Two hundred years ago, sand drift formed a flat, marshy peninsula on the Danish west coast, and it wasn't long before the region's birds discovered this uninhabited sanctuary. The hunters soon followed, along with their settlement of ramshackle cabins built from whatever materials were readily available: driftwood, recycled roofing, even pieces of cigar boxes.
The cabins were very basic, consisting of a single room, no running water or electricity. They were constantly deteriorating and under repair in the harsh western winds and North Sea weather, but they provided a much-needed place of shelter for hunters and fishermen. However conservationists recognised the area's value to the migratory birds like Godwits and Ruffs who used the peninsula to roost, and when part of the peninsula was designated a conservation area in 1928, the cabins and the human activity that came with them were an issue.
The Second World War (ironically) provided some peace and quiet for the birds because the occupying Germans cut off human access to the area. After the war, the hunters came back to reclaim and rebuild again, and the 400-strong community became engaged in another battle. In 1977 a conservation law was passed that demanded the cabins to be removed by 1995. The community mounted their own legal conservation case and presented a claim that the simple cabins were of local, historical and cultural value.
The dispute continued for decades, and still both the birds and the hunters returned year after year. Finally, in 2002, the now 327 cabins were granted conservation status, but with strict rules, including forbidding any new cabins from being built. No electricity mains, running water, satellite dishes, drainage or flagpoles are allowed (though violations have been spotted).
The result is an eerie, quiet feeling on the peninsula. Several houses are unused and unoccupied at any given time. You will not meet more than a handful of people here, most of them busy repairing their huts, largely ignoring visitors.
After the catastrophes of World War II, European cities that had been leveled by bombs began to rebuild. All but one: the German city of Schirwindt.
Today you won’t find this town on any map; there won’t be any road signs leading to it. However, if you wander to the neighboring town of Kudirkos Naumiestis in Lithuania, most every inhabitant will point to a disused bridge over the Šešupė river, on the other side of which is a meadow of large bushes and trees. It's hard to believe that less than century ago this meadow was a thriving city.
Shirwindt was a border city in Prussia-Germany—the state border between Germany and Russia was at the bridge over the Šešupė. Its main business was border trade with Kudirkos Naumiestis. Germans went to Kudirkos Naumiestis to trade geese, horses, and cows for smoked meat. Lithuanians went to Shirwindt for western clothes and shoes. The two towns were also engaged in secret spirit smuggling, as the price of alcohol between the two nations differed wildly.
Until the beginning of World War II about 1,500 people called Schirwindt home. The town had red brick houses and cobbled streets. Just on the outskirts of the city stood the tallest windmill in East Prussia. There were several churches and a railway station. So what happened to this city?
Schirwindt's end came in October of 1944. The first Russian Red Army missiles in Nazi Germany fell exactly on the town, as it was the furthest east Nazi outpost. (The missiles are currently displayed in one of the Saint Petersburg museums.) The city was completely destroyed, and the residents who survived the bombing fled.
After the war, East Prussia was incorporated into Russia as Kaliningrad Oblast. The fields where Schirwindt once stood were cleared, renamed Kutuzovo, and used for army practices. Since then it has been abandoned and no one lives in the region. Today only a German soldiers’ cemetery and the old bridge that connected Schirwindt to Kudirkos Naumiestis remain.
Kudirkos Naumiestis does its best to eulogize its lost sister city. "Schirwindt Path" leads from Kudirkos Naumiestis's main church to the defunct bridge. In 2011 a museum dedicated to Schirwindt opened in Kudirkos Naumiestis, named "Schirwindter Stube" ("The Corner of Schirwindt"). Grain by grain the curators collected everything that was left of the city. Here you can touch bricks from Immanuel church, read original letters sent to and from Shirwindt, and see everyday objects from the life of an extinct city.
Throughout the rural United States, outposts of the Dairy Queen franchise are a common sight. However, the Dairy Queen in Franklin, Pennsylvania, has a very uncommon sight at its location: one of only four surviving Apollo command module boilerplates.
A boilerplate is a mockup of a space capsule design used in simulations. After testing, many boilerplates were be sold off for scrap. It was in a Grove City scrapyard that Kim Rogers, owner of the Dairy Queen in Franklin along Pennsylvania Route 8 and space travel enthusiast, found two boilerplates from the Apollo command module in the early 80s. He bought one and transported the 3-ton piece of spaceflight history up to his franchise location, and mounted it in front of the building.
Years later a former Navy man recognized the boilerplate as the same one he had used for underwater demolition training in preparation for the Apollo missions. It was the same model they rescued from the Apollo 16 mission.
Inside the building are monitors with video telling the story of the boilerplate and how it came to rest at his family's Dairy Queen for over 30 years. That and, of course, ice cream.
The 1986 edition of the International Collection of Interior Design, a trade magazine for those in the business, issued a bold statement regarding bathrooms:
“The era of the utilitarian, puritanical bathroom is over and now it is returning to center stage as the place for luxurious, sophisticated relaxation in the home.”
