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This 'Flightlapse' Offers a Stunning View of the Milky Way

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The view from 12A on a red-eye is pretty boring. But the view from the cockpit can be spectacular. Most people won't ever access the cockpit during a flight, but Swiss International Air Lines pilot Sales Wick's "Flightlapse" video can give you the experience without the hassle of flight school. Wick took photos of the Milky Way, city lights, and other planes whizzing by—while piloting an August flight from Zurich, Switzerland, to São Paulo, Brazil, and stitched them together in this time-lapse video.

Cities including Palma de Mallorca, Algiers, and Dakar emerge as sprawling blobs of yellow light below the Boeing 777, while planes pass overhead against the dramatic blue glow of the Milky Way. The view occasionally shifts when the plane adjusts course, and Wick's helpful notes show just how much pilots see from their lofty perches.

Wick's Instagram features more photos and videos from the cockpit: a rare (and beautiful) view behind the scenes of commercial aviation. He shoots the photos and videos, including his Flightlapse, when he is monitoring the cockpit and the plane is on autopilot. Other videos show the pilots hard at work during takeoffs and landings. A window seat is always nice, but nothing beats the seats surrounded by windows.


The Boston Public Library Has a 'Car Wash' for Books

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Library books change hands all the time, and in the process, they end up getting pretty dirty, hence: the Boston Public Library's book-sized “car wash," which gets rid of dust and grime.

In a video the library recently posted to Twitter, the automated system, called a Depulvera, pulls books through a familiar looking series of stations to get their books clean. In the video, a book can be seen being pulled down the line by a conveyor system that drags it through a couple of steps, reorienting the book past a series of spinning brush bars, and finally out the other end, through a curtain of hanging plastic strips, just like in a full size car wash.

According to HuffPost, the machine, which can clean and dust around 12 books a minute, is not used on the library’s rare books, but is instead employed to take care of their closed stacks, most of which don’t have dust jackets.

The video is a nice peek behind the scenes at what keeps libraries running, but if you just can’t get enough of satisfying videos of books getting a wash, there are even more videos on Depulvera's website.

A Fond Farewell to England's Prefab WWII Bungalows

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For decades, residents of the Excalibur Estate, London’s last community of post-World War II, prefabricated houses, have been fighting against property developers and hostile local authorities to save their lovely bungalows from demolition.

This fight has proven to be in vain, as, driven by rising land values, Lewisham Council started to pull them down in 2014 and “regenerate” the estate, destroying a unique architectural and social entity. Standing on a land—in Catford, southeast London—now worth a fortune, more than one hundred bungalows are still lived in and cherished. Before they all go, here is a look at the last prefabs standing—and their residents.

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Britain was bombed heavily during the war. The Blitz and the continuous bombing of ports and big cities destroyed three million homes, resulting in a housing crisis. By March 1944, there were still more raids to come. Vicious weapons such as the V-2 rockets relentlessly damaged the country, killing civilians and destroying more homes.

To address what he called the “housing problem,” then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared in 1944 that he would “attack” it “by what are called the prefabricated, or emergency, houses.” The government, he said, hoped to “make up to half a million of these, and for this purpose not only plans but actual preparations are being made during the war on a nationwide scale.” The war government launched the Temporary Housing Programme as a military operation.

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Because of inflation and increased costs of materials, Churchill didn’t ultimately reach that 500,000 dwellings target, but, beginning in spring 1946, just over 156,000 prefabricated houses were erected all over the U.K. from Spring 1946. They were assembled in record time—each one took between eight hours and three days to build. One set an actual Guinness World Record, having been constructed in a mere 42 minutes.

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Prefabs sprouted everywhere: on wastelands, parks, bombed-out streets, and even in cemeteries. Some were gathered in little groups, some cleverly laid out on estates like the Excalibur Estate. Built to rehouse servicemen coming back from the war and their families, prefabs were luxury. They had clever designs, all mod cons and the same layout: two bedrooms, a hallway, a living room, a bathroom, interior toilets, constant hot water, and a fitted kitchen—with a fridge, a luxury that only 2 percent of British households had at the time. The homes were all detached so people could grow vegetables, as food rationing that began during the war lasted until the early ‘50s.

