If you ever happen to find yourself running late for a Broadway show, but don't know the address of the theatre, and for some reason can't look it up on your phone, there's no need to panic. Just walk to the middle of Times Square, to Duffy Square. There, between McDonalds and American Eagle, just north of the statue of George M. Cohan on 46th Street, you can find your theatre on the giant map embedded into the traffic island.
The Spotlight on Broadway Map is 28 feet long and plots the locations of the 40 Broadway theaters that were in operation at the time the map was created in 2013. The map is made of gray granite and stainless steel (and one hopes it is alterable, not only because Broadway theaters have their names changed every so often, but because a 41st theater, the Hudson Theatre, is set to officially open in the winter of 2017).
The blocky, stylized map is part of the larger Spotlight on Broadway project, which includes an interactive website with videos that tell stories about the theaters. The map was designed by Doyle Partners and Local Projects, partnering with a Norwegian architectural firm called SnØhetta, and was also part of a larger effort to rebuild public areas in the Times Square area.
Because Broadway theaters tend to be named after theatrical luminaries, the map also serves as a beautiful memorial to some of the greatest talents ever to work on Broadway, including composer Richard Rodgers, composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim, playwright August Wilson, actress and philanthropist Vivian Beaumont, and caricaturist Al Hirschfeld.
For people who love to attend Broadway shows, the map not only tells where the theaters are, but gives a great impression of the shape of the Broadway theatre district, which may seem huge and sprawling from ground level but is actually quite densely packed. Most of the theaters are between Broadway and 8th Avenue and 40th and 54th Streets, with some very noticeable outliers, like the Hirschfeld east of 8th and the Beaumont way up on 65th Street in Lincoln Center.
In the late 1800s, London was swept up in the new craze of visual, satirical journalism. When Judy magazine, a twopenny serio-comic, debuted a red-nosed, lanky schemer named Ally Sloper who represented the poor working class of 19th-century England, it was one of the first recurring characters in comic history.
But credit for that character has long gone to the wrong person. Two people were responsible for Ally Sloper—and one of the creators has only recently been rediscovered by academics and comic fans.
Wearing a shabby stovepipe hat and carrying a rickety umbrella, the iconic and popular cartoon is often credited to Charles H. Ross, a playwright, cartoonist, and eventual editor of Judy. However, Ally Sloper was actually illustrated and developed by two artists: Ross and his wife, actress-turned-cartoonist Marie Duval—who was responsible for the bulk of the Ally Sloper comics.
When Ally Sloper grew into a comic celebrity in the 1860s and late 1870s, Duval had become the sole artist behind the mischievous character’s world. She is among the earliest female comic artists, and has even been dubbed “Britain’s only 19th-century female caricaturist,” by art historian David Kunzle. In contrast to the refined artistry of both male and female cartoonists of the time, Duval’s drawing style was rugged and full of slapstick humor.
“Marie Duval leapt off the page and there are two reasons for that,” says graphic novelist and comic artist Simon Grennan, who studies and curates Duval’s work online as a research fellow at University of Chester. “One is because she was a woman drawing when not that many women were drawing, and also her drawings are very unusual for the period. There are quite a lot of things she does in her drawings that become common later on in comic history.”
During the 1800s, women were just breaking into the business of literature, illustration, and visual journalism. There were even a handful of female artists that received formal training on the level of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, explains Grennan. Classically trained artists who drew upper-class subjects in magazines and comic series produced a more restricted and elegant style. On the other hand, researchers believe Duval had no training and relied upon her previous life as a stage actress to capture characters on paper.
Marie Duval was born Isabelle Émilie de Tessier in Paris to French parents in 1847, but grew up in London. She assumed the stage name and pseudonym "Marie Duval" when she became an actress at 17, appearing on stage in several shows in London and in the south of England until 1874. She often starred as the leading man (which was not uncommon for female actresses at the time) in comedies and dramas, including the role of Jack Sheppard, a criminal and escape artist—a character with similar traits to Ally Sloper. During a tour of Jack Sheppard in 1874, Duval fell and injured her leg badly, halting her acting career. According to a fellow actor, she “bore the operation bravely, like Jack would have done,” reported Kunzle in History Workshop Journal.
Around 1869, Duval met and married Ross, who took over as editor of Judy the same year. Judy was a cheap rival to the likes of popular magazines Fun and Punch, catering towards a primarily lower and middle class and female audience. Ross assigned Duval as Judy’s new contributing artist, commissioning her to work on weekly comic fashion sketches and topics considered “typically female as well as theatrical,” wrote Kunzle.
Before becoming an editor, Ross had created and introduced Ally Sloper to the pages of Judy in "Some Mysteries of Loan and Discount," but discontinued the illustration to focus on longer novels. Sloper doesn’t reappear until 1869, and when he does he has a whole new look.
“They follow the series of drawings made by Ross, and they’re about the same character, Ally Sloper, but it’s very obvious that Ross is no longer drawing,” says Grennan.
While Ross conceived Ally Sloper, the character was developed and popularized by Duval “who did the overwhelming bulk of the drawings,” wrote Kunzle in The Oxford Art Journal. Forty-seven of the identified 78 Ally Sloper episodes published in Judy are signed by Marie Duval. Some had originally thought Ross was illustrating under the guise of the pen name "Marie Duval," but both Kunzle and Grennan agree that this wasn’t the case. “As you start to look chronologically in the archives, it becomes incredibly clear that it’s not Ross, it’s Marie Duval,” Grennan says. “They’re cut loose and very comic-y. They look much more like drawings from the 20th century than drawings from the 19th century.”