The 1986 bathroom would bring back the grand indulgences of the Romans, who surrounded themselves with plush beauty during their ablutions. This elevation of the master bathroom from the “necessary room” as it was euphemistically called, to its reign as the cornerstone of the master suite, was such a rapid and recent development, that it is easy to take it for granted.
Bathrooms haven’t changed much since indoor plumbing became a standard feature in newly built homes at the turn of the 20th century. This, coupled with changing societal expectations regarding the frequency of bathing and new technology such as the flush toilet, swiftly ushered in the era of the modern bathroom.
Indoor plumbing coincided with the discovery of germ theory—the idea that disease is spread by germs. More importantly, germ theory linked cleanliness to the prevention of illness. The intersection of science, technology, and societal pressures for cleanliness ultimately led to the development of the “hygienic” bathroom—one clad in tile and other hard surfaces, absent of carpet, heavy drapery, or other porous soft goods thought to be good places for germs to fester. The easier a bathroom was to clean, the more proper, safe, and sanitary it (and the people who used it) was.
The hygienic prototype, aided by the new marvels of mass production, swiftly became and remained the standard. The typical bathroom is a five-foot-by-eight-foot square room with a bathtub, a toilet, and a pedestal sink. The pedestal sink may be swapped out with a vanity sink, the bathtub with a tub/shower combo or a shower stall, but the basic composition of three porcelain fixtures in a small room has remained relatively unchanged throughout the decades.
The consistent design schema of bathrooms is linked to a number of factors. Ease of cleaning was the main appeal in bathroom design—hence the popularity of tile walls and floors, as well as porcelain fixtures. The vanity sink, for example, did not become popular until the 1950s, when new materials such as formica and MDF made them less expensive as well as easier to clean and maintain.
In addition, Americans have always had a difficult time talking about intimate matters, including bathroom activities. The impropriety of such dirty acts as passing bowel movements made the bathroom a place that remained out of sight and out of mind, clinical in its aesthetic and unchanged since its inception. A recent article for The Atlantic pointed out that discussing or depicting the bathroom (specifically the toilet) on television was considered obscene until as late as the 1970s.
House size, however, was the main concern. At the turn of the 20th century, the vast majority of Americans lived in cities, and dwelled in townhouses, apartments or tenements. With the availability of mass-produced housing and inventions such as the streetcar, more affluent families expanded into the first generation of suburbs, located within the outer limits of the city.
The first generation of these houses, built from the 1890s to the early 1920s, took after farmhouses and Queen-Anne-style architecture, were the largest of the kit-houses, boasting 3 or more bedrooms as well as a parlor for entertaining. Still, despite their size, very few had more than one bathroom, as bathrooms were still rather expensive to build in the days before the fixtures could be cheaply mass-produced.
The majority of the kit houses from the '20s and '30s (which made up most of the U.S.’s suburban stock) were bungalows—small, one-story houses boasting two or three bedrooms and a single bath.
The bathroom was a utilitarian place, and its aesthetics came secondary to its functionality. There was no need for a large bathroom or multiple bathrooms in early suburban life, as space was scarce and fixtures were expensive. The Great Depression and World War II stalled residential construction, creating a huge need for housing in the 1940s. Coupled with the invention and proliferation of cars and housing incentives provided for veterans through the GI Bill, modern tract suburbia was born.
Despite the incentives to buy, the GI Bill only covered housing which conformed to the guidelines set by the Federal Housing Authority’s mandates: a price range of US$8,000 to US$10,000 and a size range of 800 to 1,000 square feet. Thus, houses built in 1950 were even smaller than those built in the previous 30 years, boasting a mere two or three bedrooms, a kitchenette, and one bathroom. These houses also boasted an open floor-plan in order to make them feel much less cramped than they actually were. Families sacrificed privacy for comfort.
However, it was during the 1950s that new and exciting technologies came on the market for the bathroom: hairdryers, built-in ventilation fans, warming units, and a plethora of new catchy products for haircare and makeup.
All of these new gadgets required space, and Americans wanted bigger and more spacious houses, especially since the two-car attached garage was becoming more and more common and desired. A garage was a huge chunk of square-footage, and house size grew accordingly.
The '60s and '70s saw further expansion out of cities into rural areas, and house size increased due to the inexpensiveness of rural land.
More square-footage meant more luxury. For example, standard queen- and king-sized beds didn’t even exist until the end of the '50s. In response, the bathroom, for the first time in decades, had begun to change. The biggest change was the dawn of the commonplace master bath. House size was only one factor that facilitated this new luxurious feature.
Newly constructed neighborhoods featured infrastructure for more efficient plumbing and water management, leading to an increase in bathrooms in the home. Gone were the days when flushing the toilet meant a scalding surprise. More space meant that unlike their FHA-mandated predecessors, new houses boasted less-open floor-plans, offering the marital couple privacy. In addition, the sexual revolution of the '60s led to more open-mindedness about private matters, as well as a penchant for plush new features like jacuzzis and garden tubs.
These factors stuck with the American public, and the master bathroom took off, becoming standard on all new homes by 1980. However, these bathrooms were still rather modest, like the one above.