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Churchill and his war government anticipated a post-war housing crisis as early as 1942 and wanted to implement a successful and efficient housing program—hence the choice of prefabs, which didn’t require any labor skill and could be erected in no time. Prefabs were a national success: residents immediately loved them and strong communities grew out of this successful social housing scheme, which was only temporary and supposed to last 10 to 15 years.

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More than 70 years later, there are still thousands of these “palaces for the people,” as they are dubbed, lived in and much loved. A few are also preserved in museums and about 30 are listed by Historic England, a government body dedicated to heritage preservation. But sadly, the Excalibur Estate is doomed to disappear.

Below are some of Excalibur’s residents, in their own words. To find out more about post-war prefabs, visit The Prefab Museum, a museum dedicated to them and prefab life.

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Jim Blackender and his wife Loraine lived in their prefab for more than 20 years. They moved out in 2012 after the local authorities offered them a house in Rochester, Kent. Blackender lead the fight against Lewisham Council to preserve the estate, but the battle ended up in a ballot in 2010, in which 52 percent of voters chose “regeneration” of the estate. Regeneration was synonymous with demolition and replacement with double- and triple-story dwellings.

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“I liked everything about the prefab,” Blackender said in 2013. “It was the people, the location. When we moved in 20-odd years ago, there was a really strong community. But it’s been left to rot, the Council should have been carrying out repairs, but hardly anything has been done to the estate. It’s depressing to watch it fall into disrepair.”

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“The rich, they have their museums, their castles, but for us the poor, there is nothing, they erase our culture.”

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“I love my prefab,” said Eddie O'Mahony in 2002. “I wouldn’t swap it for Buckingham Palace even if it included the Queen!” O'Mahony was one of the first residents of the Excalibur Estate. He moved in with his wife and son in June 1946, when the estate was still being built by German and Italian prisoners of war. He bought his prefab in the ‘90s and said, in 2014: “The demolition is breaking my heart. Quite honestly it will be the end of me if I have to move. I close my eyes when I pass the ones that are boarded up. I’ve loved this place from day one.”

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O'Mahony passed away in December 2015. He was still living in his prefab.

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Christine Gregory’s prefab is a piece of art and eccentricity. There is stuff everywhere—and cats. Twelve of them live with Christine, who is nicknamed the “cat lady of Catford.” She is one of the last residents of the estate and is determined to stay in her prefab: “They are lovely. You just have to do them up a bit from time to time”.

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“They are going to pull the prefabs down,” said Ted Carter in 2012. “And of course, the reason is the land is worth millions of pounds now. And instead of 186 prefabs, they are going to put 400 dwellings, whatever a dwelling is.” Ted’s prefab was a living museum full of old radios, as Carter was an expert in repairing them. He passed away in February 2017. He was the last resident of his street.

The End of a Long Controversy Over a Striped Townhouse

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Zipporah Lisle-Mainwaring is a person who owns a townhouse in the posh London district of Kensington. In March 2015, she had red stripes painted on its white facade. Her neighbors, who are all very wealthy people, were unhappy (one called it a "real monstrosity"), This led to a protracted fight that ended Monday, when Britain's High Court ruled that Lisle-Mainwaring could keep the stripes, following a local council's attempted intervention.

Lisle-Mainwaring has denied since the beginning that she had the stripes painted just to anger her neighbors, but whether or not that is true, the stripes had the effect of angering her neighbors. She says that they also delight children. "They add to the gaiety of the nation," Lisle-Mainwaring toldThe London Evening Standard, which landed the "first full interview" with Lisle-Mainwaring in May 2015. "They are fun."

The High Court's decision was less about gaiety and more about an interpretation of a section of a 1990 law that outlines rules for town planning. “A garish—to use the judge’s phrase—colour scheme may have come about because of an owner’s eccentricity or because of his/her pique," a judge said in the court decision. "The section does not apply any differently to the latter than it does to the former.”

Victory in hand, Lisle-Mainwaring told The New York Times that these days she prefers bare brick to red and white stripes, and won't be keeping the paint job. She currently lives in Paris and uses the London townhouse for storage. Whether she intended it or not, in other words, Kensington's red-striped townhouse is turning out to be a pretty expert troll job.

When the CIA Made 'Pseudo-Marijuana'

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A version of this story originally appeared on Muckrock.com.

