We heard you like mummified crocodiles, so we put some mummified crocodiles inside your mummified crocodile! While Xzibit had nothing to do with it, according to the BBC, researchers at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, Netherlands have discovered dozens of baby crocodiles mummified within a large crocodile mummy.
The museum has had its mummified crocodile on display since 1828, only being able to discern what was inside the wrappings with traditional x-rays and other earlier methods. However, the museum began to employ a scanning technology produced by Swedish company Interspectral, for an interactive exhibit that would allow visitors to perform a “virtual autopsy” on the mummy, and the new scans ended up revealing a surprising new level to the artifact.
As the scans revealed, in addition to the giant crocodile skeleton, there are over 40 tiny little croc babies, individually mummified, and contained in the wrapping of the larger animal. Hidden from the museum for over a hundred years, the babies came as an unexpected, but not unwelcome shock to staff.
Now visitors will be able to check out the little secret mummies for themselves when the exhibit using the Interspectral technology opens to the public.
Born of a financial fiasco in the 1990s, the resort of Pirou-Plage in Normandy remained a half-built ghost town until its colorful houses were discovered by squatters and ravers. Since then the French village has taken on a new identity, becoming a hub for artists and filmmakers and blossoming into an art project open to all. Recently, though, local authorities made plans to bring in bulldozers and demolish the resort's graffiti-covered structures.
“I am in such a hurry to see this eyesore disappear for good,” says Gabriel Lallemand, Deputy Mayor of Pirou, a Normandy seaside resort. Lallemand has been following the village’s fantastic twists and turns since 1990. Back then, an unscrupulous property developer bought a 17-acre piece of land from the local authorities in Pirou-Plage. The plot was a couple of hundred yards from the beach, behind a lovely natural dune.
The site was called “Aquatour,” and the plans to turn it into a holiday village were ambitious: 75 houses, a hotel-club, 2 tennis courts—in a seaside town which counts only 1,500 year-round inhabitants. The promoter was a convincing salesman: he quickly sold all the houses—on paper, anyway. But no plans were made for water, electricity or draining.
By April 1992, 25 houses were already up when the building work suddenly stopped. The contractors were not paid anymore: the promoter had vanished with its investors’ money. Pirou-Plage would never turn into a holiday village.
The new houses were systematically plundered: everything that could easily be taken away disappeared. Stripped of their doors, windows, and roof tiles, the desolate houses then became homes for squatters and ravers who came and went as they pleased. A sort of seasonal ghost village was born, open to whoever wanted to come, without barriers.
Pirou-Plage’s story took another interesting twist when it started to attract artists in the 2000s. Street artists, painters, photographers, and filmmakers adopted the abandoned resort, and for the first time its houses were lively. In 2014, some Pirou inhabitants were featured in projects led by the famous French photographer and street artist JR, and filmmaker Agnès Varda. Word of mouth and media coverage spread the news: Pirou-Plage had become a cool place to go.
But not for long. After years of legal battles, the local authorities have finally won the land back and are ready to put it to other use. “First of all, we’ll board up the village as it’s dangerous—there is asbestos and tripping hazards. Then we’ll demolish it. We don’t want to waste time anymore,” says Noëlle Leforestier, the Mayor of Pirou.
What will happen next? “We are thinking about a mix of houses, shops and businesses—but with a reliable promoter!”
This faint mark on this shard of clay pottery is one of the oldest human fingerprints ever discovered.
Found at an archaeological site in northern Kuwait, it’s approximately 7,300 years old, dating back to the Stone Age. At this same site, archaeologists have also discovered a town, a temple, a cemetery, and other evidence of the community that lived here thousands of years ago, says the director of Kuwait’s National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters.
This fingerprint is the oldest found in this area of the world, but not the oldest ever discovered. Two years ago, a piece of pottery showing a fingerprint was found at a site in Turkey that’s dated back 10,000 years, and in 2004, a scan of a statue that’s at least 25,000 years old uncovered the fingerprint of a child on the clay.
The oldest fingerprints ever found, though, weren't made by humans at all, but by Neanderthals.
On Friday, the sun set for the final time in Barrow, Alaska, as the city plunges into polar darkness for the next two months and, in December, formally changes its name to Utqiaġvik, according to Alaska Dispatch News.
The next dawn in Utqiaġvik will be January 22, 2017, the first sunlight under its new name, an Inupiaq word that the wider area of Barrow has long gone by.
The city of around 4,300 was incorporated in 1958 and originally took its name from nearby Point Barrow, named by a Royal Navy officer in 1825.
The city is the northernmost in the U.S. and each year spends a couple of months in darkness, owing to its position hundreds of miles north of the Arctic Circle, and about 2,000 miles northwest of Seattle.
Residents recently voted to permanently change the town's name to honor indigenous peoples and the area's roots.
Locals seem relaxed about Barrow's final sunset. As ADN reports, the sun "was nowhere to be seen" on Friday, and Qaiyaan Harcharek, a Barrow City Council member who led the drive to change the name, said the event didn't have much of an effect on him.
"I didn't put much thought to it," Harcharek told ADN.
All adventures start—and end—with a story. A good story can inspire us to veer off the beaten path and reach for the unknown. A good story is also the explorer's reward, an opportunity to share and celebrate risks taken and new ground trodden.
With that in mind, we bring you Horizon Line, a podcast series about the truly intrepid. In each episode, Atlas Obscura co-founder Dylan Thuras and associate editor Ella Morton will take turns spotlighting a person who pushed the limits of what was believed to be possible.
Our first episode recounts the surreal tale of S. A. Andrée, a Swedish janitor-turned-patent-clerk-turned-aeronaut, who dreamt of ascending to the North Pole in a hot air balloon. His famed 1897 mission invoked both skepticism and wonder: Alfred Nobel personally funded the journey, while polar explorer Adolphus Greely could only say "let him go, and God be with him.”
Listen to Horizon Line here and be sure to subscribe in iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts from. We would also love your feedback, so be sure to leave a comment and a rating!
Imagine life a thousand years from now. What comes to mind? Colonies on Mars, artificial intelligence that lives alongside humans (or has enslaved us), virtual reality that helps you live whatever life you want (or disconnects you from the world)? The visions might change depending on how optimistic you are about the future of humanity.
But if you’re feeling too lazy to imagine anything right now, worry not! This 2008 map by Rick Meyerowitz provides an illustration of what life could be like in New York in the year 2108. And according to the map, the future is very, very watery.
Meyerowitz's darkly funny map is featured in the book You Are Here: NYC: Mapping the Soul of the City, written by Katharine Harmon and published by Princeton Architectural Press. One of Lampoon Magazine’s most renowned illustrators, Meyerowitz has brought sarcasm and comedy to the lives of Americans for decades with work like the iconic poster for the 1978 film, Animal House.
The Metropolis 2108 shows most of New York City underwater. New Jersey is almost completely gone, except for a tiny stretch of land called West Lido. Some beloved NYC neighborhoods also meet a watery grave: Tribeca becomes Tribewa (Triangle Below Water), SoHo is now Beloho, the Lower East Side is the Lower East Pothole, and Hell’s Kitchen has been replaced by Hell’s Bathtub.
Likewise, the only part of Brooklyn that survives is its downtown, crossed by the Atlantic Ocean Parkway, and renamed Forest City Ratner City after the real-estate company that rents office spaces in the area. The Statue of Liberty, perhaps the most widely recognized symbol of the United States, is gone entirely but for the forearm that continues to hold the torch above the water.
Of course, not everything is bad in this new world. Those who formerly thought the Metropolitan Museum of Art to be too antiquated and boring will in the future be able to enjoy the Met Aquarium, where a happy whale resides. Likewise, the Guggenheim will no longer hold abstract artworks. In fact, it will hold no expositions at all, since it will be a water park.
While concerns arise pertaining to certain perks of modern life we are accustomed to, Meyerowitz has taken the trouble to reassure us of our ability to adapt. Without streets, our beloved La Guardia airport will become Lagoona Airport and employ planes that can land on water. Even more importantly, coffee shops will be replaced by coffee boats that will transit all around the city, and recharge at the coffee tower to keep New Yorkers awake and happy.
Almost the entire landmass left after the great flood is invaded by megastores and retail giants like Whole Mart and Targbucks. Staten Island will be completely dedicated to these commerces, even being renamed “Mega Store Island. And if you want to spend your time in the post-apocalyptic world in luxury, Condo District looks like it has some great views over Lexington Avenue River. Otherwise, head over to The Trickle Downs neighborhood or Snipesland Tax Free Zone, in the present Upper West Side.
Seasons may change, polar caps may melt, but exclusive neighborhoods will apparently persist until the end of time.
Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
In an era where paper is becoming less important than ever, it feels a bit bizarre at this point to go back in time just 35 years ago, when paper was perhaps having its greatest moment of all time.
We were just a few years from the desktop publishing revolution, which expanded the sheer amount of stuff one could put on a page. The ‘zine movement was perhaps at its peak during this time, proving an important way to democratize content for the average person.
And around this time, the copier company Xerox was perhaps at the height of its powers both culturally and within the business world as a whole. And it did it all with a heck of a lot of paper.
It makes sense that its namesake technology was so popular, because the invention, when it first came about, was truly groundbreaking.
“Xerography had practically no foundation in previous scientific work. Chet put together a rather odd lot of phenomena, each of which was relatively obscure in itself and none of which had previously been related in anyone’s thinking,” Clark explained. “The result was the biggest thing in imaging since the coming of photography itself. Furthermore, he did it entirely without the help of a favorable scientific climate.”
The technique, which combined electrically-charged ink (or toner), a slight amount of heat, and a photographic process, helped to change the office environment forever. Attempting to explain this process isn’t easy—just try following along with Carlson’s patent—but the end result made everyone’s lives easier.
(One area that Xerox does not lay claim to on the invention front is the color photocopier. In 1968, 3M beat them to the punch, launching its Color-in-Color device that year. The product required specially-coated paper to allow for the printing of photos. Xerox came out with its own rendition, the Xerox 6500, in 1973, and unlike its workhorse copiers of the era, it could only print four pages a minute. The market for color copiers struggled until the ‘90s.)
Just to give you an idea of how groundbreaking that was, here are just a few examples of the ways that people copied stuff before photocopiers came about:
Carbon paper: Invented at the turn of the 19th century, the ink-and-pigment material made it easy to write on more than one sheet of paper at once, which was at one point useful. It’s still around, but in very limited uses—these days, people who attempt to buy carbon paper are mocked by confused millennials.
Hectographs: Gelatin, which is secretly made of meat, isn’t just a good dessert food; it’s actually a pretty effective medium for making copies. This process involves creating a solid blob of gelatin, writing on a sheet of paper using ink, transferring the ink directly onto the gelatin, and then transferring that same ink onto new sheets of paper by placing them on the gelatin. (Here’s a video in case you’re curious.) Because it’s low-tech and relatively easy to make, it’s still a pretty common crafting technique.
Mimeographs: This system, which had the honor of having been partially invented by Thomas Edison, was one of the most popular ways to make copies before the Xerox came along. Basically, a page of text would be set up as a stencil inside of a metal drum, and users would fill the machine up with ink, then basically turn the drum to put words on the page. The result looked really good, but the process was somewhat complicated, as you had to basically create stencils out of any document you wanted to copy.