The growth of houses, while generally on the increase since 1960, stalled in the '70s due to an energy crisis. When the '80s rolled around and energy became cheap again, there was an explosion in homebuilding, and the homes kept getting bigger and bigger. The introduction of new construction materials (e.g. vinyl siding) and relaxed mortgage lending practices in the '80s and '90s meant it was easier to get a bigger house for less money. The outsourcing of labor during the Reagan and Clinton eras made consumer goods less expensive, and Americans consumed new goods—including luxury goods now available at a lower price point—like never before. Thus, the master bath exploded.
Societal changes have played a role in the growth of the master as well: women entering the mainstream workforce and the rise of the working couple meant families earned more, had more stuff, and needed more space. The puritan notions of the bathroom as a dirty place no one talked about were over—now was the time for sunken tubs and flaunted luxury.
The story of the master bathroom was long in the making. A space we now deem a necessity is only around 36 years old. It’s one of many examples of how a cocktail of social, technological, and economic influences combine to create new standards of living, and change the face of not only architecture, but how we live.
In northern England, wedged between the counties of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, there is a limestone gorge brimming with cliffs and riddled with caves. Just outside the village of Creswell, the caverns contain fossils of ancient beasts, tools of early humans, and the northernmost ice age cave art in all of Europe.
The site is known as Creswell Crags, and it offers a unique glimpse into cave use during the Upper Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze, and Roman ages. There are four main cavities to explore (one is called Robin Hood’s Cave–it is close to Nottingham after all), as well as several shallow crevices and craggy bluffs.
The entire gorge, while open to the public, is protected as a “Site of Special Scientific Interest” (it’s also on the short list for consideration as a World Heritage Site), with a Visitors Centre and small museum of fossils, bones and artifacts representing the different eras of use. Inside the caves themselves there is evidence of ice age engravings, otherwise unknown to have been created so far north. Church Hole Cave alone has more than 80 examples from the period, around 13,000–15,000 years ago.
While the caves at Creswell were used as seasonal shelter for nomadic ice age humans, there is evidence of both earlier and much later use. From 60,000 year old Neanderthals to late-medieval Britons, the evidence of a vast survey of humankind has been collected here, with more presumed to be buried under layers and layers of flowstone (sheets of dissolved minerals that form into a hardened wall coating).
Added to the pre-historic associations there is even evidence of more recent use, including lead mining, and a pool filled with hundreds of metal pins believed to be Victorian, and left behind as tokens for good luck.
In a small city in western New York State, only 10 miles or so from Niagara Falls, there was a hotbed of manufacturing: Wurlitzer organs, Richardson Boats, Buffalo Bolts, International Paper, Tonawanda Iron & Steel, and 150 lumber mills kept the place humming from the 19th and well into the 20th century.
Still, with all this bustle, business and building going on, the official sign that greets you coming into town says “Welcome to North Tonawanda: The Home of the Carousel.”
From 1883 to 1955, the Herschell Company made roller coasters, carnival rides, narrow-gauge trains, and most famously, carousels. The jumble of buildings on Thompson Street, where Herschell designed, carved and assembled thousands of beautifully made merry-go-rounds, is a perfectly preserved factory and now museum, dedicated to the rides and amusements of a dreamy, sepia-toned childhood.
The factory complex was built between 1910 and 1915, and turned out state-of-the-art rides until 1955 when the company moved to Buffalo. Open to the public as a museum since 1983, in addition to exhibits and vintage displays there are two wooden carousels with band organs still in service. There is also a “Kiddieland,” where helpful volunteers from the younger crowd are enlisted to help test out vintage rides that have been recently restored.
The old factory is listed on both the New York and National Registers of Historic Places, honoring what is one of the only surviving examples of a manufacturing plant from the glory days of wooden carousels. Because once you’ve ridden the real thing, those clangy metal ones just don’t measure up.
In the 1800s, people were just as crazed about cats as we are today. But instead of memes, Instagram posts, and viral videos, the Victorians had satirical comics and chronicles.
The Book of Cats, he explains, is not “strictly zoological.” Rather, Ross says the origins of the cat-call, how people believed cats could predict the weather, and why some fainted at the sight of cats, among the collection of whimsical 1800s feline facts.
During the late 1800s, cats did not have the best reputation. While there were some like Ross who appreciated the furry creatures, many Victorians saw them as nuisances and “cruel” companions. When he excitedly told his friends of his plan to write a book about cats, they mocked his idea and argued that dogs, horses, pigs, even donkeys were better suited for a book. In his research, Ross found that many of the authors of cat books were prejudiced against the animal, and “knew very little about the subject.”
“Need I tell the reader who has thought it worth his while to learn anything of the Cat’s nature,” he writes, “that there are countless instances on record where Cats have shown the most devoted and enduring attachment to those who have kindly treated them.”