Duval shapes the character of Ally Sloper into a figure that people in England were most familiar with: a stock urban antihero with a bulbous nose flushed with drink, who plots ways to earn money by doing as little work as possible. While scheming and unfaithful, Ally Sloper is still familiar and lovable.
The comic also embraces slapstick, physical comedy of the lower-class. Duval used her acting experience to create scenes akin to those on stage, having characters fall in and out of things and get doused in water. Her shadow lines showing movement and action are often seen in comics today.
If Ross is considered the creative owner of the Ally Sloper, then Duval should be given credit for visualizing the comic’s entire universe. She introduces new characters based off of common people you would see in central London in the late 1800s.
“There’s a kind of ‘Marie Duval world’ in which Sloper fits, not a ‘Sloper world’ in which Marie Duval fits,” says Grennan.
By the 1870s, Ally Sloper was regularly featured in Judy and was under the sole responsibility of Duval. Despite refusing to get formal art training for 15 years, she became one of the main contributors to the magazine and even illustrated the children’s book Queens and Kings, and Other Things. Her work on the Sloper strips were praised as "extravagantly funny" by trade and press. Ally Sloper became so popular that it was sold around 1877 and commercialized. From the 1880s to the early 1900s, Sloper could be seen on stage, snuffboxes, and doorstops.
“Marie Duval is important not only as perhaps Europe’s only popular female caricaturist, and not only as the chief author of the first Sloper,” wrote Kunzle. “She also deserves recognition for her graphic experimentation in an early period of the birth of modern art.”
Due to the mass production of media in 19th century Britain, many comics and magazines were disregarded by critics in the 20th century. The cheap issues of Judy were newspapers that people often threw away, causing Marie Duval’s work to become lost over the years, explains Grennan. He and his colleagues have only come across two collections of Judy, and have collected about 1,400 of Marie Duval’s drawings online since 2014. Grennan estimates that there are another 300 still lurking around.
“Her lack of training was what made her drawings funny, so folks at the time commented about the fact that they were ‘delightfully rubbish,’” says Grennan. “Although Marie Duval might not take the world by storm, folks now still find the stories funny.”
A 1915 cartoon demonstrating how Phil's image has been co-opted for various rhetorical purposes. (Image: Jena Fuller/Flickr)
This morning, Punxsutawney Phil, America's most beloved forecasting groundhog, made his annual appearance in Gobbler's Knob, Pennsylvania. As a bevy of men in top hats egged him on, Phil spied his shadow, a sure sign that we will have a long, long winter.*
People do a lot of weird things, but the Groundhog Day behavior exhibited in the United States—which may have evolved from the European tradition of Candlemas—is pretty far out there. And for something so steadfastly traditional, the holiday has a funny way of reflecting the current moment. Here are six times when we looked for Phil's shadow and saw, instead, ourselves.
Pre-1900s: Phil's Predecessors
Phil is merely the latest creature to dupe us. According to Pennsylvania historian Christopher R. Davis, humans have looked for spring-related omens in "the position of a cat sitting by a fire, the size of the black markings on woolly-bear caterpillars, the measure of fur around a rabbit's feet ... crickets in chimneys, the height of anthills, and the elevation of hornets' nests," as well as early appearances of woodchucks, badgers, marmots, wolves, foxes, and bears. Davis also traces the strange fear of shadows to a need for cloudiness in the winter—without enough snow and rain through February, he explains, crops will be dry, and spring won't be worth looking forward to at all.
Before Groundhog Day meant placing faith in the shadow-based whims of groundhogs, it meant eating them. According to Davis, the Groundhog Club actually started as a group of people who liked to hunt and eat groundhogs, and tended to celebrate this trait on one particular day of the year. "Fellowship, oratory, skits, and rites of initiation were soon emphasized," Davis writes, and it was only a short hop from there to groundhog worship. No wonder the poor thing is scared of his shadow.
1920: Phil Gets Sauced
According to the official Groundhog Day website, during Prohibition, "Phil threatened to impose 60 weeks of winter on the community if he wasn't allowed a drink." In soberer times, Phil's favorite foods are apparently dog chow and ice cream.
The Groundhog Club in 2013. Remember, these nice-looking guys used to eat Phil. (Photo: Anthony Quintano/Flickr)
1958: Phil In Space
In 1958, as the Soviet Union beat the United States into space, Phil came out with a conspiracy theory—that a "United States Chucknik," not Sputnik, was currently orbiting the earth, presumably collecting weather data.
2013: Phil Gets Sued Despite a stellar show-up record (records show that since 1900, he has only skipped one year—1943—due to World War II), statistical analyses have found that Phil is pretty bad at his job. In 2013, Ohio prosecutor Mike Gmoser sued Phil for "misrepresentation of early spring, an Unclassified Felony." Gmoser sought the death penalty, but eased up after Phil's then-handler offered to take the blame.
2009-2017: Phil Goes Political
Phil's Big Apple stand-in, Staten Island Chuck, does not get along well with New York mayors. In 2009, he bit Michael Bloomberg on the hand after stealing an ear of corn from him. In 2014, Bill de Blasio dropped Staten Island Charlotte, who died a week later from injuries sustained in the fall. This year, Chuck disagreed with Phil, further dividing the nation. Maybe we need a Groundhog Debate.
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.
*Update, 2/2/2017: The article has been updated since it was first published to reflect 2017 events.
Ah, teens and their snakes—always getting into mischief.
Last week, Portland, Oregon, resident Ashley Glawe was hanging out with her pet ball python, Bart, when he decided to try something new. Quick as a flash, he was stuck in her gauged earlobe.