According to declassified meeting minutes from 1972 and an old article saved by CIA, the Agency’s Office of Medical Services had a drug abuse booth“originally created by CIA doctors for parents who work for the agency.”

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As described the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the booth didn’t just give off the smell of marijuana - it came complete with “a bag of the weed” for people to smell. When it came time to take the display to an American Medical Association convention, the Agency was told they were unable to take the marijuana with them. According to the Post-Dispatch, “federal narcotics agents had warned them that transporting marijuana across state lines was illegal - even for CIA.”

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The Agency’s apparent solution was to swap in “pseudo marijuana” which looked and smelled like marijuana - even when burned. Reportedly, one high school bus driver took several sniffs before commenting that it smelled “just like the back of my bus.”

CIA was apparently pleased with the results, with eight out of every ten visitors to the booth smelling the ersatz pot. It was such a big hit that they quickly received five requests to use the display at “other gatherings.”

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We’ve requested for the Agency’s “pseudo marijuana” recipe, which we’ll have to wait on to find out how they managed to so accurately recreate the look, smell, and smoke of marijuana.

The full memo can be read here.

John Lennon Left This Sketch Behind When He Moved House in the 1960s

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Imagine… moving into John Lennon’s old house as a child in the 1960s and finding his original sketch for the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Lennon once lived in a house called Kenwood, in Surrey, England, with his wife Cynthia. In the four years they lived there, from 1964 to 1968, Lennon worked on some of the Beatle’s most iconic songs in the house’s attic or on a piano downstairs. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released while Lennon lived there, too, in 1967.

After Lennon moved out of the house, the new owners found a sketchbook in which Lennon sketched out an album cover for Sgt. Pepper’s. The final version would become one of the most famous albums of all time, but in this early sketch, it’s possible to see the florid idea starting to form. Decades later, the woman who lived in the house as a child has put the sketch up for auction: according to Rolling Stone, it’s estimated to be worth at least $40,000.

How to Rescue a Stuck Beaver

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Say you're a beaver in springtime. You've spent most of winter bored in your lodge, filling up on bark and cattail roots, waiting for the weather to warm up again. Finally, it does, and you rush off on your regular route—paddle through the pond, walk down the pathway, squeeze between the rails of that metal fence...

Whoops. You're stuck.

Such was the situation in Hamilton, Ontario yesterday, when an animal services officer was called to rescue a chubby beaver trapped in a fence. "He landed... arse over teakettle through the fence onto a lower section of ground and couldn't pull his rear-end through with his tiny front paws," a city statement explains. The officer helped him out, using grit and a lot of soap.

The beaver sustained some injuries from his adventure, and is now recovering at Hobbitstee Wildlife Refuge—where, the refuge says, he has thus far enjoyed "a swim and a bath." Once he's fully rehabilitated, he'll be released back in his hometown, and will presumably get serious about his springtime exercise regime.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

Found: An Unusually Beautiful Bathroom Hidden Beneath a Factory Floor

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Stoke-on-Trent, the “World Capital of Ceramics,” became famous for its industrial-scale pottery operations all the way back in the 17th century. This is where famous brands like Spode and Wedgwood were founded: the clay in this area was just right for ceramics production.

Today, the Middleport Pottery historic site stands as example of a model Victorian ceramics factory, originally designed in 1888. Recently, the site uncovered a long-lost feature of the factory: an ornately decorated worker’s washroom that had been hidden for decades.

“The wash house is almost part of folklore,” director John Lowther said in a release. People who had visited the site in the past had vague memories of it, but it had been sealed beneath the factory floor.

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Now the historical site is opening the wash room back up and preparing to open it to the public. It has 8 ceramic sinks and a large, oversized bath, all decorated with fancy ceramic techniques, perhaps intended to showcase the factory’s best work. The site believes the wash room was still used as recently as the 1960s, but they don’t know much else about it.

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It’s rare for a community to get this excited about a bathroom, but in this case the guardians of the wash room think there’s more history to uncover. They’re hoping locals will come forward with more memories or stories of the wash room and its past.


The Nazi Board Games of World War II

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During World War II, the Nazis fueled children’s enthusiasm for both their war effort and genocide partly by stocking toy stores with cheerful-looking but insidious board games. As budding potential members of the Hitler Youth rolled dice, they competed with miniature weaponry to conquer Allied lands and clear gaming boards of pieces depicting caricatures of helpless or greedy Jews. After the war, German families tossed out the incriminating games in untold numbers, but in the last few years dozens have surfaced in institutional collections and on the market.