The Book of Cats addresses the wild, popular fears regarding cats—rumors flying that their scratches were venomous and that their breath sucked the life out of infants. In comparison to the smooth cut left from a knife, the thin scratch from a cat’s sharpened nail often festered, leading people to believe their claws were venomous, Ross explains. In addition to avoiding their claws, some would lose their wits at the mere sight of a cat. Conrad Gesner, a 16th-century botanist, documented men losing their strength, perspiring, and fainting when they saw a cat. A few have reportedly fainted after seeing a picture of a cat.
One of the most ridiculous accounts, according to Ross, were of cats accused of killing babies by stealing their breath. In 1791, the Annual Register published a story of an 18-month-old infant who died “in consequence of a Cat sucking its breath, thereby occasioning a strangulation.”
There were thousands of tales and numerous articles of the same vain, depicting cats as villainous, deathly creatures. However, Ross tries to clear up these rumors, quoting a friend and surgeon who stated that the anatomical formation of a cat’s mouth makes it impossible for it to suck a child’s breath. The surgeon proposed that if a cat were truly responsible, perhaps it’s feasible for it to lie over an infant’s mouth for the warm exhalations.
Beyond erratic fears, others believed cats had supernatural powers and psychic abilities. The Chinese reportedly used to peer into cats’ eyes to determine the time, while the playfulness of cats is said to indicate an approaching storm, Ross writes.
“I have noticed this often myself, and have seen them rush about in a half wild state just before windy weather.” People postulated that cats felt an irritation under the skin when it was about to rain, showing discomfort and unease.
He also details a method to feel shocks from a black cat, which were said to be highly charged with electricity. To produce the effect, he instructs the reader to place one hand on a black cat’s throat, while running the other down its back. One should then be able to feel the electric shocks on the hand on the cat’s throat.
Feline powers were also thought to help cure illnesses. Those who suffer from rheumatism often felt an improvement in their condition in the presence of a cat. There was a saying that collecting three drops of blood taken from under a cat’s tail, mixing it with water, and drinking it would cure epilepsy. Others thought the brain of a cat could cast someone under a love spell if taken in small doses.
The term “cat” was an integral part of 1800s language, with Victorians often referring to the animal in slang and proverbs. For example, “cat o’ nine tails” was the colloquial name for a kind of whip that branched into nine knotted cords. Used as a form of military punishment on soldiers and sailors, the whip produced lashes on the back that looked like claw marks. Salt miners used to call common granulated salt “cat-salt,” while the catkin flower got its name from the Dutch who thought the hanging rope shape was similar to a kitten’s tail. Not all cats are afraid of water—there was even a type of Norwegian ship called a cat, Ross says.
When someone was caught playing a trick, they may plea “cry you mercy, killed my cat!” to try and escape punishment. The French also had proverbs about cats, such as “elle est friande comme une chatte,” which means “she’s as dainty as a cat.”
Ross went to great lengths to clear up the cat’s reputation. Little is known about how many copies circulated of The Book of Cats or how receptive people of the 1800s were to Ross’s argument. While many of these superstitions and legends seem outlandish today, it reflects Victorians' fascination with one of our most beloved domestic animals—in addition to their mystery.
The Brough of Birsay is a small island just off the Orkney main island, accessible only during low tide.
Upon walking the concrete path over to the island, the first thing you encounter are viking ruins from the 8th or 9th century. These ruins are quite extensive and are in great shape. There are no barriers and you are on your own to respect and admire the ruins.
On the far side of the island are high cliffs where you can watch the waves crash into the rocks below. There are several places where you can stand with your feet spanning 100-foot-deep chasms. Beware of the time, however. You can only cross a few hours before and after low tide. If you don't pay attention to the time, you may find yourself stranded.
When silent film actors Clara Bow (aka “The It Girl”) and Rex Bell got married in 1931, they desperately needed an escape from the hustle and bustle of Hollywood. Searchlight, Nevada yielded the perfect landscape, an uninhabited desert far away from the glitz and glamour, where the couple could, at long last, live in complete solitude.
Rex and Clara’s escape was a Spanish Colonial style ranch complete with a swimming pool, tennis courts, and a cactus garden on a 400,000 acre plot of arid land, located just a short ride away from the Nipton stop of the Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad. The ranch was named the “Walking Box Ranch” in reference to the Hollywood box cameras - nicknamed “walking box cameras” - that followed the Bells throughout their star-studded acting careers. In fact, the image of a box camera mounted on a tripod remains the ranch’s logo to this day.
Over the years, the Walking Box Ranch grew to be one of the most well-known celebrity homes in all of Nevada. During the 1930s and 40s, Rex and Clara regularly invited many of their Hollywood friends for a relaxing get-together at the ranch, including Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, and Errol Flynn. Not only was the ranch a movie star getaway, but it also operated as a functioning cattle ranch until the 1980s. The old barn, livestock corrals, and water troughs remain standing at the ranch today.
As of now, long after the death of Rex and Clara, the Walking Box Ranch remains in its original form and is now listed under the National Register of Historic Places. Now run by the Bureau of Land Management and offering guided tours, everyone is invited to visit the formerly secluded getaway.
This old house, built into a sandstone cliffs of the protected area Kokořínsko, is one of many cliff dwellings in the area. Some windows of building are holes in the rock, chimney is in a rock crevice, and the roof looks like swamped by a big boulder.