"It all happened SO fast that before I knew what was going on it was already too late," Glawe wrote on Facebook. She ended up at Portland Adventist Hospital, where, according to Patch, doctors numbed her earlobe, vaselined the snake, and pulled him out.
She and Bart may have been physically separated, but they are now tied together by fame, having garnered coverage everywhere from Complex to Channel 8 News.
"BY FAR one of my #CRAZIEST life moments!" Glawe posted later.
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.
Though cats typically avoid water at all costs, the felines of De Poezenboot, "The Cat Boat," seem perfectly at home on their floating sanctuary.
De Poezenboot is an animal sanctuary floating on a canal in Amsterdam. It was founded by Henriette van Weelde in 1966 as a home for stray, sick, and abandoned felines, and has since grown into an official charity.
The house boat accommodates up to 50 cats at once, 14 of which are permanent residents. Human visitors are welcome on the vessel as well. Many come to choose a cat for adoption, but tourists are also welcome to drop in and scratch a kitty behind the ears.
As it is a charity, the boat sanctuary stays afloat thanks to donations left by visitors. All the money raised goes toward helping as many Amsterdam cats as possible. The Cat Boat Foundation pays for neutering of cats whose owners cannot afford veterinary care, as well as strays. Volunteers take care of the cats, some of whom are adopted by visitors. The cats are believed to readjust to life on land perfectly well in their new homes.
AirCorps Aviation, in Bemidji, Minnesota, has a very particular business: they restore, maintain and rebuild vintage planes, from the World War II era. All sorts of amazing aircraft come through their shop, but recently a P-47 Thunderbolt brought with it a particular mystery.
On the inside of the wing, the names of two women were written in grease pen. It was impossible not to wonder: Who were Eva & Edith?
The first clue came from the plane’s identification number, P-47D-23RA. The RA at the end told the company where the plane was built—at Republic Aviation’s factory in Evanston Illinois. The factory produced thousands of planes for the war effort; this one was finished in 1944.
It made sense that Eva and Edith might have worked at the factory, which had about 5,000 workers, about half of whom were women, AirCorps Aviation found. Perhaps the two women scrawled their name on the wing while working to build it.
As the company looked into the mystery, though, they found another clue. The wing itself probably didn’t come from Illinois originally, but from the Curtiss-Wright Company in Buffalo, New York.Republic Aviation licensed the Buffalo company to build P-47G models. They were “pretty much identical” to the razorback models built at the Evanston factory, according to AirCorps Aviation’s Sara Zimmerman, and the body of the plane was produced in Evansville.
So far, the identity of Eva and Edith is still a mystery, but the company is digging in and looking for more clues. They’re trying to gather as much information as they can about the people who worked on the original aircraft, the identity of these two women, and the people who flew the plane in the past. (Its serial number is 42-27609.) “It would also be a huge accomplishment if we could turn up a picture of the actual P-47, so we could learn more about who flew it and any other pieces of its history,” Zimmerman writes in an email. Anyone with information can contact the company.
As the comic icon of the Grand Old Opry for more than 50 years, and the most cherished $1.98-hat-wearing star Tennessee ever fashioned, no one would have been more proud of a larger-than-life statue made out of chicken wire than Minnie Pearl herself.
Born in the small town of Centerville in 1912, Sarah Ophelia Colley would go on to a decades-long career as a comedienne in the country music world. Performing at the Opry and on TV, she celebrated her country upbringing in semi-autobiographical roles about life in Grinders Gulch, loosely based on her own childhood in Hickman County.
Yet oddly, Centerville had no statue of its favorite daughter, having lost the one they did have to a spat between the man who paid for it, and the town muckety-mucks who didn’t like that it blocked traffic.
Stepping in to fill the void was sculptor Ricky Pittman, who wanted to use his unique talents with chicken wire to honor their local hero. The piece stands about eight feet tall, and is really a bust rather than a full statue, but Minnie is all there: wry smile, frilly costume, and her straw hat with the price tag still unabashedly dangling from the brim.
Hidden between the bleached whale bones and barbed harpoons of the Hull Maritime Museum is a morbid, aquatic curio, the mummified corpse of a mermaid. Measuring nearly 2 feet tall and covered in desiccated brown-grey skin, the petrified remains stare out at the thousands of visitors who pass through the museum each year.
It was at one point believed the remains dated back as far as the 17th or early 18th century. But although the body may look eerily realistic, the Hull Mermaid is a fake. In the 1930s it was x-rayed and found to be made from the body of a fish and the head of a monkey, held together with a system of wires.
There was a great interest in mermaids during the 16th and 17th centuries, particularly as British sailors came back from trips to Indonesia and Malaysia, bringing with them tales of beautiful half woman, half fish creatures. It is thought that these accounts describe sailors' first sights of dugongs and manatees. From a distance and distorted by water, these animals were likened to women with fish-like tails.
When these tales made their way back to Britain, public fascination with mermaids swelled, and many fake corpses, like the Hull Mermaid, were created to satisfy popular demand. They were widely displayed as natural curiosities, with some finding their way to wunderkammers, museums, and other collections of zoological items. Today we recognise the Hull Mermaid as an interesting, if not entirely legitimate, oddity.
The 550-foot Washington Monument was the tallest freestanding structure in the world when it was completed in 1884. Electrical knowledge was still primitive at the time, but the designers knew that some kind of lightning protection system was required when building at that height.
Their solution was a solid aluminum pyramidion at the very tip top of the monument. It connected to four wrought iron columns inside the hollow monument that served double duty as supports for the elevator. From there, electricity was supposed to shoot down the Washington Monument 40 feet underground into a small pool of groundwater that would dissipate the charge.