Ditto machines: If you went to school in the '70s or '80s, you probably ran into paper copied using one of these devices, which often came in a purplish hue. The devices, also known as spirit duplicators, worked somewhat similarly to the spinning motion of the mimeograph, but with an added touch—alcohol. The end result didn’t use ink, but it did have quite the smell. This scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High doesn’t make sense unless you’re aware of what a ditto machine is.
Photostat machines: Perhaps the closest thing to a modern Xerox machine, these machines relied on literally taking photographs of sheets of paper, creating negatives out of those sheets, then reprinting them. It basically combined the camera and darkroom into a single machine. The machines were large and the process relatively slow, but unlike some of the other processes listed, it wasn’t destructive: Once a single negative was created, an infinite number of copies could be made. Like Xerox, Photostat became so popular that the term was genericized. Rectigraph, one of the Photostat’s largest competitors, eventually formed the bones of the modern Xerox company.
It wasn’t just offices who loved photocopiers, either. Just ask Andy Warhol.
Warhol likely was the first person to think that putting his face onto a photocopier was a good idea. In 1969, the pop artist walked into the art-supply store at the School of Visual Arts in New York and saw an early Xerox-style photostat machine that printed to photographic paper.
He was friendly with the owner of the store, Donald Havenick, so he tried to convince Havenick to let him mess around with the machine. Havenick warned that the bulbs were hot, but that didn’t deter either Warhol or superstar Brigid Berlin, who also got in on the photocopying fun. That led to the self-portrait of Warhol above, which has been widelyimitated by people screwing around with photocopiers ever since.
“Back in 1969, after showing the piece to my wife, she said it looked like death!” Havenick told Artnet of the work in 2012. “She thought it was just too morbid to hang in our apartment—until now.“
It was just one tool for Warhol, who had spent a lot of time perfecting his skills with related techniques like silkscreens, printmaking, and photography. But the fact that his first instinct upon seeing a photocopier was to shove his face into it highlights just how innovative the photocopier had the potential to become for the art world.
Within a few years of Warhol’s face finding a new self-portrait strategy, the zine movement helped crystalize the importance of photocopying as a form of creativity. Punk 'zines like Sniffin’ Glue gained reach and influence thanks to copying machines, which made good stand-ins for Gutenberg presses.
Some zines made for particularly interesting art. Destroy All Monsters, a proto-punk band out of Ann Arbor, Michigan, built its early zines out of a wide variety of different copying techniques—from mimeographs to color Xerox copies. The band, which at one point included Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton, has remained fairly influential, but in recent years, it’s the band’s art that’s stood out, as both a subject of gallery showings and through a reprinted version of the band’s zine.
Part of the reason the band’s zine was so vibrant was because of the group’s proximity to the University of Michigan. That helped the band keep the costs down.
"Access to Xerox and mimeograph machines came through the school; some guy we knew worked in the art department and University of Michigan store. We could work all night and we didn’t have to pay,” Niagara, the band’s singer, explained in a 2011 interview.
Soon, Xeroxes would find their way to the hands of New York’s art scene. Before Jean-Michel Basquiat fully embraced painting, he was selling color Xeroxes of his artwork to Andy Warhol in the early ‘80s. Before Keith Haring embraced the world of his iconography, he was cutting up newspapers and creating his own shocking headlines, which he would then Xerox.
Perhaps the peak of what a Xerox machine could do came about in the early '90s, when director and visual artist Chel White created an elaborate three-minute animated short out of heaps of photocopies, a few tinted pieces of plastic, and a lot of faces.
Like retro computers nowadays, the process of photocopying in the '60s, '70s, and '80s carried an air of novelty in the art world, one that added possibilities rather than limits to what art could be.
Chester Carlson’s revolutionary approach to photocopying obviously had a lot more practical uses than simply printing zines—which is why you see them, or their competitors at least, in offices everywhere around the globe.
Though the start of the Middle Ages in Europe is generally considered to coincide with the fall of Rome around 500 AD, in many ways the medieval era in London truly began some time later: on Christmas Day in 1066, to be precise.
On that famous day the Duke of Normandy, aka William the Conquerer, defeated the Anglo-Saxon king in the Norman invasion and was crowned king of a newly unified England. William I’s coronation at Westminster Abbey—at the time, shiny and new—marked the beginning of a new period in the City of London. In the years that followed some of the city’s most iconic medieval landmarks were built, among them the Tower of London, the most famous incarnation of London Bridge, and Westminster Palace, which became the center of the feudal system of government.
Though much of Roman and Anglo-Saxon London has been lost, these medieval structures still attract tourists millennia later. And if you look closely, there are other, lesser-known remnants of this darker period in history that can be found throughout the city. Here are eight hidden places are must-see stops on a history lover’s tour of medieval London.
The River Fleet was a part of London life before London was even London. The largest of the city’s mysterious subterranean rivers, this tributary of the Thames predates even the Anglo-Saxons, and was a major river used by the Romans.
As London grew in industry and population during the Middle Ages, the river became increasingly choked and polluted. Despite attempts to fix this, the canal-cum-open-sewer became an embarrassment and was finally bricked over in the 18th and 19th centuries. It lay buried and forgotten for 250 years until it was recently rediscovered, but the river has never stopped running, rushing unseen, just beneath the sidewalks of London.
Post-medieval London was a place of decency, civility, and strong religious beliefs. But the post-medieval suburbs of London were another story, rife with prostitution, disease and mass burials in Cross Bones Graveyard. This south London graveyard became known as the “single-woman’s” cemetery because of its high concentration of sex worker graves. Since women of ill-repute could not be given a Christian burial, Cross Bones became an unofficial dumping ground for them and other poor people living in squalor outside of London.
Today, the horrors of the cemetery are recognized and remembered. The red fence outside the graveyard is densely decorated with tributes in the form of flowers and ribbons and the names of those buried without ceremony.
A few facts can be confirmed about the Knights of Templar. We know that a group of pilgrims traveled to Jerusalem in 1119, and some of them were armed and followed a strict, religiously inspired code. Over time the Knights grew in number and prestige. In 1185 the Temple Church in central London was consecrated, characterized by its distinct round nave. But by the late 1200s, the Crusades weren't going so well and King Philip IV of France had turned against the order, causing their clout to wane. The group was forcibly disbanded by the Pope in 1312, their land seized by the Crown. King Edward II used the land and buildings for law colleges that developed into the present-day Inns of Court.
Housed behind an iron grill in Cannon Street, this legendary stone of unknown origin stirs up all kinds of mystique and intrigue.
The earliest written reference to the London Stone is in a book belonging to King Athelstan in the early 10th century, and it was used as a common transportation landmark in the 12th century. Historic texts suggest it was actually a central marker from which all distances were measured back in Roman times. It is also sometimes called the Stone of Brutus, referring to the mythical Trojan founder of London.
Although there are no references that suggest that the stone had any symbolic authority, in 1450 Jake Cade, leader of a rebellion against Henry VI, struck his sword against it and declared himself “Lord of the City.” In the 15th century, the stone was a common place for political meetings. The Lord Mayor of London would strike the stone with a staff each year as a proclamation of authority.
Operating from 1144 to 1780, The Clink may be the oldest prison in England. The former penitentiary now houses a museum dedicated to its criminal past, built on the actual site of the ancient lock-up whose name became worldwide shorthand for “jail.”
The Clink Museum offers a number of arresting (pun intended) educational and interactive activities. In many ways, it’s more of a dark historical funhouse than a stoic museum, but the long history of the clink it was built upon adds a gravitas that is undeniable.
Founded in 675, All Hallows-by-the-Tower is an ancient church steeped in history. Samuel Pepys watched the great fire of London from its spire, noting “the saddest sight of desolation.” John Quincy Adams was married here. Due to its close proximity to the Tower of London, most of the beheaded victims of the Tower’s executions were buried here. The pub next to the church is suitably called the “Hung, Drawn, and Quartered.”
But hidden away in the crypt below the church is a peculiar artifact: the original crow’s nest from the ship Quest, which was the vessel that was fielded on Sir Ernest Shackleton’s final voyage. Hardly known about or visited, it is all that remains of the legend's sunken ship.
Located within the oldest hospital in London, Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital Pathology Museum, a collection dedicated to the treatment of disease, holds specimens from the institution’s long history. The collection was organized by Victorian-era St. Bart's surgeon and pathologist James Paget, best known for his identification of the bone disease now known as Paget’s Disease. However the hospital it's housed in was founded back in 1123, and was given to the city of London in 1543.
The St. Olave Hart Street church is London in miniature—history as a kind of layer cake, boom piled on bust, war piled on plague. With its rich medieval history, it is one of London’s hidden treasures, and the resting place of many luminaries.
While the records of this small city church only stretch back to the 13th century, legend has it that it was built on the site of the Battle of London Bridge as far back as 1014. If you descend into the crypt, you'll find a well where, it is thought, King Olaf II of Norway rallied his troops to help drive the Vikings out of London.
As the city became a center of trade in the 15th and 16th centuries, the church flourished. As the church was next to the home of 16th-century royal spymaster, Francis Walsingham, many of Queen Elizabeth I’s spies are said to have worshipped here, and at least two are buried in the church.
The Hi-Lo Diner has lived in more U.S. cities than most of its patrons. Made in 1957 in a New Jersey warehouse owned by an Italian immigrant, this classic diner—then called the Venus Diner—lived for half a century outside Pittsburgh before going dark in 2009. Vacant but full of potential, the diner lay fallow for years.
Now, the old Venus Diner has reopened in Minneapolis, more than 800 miles away. Along with its new home, it’s gotten a facelift, a new name (the Hi-Lo Diner, shorthand for two nearby neighborhoods), and a bit of TLC from a history buff who’s devoted his life to rehabilitating old greasy spoons.
Over the past three decades, Steve Harwin, who owns Diversified Diners in Akron, Ohio, has refurbished and tricked out old diners and turned them over to new owners who want to give them new lives. Harwin, who hates corporations and chain restaurants, has devoted himself to the retro local restaurant instead; he’s completely restored around 20 diners, devoting between seven months to two years per project.
Harwin first started flipping diners after discovering that the late-night fry-cooking establishments of America transfixed consumers abroad. Harwin grew up in Cleveland but spent much of his childhood in Europe; his mother was French, and he speaks English and French fluently, German proficiently, and some Spanish and Italian (“I’d make Spanish mistakes in Italy, and Italian mistakes in Spain”).
During a semester abroad on a ship (“under the pretext of learning”) while studying at Menlo College in Palo Alto, he discovered a couple of things: motorcycles were very cheap in London, and the diner is to the U.S. what the pub is to England or the bistro is to France. While most students bought T-shirts in London, Harwin hauled a bike—and a business idea to pursue years later—onto the ship deck.
Back in the U.S., Harwin continued refurbishing motorcycles and then cars, starting with a beat-up Austin-Healey.
“I brought it home, and my family was very concerned,” he says. “It looked like such a piece of trash. When I got done with it, it won a car show. Then, I was a genius.”