The rock dwelling in Lhotka is one of many in the area, and one of the oldest inhabited. If you're visiting the dwelling, you can also check out the Regional Museum in Melnik nearby.
In 2009, after the first inauguration of President Barack Obama, which was attended by a record 1.8 million people, the ground of the National Mall was wrecked. As those hordes had moved over the lawn, they ground the crown of the grass plants, the part where new growth originates, into the frozen soil. After the inauguration, the Mall was more hard-packed drag-race strip of dirt than park.
That won’t happen—can’t happen—this inauguration. The National Park Service has just invested $40 million in refurbishing the long expanse of the Mall with carefully designed turf. The most recently reconstructed section has been closed for the past few months, as the grass settles in and puts down deeper roots. January 20 will be the first time the public is allowed in, and even the smaller crowd of this inauguration, expected to be around 800,000 people, is a threat.
The Park Service now has a challenge—to keep the Mall from becoming a dust bowl or, since a warm spell is thawing the ground, a mud bowl. Its staff is mobilizing to protect its new turf.
In Pierre L’Enfant’s 1791 plan for Washington, the Mall was designated a grand avenue with a canal running down one side. In the early decades of the city’s expansion, that vision never quite became real, and during the 1800s, the Mall had developed into a different sort of public space, dotted with gardens, greenhouses, a market, and a train station.
In 1901, a congressional commission, determined to redesign the park, swept all that away. The McMillan Commission conceived of a new vision for the Mall, one they said reflect L’Enfant’s original plans. They wanted a giant lawn.
Despite their ubiquity today, lawns were once the height of luxury. The most desirable lawn aesthetic, an expanse of neat, uniform green blades, requires that the lawn be mown. In the era before lawn mowers, that had to be done either by grazing animals (declassé) or by hand-cutting (very chic). Keeping a large lawn, like the Tapis Vert at Versailles, was extremely expensive; aristocrats all over Europe made the investment.
When the McMillan Commission made its recommendation, its members had in mind those palatial lawns of European royalty. By the early 1900s, though, grass was a more democratic luxury. Frederick Law Olmsted had designed one of the first suburban developments in the U.S. with a tiny lawn for each house, and the lawn mower, first invented in the 1830s, was becoming a consumer product, complete with its own engine.
When the Mall’s green expanse was first planted more than a century ago, though, the space was little used, compared to today. Grass isn’t normally a natural resource that people think about protecting, but most lawns aren’t subject to this level of wear.
“Grass is something that’s taken for granted,” says Michael Stachowicz, the Mall’s turf specialist. “People can grow it in their yard and it’s fine. But I don’t have 30,000 people a day going over my lawn.”
Since the Mall’s last renovation, around 1976, there’s been a major revolution in grass cultivation and technology, spurred by the late 20th-century boom in golf course construction. We know much more about growing grass now—the best mix of plants, the ideal soil conditions, the correct irrigation. Those best practices have been applied to the Mall, where the grass now grows in an engineered, very sandy, and aerated soil. “We’re building 18 acres' worth of turf like we used to built 5,000 square foot golf greens,” says Stachowicz.
The technology to protect turf is a relatively recent invention, too. For the inauguration, contractors are bringing in special panels, 16 square feet each, to cover up the grass. To the human eye, they look white, but they’re actually translucent, which allows light to reach the grass and keep it healthy. The bottoms of the panels are honeycombed with small, square cells that protect the grass crowns from being crushed and act like mini greenhouses.
Right now, 800,000 square feet of Mall is being covered with approximately 50,000 of these panels, each 16 feet square—so many that they had to be borrowed from sports stadiums across the country. (“Basically we’re looking at nine baseball stadiums worth of flooring,” says Stachowicz.) When they’re lifted back up, the Mall might actually be greener, after the sad winter grass spends a few days insulated from the elements.
The grass isn’t the only element of the Mall that needs protecting from the crowds at inauguration. Trees are boxed off, so that people don’t trample the soil around them or damage the trees themselves. Places like the steps of the Lincoln Memorial are also covered with special flooring to protect the pavers.
Even after the crowds have left, the Park Service staff needs to keep vigilant as the infrastructure of inaugurations is removed. “Leaving is a lot more chaotic than set-up,” says Stachowicz, and they have to make sure that trucks don’t run over lampposts or post-and-chain fences—“That happens!”
The Park Service has spent basically the entire Obama administration making the Mall look nice again. The job now is to make sure it doesn't get ruined on Trump's first day.
Sanj Maisuria’s house in Edmonton, Canada, had a secret hidden in its walls since 1957—a report card for one Maureen Kiernan, who, it’s easy to imagine, tried to hide her bad grades by slipping the card into a crack.
Maisuria’s contractors found the report card while renovating the house, reports the Edmonton Journal. It’s not clear how the card made its way into the walls, but the grades was not good. “Maureen’s marks are dangerously low!” the teacher wrote.
Her written language and spelling, her math skills, and social studies were all poor. She did slightly better in science, where she was marked “fair, below average.” In English Literature, Health and Personal Development, and Phys Ed, she got a B, average.