The aluminum pyramidion—at the time, worth its weight in silver—was installed with great fanfare in December 1884. However according to Dru Smith of the National Geodetic Survey (NGS), the system didn’t quite work as promised. “Within the first six months they went back up and found that it had been struck by lightning; they hadn’t even finished taking the scaffolding down. It ended up doing too good of a job and melted down about 3/8ths of an inch," Smith told Atlas Obscura.
Project lead Thomas Lincoln Casey of the Army Corps of Engineers responded by installing a spiked collar for the monument to divert the lightning strikes, rendering the expensive pyramidion useless. The underground lightning-dissipation pool was also taken out of service “almost immediately,” according to the NGS.
The spiked collar remained in use until the 2011 Washington earthquake forced significant repairs to the monument. It came off in 2013 and was replaced by two less obtrusive rods. The useless pyramidion is still in place, though, and the Washington Monument is still constantly being hit by lightning.
A couple of times a year in the waters of Mexico's Sea of Cortez, a colossal column of tuna churns slowly in an underwater fish vortex. The tunnel of over 100,000 Jack Tuna, or bigeye trevally, is large enough to cast looming shadows across the ocean floor.
The clip above gives us a rare glimpse of what it's like to be under this huge "tuna tornado." At the 19-second mark, the camera is swallowed by the swirling silver mass. Each tuna averages over three feet in length.
This fantastic phenomenon is the result of the tuna's mating behavior. Many fish reproduce outside of their bodies. Here, the tuna secrete large volumes of eggs and sperm and contain it by slowly swimming around in a circle, thus creating the tornado. Because all their genes are swirling in one big mix, the ritual allows for genetic variability. Once fertilized, the eggs then float in the water for a couple days until the babies hatch.
In 2012, Octavio Aburto, a scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, published a photo of his friend David Castro next to the column of fish in Cabo Pulmo National Park marine reserve in the Sea of Cortez to show its impressive size. It took him almost three years to get that photo.
"I have been trying to capture this image ever since I saw the behavior of these fish and witnessed the incredible tornado that they form during courtship," Aburto told Mission Blue.
Aburto has taken many other photos of underwater wonders to bring attention to the beauty of marine wildlife. He continues to work to protect and preserve marine species in South America.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
A lighthouse on the north tip of Monterey Bay houses a museum that chronicles the history of surfing, which was delivered to Santa Cruz by three Hawaiian princes.
Surfing, of course, did not originate in California. It's an ancient Polynesian sport, but Santa Cruz was its point of entry in the United States. It was introduced during the hot summer of 1885, when three teenage Hawaiian princes, David Kawananakoa, Edward Keliiahonui and Jonah Kuhio Kalaniana’ole, escaped from their boarding school classes at St. Matthew's in San Mateo, California, hopped on a train, and headed to the ocean.
The beach was busy that day, with swimming races taking place, revelry in the many bathhouses along the shore, and even a theatrical troupe performing on the sand. But everyone was distracted from their amusements when the three Hawaiians took to the waves on massive boards made from local redwood pine. All those on the shore spent the day admiring the princes' surfing exhibition, with the Santa Cruz band capping off the evening by bonfire.
The three princes eventually left Santa Cruz to fight for Hawaiian independence, but their influence remained. In 1896 the Santa Cruz Surf remarked that, “the boys who go in swimming at Seabright Beach use surfboards to ride the breakers, like the Hawaiians.” This remained true throughout the 20th century, and the Surf Museum chronicles the evolution of surf culture, from the beach parties of the 1950s to competitive surf competitions in the '80s and '90s.
The city's 130 years of surfing history are detailed through photographs, surfboards, and assorted artifact in the little museum, spitting distance from the ocean. When it faced closure in 2008, big names in surfing came out to save the museum, including Jack O'Neill of O'Neill wetsuits.
The lighthouse that houses the museum was erected in memory of 18-year-old Mark Abbott, who drowned while body surfing off Pleasure Point in 1965. With the reimbursement from his life insurance policy, Mark's parents wished to erect a memorial in his honor. There had previously been a lighthouse overlooking the Santa Cruz Anchorage, but it was torn down when it was no longer needed to guide ships into Monterey Bay. The Abbotts, recalling how Mark had loved the lighthouses along the Oregon coast, had one constructed in its place to remember their son.
In 1986 the city opened a museum in the body of the lighthouse building dedicated to the activity dear to so many Santa Cruzans, including Mark. From the lighthouse's perch, visitors can also watch surfers on Steamer Lane as they hang five on their longboards, inspired by the traditional Hawaiian boards.
Someday in life you will encounter a blinded squirrel with a single-serve cereal bowl stuck on its head and you will be confronted with a choice: Is today the day you will be a hero? Or is today the day you admit defeat, your life culminating in this moment, in which, definitively, you must come to terms with the fact that you are a zero?
On Tuesday, Joey Wolfe, a worker at a youth development center Omaha, made his choice. Joey Wolfe is a hero.
In the video above, you can see Wolfe, after a few starts and stops, carefully pluck the cereal bowl from the squirrel's head, freeing it. He said afterward that he was merely trying to avoid tragedy.
"There were a couple of times he jumped out of the way of an oncoming car or truck," Wolfe told the Omaha World-Herald. "It would have been really sad to come out later that day to see a squirrel with a cereal bowl on his head, dead in the street."
Indeed, it would have. Instead, Wolfe, who originally thought the squirrel might have been wearing a hat, says he's pleased to have done his part in an increasingly uncertain world.
"The last two weeks haven't been the best for a lot of people," he told the World-Herald. "Even if this is the smallest thing I can do to make things better, maybe it will brighten up someone else's day a little bit."
