigned, the towns began holding massive auctions; a moving sale on a grand scale. On a Saturday in April, 1954, a crowd of around 2,000 people poured into Shavertown to snap up items from the Atkin’s General Store, where five years earlier, anxious crowds had pondered their fate for the New York Times. Water officials pitched in, parking over 700 cars. A camera crew from NBC descended to film the event, and women served sandwiches, coffee, cakes and salads as an auctioneer sporting a silk hat and horn-rimmed spectacles awarded goods to the highest bidders.
Four months later, the town of Arena held their own auction in the August heat. At this one, the auctioneer led the crowd of thousands up and down the streets, selling off buildings one by one to be torn down for scrap. Arena’s melancholy auction attracted a boldface gawker in the form of novelist Fannie Hurst, whose life was once of such interest to the public that marriages where husbands and wives lived separately (as the writer and hers did) were once called “Fannie Hurst marriages.”
“I am sorry to see the homes and farms of this lovely old East Branch dismantled,” she told the Oneonta Star. “But I guess we can’t stand in the way of Progress.” Hurst’s attitude echoed the sentiment of the day—the building of the reservoir was met with awe and a sense of inevitability; the loss of the picturesque towns a bittersweet sacrifice to innovation.
The towns fell like dominos; the same month Arena held their auction, the abandoned town of Pepacton boasted a single building. The construction company commissioned to pulverize the hamlets had flattened everything except a 13-room house commandeered for their headquarters. On a Sunday night they moved all of their equipment out, set the building on fire, and watched it burn in celebration of a job well done.
“I wish we had invited hundreds of people,” the company’s vice president told the Oneonta Star. “In order that they might see how terribly fast a home can burn and how very important it is that people leave their homes when they discover them afire.”
There was also the problem of the towns’ non-living residents. In December 1954, the New York Times reported that officials were responsible for digging up and reinterring 1,330 bodies from the four villages. This means that the act of evacuating the four towns involved relocating more dead than living people. (Accounts of the Pepacton Reservoir relocations put the number of displaced townsfolk at just under 1,000.) The dead were rehomed to the Town of Andes, where the Pepacton Cemetery still sits. The city of New York still maintains it, and announced this year that it would spend $150,000 to spruce the place up.
Today the Pepacton Reservoir, which is 15 miles long and can hold 140.2 billion gallons, supplies about 25 percent of New York City’s daily water. The streets where townsfolk once strolled are now home to large brown trout, beloved by the fishermen who frequent the reservoir. Aside from the Pepacton Cemetery, the reservoir itself is the most visible homage to the submerged town. New York was fond of naming reservoirs after the communities they subsumed. The Neversink Reservoir, for instance, occupies the spot where the towns Neversink and Bittersweet once stood. The Cannonsville Reservoir was also home to a town of the same name.
The Board of Water Supply had made good on their estimate; by the end of 1955 the towns had been evacuated and water was slowly filling the finished Pepacton Reservoir. On a rainy day in October, then-mayor of New York City Robert Wagner toured the half-full site with a crowd of twenty officials, gazing down at the ghost town of Arena, which was not yet fully destroyed—although water crept towards its borders. He told a reporter that he was impressed with the “vastness of the city’s water domain” and that the city was getting its money’s worth.
Driving south through the very small town of Shrewsbury, Vermont you come to the very, very small village of Cuttingsville. Here you will catch a glimpse of a mysterious larger-than-life marble man, perpetually walking up the steps of his own family crypt.
The sad-looking fellow with the bushy mustache is clutching a top hat and coat, further weighed down with a large key over his heart and a funereal wreath in his hand. He’s the statuary likeness of a local 19th century tanning magnate named John Porter Bowman.
Despite Bowman’s wealth and success in business, by 1880 he had suffered a string of personal losses, beginning with the death of his infant daughter in 1854. He lost his second daughter in 1879 at the age of only 23, and then his wife the following year. To remember them, he had a lavish mausoleum constructed in Cuttingsville’s Laurel Glen Cemetery, dwarfing the surrounding gravestones and markers.
Bowman commissioned an architect, stoneworkers and a renowned sculptor to create his vision of post-mortem devotion, expending 750 tons of granite, 50 tons of marble, and $75,000 (over a million in today’s dollars). Inside there are sculpted busts of the deceased, ornate stonework around the crypts, and mirrors are positioned to make the room seem larger than it really is.
When the mausoleum was completed in 1881 it became a local tourist attraction, with thousands converging at Laurel Glen to gawk at such deathly extravagance. Bowman even had a guest book placed inside the chamber, hiring an usher and guide to conduct short tours.