But he also kept thinking about applying those rehabilitation skills to diners. He started window-shopping, and in Pennsylvania, he found one for sale. “I bought it, which was probably the biggest mistake, because I really didn't know what the hell I was doing,” he says.
When Harwin first became seriously interested in flipping diners, he road tripped across the U.S., canvassing the diner scene. Most of the diners were concentrated in the Northeast, as a handful of companies, including Fodero, Silk City, and Jerry O’Mahony, had mass-produced classic diners, some of them incentivized by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal economic programs after World War II. While the 1950s became the heyday for diners, they weren’t a universal experience. In some regions, the idea of sitting elbow-to-elbow with strangers was considered outlandish. Rumor had it that one owner tried operating a diner in North or South Dakota, and the concept flopped. The diner “was treated like a UFO,” Harwin says.
During his hunt for the first 10 small diners, he’d drop into post offices or police stations to tap into community lore. “It was like looking for a lost kid.” As his lot grew, he cut a deal with the city that he wouldn’t keep more than eight; lately, he has only a few for sale.
“I told them, if I ever have more than eight, they should lock me up,” Harwin said.
Since 1987, Harwin has consulted for or sold parts to countless private owners or developers—everyone from man cave enthusiasts (“I can’t tell you how much diner stuff I’ve sold to people for their basements and garages”) to Hollywood production companies. One of his diners went to Oslo, Norway, where its new menu pays homage to its old home; food on offer includes the Brooklyn burger, Southern fried chicken, and an omelet called “The Eastwood” (“as in Clint,” the menu notes). At an Ohio aviation museum, the Tin Goose Diner from Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, is a recent spectacle, and Harwin has recently teamed up with a high-rolling developer in Buffalo, New York, to transplant a diner, made in Massachusetts, from Rochester into a blossoming section of the city.
“He’s probably one of the premiere diner restorers in the country right now,” says Larry Cultrera, an author in Boston who has chronicled diners on his “Diner Hotline” blog for a decade. “He’ll take it right down to the skeleton and completely rebuild it. A lot of diners have survived because of him.”
Vintage diner restoration is no ice cream sundae. Before a crane dropped Hi-Lo diner, piece by piece, in the Twin Cities, it was a massive headache. “It’s not rocket science, but there are no books,” Harwin says. He usually starts by gutting, finding parts to match the retro aesthetic—there’s only one go-to vendor for classic, porcelain enamel panels, so imagine the price—and then reassembling the diner and shipping it to a new home. There it must be permitted, zoned, and accessible to meet modern standards. And for dessert, new owners receive a binder of carefully curated records, photos, and anecdotes of the business they’ve just resurrected—built-in talking points for hungry patrons.
The menu for the new Hi-Lo Diner includes trendy cocktails (#AmIRite-O Sour and Alexander Hamilton) and pulled pork sandwiched between fried dough (Notorious P.I.G.), and the restaurant draws visitors including Adele. But restoring the diner was no picnic, says Harwin. “I lost a ton of money on that,” Harwin says of the Venus Diner project. “It was deceptively nice looking when I bought it, but underneath, it ended up being so much more than that… Everyone would run the other way. It looks like a disaster.”
In the end, the Hi-Lo wasn’t a disaster—but that’s a testament to Harwin’s expertise and thoroughness. “I underestimated what I had to do, but as I got into it, I started learning a lot of things,” he says. “You can't cut corners. It’s just not the way to do it.” His meticulous style helps ensure that people know he’s the one to call, even if he doesn’t publicly list his phone number.
Former owners and new owners alike appreciate Harwin’s work. “Steve was really picky about what we chose,” says Jeff Castree, who with his wife Vonnie owns the Broadway Diner, formerly Rosie’s Diner, in Baraboo, Wisconsin.
The diner opened in 2012 in a historic part of town, and serves nearly 2,000 people a week. The owners received financial support from the city, and the Broadway Diner—though new in town —sits on the historic registry. Part of Jeff Castree’s dream was to cook in front of customers, which became a matter of handiwork for Harwin—along with an expanded vestibule to keep waiting guests warm during the icy winters.
Once, a gaggle of older women passing through Wisconsin stopped for a meal, and one said she was from Groton, Connecticut, where the diner once lived—first as “Twin Bridge Diner,” and then under new ownership, as “Rosie’s.”
“Have you been to Rosie’s Diner?” Castree asked. “Well, you’re eating here again.”
Denise Worthy, a military veteran who worked in the Ohio prison system for 12 years before quitting to run her family’s restaurant, has also met some of her new diner’s old patrons. Harwin found Worthy a stainless steel diner car, with sunburst accents and its original booths, which she attached to Nancy's, the Cleveland restaurant founded by her parents.
Before it moved to Ohio, the diner lived in Boston, as “The Big Dig Diner,” named after a transportation project that dug tunnels across the city. In Boston, the diner opened in 1998 to help troubled teens rebuild their lives. After the Big Dig became part of Nancy’s, the previous owner and some regular patrons tracked it down to Cleveland and visited. The past was commemorated with a double-decker handheld called “The Big Dig Burger.”
Vintage diners have weathered long journeys and decades of history, but Harwin is not trying to mask their scars. For him, the job is a fair amount of reconciling the old with the new. “I'm a preservationist, and I'm trying to do historic preservation,” he says. “I would find ways to make a diner look totally authentic and original, but get the benefits of better, formal efficiencies.”
Their survival and story, he recognizes, begins when his work is done. “A diner has to have an owner’s personality,” he says. “It can't be anything else.”
You've likely heard of the theremin, an early electronic synth instrument once intended to replace the violin that has now been relegated to the sphere of novelty. You've also likely heard of the matryoshka, the Russian nesting doll. But have you heard of the Matryomin?
It's the invention of Masami Takeuchi, who mastered the theremin in Russia, where the instrument was invented by Léon Theremin in 1920. He spread the word of the theremin by teaching and performing in Japan, eventually establishing a touring ensemble. To bring a little innovation and ingenuity to his theremin group, Takeuchi placed the frequency antenna inside a Russian nesting doll. Thus the Matryomin was born.
In this video, 167 matryominists play Beethoven's Symphony No. 9. As if that weren't peculiar enough, after the first movement the ensemble breaks it down into a bluesy boogie-woogie rendition of the famous melody, topped off with a final, warbling "wooo!"
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 team of archaeologists excavating the tomb of a powerful Italian family has found centuries-old dentures—five human teeth held together with a clever gold plate.
"We couldn't find the corresponding jaw, so we do not know who the appliance belonged to," the lead archaeologist, Simona Minozzi, told Seeker.
Minozzi’s team has been working at the monastery of San Francesco, in Lucca, Italy, a Tuscan city that dates back to the Etruscans. The excavations included the tombs of the Guinigi family, one of the city’s most famous and powerful. The tomb contains the remains about 100 people, buried there over the course of time, so it’s not possible to precisely date the dentures from the context in which they were found.
The dentures include five teeth—three incisors and two canines—connected by golden pins to a golden band. The ends of the device are curled to fit around neighboring teeth; the whole thing would likely have been held in place by string, Seeker reports.
Devices like this one are described in writing, but this is the first archaeological find demonstrating the use of the technology. Whoever it belonged to, they got good use out of it: the archaeologists’ analysis of deposits on the dentures show that the person wore it for many years.
In the world of fine dining, Auguste Escoffier has had a greater influence than perhaps any other chef in history. When his canonical cookbook, Le Guide Culinaire, was published in 1903, it set the standard for fancy food, moving systematically through stocks, sauces, aspic jellies, omelets, consommés, sweetbreads, rabbits, truffles, canapés, and every other fussy French preparation imaginable. More than a century later, his recipes still guide ambitious cooks: anyone who’s felt it necessary to learn to make the five “mother sauces” can blame Escoffier.
But while even today fancy chefs refer to Le Guide Culinaire as a foundational text, a cookbook Escoffier wrote in 1911 has fallen into complete obscurity. That year, the famous French chef took on the most American of food challenges—Thanksgiving. He got it almost entirely wrong.
Escoffier’s Thanksgiving Cookbook was published as a supplement to the Sunday edition of a Hearst paper named, most patriotically, The American. The cookbook was 32 pages of commentary and recipes from Escoffier, “the Greatest of French Chefs,” who had supposedly selected dishes suited for American tastes.
The book was intended to double as a guide for home cooks preparing a Thanksgiving meal and an intro to French cooking. Escoffier did include a suggested menu for a multi-course Thanksgiving meal. Strangely, though, it did not have any of the dishes we’d now associate with Thanksgiving—no turkey, no mashed or sweet potatoes, no stuffing, no gravy, no green beans or brussels sprouts, no squash of any kind, no cranberry sauce, and no pumpkin pie.
Instead, in the cookbook, Escoffier offered 12 separate recipes for rabbit, a chapter on ragouts that featured only mutton, recipes for tomato sauce and macaroni; “some new ways for preparing tomatoes” including “Tomatoes à la Americaine” (basically tomatoes sliced and sprinkled with salt, pepper, vinegar and oil); crawfish recipes and tips on making cream soups.
His suggested Thanksgiving menu was based on a meal he’d had in Perigueux, a town in southwestern France known for its truffles. It included an omelette of potatoes and bacon, veal sweetbreads with spinach, a roast saddle of lamb, celery salad, sautéed mushrooms, and partridge terrine. There was only one dish mentioned in the whole cookbook that an American might recognize as Thanksgiving fare: a pie of “carameled apples,” for which no recipe was given.
Thanksgiving is an invented holiday, first officially established by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 and moved to its current position on the calendar by Franklin D. Roosevelt. By 1911, Thanksgiving menus usually contained the foods we think of as standard Thanksgiving dishes—turkey, cranberry sauce, and all the rest—but weren’t quite as codified as they are today.
One menu published in 1911, for instance, included roasted stuffed turkey, brown gravy, sweet potatoes, cranberry conserve, and pumpkin pie, but also featured oysters with sherry, chicken pie, and something called “puritan pudding.” That same year, a Boston Globe columnist engineered a “frugal” Thanksgiving menu featuring potato soup, dried herring, oatmeal mush, bread pudding, and corned beef hash. It wasn’t until World War II, when Norman Rockwell put a giant turkey at the center of his painting "Freedom from Want," that the Thanksgiving menu in its current form was truly mythologized.
Even with some flexibility in the Thanksgiving menu, though, French food wasn’t an obvious fit for the most self-consciously American of all American holidays. Americans had inherited a suspicion of French cuisine from their British forebearers (who took some lessons from the French but did not adopt their willingness to make the most of offal or of animals like snails and frogs). Among elite Americans, from Thomas Jefferson onward, French cooking had cachet, but that taste never became popular.
“By the turn of the 20th century, French food would still have been really elite,” says Jennifer Jensen Wallach, associate professor at University of North Texas and the author of How America Eats.“There still wasn’t an extensive dining culture, but to the extent that it existed, it was French. The menus were French and designed to be exclusionary and elite. It’s not the kind of food Americans would have identified with.”