Erik Steiner is a geographer, and in his field people trying to understand how places worked in the past tend to look at census records and old maps. But in a recent project, Steiner, the creative director of Stanford University’s Spatial History Project, worked with colleagues from the school’s Literary Lab to mine an unusual source of geographical data: 4,862 works of British literature, published between 1700 and 1900.
"From a geographer’s standpoint, fictional geography is amazing," he says. Characters in novels are often moving about real places, recruited as settings because they’re recognizable to readers. Even in creating a fictional world, novelists are capturing data about the reality in which they live. Pull out that data, says Steiner, and "you can uncover some unexplored truth that’s somewhere in there."
In the case of London, one of the team's discoveries, published in a pamphlet this past fall, was that the physical London of the 19th century and the fictional London of the same time period occupied two different geographic spaces. Even as physical London expanded madly, fictional London stayed small, contained within the historic city center and the wealthy West End.
"From the perspective of literature, London’s urban development didn’t quite happen," says Ryan Heuser, a Stanford graduate student who led the Literary Lab's research on the project.
Literary geography is a relatively new field of study: the 1998 Atlas of the European Novel, written by Stanford’s Franco Moretti, a collaborator of Heuser and Steiner on the London project, is considered one of the discipline’s first modern works. The goal, as a group of European cartographers wrote in 2008, is to explore "what happens when the 'literary world' and the real world meet or intersect."
The London project drew on even newer strategies of "digital literary geography," using algorithms and other digital tools to explore place in British literature. It was developed under the umbrella of Stanford's Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, by a team that included several undergraduate research assistants, along with grant and project managers. They identified hundreds of historical locations in London, by matching proper names from their corpus of texts to historical maps and other sources. Altogether, those names appeared in about 15,000 passages over thousands of texts.
With that data set in hand, the researchers worked to map literary London. Using historic maps and census records, Steiner created a series of images (above) showing the growing urban density in real-world 1682 London, when it was a small city huddled along the banks of the Thames, to 1896 London, when its population was heading toward 6.5 million people.
On top of those maps of urban growth, the team layered the places mentioned in their texts, to show how literary London developed alongside real-world London. Literary London, they found, changed hardly at all: even as real-world London grew, literature stayed put in the historic center of the city and in the wealthy West End.
"The number of geographical references kept increasing, but they remain essentially localized in the City and in the West End," the researchers write in the pamphlet. "The rest of London—where most of the growth was actually taking place—never really mattered. In the course of the nineteenth century, real London radically changed—and fictional London hardly at all."
Literary London had, in Heuser’s words, a "historical stuckness" that restricted its growth. Even as the city grew, the places that authors used as touch points, to imbue their stories with meaning, stayed the same.
The Stanford researchers weren’t just interested in locating literary London, though. They wanted to map the emotions of the literary texts onto the city—the relationship between space and emotion and how that's reflected in literature.
It’s not intuitive to think that emotions might have a location. Where is sadness? Where is happiness? Do emotions have, the researchers asked, "an intrinsic connection to a specific place"? Inspired by a passage about the "element of suddenness" in fear, the Stanford researchers saw a way to link emotion with place: the suddenness of emotion could tie it to geography. "What is sudden occurs at a specific moment in time and hence also at a specific point in space," they write.
To create a data set of place and emotion, the Stanford team clipped 200-word passages, centered around place names, and had 20 people read each passage. Half were asked to judge if the passage had an element of fear to it; the other half were asked to note if it had an element of happiness. The researchers also ran the passages through an algorithm that identified sentiment.
Their baseline finding was surprising: the majority of the passages—two-thirds, according to the human readers—were emotionally neutral. The passages that had an emotional valence, though, did have some relationship to place. With another group of colleagues, Heuser mapped the emotion data onto an 1899 map of London that included sociological data on class and poverty.
In that context, he could see how passages with positive emotions were associated with the West End and other wealthy places, while passages with negative emotions tended to be embedded in neighborhoods the 1899 map coded as "struggling."
Emotions such as fear and happiness might seem subjective and individualistic, says Heuser. But find a way to map them onto real places, and you suddenly see how very constrained they could be by economic and class geography. To him, that’s one of the great advantages of digital literary geography. Computer analysis might obscure the details of individual passages, but in exchange it offers scale. "You can do this for 5,000 novels across 200 years and draw these very large historical conclusions," says Heuser. In fiction, at least, the places where stories take place and the places where people are allowed to feel happy are limited.
A couple of weeks ago, at an event in Manhattan, I found myself in conversation with a George Washington impersonator. Even as we chatted about our 21st-century lives, he had an enviable commitment to the aesthetics of his character—he stood straight as a tree, and the gravitas never left his face.
Posing with me and a friend for a photo, he instructed us to keep our left legs straight and turn the right ones outward. "In colonial times, the calf was the most attractive part of a man," he said. "Some even put calf enhancers in their socks, to look beefier." He struck the same position, effortlessly, and the camera flashed.
I found this bit of news delightful. Our Founding Fathers, signing the Declaration in calf falsies? Suddenly, everything made sense—the fact that breeches end at the knee, the phrase "put your best foot forward," the many portraits of colonial luminaries thrusting their calves at the viewer.
Guide Sue is teaching Colonial Etiquette. The man's calf was the most attractive part and woman's hips. pic.twitter.com/ToSnApXNVv
Online, history buffs seemed similarly tickled. After a trip to Colonial Williamsburg, one fan theorized about what he'd learned that day: "The exercises a successful male Colonist gets over his not-as-successful counterparts include activities like horseback riding (stirrups strengthen calf muscles), stairs (your home must be larger with upper floors), waltzing (try that with weak calves), etc."