The school also graded “Growth in Citizenship.” Maureen’s self-respect was a 2 (good), as was her cooperation and dependability. But her creativeness and judgment were both poor, according to the teacher. The only perfect mark she got was in courtesy.
When Maisuria first saw the card, he imagined finding its owner. He was able to find her son, but the girl with the bad marks had died, at 69, in 2012. She was, writes Juris Graney for the Journal, “co-operative, dependable, a person who showed consideration for the rights and feelings of others, a person with self-control and poise”—proof that math grades aren’t the most important thing in life.
Sitting in the Jardins District of São Paulo, Brazil, is a towering 80-foot ship that would fit better in an ocean than a residential neighborhood. This giant inverted arch, complete with porthole-shaped windows, is the peculiar Hotel Unique, which welcomes guests aboard to a boat-shaped modernist fantasy.
Known locally as “The Watermelon,” the strange half-moon crescent shape of Hotel Unique is one of the lodging's main draws, and it greatly influences the shape of its rooms. The hotel’s designer, Roy Otake, takes full advantage of the oddly slanted walls by artistically placing TV sets on the slant and extending tables to reach the edge of the curvature, despite the uneven ground beneath them.
Just as fascinating as the rooms’ angled slants is the rooftop terrace, which features a gourmet restaurant and a panoramic view of South America’s largest city. Atop the terrace is a blood red outdoor pool, complete with underwater music. In the lobby, one can find a large blue circular cushion and a 15-tier stack of liquor bottles. On both the inside and out, Hotel Unique seems to live up to its name.
For months, hunters in the Canadian territory of Nunavut have had to deal with a mysterious foe—a pinging sound coming from deep beneath the Arctic Ocean. The noise, which can be heard through the hulls of boats, may be scaring away the sea mammals the hunters rely on for food, the CBC reported in November.
The noise is most prevalent in a narrow channel called Fury and Hecla Strait. Normally teeming with seals and bowhead whales, it has been strangely empty this past year, area representatives told the outlet.
Although many theories have been raised—sonar surveys, construction, a Greenpeace conspiracy to keep seals out of hunting grounds—none have been borne out. A military plane, sent to investigate in early November, turned up only "two pods of whales and six walruses," and zero unusual sounds.
But Canada isn't giving up. According to the CBC, the Canadian Forces will send two acoustic specialists north to the nearby town of Igloolik, where, aided by their own ranger patrol, they will talk to locals to learn more about the tricky sound.
What they do after that remains to be seen. Best of luck, acousticians, and beware Cthulthu.
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.
For some, 43 wax likenesses of U.S. presidents in a maze of dimly lit rooms is a ready-made nightmare. For others, they’re a solid business investment.
When Gettysburg’s Hall of Presidents and First Ladies Museum announced it would be closing back in November, they also scheduled an auction of their life-like commander-in-chiefs. The bidding finally kicked off shortly after 10 a.m. on a dreary recent Saturday morning. Wax President George Washington quickly sold for $5,100. Next, John Adams went for $1,600. Then Jefferson at $2,400, and so on, until every president—and first lady—from Washington to Obama (who fetched $2,000) had found a new home.
“We really did not expect them to go that high,” says Carol Metzler, vice president of Gettysburg Heritage Enterprises, the company that owned the museum. “But it was a very pleasant surprise.”
The museum itself opened in 1957 as a kitschy roadside attraction situated between Gettysburg National Military Park and the main part of town. According to the Washington Post, a couple hundred thousand people visited annually during the first few decades of the museum’s existence. But in recent years, attendance dropped precipitously, forcing owner Max Felty’s hand (which isn’t made out of wax). He told the The New York Times that even 2016’s intense presidential election didn’t seem to be enough to push people through the doors.
Still, there’s something about a life-size wax president that holds one’s attention. “You can see pictures of presidents on the internet, but it’s not the same as this,” says Carol Hunter, while her two little girls were busy peering up in a mixture of awe and confusion at Wax President George H.W. Bush. Twelve-year-old Derrick Lang, roaming the museum with his dad about an hour before the auction, says he often passed by this building but had never been inside. He wanted to stop by before all of the presidents were gone, plus he was hoping to bid on President Eisenhower. Unfortunately, even if Lang had saved every last penny of his allowance, it’s unlikely he could have afforded the general-turned-president. Wax Eisenhower went for $2,600.
Several presidential doppelgängers went off to museums or historical sites, but a large percentage sold to private collectors. Scot Fisher of Villanova, Pennsylvania, bought not only Washington, but also Abraham Lincoln (who went for the day’s high of $8,500) and Ulysses S. Grant. Overall, Fisher spent nearly $20,000 on wax presidents. His reasoning was fairly straightforward. “I’m just a history buff...and (these wax figures) are a piece of Americana.” When asked if he plans to display them in his dining room or kitchen, Fisher chuckled. “We’ll figure it out,” he says. Next to him, his wife’s smile got bigger.