To his credit, Escoffier seemed to understand that Americans didn’t think of French cooking as food for average people. In his Thanksgiving cookbook, he took pains to explain that the recipes he had picked were economical and representative of French household cooking, not fancy restaurant food. He focused on rabbit because of its low price, “especially suited to families where economy is important.” He emphasized that ragout, in France, was a “respectable dish in domestic cookery,” and that pot-au-feu was a cost-effective meal. He lamented that Americans didn’t make better use of all their very good vegetables but chose to include the tomato because “its moderate price makes it accessible to all purses.”
Escoffier’s best efforts to speak to the American masses, though, did not land. “The emphasis on game and on organ meat would have been typical of French lower middle class food,” and the idea of making the most of all foods, says Andrew Haley, a historian at the University of Southern Mississippi. Around this same time, American reformers were advocating for a similar reform of cooking among poor Americans. But lower class Americans were not interested in carefully preparing cheaper cuts of meat to get the most value out from them.
“I don’t think Escoffier’s attempt to reach out would have been well received, because those efforts by Americans to do the same thing were not well received. They were seen as patronizing,” says Haley. “Americans wanted to buy better cuts of meat when they could afford them.”
In 1911, too, American food culture was slowly changing. Middle class Americans were starting to dine out more but, as Haley explains in his book, Turning the Tables, the way they asserted their identity was by rejecting French food in favor of American food. Escoffier had come to America in 1910 to oversee the expansion of the Ritz-Carlton restaurant in New York, but by then the Waldorf-Astoria was already serving its more Americanized version of fancy food, including the famous Waldorf salad.
Escoffier’s attitude towards Americans and their food didn't do him any favors. He praises American ingredients but doesn’t seem to think much of American diners or cooks. “Americans have an abundance of good, cheap vegetables at their command, and they do not make a sufficient use of them or prepare them in as many attractive ways as would be possible,” he writes. He doesn’t understand why Americans aren’t more interested in crawfish, either. “Probably if the virtues of bisque of crawfish were thoroughly understood, it would become as popular in America as in France,” he writes.
His instincts in this case are misplaced, though. He’s so proud of the Thanksgiving menu he put together and so confident of it! He writes, of the meal he had in Perigueux, “The midday repast to which I was entertained was remarkable as an example of the best French household cooking, and I feel sure that it will interest my American readers as a possible menu for Thanksgiving Day.”
He was probably right about that first part—anyone looking for a French menu for a fancy feast might consider this one. But, as much as his influence was felt in the rest of food world, Escoffier’s attempt at creating an American meal had zero influence on Thanksgiving.
Over the years, Christmas-themed amusement parks have popped up all across the globe (and crumbled right back down), but to this day there is is only one theme park that celebrates the American Thanksgiving holiday nearly all year. Just not on Thanksgiving.
Holiday World, in the town of Santa Claus, Indiana (yes, that's its real name), is the world’s only holiday-themed amusement park. It features a section devoted exclusively to Thanksgiving, in which visitors can feast on turkey dinner, then try to keep that dinner down while zooming around a pilgrim-themed roller coaster track.
But it wasn't always that way. The park was founded by wealthy businessman Louis Koch in 1946 as Santa Claus Land, a Christmas-themed amusement park featuring a year-round Santa Claus, children's rides, and a toy shop. Over the decades the number of attractions grew, but it wasn't until the 1980s that the owners started looking past Christmas. In 1984, the park was rechristened Holiday World and two new themed sections were added to the park, celebrating Halloween and the Fourth of July.
As the only theme park in the world to focus exclusively on the theme of holidays, Holiday World continued to thrive. Then in 2006, on the park’s 60th anniversary, they added the latest section of the park: Thanksgiving.
“It was quite the controversy back in 2005,” says Paula Werne, Director of Communications for Holiday World. “We knew we were going to be adding a new holiday to Holiday World in 2006. And there were all too many holidays put out there. I personally wanted Valentine’s Day, if I may tell you that. But my powers of persuasion failed me this one time.”
In the end, the park owners decided to theme the new section after Thanksgiving because it represented a time when families come together, and as a family owned and operated park, it made sense—even if the theming possibilities were a bit limited.
The most recognizably Thanksgiving-y parts of the park are probably the rustic colonial architectural flourishes that litter the entire section, and the Plymouth Rock Cafe, where full turkey dinners are offered throughout the year. “People really enjoy that they can eat Thanksgiving dinner in July,” says Werne.
Fitting thrilling rides into the Thanksgiving theme is a bit tricker. At its unveiling, the Thanksgiving section of the park was anchored by a massive new wooden roller coaster known as The Voyage. Over a mile long, the coaster continues to win awards and accolades nearly every year, although these have to do with the coaster’s huge drops and freefalls, and not its pilgrims-on-The-Mayflower theme.
In 2015, another steel roller coaster was added to the Thanksgiving section. Called the Thunderbird, it needed a little finessing to fit the theme. “We had to kind of create our own legend to more or less pull together the pilgrims’ ride over in The Mayflower to the thunderbird helping them find their way,” says Werne. The mix of feasting and lurching around also makes for strange bedfellows. “It’s funny that the most thrilling of our rides are located [in the same section] as our heaviest meals,” she says.
Other rides in the Thanksgiving land include a tilt-a-whirl in which the passenger buckets are shaped like turkeys, and a dark ride where guests round up neon turkeys with infrared “turkey callers.” There is also a swinging boat ride, called The Mayflower, that the Holiday World website admits is, “not exactly the Atlantic Ocean, but that pop of airtime will give a hint of what the Pilgrims experienced on their heroic voyage long ago.”
Surprisingly, Holiday World is closed from November through March, meaning it is shut on half of the holidays that it celebrates. This dissonance hasn’t gone unnoticed. “We catch a lot of heat," says Werne. "‘Why aren’t you open at Christmas time?’”
Yet people seem to love the turkey-filled section of the park as much as the Halloween or Christmas sections, according to Werne. So, why don’t more amusement parks embrace a love of Thanksgiving?
According to Jim Futrell, historian at the National Amusement Park Historical Association, it’s all about business. “If you look at parks that are open year round, or through the end of the year, logistically, it’s just very difficult to do,” he says. “There really isn’t a whole lot of time to do anything specifically Thanksgiving-themed.”
Halloween and Christmas may be much more marketable holidays, but, as Holiday World proves, there is a demand out there for turkey-shaped tilt-a-whirls.
When a loved one died in parts of England, Scotland, or Wales in the 18th and 19th centuries, the family would grieve, place bread on the chest of the deceased, and call for a man to sit in front of the body. The family of the deceased watched on as this man, the local professional sin eater, absorbed the sins of the departed’s soul.
The family who hired the sin eater believed that the bread literally soaked up their loved one’s sins; once it was eaten, all the misdeeds were passed on to the hired hand. Once the process was complete, the sin eater’s own soul was heavy with the ill deeds of countless men and women from his village or town.
The sin eater paid a high price to help others drift smoothly into the afterlife: the coin he was given was worth a mere four English pence, the equivalent of a few U.S. dollars today. Usually, the only people who would dare risk their immortal being during such a religious era were the very poor, whose desire for a little bread and drink carried them along.
As early as the 1680s this morbid local feast was written of as an “old Custom at funerals,” and it survived into the early 20th century. According to Brand's Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, first published in 1813, the sin eater “sat down facing the door; they then gave him a groat, which he put in his pocket; a crust of bread, which he ate; and a full bowl of ale, which he drank oft' at a draught; after this, getting up from his stool, he pronounced, with a composed gesture, 'the ease and rest of the soul departed, for which he would pawn his own soul.”
Many funerals in the Welsh county of Monmouthshire included a professional sin eater, author Catherine Sinclair notes her 1838 travelogue, Hill and Valley. Her description of the job gets harsh when she adds that the men “who undertook so daring an imposture must all have been infidels, willing, apparently, like Esau, to sell their birthright for a mess of pottage.” To those who believed in the powers of this ritual, sin eaters were doing a necessary but distasteful job, literally becoming a bit more evil as they performed their task.
Sin eating had experienced a decline by the time Sinclair observed the practice in Wales, but the last recorded sin eater, Richard Munslow, briefly brought the custom back in the late 19th century. In the travel guide Slow Travel Shropshire, Marie Kreft explains that Munslow revived the practice not because of desperation, but due to sadness. Munslow was a successful farmer who suffered the loss of four children, three of whom passed away within one week. It’s speculated that this tragedy drove him to practice the sin eating trade, at first as a form of grieving, to help his children on into the afterlife.
The god-fearing villagers who hired sin eaters in the profession’s heyday, however, wanted to skirt the consequences of their sins by giving them to someone else, and adapted their own morals to accommodate the practice. Because of the religious cultural climate of the time, people took the idea of sin seriously, and were eager to reach heaven free from their misdeeds. They needed a sin eater to come around every once and awhile, but most of the time being a sin eater meant you were homeless and a social pariah. Nevertheless, sin eaters in the U.K. were expected to attend funerals and wakes when they were notified of a local death.
The origin of sin eating is elusive, but the custom may have grown from older religious traditions. Historically, scholars believed it came from pagan traditions, but in Death, Dissection and the Destitute, Ruth Richardson writes of a medieval custom that she thinks may have developed into sin eating; before a funeral, nobles gave food to the poor in exchange for prayers on behalf of their recently deceased.
In the 18th century, rituals involving symbolic breads, which represented the souls of the dead, were fairly common and may connect to sin eating, too. Antiquarian Henry Curzon wrote in 1712 that villagers in the English county of Herefordshire hired “poor people to take on them the Sins of the Deceased,” yet also piled cakes in “high heaps” on tables to honor their dead loved ones for the Catholic holiday All Souls’ Day, on November 2.
In her essay The Gift of Suffering, Ingrid Harris says Protestant Christian religions may have used sin eating to regain the lost sacraments from their Catholic roots; many sin eaters listened to confessions from grieving families. Sin eating was not officially supported by the Church, however, and Richardson argues that using a sin eater bestowed human power over spiritual events, which was considered heresy.
Calling a sin eater might also have meant that the local priest, who normally would coax the soul’s entry to heaven and perform a funeral ceremony alone, was overlooked. Over time, fewer sin eaters took on the mantle, restoring priests to the role. By the early 20th century, the sin eating profession had mostly died out.
Sin eaters may have stopped plying their trade, but according to Jane Aaron’s book Welsh Gothic, they continued to eat sins in literature, and were used to explore various forms of Welsh identity; in texts the sin eaters were always reviled. A narrative poem from 1920 featured a sin eater called Morgan who is described as “gaunt, ghastly, lean and miserably poor,” and was later found dead as if struck from a bolt of lightning. In the United States, the concept of sin eating made its way to communities in Appalachia, surviving as legends about nomads who roamed the countryside, looking to absorb dark and powerful sins.
When the last known sin eater in the U.K., Richard Munslow, died in 1906, he was probably one of the first in his profession to be commemorated with a ceremony and funeral of his own, which was carried out in 2010 in Ratlinghope. While it’s unlikely that anyone was able to atone for the heavy burden of his sins with a bready meal, at least he was finally served something he and many other sin eaters deserved more—recognition.