In fact, many young men on trips to historic sites have apparently learned how to enhance their calves by posing: “Daniel learned that to woo ladies in colonial times you had to have nice calves and put your best foot forward," one teacher tweeted from Old Town Alexandria, with a photo of poor Daniel. Alexander Hamilton superfans love to repost this page from a children's book about the Founding Fathers, which asserts that Hamilton, unlike some of his peers, had no need to stuff sandbags in his stockings. "If you're bowing to a man, your calf projects your power," famed George Washington impersonator Dean Malissa told Esquire in 2010. "If you're bowing to a woman, your calf projects something else."
In a world where the current U.S. president has spent his life defending the size of his hands, it's both amusing and humbling to consider that giants of history might have had their own now-ridiculous sticking point. There's just one problem: it's probably not true. Or at least, not as true as people seem to want it to be.
When I got in touch with experts at Colonial Williamsburg about this, I was met with the rhetorical equivalent of a heavy sigh. "The notions that people in the 18th century were obsessed with men's calves and that a well-developed calf was the sign of a gentleman appear to be myths," writes Cathy Hellier, a historian at Colonial Williamsburg, in an email. Mark Hutter, supervisor of the Tailor Shop in the Department of Historic Trades and Skills, backs her up: "It's not at all uncommon in historical interpretation for small grains of truth to grow into greater folklore," he says. "I think this is an instance of that."
Hellier, who studies deportment, has a few theories about how this idea got so much traction. First, there's the phrase "to make a handsome leg," a fairly common expression in the 18th century. In reality, though, this just means "to bow in a genteel way," something that involved a lot of minute movements, including a leg turn. She also points out that, although dancing and horseback riding certainly work the calves, so do activities associated with the less well-off, such as plowing and walking.
This isn't to say calves weren't considered sexy. "There certainly is preference for a good leg," says Hutter—and Washington, for example, is on record as having had exquisite ones. They just weren't the be-all end-all of attractiveness, or even close. In fact, Hellier points out, when you trawl through the many, massive etiquette books of the time, you hardly see legs mentioned. "Letters, diaries, and books generally ignore or downplay the appearance of gentlemen's legs—a singularly odd omission in an era supposedly obsessed with them," she writes.
All those turned-out legs on portraits and statues, Hellier says, reflect their subjects' substantial dance training, and the pose was actually meant to emphasize the hips, not the calves. According to The Young Gentleman and Lady's Private Tutor, a 1770 etiquette guide, turning the foot outwards makes "the Hips… appear firm, yet light and easy." If turned inwards instead, "they will appear heavy and misplaced, awkward and ungenteel." When "standing genteel," he suggests, "the whole Body should rest on the left Foot."
As for the falsies, those were actually real—but accounts of them appear to be pumped up as well. While my secondary-source research alluded to cork, parchment, pith, and sandbag calves, the only type that turns up in primary sources is the "downy calf," essentially a padded stocking. Even these were likely pretty uncommon. When padded calves show up in literature, Hutter says, they're almost always used to satirical ends, worn by dandies in cartoons or characters named Lord Foppington.
He also points out that even these cartoons don't show up until the beginning of the 19th century—right when men's deportment changed, and people began keeping their legs straight beneath them while bowing. "I would say that, if anything, this argues against the idea that you're showing off a leg" when you bow, he says.
It's tricky to quash a historical rumor—especially one that was likely started by well-meaning experts, and has been perpetuated by enthusiasts. "I do think that, through the public interpretation in places like Colonial Williamsburg, and then probably spreading to other historic sites, these ideas have sort of entered the popular mind," says Hutter. But those who are invested in bringing the historical record to life also consider it their responsibility to correct it. "We are making an effort to root out these fallacies," writes Hellier.
"It's part of the nature of history," says Hutter. "Grains of truth grow into great beaches of myth." Or, in this instance, into great calves.
Situated at the entrance to the equally enjoyable Lee Richardson Zoo, the Finney County Historical Museum is a quaint museum that tells the history of Southwestern Kansas. It also tastefully displays the World's Largest Hairball atop a brass spittoon.
Removed from the stomach of a cow that was processed in a nearby packing house, this mammoth trichobezoar was nearly 40 inches in circumference and was said to have weighed 55 pounds wet when first removed. Though smaller and drier now, it's still a very impressive sight. Visitors are free to lightly touch the ball (it feels like a velvet basketball) but signage politely reminds them not to pick it up.
Hairball aside, the museum has several walk-through areas and numerous exhibits where visitors can trace the roots and historical events of the area, from the lives of the first native peoples, to the cowboy era, all the way up to present day.
Volunteer docents are friendly and will happily answer any questions you might have as you explore the facility. The grounds also include a research library, an original one-room school house, and a museum store with enough kitschy items to satisfy any traveller's needs, including t-shirts featuring the giant hairball.
There are so many small mysteries left in the world. Today’s evidence—a hammerhead shark and a ghost shark, both new discoveries. One is small and, dare we say, cute? For a shark? The other is the largest species of ghost shark ever discovered and, to the human eye, really ugly.
The new species of hammerhead shark was discovered in Belize by a team studying bonnethead sharks. These smallish sharks are plentiful in the Caribbean Sea and were thought to be one big happy family of sharks.
But when a team of scientists analyzed the DNA of bonnethead sharks captured in Belize, they discovered that these sharks were a different species from the ones that live around Mexico, the U.S. and the Bahamas. Even though all the sharks look quite similar, the DNA of the Belize sharks showed they hadn’t interbred with those other groups of sharks for several million years.