Nicole Murphy won the auction for William Henry Harrison ($3,200), a man who was president for only 31 days. But she was quick to point out the ninth president was not for her. She’d flown in from Los Angeles to act as a “middleman” for a buyer she says she’s not at liberty to disclose. Why Harrison? “(He’s) unexpected, I suppose,” says Murphy of her mystery client. “Eccentric people have eccentric interests.”
In general, the wax first ladies sold for far lower prices. Perhaps this was because, unlike their life-size male counterparts, they’d been constructed at two-thirds the size of a normal human, making them all about 3 feet 10 inches tall. While no one remembers for sure why the first ladies are smaller, the consensus is that it was probably a cost-cutting measure. The miniature figures are clothed in replica gowns measured and sketched from those housed at the Smithsonian. Mary Todd Lincoln ended up the highest-priced first lady at $900, while Hillary Clinton went for $675. Karina Montgomery, a junior at Slippery Rock University minoring in history, was able to purchase Lucy Ware Webb Hayes for the reasonable sum of $325. Montgomery says she plans on proudly displaying Mrs. Hayes in her college apartment.
One more obvious buyer at the auction was Tom Ryan, president and CEO of Lancasterhistory.org, the organization that operates the onetime home of 15th President James Buchanan. Prior to the sale, Ryan hoped that President Buchanan’s well-known troubles as president would help keep the cost down. “If the price conforms to the reputation that most historians hold of him,” says Ryan, “he should be rather inexpensive.” Several hours later, he bought Buchanan for $4,000.
The auction concluded a little after 4 p.m., by which time the winning bidders were already busy removing wax figures from their museum pedestals, where many had stood for almost 60 years. It was a bittersweet day for those who saw the Hall of Presidents and First Ladies Museum as part of the fabric of Gettysburg, the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War. But every single glass-eyed icon found a new home, even James Monroe (who sold for the day’s low of $1,000). Says Metzler, “(They’re) obviously a conversation piece... now people at home can have cocktails with Washington or Lincoln.”
Across from the beautiful and historical Grant County Court House in Silver City New Mexico is an amazing wall around the yard and driveway of a private home constructed entirely of wine and other bottles. The thousands of bottles are held together by stucco. The wall is still under construction but in places is already head-high. At sunrise, the bottles create a series of interesting colors on the surrounding sidewalk and street.
There is a strong tradition of negative place names in Australia: Witness such places as "Useless Loop," "Suicide Bay" and the four different hills designated as "Mount Hopeless." There are also a total of 17 places which apparently didn't live up to expectations and were given names that include variations of the word "Disappointed." One of them is Disappointment Rock in Western Australia.
No one seems to know who suffered the disappointment at this particular place. Given the location, they may have been disappointed by the lack of gold, or the lack of water.
Nowadays, providing you bring your own water, you can take an interesting two-kilometer walk around and over the scorned rock. You will see Aboriginal water holes (gnamma), one of the only higher order tuberous plants in Australia (Calothamnus tuberosus), the biggest A-tent rock formation in Australia (formed when compression breaks a slab of rock, forcing it upwards into an A-shape), and many, many lizards. There are 17 signposts along the walk explaining the geology, botany and history of the area. If you visit during springtime (September to October) you will also see an amazing display of wildflowers.
This blocky monolith occupying an entire city square on Washington, D.C.'s Capitol Hill is the Rayburn building, built in the 1960s as new office space for the House of Representatives. It’s design frequently evokes soliloquies on “monstrous,” “soul deadening,” and “fascist” architecture.
The layout of the Rayburn building resembles a corrupted letter “H,” with tentacle stubs jutting outward off the center and inward on the ends.
The “H” shape has two unintended impacts on the building. First: its windowless hallways are impossible to navigate. To get from one corner to the opposite you need to make a right, a left, another right and another left. Second, it occupies the maximum amount of real estate with the minimum amount of usable space. Less than 20 percent of the Rayburn’s floorspace is offices. The rest is taken up by corridors, garages, cafeterias, elevators, and so on.
Rayburn has a five-acre footprint, and looming four stories over the Hill it is larger than the nearby Capitol building. The height is even more pronounced at the southwestern corner of the building, where a drop in elevation exposes the subbasement level and gives the appearance of a six-story building.
The entire facade is clad in seven million pounds of blank white marble. It can be difficult to appreciate the overbearing scale in photographs, but standing at its base it is impossible to ignore how Rayburn dwarfs its human inhabitants and much more restrained neighboring offices.
The sparse decorations come across as random, bizarre, and a little amusing. One one side of the building you can find an unidentified topless Art Deco statue with an enormous sword; another is adorned by horses with drinking horns rising out of their hindquarters. Don’t be embarrassed if you miss the symbolic meaning of these statues; there is none.
Architectural quirks abound on the inside of the Rayburn building. When it opened, the Washington Post called out the numerous “stairways that lead nowhere” and baffling designs that result in “hot and cold air blowing into offices at the same time.” The building also used to have an underground swimming pool and Capitol Police shooting range (recently abandoned because of bounce-back bullets.)