Empress José Sarria knelt by his husband’s grave clad in an old-fashioned black petticoat, dress, and widow’s veil. Dark gloves ran the length of his arms; elaborate jewelry hugged his neck and wrists. Around him, fellow mourners who had come to know Sarria through his performances and his political activism wore a peculiar mix of black and colorful drag clothes, and in the back, a small marching band dressed in bright red.
The scene was always the same: every year from 1976 until his death in 2013, Sarria led a procession of hundreds of gay and trans San Franciscans to the grave of Joshua Norton, an 1850s merchant who, after going bankrupt and disappearing from public view, returned in 1859 in dramatic fashion—he strut into the offices of a local newspaper wearing a plumed hat and a military coat and declared himself emperor of the entire United States. Around the grave of this eccentric San Franciscan, Sarria and his devotees would mourn, laugh, and discuss the state of their community. A gay and lesbian choral group sang; people sat and watched in chairs.
Empress José Sarria and Emperor Joshua Norton, of course, never actually wed—the timeline makes that impossible. Norton died in 1880. Sarria began making his pilgrimages almost a century later. The fake marriage was a kind of inside joke, part of Sarria’s flavor for the outlandish. A trailblazer himself, Sarria perhaps saw a kindred spirit in Norton’s brand of fearless outcast.
Since the AIDS epidemic, Sarria’s annual pilgrimages to his husband’s cemetery took on a new meaning: more than just an ironic celebration of Emperor Joshua Norton, they became a way for gay and trans San Franciscans to mourn their dead and to agitate for socio-political change.
The journalist Michael R. Gorman recounted a pilgrimage he attended in the early 1990s in his book The Empress Is a Man. At the time, the AIDS epidemic was reaching new heights, and much of the ceremony was spent grieving the fallen. At one point, a drag queen stepped forward clutching the ashes of one of her friends. She dumped it by Norton’s grave, then began dancing a scene from The Nutcracker, her dress sweeping the remains into the air. The ashes, which were mixed with glitter, sparkled in the sunlight. Everyone was crying.
The pilgrimage to Norton’s grave became a necessary catharsis for a community long marginalized, led by a man—José Sarria—who, decades earlier, had transformed the very foundation on which it rested.
The bulletin was part of a bold campaign by the newly formed League for Civil Education to consolidate the political power of San Francisco’s LGBT minority. At the time, gay and trans San Franciscans were subject to constant abuse. The legacy of the McCarthy era had intensified public animosity toward the queer community, whose members were labeled anti-American “subversives” linked to communism and espionage. Public outcry soon demanded that queer people be weeded out—a mandate the San Francisco police embraced.
Spurred on by editorials like the one in the San Francisco Examiner urging that someone "drive [gays] out of the city,” police in the 1950s launched campaigns of harassment against suspected homosexuals. They sent attractive undercover officers into gay bars, arresting anyone who flirted with them. They charged customers for being “inmates of a disorderly house,” a bogus crime they employed when they wanted to make an arrest, then printed the names of those gay arrestees in the local newspaper and called their employers, in effect ruining their lives.
Police also frequented gay cruising spots, confiscated gay and lesbian pulp novels, and—at one point—raided a local theater during a showing of a short movie about a young homosexual, arresting the manager and taking away the film and projector. By 1961, 40 to 60 homosexuals per week were charged with some crime relating to their sexuality, and over a dozen gay bars had been shut down.
The city’s queer population, meanwhile, could do little to defend itself. Because so many residents remained closeted, few spoke out against the constant police harassment. The queer community also lacked a unified mouthpiece—the only gay organizations that existed, like the Mattachine Society, were mostly decentralized and non-confrontational, which meant the community had few ways of voicing its anger.
The League for Civil Education aimed to change that. By registering gay and trans people to vote, they reasoned, they could create a powerful queer voting bloc, one that local politicians would have no choice but to listen to. They were trying to do something that had never been done before—to galvanize gays into politics, in effect scaring city higher-ups into submission. Perhaps, the logic went, those higher-ups would think twice about supporting homophobic harassment campaigns if they knew there was a coalition of voters waiting to punish them for it at the polls.
José Julio Sarria, a co-founder of the League for Civil Education, would soon claim that there were 10,000 voting gays in the city, and politicians had better take their needs seriously if they wanted to keep their jobs.
A waiter and performer at a local gay bar, Sarria had become a fixture in San Francisco gay circles, famous not only for the elaborate operas he performed in drag but also for his outspoken activism. Sick of the inaction by gay organizations, he burst onto the scene peddling phrases like “There’s nothing wrong with being gay—the crime is getting caught” and “United we stand, divided they catch us one by one.” Because he’d never been ashamed of his sexuality, he had no qualms about speaking out—his performances railed against both institutionalized homophobia and the queer San Franciscans whom he felt settled for second-class citizenship.
Sarria galvanized queer people to stand up for themselves, for instance telling his audience to fight against the bogus charges the police slapped on them. Previously, the custom had been for arrested gay and trans people to simply plead guilty and pay a fine, for fear that dragging out a court case would out them to their families; but Sarria’s invocations created a backlog of cases, and local judges forced the police to scale down their arrests.
Sarria became especially attuned to the city’s harassment campaigns against the gay community because the bar he worked at and dearly loved, the Black Cat Café, had become one of its major targets.
Since its inception in 1908, the Black Cat Café branded itself “the most popular place in Bohemia,” home to a clientele of vaudeville stars, writers, anarchists, and gays and to a waiting staff clad in ridiculous carnival clothes.
The bar was quickly mythologized in literary circles: it served as a backdrop for Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road, and its customers included John Steinbeck and Allen Ginsberg. Upon his visit, Ginsberg proclaimed it “the greatest gay bar in America.” “Everybody went there, heterosexual and homosexual… All the gay screaming queens would come, the heterosexual gray flannel suit types, longshoremen. All the poets went there.” The Black Cat had cemented its reputation as a gay bar by the mid-1950s, in part because of the immense popularity of José Sarria himself.
Perhaps because of its fame, the Black Cat was subject to constant police scrutiny. First raided in 1949, the bar was added to the Armed Forces’ list of banned businesses. Around this time, the Black Cat’s liquor license was suspended for serving “known homosexuals”; when the California Supreme Court overturned the suspension, the police tried against in 1956, this time revoking the Black Cat’s license on the grounds that it catered to “sexual perverts.” The Black Cat’s lawyer managed to get a stay on the prosecution, but everyone knew it would only last so long.
With the police cracking down, paranoia soon became an essential staple of running a gay bar: to stay open, bars like the Black Cat couldn’t allow same-sex touching, kissing, or hand-holding (permitting such acts would make bars “a resort for sexual perverts” and thus result in a loss of their liquor licenses). Those few that permitted dancing hired bouncers; if someone suspicious came by, the bouncers would flicker the lights and everyone in the bar would switch partners so they appeared to be part of a heterosexual couple.
By 1961, with his campaign to register gay voters underway, Sarria became drained of this routine. He was done sitting idly by and watching the police ruin the lives of innocent people whose only crime was being gay. He also couldn’t help but notice that in the upcoming election, there were five seats open on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
So, shortly after his disastrous meeting with local officials about his proposed gay voting bloc, Sarria took a step no other openly queer person had ever dared to in the history of the United States—he decided to run for public office.
“Watch me,” indeed.
There were a few snags.
First: no one wanted him. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans would let him file to run under their party umbrella; they refused to endorse a homosexual.
Second: almost everyone Sarria talked to was unwilling to sign his petition to get on the ballot; they feared the ostracism that would result from publicly supporting a gay candidate.
To run, all he needed was 35 signatures and a party endorsement—he could get neither.
Third: he didn’t even have a suit to wear. All of his clothes were either drag or casual; he had to convince a friend to lend him something more formal.
He said later: “I ran ... because I saw a need. The only way that the gay community at that time could become forceful was to become political. I don’t care what people say, even one vote will make a difference. If enough people scream, it will make a difference.”
Soon, he began having small successes. He “blackmail[ed]” (his words) 35 friends into signing his candidacy petition, insisting he would spill their secrets if they refused. In order to get on the Democratic ticket, he threatened to sue the party—they eventually relented.
But party officials so badly did not want Sarria to win that, in the final hours before the filing deadline, they recruited 24 more people to run against him.
The day of the deadline, when Sarria submitted his petition, there were five open seats on the Board of Supervisors and only nine candidates; by the end of the day, there were 33 candidates, among them a musician and a garbage collector.
The election netted a record number of candidates, likely because of Sarria’s candidacy. Though city officials scoffed at the idea of an organized gay voting bloc in San Francisco, they were privately terrified by the prospect—and a victory for Sarria would thus throw their careers into jeopardy.
Operating on a meager $500 budget, Sarria bet that his local fame would be enough to win him a seat. No one who saw Sarria could forget him. He was known around San Francisco for his flamboyance: when he needed to make a deposit at the bank, for instance, he would ride in the sidecar of a motorcycle clad in red high heels and bright lipstick for all to see. Later, after winning a drag contest, he would declare himself Empress of San Francisco.
As a proud Latino and native Spanish speaker, Sarria was also able to engage with long-neglected Hispanic voters, appearing on many Spanish-language radio programs throughout the city in order to promote his candidacy. If he won, he would become the first Latino ever elected in San Francisco.
But Sarria’s main campaign arm was the League for Civil Education, which in its first year of existence devoted most of its energy to Sarria. Its publication, the LCE News, dedicated countless pages to coverage of Sarria’s campaign, keeping the local gay community apprised of everything that was unfolding. Sarria and the League’s president, Guy Strait, also passed out flyers, stopped by gay bars to register voters, and—during Sarria’s widely attended performances at the Black Cat—urged audience members to spread the word about the election.
Both Sarria and Strait viewed the campaign as an outgrowth of their push to register gay voters and create a unified voting bloc. After all, what better way to inspire gays to vote than if one of their own was on the ballot?
By spreading the word about Sarria’s candidacy, they were reminding gay, bisexual, and transgender San Franciscans that they were normal, that they should not have to hide, that people like them should be represented in all political bodies across the nation. It was a bold message, to be sure—one that would echo for decades to come.
Born in 1923 to a Colombian mother who had fled her home during a civil war, Sarria was dressing up in girl’s clothing since he was two years old. Both his biological mother and his godmother, who took turns caring for him, found it adorable; often they let him wear girl’s clothes in public. Soon after, he started taking vocal, tap, and ballet lessons. Sarria was always free to be himself, and perhaps this is why for him being gay was never a source of shame.
He grew up speaking both Spanish and English, and in high school he also enrolled in French and German. By the time he graduated, he was nearly fluent in four languages. He dropped out of college once the U.S. entered World War II, quickly finding a position as a translator in the Military Intelligence department. (At 90 pounds and just under five feet tall, Sarria didn’t meet the physical requirements to enter the army—to get in, he flirted with the recruiter, who pulled strings for him.)
Once the military discovered his sexuality, they transferred him to the Cooking and Baking School. Though normally such a discovery would result in an immediate dishonorable discharge, the U.S. during the war was so pressed for bodies that they overlooked it. By the time Sarria left the army in 1945, he’d been promoted to staff sergeant.
He soon returned to college under the GI Bill. His dream was to become a teacher. To make money on the side, he started working part-time as a waiter at the Black Cat, then a bohemian center, donning his signature high heels and singing to customers as he passed out drinks.