At the International Museum of World War II in Natick, Massachusetts, swastikas line the path to the central victory zone on a swastika-shaped pachisi-style board made in wartime Germany. On another propaganda game in the collection, children could play at encircling the British coastline with tiny U-boats.

Kenneth Rendell, the museum’s founder, says that Nazi power derived partly from such shrewd product design. Manufacturers applied symbols of anti-Semitism and death to toys, along with all manner of other household furnishings, from Christmas ornaments to lightbulb filaments. The racist objects, even if they never directly incited heinous acts, would have inured the owners to the prospect of violence all around them.

“The real power of evil,” Rendell says, “is to make it normal.”

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The Wolfsonian museum in Miami Beach has obtained Nazi games with graphics that show masses of soldiers saluting Hitler and gunners bringing down Allied planes. Nazi board games at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., allowed players to imagine themselves as paratroopers sneaking behind enemy lines and radio operators who blocked Allied broadcasts.

Steven Luckert, a senior program curator at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, says that inculcating youth was particularly important for the Nazis—their vision, after all, was that tomorrow belonged to the next generations.

The museum recently acquired a collection of anti-Semitic material produced in Europe and America over the 500 years preceding World War II, and it includes ancestors of the Nazi toys. In 19th-century board games, for example, players tried to avoid giving money to Jews. Numbering nearly 1,000 items, the collection was assembled by Peter Ehrenthal, a Holocaust survivor from Romania who long ran a Manhattan gallery specializing in Judaica. Ehrenthal’s son Michael says the games echo racist ideologies that were common in children’s books of their time. But three-dimensional toys that youngsters held in their hands for hours, he adds, would have been “more tactile to the anti-Semite’s burgeoning mind.”

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In the last decade, Regency-Superior auction house, based in St. Louis, Missouri, has sold examples of the Nazi games (for prices between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars each). The boards depict soldiers hugging their sweethearts, burning down villages, and rounding up Jews. Toys related to civilian life illustrate how to behave during and after air raids, by extinguishing fires on apartment window curtains, helping stabilize bombed buildings, and calmly playing board games while waiting for all-clear signals in air-raid shelters.

The auction catalogs quote the games’ unnerving instruction booklets, which explain that they were designed “for spiritual training, military training, and public education.” The author of a booklet for a game about bringing down Allied warplanes asserts that the plaything’s “deeper meaning lies, in the ever-alert mind, the protection of the homeland.”

Thomas Garcia, an antiques dealer in Los Angeles, has spent more than a decade building a collection of Nazi games. He has a few dozen, including a batch that turned up in a German couple’s attic. “The owners themselves were absolutely appalled that they had these things,” he says, and no one could remember who had piled them there. (He has consigned many of his duplicates to Regency-Superior auctions.)

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Garcia says that the games’ troubling graphics and messages are important to preserve and document, given their impact. He has also sought out propaganda toys made in Allied countries, which were likewise meant to mold patriots, sometimes with graphics that demonize German and Japanese forces.

As the war dragged on, Garcia says, signs of paranoia and pessimism became more common on German playing boards. They warned about the dangers of double agents and air raids, rather than celebrating enemy nations falling under Axis control. The quality of the materials also deteriorated. By 1942, manufacturers had begun supplying cheap paper playing pieces instead of ones made of metal or plastic. The games, Garcia says, “became very flimsy toward the end—you can tell how the fate of Germany was proceeding.”

Kerstin Merkel, an art historian in Germany, analyzed the subject for a comprehensive book she cowrote, Playing With the Reich: Nazis Ideas in Toys and Children’s Books. Though hardly any records from the manufacturers survive, she says, she found examples to study in museum collections. The objects may have survived postwar purges of propaganda because owners felt sentimental and may “have not seen any political dimension in the toys.” Families may have just nostalgically tucked away these artifacts from the days when—in the form of little zeppelins, torpedoes, Luftwaffe planes, Panzer tanks, and imprisoned Jews—evil was just normal.