Here’s a close up of one of these sharks:
Yeah, the shark has eyes on the side of its head, but check it out in context:
It’s pretty small and cute! Unlike this newly discovered ghost shark, which the scientist who discovered it describes as “chunky in the front.”
Ghost sharks aren’t technically sharks (though they’re related) since they move themselves with their fins rather than their tails. This is the 50th named species of ghost shark, Live Science reports, and is three feet long, making it the largest ghost shark yet discovered.
Fishermen working in the region around South Africa, where the ghost sharks live, have known about them for awhile and suspected that they weren’t quite like other ghost sharks. They were just too big.
There's no easy way to say this, so let's get right to it: As recently as yesterday morning, a minivan filled with dozens of copies of the film Speed has been spotted parked in Brooklyn.
The minivan is black and, judging by the duct tape on its wiper cowl, somewhat beat up. Emily Hughes is the latest to spot the unusual vehicle, which has been tooling around Greenpoint and Williamsburg.
In the 1994 film Speed—as you doubtlessly remember—Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock team up to thwart a domestic terrorist who has planted a bomb on a Los Angeles city bus. If the bus falls below 50 miles per hour, the bomb will explode.
If this is a 2017 meta-remake, the plot appears to be quite different. The van is generally stationary and, although there are receipts scattered across the dash as well, they do not appear to be speeding tickets.
According to Twitter reports, the van has been around since summer of last year, at the very least. Based on photos, it seems to be slowly but steadily accumulating tapes, but that could be an optical illusion caused by an overdose of staring Keanus.
Oddly, this is not the Speed-iest van in the world—according to Vice, a collector in Idaho has over 500 copies in a repurposed Care-A-Van.
Which is to say, this particular disease appears contagious. Brooklyn residents, remember—if you see something, say something.
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.
There are lots of examples of western-style architecture throughout Japan, but Kobe’s historic Kitano-chō district has a rare and extensive collection of homes from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the city’s Hyōgo Port first opened to American and European traders and diplomats, who brought along their particular architectural preferences with them.
Located in the heart of the city at the foot of Mt. Rokko, Kitano-chō is full of trendy shops, restaurants, and cafés with a distinctly international feel, but the district’s main draw is the 30 or so former merchant mansions from the Meiji and Taishō periods, many of which are open to the public as museums.
Foreign residences like these are known as ijinkan, and while there are similar ones in other Japanese port cities, none are as highly concentrated or well-preserved as those in Kitano-chō.
Each mansion is unique and exhibits antiques, artwork, and historical items. Fans of Sherlock Holmes will appreciate the England House, where the second floor features memorabilia of the great detective, and a recreation of his cluttered 221B Baker Street quarters. The France and Italy Houses are notable for their furniture and fine art collections, and the Dutch Museum includes a perfumery.
Perhaps the district’s most distinctive residence is the Uroko House, the name roughly translating to “scaly” house–a massive building with turrets and multi-hued slate shingles that look like fish scales. The house offers beautiful views of Kobe from its top floor (if you can stop staring at those crazy fish scales).
A tunnel the length of almost two football fields separates the hustle and bustle of Tirana, Albania’s capital, from one of the country’s largest nuclear bunkers.
In the communist days, this five-story, 106-room bunker, located at the base of the one-mile-high mountain range that dominates Tirana from the east, was known as “Facility 0774.” Built in the ‘70s, it was designed to protect Albania’s communist dictator president, Enver Hoxha, and his government officers in the event of a nuclear attack.
This long-forbidden military facility was first opened to the public by the Ministry of Defence in 2014 during the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the country’s liberation from the Nazis. It remained open for just two months.
Now the bunker has been transformed into Bunk’Art, a cultural center that mixes contemporary art and history exhibitions about Albania’s tumultuous 20th century.
Non-profit organization Qendra Ura, an association founded in 2008 for the promotion of culture and artistic activities, runs the place, but the bunker itself is still owned by the Albanian state.
As Eva Haxhi, manager of Bunk’Art, puts it, “it is sort of an ‘artistic bunker’”.
To go inside is to take a trip to the paranoid mind of Hoxha, who ruled the country from 1941 to 1985.
In the early ‘60s, hardline Stalinist Hoxha broke relations with the U.S.S.R. after Moscow denounced Joseph Stalin. Under his command, Albania became one of the most hermetic states in the world.
Hoxha’s obsession with a potential foreign invasion led him to order the construction of some 700,000 bunkers around the country. Most of them were just small, egg-shaped concrete structures suitable only for one of two people. Many still dot the Albanian landscape.
The massive Bunk’Art bunker is different. It was a key part of Hoxha’s escape and resistance plan. Hoxha and his prime minister at the time, Mehmet Shehu, had their own apartments inside the bunker. Each of them had a reception room for their secretary, an office, a bedroom and a bathroom. There was also a room for cabinet meetings, an intercommunications room and a chief officer’s room.
Many in Tirana still believe that a network of secret tunnels linked the bunker with the president and his ministers’ residences in the city center, three miles away. But regardless of how expansive the hidden infrastructure was, it didn’t end up being used. Hoxha died in April 1985 and his regime only managed to survive for a few more years. In the early ‘90s, Albania became a capitalist country: the long-feared foreign invasion did not occur and the bunker never served its original purpose.
The original facilities, though, are almost all intact today. All the furniture dates back from the bunker’s original era: the armchairs, the cracked maps of Albania, the Chinese-made air purifiers with red five-point stars on them. On Hoxha’s desk, an old radio plays one of his speeches on loop. His bed is still covered with a red bedspread.