One Sunday afternoon, he started belting out a song from the opera Carmen—by the time he finished, the room erupted into applause, and customers began asking why he didn’t perform more often. A star was born.
But in the early 1950s, cops arrested him for “moral charges” at the St. Francis Bar, a popular gay cruising spot. His dream of becoming a teacher thus shattered, Sarria plunged himself further into the world of the Black Cat.
By the end of the decade, he’d dropped out of school, and he was soon putting on four performances a night. His most widely attended were his one-man opera parodies, which became especially popular among the local gay community. Underlying the brash humor and ridiculous costumes was a message of justice and self-love that the gay community, still reeling from constant police harassment, so desperately needed.
Before each opera, the other waiters pushed together dining tables in the Black Cat to form a stage. Then, once the bar fell silent, in stepped José Sarria, clad in red pumps, a tiara, tight black pants, and cherry lipstick. Sometimes he’d wear a scarf or a shawl; sometimes he’d have on an orchid. But he was always lively and unpredictable, interrupting his songs to point to an attractive audience member and say, “Now pay attention, you handsome man. This is very sophisticated stuff. You should learn this. You won’t always be beautiful, you know. You’ll need something to talk about when the plumbing gets rusted.”
Sarria’s repertoire of operas extended beyond 45, and his dresses would change with each one. Because operas were only available to the wealthy, few of Sarria’s viewers were familiar with the original versions, and he therefore tried to express their meanings through clothing. He wore Spanish outfits for Carmen, bouffant dresses for La bohème, and clown clothes for Pagliacci. Rarely did he follow a script. Even his costumes were sometimes ad-libbed—once, he came on stage dressed in window curtains from his house.
Sarria’s most famous production was his modern-day rendition of the French opera Carmen. Set in San Francisco, it featured Sarria as Carmen visiting a popular gay cruising spot; when the police arrived, Carmen ducked behind bushes to avoid the cops. By the time she finally escaped, all of the Black Cat was hollering.
Sarria’s operas became so popular among gay and trans San Franciscans that they developed into a kind of gay news service. Sarria often interrupted his operas to report some new police raid. “A blue fungus has hit the parks,” Sarria once said in reference to a crackdown on park sex. “It does not appear until about 2 a.m. It twinkles like a star. Until this fungus dies, it’s best to stay out of our parks at 2 a.m.”
As his celebrity swelled, Sarria began calling on his queer audience to take more confrontational approaches to police harassment. He railed against the custom of submitting to bogus charges leveled by the police for fear that fighting back would equal being discovered. He pushed queer people, who were at especially high risk for diseases like syphilis and gonorrhea, to visit the Health Department even though they feared the judgment of their doctors. By 1961, after the formation of the League for Civil Education, he also started calling on his audience to register to vote.
In effect, Sarria reminded queer San Franciscans that they had rights—and if they wanted social equality, they needed to start using them.
Sarria also found ways to undermine the police. Whenever he spotted an undercover officer in the Black Cat, for instance, he called them out from the stage so that everyone in the bar would know to avoid them. And when law enforcement in San Francisco began enforcing an obscure law that banned the “impersonation” of the opposite sex “with the intent to deceive,” a rule targeting trans people and drag queens, Sarria had his drag queen friends parade around in women’s clothing—but with notes pinned to the collars of their dresses that read, “I am a boy.”
But Sarria’s most lasting legacy was the sense of hope he instilled in his predominantly queer audience. He helped to stitch a disparate social identity into a thriving community, one that was just beginning to stand up and fight for itself. At the end of each of his performances, Sarria asked every customer in the Black Cat to join hands, make a circle, and belt the lyrics to a song he’d written, “God Save Us Nelly Queens,” sung to the tune of “God Save the Queen.”
God save us nelly queens
God save us nelly queens
God save us queens
From every mountainside
Long may we live and die
God us nelly queens
God save us queens!
George Mendenhall, author of TheWord Is Out, later wrote: “It sounds silly, but if you lived at that time and had the oppression coming down from the police department and from society, there was nowhere to turn ... and to be able to put your arms around other gay men and to be able to stand up and sing, ‘God Save Us Nelly Queens” ... We were really not saying, ‘God Save Us Nelly Queens.’ We were saying, ‘We have our rights, too.’”
For a community so in need of hope, “God Save Us Nelly Queens” became a kind of anthem, and Sarria, a hero.
By the time he filed to run in 1961, it was this sentiment that propelled him forward. Despite living under a hostile government, gay and trans San Franciscans—like their counterparts across the United States—were beginning to come together and demand their rights. They were forming political organizations. They were registering to vote.
They were done staying quiet. They were done hiding.
By the end of the day on November 7, 1961, the votes were in: José Julio Sarria, the first openly gay candidate for public office in U.S. history, had not won any of the five seats on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
But he’d come in ninth in a field of 33 candidates, winning, according to most sources, a total of about 5,600 votes. Though shy of Sarria’s claim that there were 10,000 queer San Francisco voters, the number shocked the political establishment. So many thousands of votes was certainly enough to sway an election in the city—and, as an organized voting bloc, it could threaten the positions of countless politicians. Soon they were drawing the obvious conclusion: if they wanted to keep their jobs, especially if they were liberal, they needed to win the gay community.
By the end of the decade, local politicians were actively courting gay voters. Organizations like the Society for Individual Rights—a spinoff of the League for Civil Education—began hosting “Candidates’ Nights,” which brought together gay voters and local office seekers. Over the years, as the gay community became more organized, almost all liberal politicians were stopping by these events. In fact, in 1970, now-senator Diane Feinstein attended a Candidates’ Night during her race for supervisor of San Francisco. Other candidates started taking out ads in gay publications, even floating the possibility of introducing anti-discrimination measures.
In a sense, then, Sarria ultimately won. His run for office no doubt made a mutual relationship between politicians and queer voters possible, for he not only galvanized gay people into politics, but he also shocked the San Francisco political establishment into taking LGBT issues seriously.
His run for office also paved the way for future queer office seekers, most famously Harvey Milk, who would enter the political scene over a decade later.
The end of Sarria’s campaign for supervisor, however, was not the end of his life of history-making political activism. In 1965, he founded the Imperial Court System, a charity entirely composed of unpaid volunteers that raises funds—largely through elaborate drag shows—for fighting AIDS, domestic abuse, homelessness, and more. With chapters across North America, it remains one of the largest LGBT organizations in the world.
When registering his organization, Sarria realized he needed to include a list of officers—but because labels like “president” sounded too boring to him, he decided to make up his own names. Volunteers for the Imperial Court therefore bear titles like duke, duchess, czar, czarina, jesters, and so on. The head of the organization is called the Empress, and is elected annually—Her Royal Majesty José Julio Sarria was the first.
Later, in 2006, the city of San Francisco honored Sarria for all of his achievements, renaming a section of 16th Street “José Sarria Court.”
But despite the flurry of press coverage, Sarria today remains unknown in most circles. Maybe this isn’t surprising: in the U.S., LGBT history is not taught on a large scale, and the names of heroes like José Sarria languish. Further, those few LGBT people that we do remember are predominantly white, despite the fact that so much early queer activism was driven by people of color (take Stonewall civil rights pioneers Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, for instance). That Sarria was Latino should therefore not be forgotten.
Sarria was buried beside his late husband Emperor Norton, in a plot of land he’d purchased in 1976. Still today the annual pilgrimages to Norton’s grave continue—but now, when his admirers come to celebrate the U.S.’s one true emperor, they are also celebrating Sarria, its first openly gay politician and a man who changed the LGBT community forever.
It’s an almost supernatural ability that most of us take for granted: at any given time, almost anywhere in the world, we can know the weather of the future. It’s all laid out for us, often on maps that show the movement of weather like armies colliding mid-air: triangles for cold fronts, half-circles for warm, and a mix of the two for occluded fronts, where a cold front overtakes a warm.
It wasn’t always this way. Though the very first committee dedicated to collecting and mapping weather data—the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia—was formed in 1831, all of the maps they produced had to be drawn after weather had already occurred. Predicting the weather remained largely based on superstition, like the famous “red sky at night, sailor’s delight” rhyme. In the mid-1840s, the newly-elected secretary of the Smithsonian Institution expressed his frustration with the lack of progress in meteorology. The Smithsonian's new program, he said, would focus on “solving the problem of American storms”—and yet American storms remained a problem.
That all changed in the late 1800s and early 1900s, in no small part due to the work of a father and son pair of Norwegian geophysicists, Vilhelm and Jacob Bjerknes. The Bjerknes dedicated their lives to understanding the workings of our atmosphere, and in doing helped produce the weather models that we know today—and which are still based in the work the Bjerknes did almost 100 years ago.
Jacob Bjerknes and the future of weather forecasting were born in same year. That year, 1897, Jacob’s father Vilhelm had a breakthrough: he figured out a theorem that describes the motion of a vortex in a non-homogenous fluid—like the air masses interacting in our atmosphere. Vilhelm was sure that his calculations could be used to develop a system of predicting the weather, in all its complexity, days ahead of time. This was the aim of his work: as he would lay out in 1902, “The goal is to predict the dynamic and physical condition of the atmosphere at a later time, if at an earlier given time, this condition is well known.”
When applied to the motions of the ocean and the atmosphere, Vilhelm believed his new theorem should allow weather forecasting to be handled as a problem of mathematical physics, just like a calculation of friction or gravity. At the time, this concept was a revolutionary one.
In 1913, Vilhelm became director of a new geophysics institute at Germany’s University of Leipzig, where he was surrounded by talented students—one of them, Vagn Walfrid Ekman, would become known for his eponymous theory describing how wind drives the circulation of water currents (an idea that came to him one evening at a dinner party). By 1915, this group also included Vilhelm’s son Jacob, whom everyone called Jack.
It was not the easiest time for the Bjerknes’ studies. In July 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Germany joined the fray only days later, setting World War I into motion. Much of the institute’s German students and staff were called into service, leaving the institute short-handed. Recent progress in the field also suffered. The first daily scientific maps displaying the globe’s weather, issued by the United States’ Weather Bureau, had to be suspended only seven months after the program began, when the war halted European telegraph transmissions. This must have been a particularly disappointing blow for Vilhelm—years earlier, he had suggested that weather observations and computations be combined on charts, allowing scientists to graphically derive maps in sequence, “just as one usually derives one equation from each other.” In a 1914 letter to the Carnegie Institution, one of his biggest funders, Vilhelm wrote worriedly: “I hope that the most unnecessary and most cruel of all wars shall not disturb the work which I am performing …”
Yet this was just the beginning of the curious entanglement of the military and war with the Bjerknes’ work—indeed, its entanglement with the development of weather forecasting itself.
In 1916, Herbert Petzold, one of Vilhelm’s doctoral students, was killed at the battle of Verdun. Though Vilhelm had written only a year earlier that his son was “still too young to devote himself to this work,” Jack took over Petzold’s studies, which examined the movement of “convergence lines,” or distinct masses of air in the atmosphere. Shortly afterward, Jack published his first scientific paper, describing that these lines of wind could be thousands of kilometers long, that they tended to drift to the east, and that they had some connection with clouds and precipitation.