How FDR Used Famous Immigrants to Extoll America’s Greatness

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On May 4, 1940, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) launched a radio show called I’m an American. On each episode of this short-lived and long-forgotten program, an INS employee interviewed a “distinguished naturalized citizen”—among the famous actors, scholars, musicians, artists, and politicians who appeared on the show are Thomas Mann, Frank Capra, and Albert Einstein. These luminaries were paraded out to extoll the joys of American citizenship—“a possession which we ourselves take for granted, but which is still new and thrilling to them," as the show's announcer put it—and to promote the United States as a beacon of tolerance and democracy. (Listen to full-length episodes of the show below.)

The America portrayed in the show is one of the more inspirational takes on the country: the melting pot, the nation that mobilized to defeat the Nazis and brought freedom to Europe. But even though the government was trying to convince the American public about the advantages of immigration, there were limits to this embrace. The government was only ready to accept some immigrants as loyal Americans.

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As a collection, the interviews can be both charming and awkward. They are weighed down, at times, by the expected tedium of any government document, and are shadowed by the power the government held over immigrants—not all of whom were as welcome as the show made it seem. The dialogues on the show were carefully crafted by government officials: They began with written answers submitted by the interview subjects, but every line was approved, and sometimes scripted, by an INS employee. While the official interviewers are often stiff and halting in their delivery, one sign of the guests’ brilliance is how well they pull off their parts, despite some thick accents. Listen, for instance, to Attilio Piccirilli, the Italian-born, Bronx-based sculptor perhaps best known for his work on the U.S.S. Maine National Monument in New York's Columbus Circle:

The interviewees told personal stories of their journeys to America or discussed the ideals of America and the country’s role in the world. Part of the show’s purpose was to portray America as the land for “lovers of freedom, the refugees of intolerance, the fighters for liberty of man,” as the introduction to a published collection of the interviews puts it. European immigrants who fled rising fascism had a personal stake in American democracy and understood what was at risk across the Atlantic. The author Thomas Mann, who had been a vocal opponent of the Nazi Party in his native Germany, spoke powerfully about the need for democracy to triumph over totalitarianism:

In 1940, when NBC began to broadcast the show on Sunday afternoons, the United States had not yet entered World War II, but President Roosevelt believed it would happen. However, this sentiment was not broadly shared by the American people. As government propaganda, the show had a clear goal to promote a spirit of internationalism, head off the anti-immigrant sentiment that hampered America’s efforts in World War I, and gin up support for American intervention in Europe.

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“It’s a great example of the ongoing tension between the Roosevelt administration and the isolationist flavor of the country at the time,” says Gerd Horton, a history professor at Concordia University and author of Radio Goes to War, which examines the role of American radio in World War II. “This was a time when Americans were not very eager to take in immigrants, including Jewish immigrants. In a way, President Roosevelt was treading on thin ice a little bit, and the Republicans went after him wherever they could, trying to curtail the New Deal programs and this socialist nonsense. I’m sure they were not happy to hear this program to go on the air.”

While plenty of the guests on I’m an American spoke with unalloyed patriotism and enthusiasm, not every interviewee was at ease with the administration’s propaganda project. One early guest, the historian Hendrik Willem Van Loon went off-script and tried to call attention to the show’s charade of informality. Listeners, he said, were smart enough to know the whole script had been approved ahead of time. Ludwig Bemelmans, the children’s book writer and illustrator who created the Madeline series, insisted, “You see I am not the person to go for a message or to advise naturalized citizens how to be good Americans.”

When movie director Frank Capra was asked to appear on the show, he felt pressure to prove his loyalty to the government, his biographers write. As an Italian-American and a member of the Hollywood community, which had long been held in suspicion for left-leaning tendencies, even the director of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was vulnerable to accusations of un-Americanism. Capra was no longer so keen on creating “message films” such as Mr. Smith, but he went along with the government script that had him praise his own film:

Well, I think that picture, well, it was American in spirit. The hero was a young legislator, green about politics but with a good sound American character, and he wasn’t afraid to criticize what he saw that was wrong. It think Americans liked it because he was the underdog and he would speak right out.

Capra was also asked, in preparation for the show, to “give a defense of Hollywood and its people, showing their strong sense of Americanism and loyalty to democratic ideals.” On the show, he said, “Hollywood is no more an offender on this score than any other community. Naturally we have left and rights and middles and ups and downs—mostly ups and downs—but not more than any other place.” But according to Joseph McBride, author ofFrank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, the director’s original response was to attack the Hollywood left and the community’s immigrants from central Europe so sharply that the INS decided to soften the language.