On the sides of the corridors, rooms alternate art installations with history exhibitions about the hardship and repression in Hoxha’s Albania. One of the displays recreates a classroom of a primary school during the communist era. Another one highlights the importance of sport during those times. There, a bust of Enver Hoxha hangs in the net of a basketball basket. There is a place for nostalgia and irony at Bunk’Art.
The main room of the bunker, an assembly hall, has been transformed into a concert hall. From the walls, black-and-white portraits of Hoxha and other politicians of his time are forced to look at and listen to jazz—the music they banned for so many years.
From the bespectacled bust of James Joyce in St. Stephen’s Green to the busty bronze of Molly Malone off Grafton Street, Dublin is a city of icons. But if you venture out from the winding cobblestone and Georgian brick of the city center, something very different may grab your eye.
She bares the full length of a leg, sensuously arched at the knee. A wrap slips from her shoulders, falling down her chest and between her thighs. And she gazes out, seductive yet aloof, from the windowsills of countless Dublin homes. She’s a white plaster statuette many call The Lady on the Rock. Once you notice her, you’ll spot everywhere. Who is she? Why is she all over Dublin?
The Lady on the Rock answers to many names. Some dub her the White Lady or theLady in the Window. Some root her in particular neighborhoods, like the Lady of Cabra or Crumlin, north and south, respectively, of the River Liffey, which bisects the city. Others claim her for an entire swath of town: Our Lady of the Northside. A number of natives don’t know she has a name, but they recognize her as a phenomenon seldom found outside Dublin.
The statuette started cropping up in working-class pockets of Dublin, including Cabra and Crumlin, during the late 1990s. As she multiplied over the 2000s, so did the myths about her. There was a shipwreck, one tale goes, off the west coast of Ireland. It killed all aboard, except for one lady who washed up on the rocks, naked. Another spins a more modern nautical yarn. A freighter lost a crate of the statuettes, purportedly mass-produced in China, to the Irish Sea; they were later hawked in discount stores. Could she represent the Virgin Mary or Mary Magdalene, Catholic imaginations have wondered? Or that same Molly Malone, a 17th-century beauty of many a myth, sung as a fishmonger but slandered as a lady of the night?
That the Lady on the Rock tends to populate inner-city working-class areas has spawned suspicion, nasty if flippant. Urban legends claim she’s a secret sign that drugs or sex are for sale where’s she housed. One taxi driver elaborated on this theory: Only if she’s pointed to the left does it mean you can buy drugs there. In some houses, you’ll see her perched on every available windowsill. The more statues in the windows? Well, the more ladies in the brothel.
The Lady on the Rock, though, has far less sensational origins, as Jessie Ward O’Sullivan uncovered in her 2010 short documentary, The Lady on the Rock. Harold Gardiner, a local artist, conceived the idea in the early 1990s; a craftsman, Edward Loughman, helped make her plaster mold. Gardiner sold statues to the occasional friend before passing away, and she would have passed into oblivion if Vincent Doran, a professional plasterer, hadn’t bought her off Loughman when clearing out Gardiner’s workshop.
Doran’s shop, Dublin Mouldings, showcases busts of Shakespeare and Elvis alongside the Lady on the Rock. In a few hours, Doran and his son construct her from silicon fiberglass using a two-piece mold. They clean up her joints and sell her for 20 quid. Sometimes a painter will even dress her up with some color. “People like seeing them in the windows. They look well,” Doran says.
A person buys one, some neighbors fancy their own, others want to fit in, a trend emerges. I visited some houses with Ladies in their windows; all declined to talk, my curiosity, perhaps, seeming as suspect as others have viewed their taste in interior design.
And, indeed, not everyone thinks the statuette looks well. “Absolutely disgusting,” the same taxi driver said. He didn’t buy the Lady’s lurid lore, but nor did he think highly of her—or her owners. “If someone presented me with these, I would break them up,” he says. “They think they are classy, but that’s nonsense. Keeping up with the Joneses? More like keeping up with the junkies.”
“It’s garbage. Snobbery,” Fergus O’Neill, a commercial artist, says of such sentiments, which often divide Dublin’s north and south sides. “She’s a working-class badge of honor.”
O’Neill began crafting White Lady Christmas ornaments four years back after noticing the Lady in the Window, as he calls her, around town. Other Dublin artists have embraced her, too, on t-shirts, theatrical posters, even as the focus of a high-school art project.
Originally, O’Neill wanted to make a punny desktop version: the Lady in the Microsoft Windows. But his project lead him to some extraordinary discoveries. In the early 20th century, Dublin’s grand Georgian homes were divided up into squalid tenements, whole families squeezed into single rooms. But if a family displayed matching objects in multiple windows, even floors, O’Neill says, it signaled they could finally afford multiple rooms. The Lady on the Rock follows in this tradition: “It’s fashion and it’s marking one’s territory,” O’Neill says, proudly adding he keeps one in his own home.
Dublin experienced a similar trend in the 1960s. Families displayed white horse statues in fanlights over Georgian doors. But, according to O’Neill, these families were posh and Protestant. The Lady on the Rock, then, could be the working-class—and Irish Catholic—answer to the trend.
For some, the Lady on the Rock’s identity will ultimately be just that: a trend. “She’s a real-life meme,” says Ruth Keating, who sells O’Neill’s ornaments at a local gallery. “An interesting thread in Dublin’s day-to-day,” but only a short-lived icon in the end.
Not for O’Neill. The Lady on the Rock is “a real symbol of Dublin,” he says. And a fitting one, too: A simple white plaster mold, reshaped and colored in by Dublin’s many stories, by Dublin’s many identities.