By 1917, the fighting in Germany drove the Bjerknes’ to flee for their native soil. “I am now back again in Norway, not merely for a summer journey, but forever,” Vilhelm wrote solemnly. The elder Bjerknes became a professor at the new Geofysisk Institute at Norway’s Bergen Museum, where he developed the school of weather analysis that would become known as the Bergen School.
The Norwegian coast became the school’s laboratory: through negotiations with the government, Vilhelm increased the number of weather observing stations in the south by nearly tenfold. Jack and two other students were set up as forecasters. With the war severely limiting supplies—the scarce winter of 1916–17 became known as the Kohlrūbenwinter, or turnip winter—Vilhelm’s goal of figuring out how to predict the weather was not just a scientific quest, but a practical one, one with the urgently needed goal of “assist[ing] the production of breadstuff.”
The plethora of weather data the Bjerknes were receiving also allowed Jack to continue monitoring convergence lines and refining his theory. By the fall of 1918, he had made a discovery: these lines of weather were connected with cyclones—large air masses that rotate around low atmospheric pressure. He published his observations in 1919. Though he didn’t yet know it, Jack had identified one of the most characteristic features of weather maps and weather forecasting. These features, too, would be linked with war, named for their resemblance to the lines of advancing armies. Jack Bjerknes had discovered the “front.”
The Bergen School continued to work off of Jack’s theories through the course of World War I. The school used mathematical analysis and data from their weather stations to revolutionize its weather maps, including the differing lines of convergence that would later be known as “cold fronts” and “warm fronts,” and the fronts colliding in a process that Jack discovered and called occlusion. Another member of the Bergen school, Tor Bergeron, proposed the symbols currently used for different types of fronts—though it would take several decades before the symbols were adopted as the standard.
By the end of the war, the Bergen School had developed realistic structural models which laid out a set of rules for how storms would behave: how they would form, where they might move, and how they could disperse or intensify. This life cycle is intimately connected with the weather forecast. With such rules, dubbed the “Norwegian frontal cyclone model,” the Bergen school sought to remove subjectivity from meteorology, and to transform it into a science.
Jack and Vilhelm’s physical paths split in the early 1920s, though their scientific goals remained united. Jack Bjerknes became the head of the Weather Forecasting Office for western Norway from 1920 until 1931. In 1926 Vilhelm moved to a professorship at the University of Oslo, where he remained until his retirement in 1932. He would remain scientifically active through his later years, up until his death in 1951. After leaving the Weather Forecasting Office, Jack followed in his father’s footsteps, teaching meteorology back at the Bergen Museum.
The 1920s were a time of exciting advancement in meteorology. The development of radio technology allowed faster and more detailed transmission of weather information; by 1922, 98 stations across 35 U.S. states were verbally broadcasting weather reports, forecasts, and advisories. That year also saw the beginning of an exchange of weather observations between France and the U.S. Weather Bureau, to be broadcast from the top of the Eiffel Tower to other European services. By 1924, pressure maps were being drawn daily for the northern pole and much of the Northern Hemisphere.
Yet it wasn’t long before war again caught up with the world, the younger Bjerknes, and his work. In July 1939, Jack and his family—his wife Hedvig Borthen and their two children—departed for a lecture tour in the United States. It was supposed to be an eight-month trip. But in April 1940, Nazi Germany invaded Norway. Almost immediately, the Norwegian weather alert service was forced to halt its work, and all weather transmissions. The Bjerknes family’s visit to America became a permanent one.
To the Allied war effort, of course, the expatriate (and soon citizen) Bjerknes was a valuable resource. With accurate weather information urgently needed by troops, the U.S. Air Force asked Jack to lead a new school for training Air Force weather officers. Jack chose the University of California’s Los Angeles campus for his school. The Department of Meteorology that he would develop there rapidly grew into one of the world’s leading centers of atmospheric science, and remains at the forefront of the field today.
Meanwhile, the model that the Bergen School had developed finally began widespread implementation—also thanks to the war. In 1942, the U.S. Army Signal Service began a new service to gather and distribute weather data, which would one day be combined with the Weather Bureau Air Force-Navy (WBAN) Analysis Center, the central source of weather charts and maps for national distribution. Late in 1942, it also began the first formal analysis of fronts on surface maps, using the Norwegian cyclone model.
As weather forecasting advanced over the following decades, Jack Bjerknes’ focus would turn to larger questions about our atmosphere; he was the first to identify that El Niño, previously known only as a phenomenon local to Peru, was actually the result of a global oscillation, and that it had significant impacts all over the world. After his death in 1975, biographer Arnt Eliassen wrote that “more than any other atmospheric scientist, Jack Bjerknes managed to create order and system in a seemingly disorderly atmosphere.”
Indeed, while our increased understanding of the atmosphere, along with technology like satellite observation, has modernized weather maps beyond what the Bjerknes might have ever imagined, the theory that informs these predictions is the same. Much of weather forecasting today remains grounded in the Norwegian cyclone model, and the Norwegian cyclone model owes its existence to Jack and Vilhelm Bjerknes.
Apo Whang-Od, aged approximately 97, keeps a steady pulse and entrancing rhythm as she completes her tattoos. She is not only the oldest tattoo artist in the Philippines, but the only surviving Mambabatok (tattoo artist that follows the hand-tapping tradition) in the country's Kalinga province.
The Last Mambabatok, a short film that is part of While I’m Still Here Legacy Project by Foster Visuals, takes us into the world of Whang-Od and her great grandniece, Grace Palicas. Her wrinkled hands and focused eyes demonstrate total control as she performs the ritual. “When you die, they will take away all your accessories,” she says in the video. “Only your tattoos will remain with you.”
The ink used is a mixture of charcoal and water, and is inserted in the skin with the broken end of trees or thorns. With extraordinary patience, Whang-Od produces beautiful geometric figures tap by tap. This method is slower and more painful than modern ones, but thousands of people travel to this tiny village every year for the experience of getting a tattoo by the village elder, who is quite possibly the world's most hardcore tattoo artist.
Today, as younger generations turn away from the old ways, there seems to be little interest in learning this art. Tradition dictates that the knowledge can only be succeeded through lineage—luckily, Apo Whang Od’s great grandnieces are willing apprentices, and aspire to continue the work of their ancestors.
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.
In 1989, full-page ads for a new product named Chelsea began appearing in American women’s magazines. Featuring soothing imagery of glittering tropical waters and a scent strip that smelled like vanilla with a hint of cocoa, they looked like a standard perfume ad of the time. But Chelsea wasn’t a perfume. It was, in the words of its marketers, “The first cigarette that smells good.”
Chelsea, which tobacco manufacturer R.J. Reynolds introduced into test markets in Florida, Pennsylvania, and Las Vegas in April of 1989, was one of the more striking products in a line-up of cigarettes designed to be less offensive to a smoker’s friends, lovers, and passers by. This genre of products—dubbed “socially acceptable cigarettes”—emerged in the 1970s in the wake of increasing public disapproval of smoking. As its many negative health effects became more apparent, and clean indoor air laws began to be introduced, cigarette manufacturers had to get creative.
The solution deployed in the Chelsea cigarette was a special scented paper that, when it burned, provided a vanilla aroma alongside the standard tobacco. "Chelsea was created for those concerned about offending others or those who personally find a better-smelling product more appealing," said R.J. Reynolds spokesperson Maura Payne in May 1989.
These concerned smokers were, in the imagination of the R.J. Reynolds execs, women. Documents detailing the Chelsea marketing campaign show that the target consumers were 21 to 34-year-old women. To go after these concerned, socially aware ladies, R.J. Reynolds offered freebies like the promotional object below: a cigarette lighter that doubled as a makeup compact.
But R.J. Reynolds' expectations were confounded. Analysis of the test-market buyers showed that 40 percent of those who tried Chelsea were men. The product vanished shortly thereafter following poor sales. After discontinuing the product and blaming its lackluster sales on a marketing campaign that "failed to communicate personal/social benefits to [the] smoker," R.J. Reynolds decided to, in its words, "retest the good-smelling cigarette proposition" and try to appeal to a broader audience. The company relaunched Chelsea in the Atlanta test market in May 1990 under a new name: Horizon.
Aimed at both men and women, Horizon cigarettes offered the same sort-of-vanilla smell and the same confusion over why anyone would buy the product. Its advertising slogans focused on the shame and guilt smokers felt when they lit up among non-smokers. “You shouldn’t have to leave the room,” read one. “You shouldn’t have to apologize.”
Unfortunately for R.J. Reynolds, this new shame-and-guilt approach didn't make much of a dent in the sales figures. Horizon, too, was discontinued, joining several other failed "socially acceptable cigarettes" of the era. At least it went quietly, unlike R. J. Reynolds' "Premier" a “smokeless” cigarette, which cost $300 million to develop and was pulled from the market in early 1989 after five months of testing.
Though its failure was blamed on marketing and lack of flexibility among brand-loyal smokers, one overlooked factor in the flash-in-the-pan life of Chelsea was the taste of the thing.
"It tastes like a room freshener," said one smoker in 1989. "Yuk."
Object of Intrigue is a weekly column in which we investigate the story behind a curious item. Is there an object you want to see covered? Email ella@atlasobscura.com
It’s the church that celebrates America’s Thanksgiving. But it’s some 3,500 miles away from U.S. shores in the Netherlands.
On one wall hangs a bronze plaque, a “token of enduring gratitude and in Christian brotherhood” from the Boston Congregational Club, dated July 1906. On the opposite wall, a stone gifted by the New England Society of Chicago and dated Feb. 7, 1867 faces it. That stone, inscribed in Greek, “One Lord,” represents the last trace of a church that burnt down in Chicago’s Great Fire of 1871. The church had sent it to Rotterdam after receiving a small 16th century gravestone from Rotterdam to insert in its new building.
And in a museum in a back room, the Rotterdam church celebrates American leaders George W. Bush and President Barack Obama.
All of this is steps from a 17th-century windmill on a postcard-worthy Rotterdam canal, at the Pilgrim Fathers' Church, which serves as a memorial and celebration of the pilgrims who may have prayed there before boarding the Speedwell, a ship slated to meet the Mayflower in 1620. But when the Speedwell sprang leaks, the pilgrims were able to book alternative passage on the Mayflower.
The church was founded in the early 15th century as a Catholic church devoted to saints Mary and Anthony but became Protestant following the Reformation. It has undergone several restorations and renovations over the century, including raising the floor to counter flooding and lifting the ceiling to improve ventilation. In the 18th century, it seems, parishioners used to use small, coal stoves to keep warm in the winter. The fumes from the stoves caused many to faint.
Later, it was given the name Pilgrim Fathers' Church to honor the pilgrims’ final prayer site before setting out for the new world. Every year, the Pilgrim Fathers' Church hosts a Thanksgiving celebration. Americans living abroad join congregants for a traditional meal and special church services.
The church’s history represents a preamble to the Thanksgiving story, which isn’t as well known as the aftermath of the landing on Plymouth Rock. The pilgrims, notes an essay in a book on sale in the church about its history, were real people, not symbols.
