Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

[BlueTrain]

I rather enjoy seeing buildings that have a monumental character about them. That is not to say that very many large buildings are the least bit monumental in character. Many sports stadiums do but I doubt any shopping mall does. The Mall of America, though, has to be seen to be believed but it's the inside of that place that I'm talking about. The Empire State Building had style--of a sort--as did the Chrysler building, and they still do, but somehow we don't see them the same way today. And then again, maybe we do. The World Trade Center was much to modern to have a real style.

The same could be said about churches and private homes. Frank Lloyd Wright houses do nothing for me, yet we keep visiting them. The most fascinating private house I can think of is Phillip Johnson's glass house in Connecticut. Fascinating (to me) without a doubt but it's hard to find other words to describe it. But talk about transparency. It's not exactly the mid-century modern we usually think of.

Something else that can be interesting and sometimes eye-opening are alternative designs for structures that actually got built. The Washington Monument, for example, is plain and simple and elegant. It also has an unreal air about it, such that even when you are driving by on the street, it doesn't quite look real. It looks more like a painted backdrop. Alternative designs tend to be classical and busy. Some claim that the George Washington Masonic Temple in Alexandria was one of the alternative designs but that's doubtful. It's still an impressive building, if a little bizarre to some.

 

[BlueTrain]

I should add that sometimes it is difficult for architects to create a stylistically different building simply because there will be too many objections or to put it another way, a building usually needs to fit in with the environment in more ways than one, especially in a crowded environment. There are few red brick buildings in the Southwest but few Spanish Colonial structures with red tile roofs here in Virginia, either, though to be sure, there are some.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I've always wondered what they were thinking when they designed the old Braves Field in Boston -- its most distinguishing architectural characteristic was a red-tile-roof Spanish mission-looking administration buiilding that looked about as at-home on Gaffney Street as an Irish bar would have looked in the middle of San Juan Capistrano.

If it wasn't for the fried clams at the concession stands, you'd have thought you were in Old California.

 

[Fading Fast]

S'all good. The case is a very sore point with me, as much for the popular image of it as for what actually happened.

The "UYM" building above was a department store, built in the 1930s, and has a lot in common, I think, with American styles of the same period. There was an old downtown W. T. Grant store in this area that had a similar sort of profile.

Funny, I typed and then deleted that the building has a feel very '30s American generic Art Deco to me.

 

[BlueTrain]

Are those streetcar tracks going into or beside the stadium?

 

[LizzieMaine]

Beside. There was a special "Braves Field Loop" that came down Babcock Street and around onto Gaffney to drop off ballpark habitues, and then looped around to go back where it came from. They had a special series of extra-large "people mover" cars to handle these crowds.

You can still see the remnants of those tracks depending on how efficient the latest paving crew has been after frost-heave season.

 

[BlueTrain]

A few cities have streetcars that are "as modern as tomorrow," but others, including the one in the post above, look like they were always old. Everything looks older in black and white, though.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Boston's always been a city that tends to be cobbled together from old junk. When they try to be Modern As Tomorrow, the results are usually very unfortunate.

 

[BlueTrain]

Speaking of schools again, architecture aside, when do you suppose parking lots became an essential feature of school design, especially high schools? We have this vision of high school boys driving jalopies to school but I expect that was limited to just a few lucky ones. But the high school in the golden days of the past in my hometown was right in the middle of town and had no parking lot. As a matter of fact, everyone complained about the lack of adequate parking downtown--at least those who owned cars did. The new one built in 1955 had one, presumably just for teachers, though. But at the high school my kids attended rents parking spaces to students! How about that!

That building looks ever so much like Sainte Marie de La Tourette monastery in France, designed by Le Corbusier and built beginning in 1953. One description of the architecture is "brutal." But it is out in the countryside, which softens the effect somewhat.

 

[Harp]

And then there were whorehouse tokens. That was a currency with a genuine, recognizable value. Out West, some employees were paid with them.

The Greek Army in the 1970s paid a draftee private 90 drachma per month, or $3.00 USD; a government sponsored whorehouse visit was included several times annually.
Lines block long filed streets and alleys in Salonika's red light district.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Speaking of schools again, architecture aside, when do you suppose parking lots became an essential feature of school design, especially high schools? We have this vision of high school boys driving jalopies to school but I expect that was limited to just a few lucky ones. But the high school in the golden days of the past in my hometown was right in the middle of town and had no parking lot. As a matter of fact, everyone complained about the lack of adequate parking downtown--at least those who owned cars did. The new one built in 1955 had one, presumably just for teachers, though. But at the high school my kids attended rents parking spaces to students! How about that!

That building looks ever so much like Sainte Marie de La Tourette monastery in France, designed by Le Corbusier and built beginning in 1953. One description of the architecture is "brutal." But it is out in the countryside, which softens the effect somewhat.

Where I live now we have an old white elephant of a high school building put up in 1862 -- the traditional red-brick three story type building as seen in all Andy Hardy/Henry Aldrich movies -- and it has a small parking lot carved out of an area that was once a stable of some kind. The building is shoved into a tight residential neighborhood and there's no on-street parking to speak of, just this one little lot. So if there were jalopies, there weren't many of them. The city was such that students would all have walked to school. The building was retired from use in the '90s and hasn't been much use to anyone since -- there's always something in the paper about it being redeveloped for this and that, but the building is so dilapidated that nobody can afford to bring it up to code.

 

[David Conwill]

I present to you "older car parked on the street, across from Belmont High. 1938."

And unfortunately, that's the extent of my knowledge on it. Though I'll say it reminds me of a Herman Schultheis photograph.

 

[LizzieMaine]

You don't see kids painting snappy slogans on their cars anymore. All they do is stick faded, ragged, tattered excuses for flags in the back of the truck beds, and "roll coal" at stoplights.