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Capra wasn’t wrong to worry. During World War I, nativism had swept through America, and immigrants faced discrimination so acute it hampered the war effort. The sentiment was again rising in the 1940s, and the federal government was keeping a close eye on its immigrant population. Not longer after I’m an American started airing, Congress passed the Alien Registration Act, which gave the government increased leeway to deport immigrants for their political views and required noncitizens to register with the government. According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, one of the successor agencies to the INS, at one point the I’m an American broadcasts included reminders for noncitizens to register their locations by the December 1940 deadline. These same registration lists were used later to locate Japanese-Americans and imprison them in internment camps.

If I’m an American was an effort to argue for the mutual benefits of immigration to America, its vision of a diverse country was limited. The government was pushing for acceptance of eastern and southern Europeans—Jews, Italians, Greeks, Poles—as good Americans, but not African Americans, Japanese Americans, and others. “There’s no question that Asian Americans and Latino Americans are outside of this,” says Robert L. Fleegler, a historian at University of Mississippi and author of Ellis Island Nation. It wasn’t even legal for Filipino and Indian immigrants to become naturalized citizens until 1946.

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Laws such as the Alien Registration Act reveal what Nancy Morawetz, a clinical law professor at New York University who specializes in immigration rights, calls “an internal battle for the soul” of the INS. The agency was responsible for the dueling missions of immigration enforcement and promoting naturalization. When enforcing the Alien Registration Act, for instance, the INS found room to forgive people who didn’t have the right papers, or who might otherwise qualify for deportation. “It’s not as though these were benign laws,” says Morawetz. “It was the first step toward internment. But it was not thought of as being universally inconsistent with an embracing of immigrants.”

Within limits, the Roosevelt administration was dedicated to promoting tolerance—for European immigrants, at least. Perhaps the clearest expression of this spirit is the campy program the INS created for the first “I’m an American Day,” celebrated on May 18, 1941. In a triumphal moment, the announcer lists the many places that immigrants had come from and what they had contributed to the country:

Ultimately, for the groups embraced by the administration, the propaganda worked. In the story that’s now usually told about American history, these select groups of people are a core part—if clearly not all—of what defines Americanness.

Selected full-length I'm an American interviews


Guy Lombardo, Bandleader

Attilio Piccirilli, Sculptor

Ludwig Bemelmans, Children's Book Author and Illustrator

Thomas Mann, Author

Anton Lang, Professor

Kurt Weill, Composer

Luise Rainer, Actor

Albert Einstein, Scientist

"l'm an American Day" Broadcast

Secrets of the Swazzle

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Long before there were Muppets or Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, there was Punch and Judy. The traditional puppet show has been around since at least the 17th century, and even today, specialist puppeteers known as “professors” keep it alive. In their efforts, they are aided by a simple, hidden tool of the trade, called a swazzle.

Also called a swatchel in the English tradition, a swazzle is sort of like a miniature kazoo that is held in your mouth. The name is thought to derive from the German word “schwätzen,” which means “to chatter.” Typically, a swazzle is constructed of a reed held between two strips of metal, though sometimes other materials are used. The swazzle is placed between the tongue and the roof of the mouth, and when a professor blows, or “talks” through it, the reed vibrates to create Mr. Punch’s high-pitched, buzzing voice.

One aspect of the Punch and Judy show that has helped it survive for centuries and spread all across the globe is that it is generally wordless, with the story and comedy deriving mostly from the violent pantomime of the puppets. Still, Mr. Punch often makes unintelligible but emotive squawks and chirps, and this is where the swazzle comes in. In a history of the swazzle by the performer Professor Glyn Edwards, he writes that “Meaningful dramatic dialogue between [Mr. Punch] and the other puppets can never take place. He is an elemental spirit of anarchic mischief – and his swazzled voice alone tells us as much.”

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Originally evolving out of Italy’s commedia dell'arte tradition, today Punch and Judy can be found in various forms all over the world, from Brazil to Russia. No matter where or when it is performed, the comic show centers on the two titular puppet characters, Mr. Punch and his long-suffering wife, Judy. Additional characters have been introduced and made a part of the proceedings over the years, including their baby, a biting crocodile, and the devil, just to name a few. But Mr. Punch is central to any performance.