“The national myth of a glorious American past has loved to praise them as a kind of model democrats, founders of the American Commonwealth and as the chosen people which founded ‘God’s own country’ in the wilderness,” notes the essay “On the Move as Pilgrims” by professor J.W. Schulte Nordholt. “Or the other way round, they were portrayed as a small group of bigoted Puritans, anchored on the rock of Plymouth, intolerant towards their fellowmen, daming down all human pleasure, alcohol, sports and games, in short: a community of hypocrites.”
Like all historical figures, the professor argues, the pilgrims should be seen as important in their own right and their own times. “Let us try to see them as they saw themselves,” he writes.
Here’s how that portrait looks. A group that had separated from the Church of England fled to Holland, settling ultimately in Leiden, about 20 miles north of the Pilgrim Fathers' Church. There, over nearly a 12-year period, the Brownists—for its leader Robert Browne—grew to about 100. When Browne chose to return to the Anglican church, the group began referring to itself as pilgrims, with John Robinson as its leading pastor.
Although they found religious tolerance in Leiden, the pilgrims didn’t find it to be edenic by any means. Leiden’s morals weren’t sufficiently strict for the pilgrims, Schulte Nordholt writes. “Their youngsters became rebellious and wanted to play at ball and ‘kolf’ and more of such worldly amusements with their Dutch friends, even on the day of the Lord.” (Kolf is a Dutch game, perhaps dating back to the Middle Ages, which is credited as an inspiration for golf.)
When the separatists finally had secured arrangements to travel to the new world, the “sade and mournfull parting” was a “truly dolfull” sight, wrote William Bradford, who would go on to become a Plymouth governor. “To see what sighs and sobbs and praiers did sound amongst them, what tears did gush from every eye, and pithy speeches peirst each harte; that sundry of the Dutch strangers that stood on the key as spectators, could not refrain from tears.”
The rest of the story is well known. After the Speedwell“leaked as a sieve,” as the professor puts it, the pilgrims crossed the ocean on the Mayflower, upon which they drafted the Mayflower Compact. But their troubles were only beginning. Half of the group died within the first two months: January and February. That the others survived was thanks to the help of American Indians, who taught them to grow corn and catch fish.
That the pilgrims faded into obscurity is a testament to their aim simply to live quiet and peaceful lives. But tracing one’s ancestry back to the pilgrims has become a sort of American gentility. Revealed in museum exhibits are historical tidbits about pilgrims’ descendants living today that would surprise. “Many famous Americans, such as former president George Bush, are direct descendents of the pilgrims,” notes a video in the church’s museum, displaying a photograph of George W. Bush. In 1989, George H.W. Bush had visited Leiden, and in remarks there, he referred to his ancestor Abigail Jenney, who was born in Leiden.
“I’m glad to be back with my cousins, because we fondly remember Aunt Abigail back there those many years ago,” he said at the time.
Back in the museum in the Rotterdam church, a poster on a wall lists nine U.S. presidents who can trace their ancestors to the Speedwell, including both Bushes. The others are: John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, James Garfield, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Barack Obama. An asterisk beside the latter’s name adds, “Obama is a descendent of a pilgrim, who came to America on Mayflower II in 1629.” As an article in the Quincy, Mass.-based Patriot Ledger recorded in 2009, the president’s ancestor, Thomas Blossom, came to the new world nine years after the Mayflower sailed, but in a ship of the same name.
In addition to being a surprising offering of Americana amid a city and scene that is entirely Dutch in every other regard, Pilgrim Fathers is a fascinating church for entirely domestic reasons. The church, whose active members number about 1,200, attracts some 400 people a Sunday, says Rikko Bulten, a Rotterdam-based tour guide, who runs a bed and breakfast. Bulten joined the church nine years ago and was part of a group that decided seven years ago to open the church to visitors twice week.
Bulten thinks three things will most surprise visitors to the church. First, it’s extensively decorated for a Protestant church. On Sundays, it is full of parishioners, unlike many other churches. And despite the fact that the pilgrims spent just a day and a night there “before the tide called them away,” Bulten says, “it’s still an important spot along the pilgrim fathers trail.”
One sign of the church’s unique story is its spire, which features not a cross but a sculpture of a herring -- Rotterdam’s symbol -- and its stained glass windows honor the nautical heritage the church represents.
If the essay by Schulte Nordholt is to be believed, Thanksgiving itself has its roots in The Netherlands. “That idea arose from having seen how the third of October—the day of the deliverance of the city of Leiden from the Spanish siege in 1574—was still being celebrated in Leiden,” Schulte Nordholt writes. “In this way, the Dutch left their mark on the American world, although herring and white bread changed into turkey.”
Salvador Dali once claimed that “Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.”
It was perhaps because of this that he decided to bring surrealism to one of the art forms he most admired: cooking. In 1973, he published the wonderful, confusing, and delectable cookbook Les Dîners de Gala—a titlereferring both to his wife, who went by the name Gala, and the lavishness of the dishes he included.
As with everything Dali, the book is all about finding extreme pleasure. But this pleasure is combined with the grotesque, the morbid, and even the violent. He writes at the beginning of the book:
Do not forget that woodcock “flambee” in strong alcohol, served in its own excrements, as is the custom in the best of Parisian restaurants, will always remain for me in that serious art that is gastronomy, the most delicate symbol of true civilization.
Within the 12 chapters and 136 recipes, Dali plays with our senses, our imagination, and our logic. Each chapter is peculiarly named— first courses are “the supreme lilliputien malaises” and meats are “the sodomized starter-main dishes.” He even dedicates an entire chapter to aphrodisiacs, “the I eat GALA.”
The chapters are dotted with philosophical musings, striking illustrations, and instructions that range from the whimsical (“have this delicate dish prepared for you only in Brussels”) to the cruel (“Rest assured that for each member you will pull off [the gooslin] will scream so that he will be eaten live rather than dead”).
But for all the eccentricities, the cookbook is surprisingly practical. As food historian Alex Ketchum, who runs The Historical Cooking Project, told Atlas Obscura, many so-called cookbooks are not really about food preparation, but a way to talk about ideas (as in the Anarchist Cookbook), or tell stories. Les Dîners, however, actually is about the recipes, which, as Ketchum attests, “are not just edible but very good.” The surrealism, she says, comes in the illustrations within the book and also in his recommendations.
Though there are only around 400 copies of the original book left, as of this month the first-ever reprint of the book has been released by Taschen.
In honor of the re-release, we have compiled some of the recipes from the book. With a bit of patience and a wide-open mind, you can use these to create the perfect surrealist Thanksgiving meal.
105 Casanova Cocktail
(To drown out your family's political opinions)
The juice of 1 orange 1 tablespoon of bitters (campari) 1 tablespoon ginger 4 tablespoons of brandy 1 tablespoon of old brandy (vieille cure) 1 pinch cayenne pepper
This is quite appropriate when circumstances such as exhaustion, overwork or simply excess of sobriety are calling for a pick-me-up.
Here is a well-tested recipe to fit the bill. Let us stress another advantage of this particular pep-up concoction is that one doesn’t have to make the sour face that usually accompanies the absorption of remedy.
At the bottom of a glass, combine pepper and ginger. Pour the bitters on top, then brandy, and “vieille cure”. Refrigerate or even put in the freezer.
Thirty minutes later, remove from the freezer and stir the juice of the orange into the chilled glass.
Drink..and wait for the effect.
It is rather speedy.
76 Young Turkey with Roquefort
(To innovate your regular turkey recipe)
1 young turkey 1 white blood sausage 7 ozs of roquefort cheese 3 “petits-suisses” cheeses nutmeg (Swiss knight wedges) 1 tablespoon of oil 1 tablespoon of flour 3 cups of water 12 chicken bouillon cubes 2 carrots 2 onions 10 ozs of roquefort cheese 6 ozs of breadcrumbs 3 ½ ozs of corn flour 2 eggs 2 tablespoons of breadcrumbs 1 tablespoon of butter 1 egg yolk 1 quart of water
Pick a tender and well-fleshed young turkey. Clean it and pass it through a flame; we are going to stuff it.
In a salad bowl, combine the white blood sausage, roquefort cheese, “petits-suisses”. Add salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg. Stuff the young turkey; sew up the bird.
In a saucepan, put the tablespoon of oil and in it brown the tablespoon of flour. When it turns light brown, add water, sliced carrots, chicken bouillon and sliced onions. At boiling point, add the bird. Cover and simmer for 1 hour.
At the same time, mash the 10 ozs of roquefort cheese with the breadcrumbs, corn flour, egg yolk, 2 eggs, salt. Blend into a smooth paste.
Bring the quart of water to a boil, add salt.
Using a spoon, put the paste into the water (each spoonful should hold about the size of an egg).
When the puffs start floating, remove them and drain them on a dishtowel. Then roll them in breadcrumbs.
Remove the turkey, strain the gravy, slam the fat off and keep it warm to serve in a gravy boat.
Place the turkey in a baking dish surrounded with the puffs. At the bottom of the dish put the tablespoon of butter. Bake at -400°- for 15 minutes.
Watch it: the puffs turn golden very quickly, you will have to turn them several times.
94 Stuffed Artichokes
(Substitute your green bean casserole with tequila-infused veggies)
6 medium artichokes 2 quarts of water 1 small can of peas 2 avocado pears 7 ozs of grated swiss cheese 7 ozs of pork Pâté de foie 4 tablespoons of tequila 1 cup of white wine 1 tablespoon of tomato paste 1 pinch of thyme
Cut off the green part of the artichoke leaves and scrape the hearts.
Put the artichokes in salted boiling water for 30 minutes. Remove, cool, and take out the choke that is in the center. Mash the peas, the peeled avocados and the Pâté de foie.
Mix well and combine with the swiss cheese and tequila.
The particular taste of the latter will go well with the aroma of the vegetables; but if you cannot buy any tequila, use any white liquor.
Using this stuffing which you have salted and peppered, generously fill your artichokes. Put them side by side at the bottom of a big pot.
In a bowl, combine water, wine, tomato, and thyme. Add salt and pepper and a bit of the stuffing. Don’t let the liquid drown the artichokes. Cover and simmer on low flame for 1 ¼ hours.
Now and then, add a bit of liquid so the bottom won’t burn.
65 Bush of Crayfish in Viking Herbs [recipe by La Tour d’Argent]
(In a surrealist Thanksgiving, crayfish can substitute cranberry sauce)
After giving us this recipe the chef decided that he wanted to keep the exact ingredients a secret. We present the recipe any way for its reading pleasure.
In order to realize this dish it is necessary to have crayfish of 2 ozs each.
Prepare the following ingredients for a broth: “fumet” (scented reduced bouillon) of fish, of consomme, of white wine, vermouth, cognac, salt, pepper, sugar, and dill (aromatic herbs).
Poach the crayfish in this broth for 20 minutes. Let it all cool for 24 hours and arrange the crayfish in a dance. Strain the broth and serve in cups.
If you don’t have the time to cook these or the money to spend on their lavish ingredients, heed Ketchum’s advice: make your traditional Thanksgiving meal surrealist by presenting each dish in peculiar ways. That is, after all, the way of Dali.
