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Tags Archives: America

The Man who makes the Neon Signs

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In a dark and forgotten storage room of Clifton’s cafeteria in downtown Los Angeles, a neon sign was secretly glowing and flickering since the Great Depression, until it was discovered after 62 years, having accumulated over $17,000 in electricity bills for the unwitting owners. The sign was purchased in 1935 but later stored out of [...]

Abandoned Route 66: The Tourist Trap Ghost Town

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(c) El Toro Route 66; where all those wonderfully off-beat attractions of ‘Roadside America’ culture first sprouted. By the 1920s, Route 66, known then as the National Trail, was fast-becoming the most popular road in the country for Westward pioneers travelling across the Diablo Canyon. A 19th century isolated trading post in Arizona suddenly became a [...]

American Cowgirls of the 1940s

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This post is pretty much the result of me getting lost in the LIFE magazine archives again and coming across a bunch of mostly unpublished photographs of cowgirls that were too good not to share. These snaps are a melange of photo stories by LIFE photographers, Nina Leen, Peter Stackpole and Cornell Capa between 1947-48 at the [...]

Trailer Park Hotels (without the Trash)

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No American road trip would be complete without a stop at a trailer park palace! So for those with a ‘kitsch itch’ to scratch (note to self: google and see if I just coined ‘kitsch itch’), Nessy has picked out three hotels in the great ol’ US of A for the ultimate vintage (and dare [...]

Lost Photographs of a Segregated World

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I‘m not used to seeing segregated America in pretty pastels. Typically, the civil rights photography we look at is in black & white and instantly disturbing. But these rare pictures, discovered after the photographer’s death at the bottom of an old storage box, wrapped in paper and masking tape and marked, “Segregation Series,” are unlike any [...]

The Car Park Theatre of Detroit

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  Detroit’s horrible, beautiful decline has been so well documented by urban explorers that to the outside world, it might seem it’s the only thing to know about this once great industrial metropolis. And yet undeniably, it’s vast urban abandonment is intensely interesting. My latest guilty fascination is the Detroit’s renaissance revival theatre that has [...]

Inside America’s Biggest Flea Market

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The Brimfield Flea Market was founded in 1959 in Brimfield Massachusetts and has grown to become one of the largest flea markets in the world. Three times a year, the population of Brimfield swells from 3,000 to a quarter million, when treasure hunters flock to the fair in search of vintage Americana. One dealer sums [...]

America’s Last Drive-in Movie Theatres

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Photograph by Thomas Wrede At their peak, in the late 1950s, there were almost 5000 drive-ins. Today, there are only 366 drive-ins operating in the United States. The outdoor theaters saw a dramatic decline in the 70s and 80s and many of their remains can still be found off highways, marked by rusting entrance marquees [...]

The Ghostly Flintstones Amusement Park

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The soundtrack of Flinstones cartoons broadcast continuously over the park’s tinny loudspeakers, echoing eerily between the dusty, dilapidating houses of Bedrock’s famous residents from a bygone era.  Built over 40 years ago during the Route 66 roadside attraction craze, this lonely concrete replica of a cartoon town has seen better days. You can only wonder how [...]

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