“Mr. Punch is an immortal archetype: a Lord of Misrule. He embodies a spirit of anarchic mischief that resonates down the ages,” says Edwards, a second-generation puppeteer who's written multiple books on the Punch and Judy tradition.

The show’s storyline has changed with the times, updating and adding new routines depending on the location and era. But generally speaking, the plot involves Mr. Punch getting into any number of mischievous situations. Some common storylines include Mr. Punch bungling his parenting responsibilities, or running afoul of some inept police officer. Most stories end with Mr. Punch’s adversary getting beaten with a stick, to the delight of the audience.

How and when the swazzle used for Mr. Punch's voice was first created is unknown, although Edwards thinks that it could predate Punch and Judy shows altogether. “The device, like ventriloquism, dates back into antiquity,” he says.

Learning to use the swazzle takes practice, and lots of it. There's a common joke among Punch and Judy masters that you can’t consider yourself a full professor until you’ve swallowed at least two swazzles. “Once you can master the basics there are a few hints and tips on how to improve, but 'learning to swazzle' is like 'learning to juggle,'” says Edwards. “You have some equipment to use and it's up to you to get it to work. You'll get advice and help from those who can already do it, but they can't do it for you.”

Edwards estimates that today there are probably around 300 people worldwide who consider themselves Punch and Judy professors, keeping Mr. Punch’s antics alive. And thanks to their swazzles, the “hunting horn cry of the Lord of Misrule” will continue to cry out well into the future.

“The swazzle is so central to Punch and Judy," Edwards writes, "that even its limitations are important because they prevent the show from straying too far from its roots.”

Objects of Intrigue highlights extraordinary objects from the world’s great museums, private collections, historic libraries, and overlooked archives. See more incredible objects.

Practicing Looking for Life on Mars in Chile's Atacama Desert

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A team of scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has been in Chile's Atacama Desert to test a new computer—in part because the region is so arid and lifeless that it makes an able stand-in for Mars. Sending robotic probes to our planetary neighbor is expensive and time-consuming, so it's important to get the technology they send up there just right. There's a few places on Earth extreme enough for this work, and the Atacama is one of them.

The new computer, dubbed the Chemical Laptop, tests for the presence of 17 specific amino acids, the building blocks of proteins and, in turn, life. Samples from the Atacama Desert are bone dry—as the Martian samples will be—so the device mixes collected soil and dust with water, and then heats it up to a whopping 392 degrees Fahrenheit. The amino acids dissolve in the water, where a fluorescent dye then attaches to them, and the Chemical Laptop can measure how much of each amino acid is present with a laser.

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The Atacama Desert is the perfect venue for these tests. It is one of the driest nonpolar regions, and harbors some of the hardiest microbes on the planet. It's these microbes that give scientists hope that they'll find life on the inhospitable Martian surface. More tests are planned for the new device, in the Atacama and in Antarctica. Scientists are trying to bring the entire process together in one compact package that a rover can use on Mars, or even on an icy moon such as Enceladus or Europa. "The idea is to automate and miniaturize all the steps you would do manually in a chemistry lab on Earth," said Fernanda Mora, the Chemical Laptop's lead scientist, in a release. "That way, we can do the same analyses on another world simply by sending commands with a computer."

Until then, practice on Earth makes perfect.

Last Century a DJ Saved My Life

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If you're in New York City, and you like to dance, you've got a lot of options. A typical night offers everything from punk shows to EDM nights to tango classes to old-school hip hop. It is the city that never sleeps, after all.

But what if you're really old school—like ragtime-vs-jazz, Ma-Rainey-for-life, beat-anyone-in-a-jitterbug-contest old school? Never fear: there's someone out there spinning for you, too. Michael Cumella and Mike Haar, New York's premiere phonograph DJs, both love music from the early 1900s. For decades now, they've spent their spare time keeping it alive, one hand-cranked revolution at a time.

The first three decades of the 20th century saw an explosion of musical experimentation, as ballads and military marches gave way to jazz, blues, country, and early R&B. Although much of this invention was happening live, in dance halls and on vaudeville stages, some of it ended up etched into 78-rpm discs, or "78s." Fans would buy these and play them in their living rooms, on big-horned phonographs.