 

[tonyb]

As to school architecture ...

Schools ought to be nice places. People take cues from their surroundings. Substantial, aesthetically pleasing surroundings tell the little buzzards that we take them and their education seriously. And we expect them to take it seriously, too.

This is not to say that kids couldn't be well educated in a damp basement under a bare lightbulb, provided their parents and educators are committed to their academic success. (The nicest campus in all creation won't substitute for that.) But if that's all we give them while simultaneously giving professional sports franchises billion-dollar play palaces it's hard to fault the kids for harboring wildly unrealistic hopes for their own athletic futures.

My dear old ma takes a bit of pride in having graduated from East High School in Madison, Wisconsin. It's a nice school, for sure. An acquaintance here in Denver has mentioned on more than one occasion that she went to East High here. That's another grand edifice. A friend back in the Seattle area makes an apple-polishing motion whenever she mentions her status as an alumna of Stadium High in Tacoma, which is about as spectacular a high school, in as spectacular a setting, as you're likely ever to find.

 

[HudsonHawk]

A friend back in the Seattle area makes an apple-polishing motion whenever she mentions her status as an alumna of Stadium High in Tacoma, which is about as spectacular a high school, in as spectacular a setting, as you're likely ever to find.

I remember that school from 10 Things I Hate About You. It is indeed spectacular.

I've posted this before, but this is the high school of both my parents. Of course you could never get something like this constructed today...the Gothic Revival architecture and stained glass windows. I remember my mother pitching a fit at the waste when they put in air conditioning back in the 80s.

 

[sheeplady]

My old school was a WPA centralized rural school (located in a town of 450 people.... now). If kids had cars there was ample space to park, but it likely would have been in a field (they were granted about 10 acres of land when the school was built in 1937, and it previous had been crop land). I doubt that many kids owned cars where I grew up, though. Perhaps in the 1950s; the area wasn't doing too poorly then- but it was still farm kids.

ETA: I agree that surroundings make a difference. It doesn't have to be decadent, but it says something that "Hey, we the administration respect you as human beings enough to make you comfortable." And unless you respect someone as a human being, it's awfully hard to get respect for authority back from them. Unless you plan on torturing them.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^
Did your folks meet in high school, HH?

Used to be common, that. Not so much anymore, although my deceased brother and his more recently deceased wife went to high school together and started dating then.

 

[HudsonHawk]

^^^^^
Did your folks meet in high school, HH?

Used to be common, that. Not so much anymore, although my deceased brother and his more recently deceased wife went to high school together and started dating then.

They did not. Dad left school in '57 to join the Army (101st Airborne, he was). Mom was a few years behind, graduating in '62, and they didn't meet until Dad got out of the service and Mom was in college.

I know a few couples my age who met in high school, but not many. I know many more who met in college. I myself met my wife in college (New Year's Eve 1987, to be exact), though we didn't start dating until five or six years later. My sister and brother-in-law met as kids, as his family lived across the street from us. I'd guess that's even more rare.

 

[LizzieMaine]

My parents dated in high school, were vociferously warned against getting married, but did it anyway -- to my mother's eternal and often violently expressed regret. Pretty much every high-school-sweetheart marriage I knew of in their generation ended badly. I don't know any couples of my own generation who met in high school and stayed together for more than a couple of months -- none of them long enough to get married.

The best time to get married is not, I would suspect, in the middle of an adolescent hormone surge. One of the kids at work pulled the rope this past summer, to her on-and-off high school boyfriend, at the age of nineteen, and we're all scared to death how it's going to turn out.

 

[ChiTownScion]

My parents dated in high school, were vociferously warned against getting married, but did it anyway -- to my mother's eternal and often violently expressed regret. Pretty much every high-school-sweetheart marriage I knew of in their generation ended badly. I don't know any couples of my own generation who met in high school and stayed together for more than a couple of months -- none of them long enough to get married.

The best time to get married is not, I would suspect, in the middle of an adolescent hormone surge. One of the kids at work pulled the rope this past summer, to her on-and-off high school boyfriend, at the age of nineteen, and we're all scared to death how it's going to turn out.

I suppose that my parents were "high school sweethearts" within the broadest definition of the term: different high schools, he was a senior, she was a freshman. Then he went off to fight World War II and she was "the girl back home." They married in 1946, and that marriage lasted 29 years on paper... but I tend to think that it was "over" long before the dissolution was decreed by the court. I was in college at the time that they split, and quite honestly I wish that they had pulled the pin at least ten years prior: keeping it together "for the sake of the kids" generated as much dysfunction as the alternative.

Their whole scenario made me terribly gun-shy as to the who "work young/ marry young/ die young" mentality. I didn't marry until I was thirty. The downside of waiting so long is that, while you can me more emotionally and financially settled than you were as a teenager, you do get "set in your ways" as you age, and working out the perimeters within a marriage may take more work. And parenthood for the first time at an older age? Again: the other side of the emotional and financial security of age is the vulnerability to the sheer exhaustion that parenthood brings- especially when dealing with a high demand infant.

Another aspect of teen marriages that I witnessed that was ironic: girls who were "too cool" to go out with a geek like me in high school and ended up marrying Mr. Wonderful often found out that he turned out to be a lot less than they thought. I'd be greeted by them in my 30's (usually through one of those out of the blue phone calls) with the question, "Do you know a really good divorce lawyer?" Now, I really don't wish an anti-social, abusive, unfaithful, and/ or alcohol/ drug addicted spouse on anyone.. but there was always a sense of karma coming home to roost in that particular scenario. What was really sad was when a kid or kids were in the middle of it- sometimes a kid brought into the world with the hope of "saving" a failing marriage.