With his mini-temple done, Bowman went on to build Laurel Hill, an elaborate summer home right across the road. It was during construction that he had the grieving version of himself added on the tomb steps. Eventually he moved into Laurel Hall permanently, so he could gaze at himself, key in hand, ready to unlock the mausoleum when the time came. In 1891 it did, and Bowman joined the rest of the family “on the couch of dreamless sleep.”
The Smithsonian’s Museum of American History is one of the only places you can see a computer bug preserved for all posterity.
On September 9, 1947, Harvard's Mark II Aiken Relay computer was malfunctioning. After rooting through the massive machine to find the cause of the problem, Admiral Grace Hopper, who worked in the Navy's engineering program at Harvard, found the bug. It was an actual insect.
The incident is recorded in Hopper's logbook alongside the offending moth, taped to the logbook page: "15:45 Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug being found."
Grace Hopper had been a keen mathematician her entire life, but it wasn't until she enlisted in the Navy during WWII that she got a chance to unleash her skills. Originally turned away from the Women's Naval Reserves because at 34 she was considered too old and too small, Hopper persisted and eventually came to work at Harvard. She was one of the top minds in computer science, pioneering early compilers that translated computer source code into English, not to mention the fact that she became the Navy's first female admiral.
The "bug" and the page it's attached to reside at the Smithsonian's Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. Though the moth anecdote is often falsely credited with the creation of the computing terms "bug" and "debug" (these were actually used as early as Edison), it accurately provides a glimpse of the wit and cleverness of Admiral Grace Hopper.
The Ten Bells Pub has stood on the corner of Commercial Street and Fournier in one form or another since the mid 18th century. This dive bar likely would not have survived till today if not for its ties to Jack the Ripper.
Prostitutes and ne'er-do-wells were known to frequent this watering hole in the heart of Spitalfields. Two of Jack the Ripper's victims, Annie Chapman and Mary Kelly, both drank here often. In fact, Mary Kelly was last seen here just an hour before she was murdered.
In the the late 70s, capitalizing on its infamous past, the pub changed its name to Jack The Ripper. It even displayed authentic memorabilia from the case as its decor. The name was changed back to The Ten Bells after protests that violent murders, particularly of women, shouldn't be glorified in such a manner.
The pub now is a popular watering hole, and can get very busy on the weekend. This might be because The Ten Bells is a genuinely good pub, but it just as likely might be because macabre tourists want to follow in the footsteps of the Ripper's victims.
The first issueof National Geographic magazine, published in October 1888, was vastly different to the magazine we know today. It contained no photographs or illustrations. The cover was brown, with just the title and symbol of the National Geographic Society.
The following year, the magazine published a four-color foldout map, the first step towards the all-color charts and diagrams that have since become synonymous with National Geographic. “We’re in the business of using art to explain,” Kaitlin Yarnall, Deputy Creative Director, explains in the introduction to National Geographic Infographics.
Since then, National Geographic has become renowned for the infographics it uses to break down complex information. The new book, published by Taschen, brings together the best infographics from the magazine’s 128-year history.
Elko, a small town of 18,000 in a sparsely-populated stretch of northeastern Nevada, is the most populated city for 130 miles in all directions. Founded in 1868 along the Central Pacific Railroad, Elko became a historical Wild Western town of booming economic growth, prompting the establishment of Elko’s first bar, the Pioneer Saloon. Since then, the Pioneer Hotel has been constructed around the mahogany and cherry wood Brunswick bar, and the old brick building has been converted into one of the most elaborate heritage centers of cowboy life in the entire American West.
Now known as the Western Folklife Center, Elko’s historical hub of American Western culture features two theaters, an exhibition gallery, a gift shop, and, of course, the original Pioneer Saloon. Featuring historical artifacts, Native American art, and cultural memorabilia of the Wild West, the Western Folklife Center contains antique saddles, neon bull designs, and Western artisan crafts. In addition to these handmade accessories, the folklife center also depicts cowboy life through various forms of multimedia, including a photo gallery of cow bones, a slideshow of wild horses, and a short film depicting the connection between cowboys, music, and poetry.
Just as fascinating as its exhibits is the Western Folklife Center's National Cowboy Poetry Gathering celebration, held annually from January 30th to February 4th and open to “cattle people, rural folks, poets, musicians, gear makers, western enthusiasts, and urbanites tired of the teeming city.” For five days every year, buckaroos from across the western United States use art and performance to express their Western cultural heritage through rawhide braiding and horsehair hitching workshops, veterans writing projects, poetry and music slams, and even performances by “Cowboy Celtic,” a band honoring the cowboys that long ago roamed the lands of the Celtic nations.