The building was designed by a congressional commission headed by powerful Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, and it was built under the guidance of George Stewart. Stewart was a former congressman, and college dropout, lacking any formal training in architecture.
In the early 1980s, Gino Francesconi was working as a backstage artist attendant at Carnegie Hall when he found something quite remarkable. For many years, after a concert, instead of putting programs in the trash and dragging it down five flights of stairs, porters dumped programs down air vents that were at the time located between every tenth seat. This heap of filthy programs became collection No. 1 of the archives of one of the world’s most prestigious concert venues.
After discovering the hidden hoard of concert programs in the air vents, Francesconi and his team set about collecting photographs, autographed posters, musical manuscripts, and videos telling the history of the building and the events that made it famous.
Built in the 19th century, Carnegie Hall occupies the city block of 7th Avenue between 56th and 57th streets in Manhattan. Starting with Tchaikovsky in 1891, it has hosted virtually every important artist, composer and performer since then, from Ella Fitzgerald to Judy Garland to Leonard Bernstein. For many years it was home to the New York Philharmonic. Today it remains one of the most prestigious and world famous venues, and has hosted more than 50,000 events. Until 1986 however, there had been little effort to preserve Carnegie Hall’s history.
Carnegie Hall is full of secrets. Walking around behind the scenes, the Hall is pleasingly filled with the bustle of preparation for the next event. Musicians and ushers in plush red jackets throng the passageways backstage, to the sounds of clarinets and trombones warming up. It is on one of these warren-like floors that the full archives can be found, consisting of more than 300,000 artifacts. (A rotating selection of highlights of the collection are also on display in the Rose Museum inside the venue.)
One shelf of the archive has rows of boxes marked “batons.” Inside sits the concert sticks used at Carnegie Hall by the world’s greatest conductors, among them Leonard Bernstein, Zubin Mehta and Arturo Toscanini. Another shelf is marked “programs,” going all the way back to the first night with Tchaikovsky.
Leafing through the ledgers is to look through the day-to-day history of Carnegie Hall. The same care was given to Stan Getz (Main Hall, 8/3/64, $875) as to the Macy’s Spring Bridal Fashion Show (Main Hall 12/2/63, also $875). On January 22nd, 1964, you can see the venue booked “The Beetles (sic) presented by Walter Hyman” for two shows in the Main Hall for February 12th, for $1,750.
According to Francesconi, the most valuable single item in the archive is a page from one of Beethoven’s sketch books, part of the score for the Wellington Symphony. It came to Carnegie Hall by a donation form doctor who had been treating a one-time executive director of the hall. Next to it is a meticulously neat excerpt of a score, part of “A New World A Comin’," written out by Duke Ellington in his own hand.
Francesconi’s favorite item is neither the most commercially valuable nor the most famous. It's a small autograph book that had been kept backstage by Louis Salter, the former house manager of Carnegie Hall. Salter began working there in 1891 as a lighting engineer in the rafters and started the book in 1916, not letting any performer leave until they’d autographed it. Looking through the delicate pages is a window into 20th century history, the great names of the past of who trod the stages of Carnegie Hall. Today the book lives in the hall, perfectly preserved, digitized, and able to be explored by all.
The meticulously recreated Trading Room is one of the few extant remains of the historic Chicago Stock Exchange building. Designed in the 1890s by famed architects Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler, the space was almost lost to the wrecking ball in a misguided 1970s urban redevelopment scheme.
The Trading Room is a double-story, 100 by 75-foot institution of Midwestern finance. The ornate hall was once the scene of commodity deals that set the price of vegetables and meat across the country. Its decorative flourishes include beautiful organic wall stenciling (a now-forgotten craft that once defined Chicago design), and intricate stained glass skylights.
It’s a quiet and contemplative space today, but when it was in operation the Trading Room was the scene of frenzied activity. A Chicago Tribune reporter in 1960 described how “the shouts of the white coated, gray coated, and tan coated men” imparted a “sense excitement and tension even tho [sic] you don’t understand precisely what they are doing.”
By the 1970s the old Stock Exchange building had fallen into disrepair and was deemed “economically unviable” by its owners. According to Chicago historian Richard Cahan, the preservation and relocation of the Trading Room was “the price paid for the demolition permit.”
Photographer Richard Nickel and architect John Vinci were instrumental in the salvage work. Cahan records the challenge they faced when work began on November 8, 1971:
“The ceiling was dirty and peeling. Many of the stenciled canvases had fallen off or been ripped off for souvenirs. Dirt from decades of neglect had piled up so high that mice or rats had carved paths through it. It took a great leap of the imagination to see the beauty here. Even the gilded capitals looked like cheap plaster. But Vinci and Nickel knew the true beauty of this huge and foreboding place. ‘I think of it sort of like a holy room,” said Nickel after the work had began. ‘The more you are in here the more you are in awe of it.”
Over the course of three months they documented the room and then unscrewed, pried and sawed off every bit they could carry. The entire thing was rebuilt inside the Art Institute’s new wing in 1976. Nickel was tragically killed in 1972 accident inside the old Stock Exchange and never lived to see the completed Trading Room.