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Fast forward a century or so, and despite the repeated terraforming of the music technology landscape, one thing hasn't changed: if you want to listen to a recording from the early 1900s, you pretty much have to do it the old-fashioned way, via a 78 played through a phonograph. Cumella learned this about 30 years ago. "I've always collected records, and I wanted to go back farther with music," he says. "At a certain point, you have to encounter the 78 era. There wasn't much reissued, so if you're interested in it, you start to acquire those kinds of records, and the machines that people played them on."

He was quickly hooked. In 1995, he started spinning 78s on the radio, hosting a show called "The Antique Phonograph Music Program" on WFMU. He did his first live gig soon after, upon request. "Someone contacted me and said, 'We're having a party, would you come and DJ with the phonographs?'" he recalls. "I was like, 'You know what they sound like, right?'" After a few other one-offs, a friend of his encouraged him to get serious: "'It's your thing now,' she told me." He had some business cards made up, and he now plays live a few times a month, at jazz festivals, record fairs, and weddings.

Phonograph DJing takes dexterity—you've got to change the needle (every two songs!), switch out the 78s, and keep the machine cranked. But rather than focusing on traditional DJ calling cards (volume, hipness, smooth transitions), Cumella generally goes for a more interactive experience. He'll play the music relatively softly, so that people have to come over to see what's going on. He answers questions, and lets people stick their heads in the horn, like the dog in the classic Victor ad. Sometimes he fails to re-crank the machine, on purpose. "It'll start to slow down and get lower—deedly-deedly-deeeeeedlllyyyy-deeeeeedddllyyyyyy," he imitates. "They're like, 'What's going on!'"

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Haar, who is almost two decades younger than Cumella, first heard phonograph-era music in a college class on African-American jazz and blues. "The professor was playing all these records from the tens, teens, 20s and 30s, and I was blown away by it," he says. "It paralleled the energy and excitement and oddity that punk did for me as a teenager… Something about it was so different and raw." When he came across a phonograph and some 78s in his great-aunt's closet, his fate was sealed.

Although the two each developed the hobby on their own, they didn't stay strangers for long—even New York City isn't big enough for that. "Someone told me, 'You know, there's another guy named Michael who actually does the same thing,'" remembers Haar. "We became buddies." "He's my bestie," confirms Cumella. They now perform together, and guest on each other's radio shows.

Before he found Cumella, Haar practiced his art on his immediate family, playing records for his grandparents and their close friends. When he got more comfortable, he ventured out, bringing his crates and machines to nursing homes in Queens and the Bronx. Reviews were mixed: "Some were amused and some were not amused," Haar says. "The music that I was playing, it was more like their parents' music—older, even."

Such is one burden of the phonograph DJ. Another is more literal: "It's a heavy profession," says Haar. The 78s, which were generally printed on shellac, are thicker and more fragile than this era's vinyl LPs. The horns are huge—each has the circumference of a bicycle wheel. Cumella has custom cases for his go-to phonographs, a Victor and a Columbia, both from 1905. "They were made so well," he says. "They'll probably outlive us, and our children, and their children."

Even if his muscles occasionally complain, Haar, especially, appreciates this physicality. For his day job, as a barber, he uses antique straight razors—"I always wanted to do something professionally that involves tools, and using my hands," he says. He wears vintage clothing, and sports a center part and a caterpillar mustache. If you ran into him on the street and he told you he was a phonograph DJ, you wouldn't necessarily be surprised.

When you listen to music on a phonograph, he says, you can almost hear the sheer effort that went into it. "I enjoy the hardship," he says. "Today, we have thousands of songs on our phones. It's interesting how slow of a process it was [in those days], and how much one song meant." Cumella agrees: "When you're listening to [this music] live, standing in front of the machine, it's almost physical," he says. "You can feel the vibrations."

People will approach them when they're playing, Haar says, trying to figure it all out: "Is it real? Where is the sound coming from?" From the past, via a couple of conduits named Mike.

Learn more about early recording technology at the Johnson Victrola Museum on Obscura Day, May 6, 2017—or dance to the two Mikes' phonograph stylings at the official Obscura Day After-Party, held at New York's oldest club.

Found: A Lot of Snakes in a Walmart Parking Lot

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There’s a lot of reasons to avoid going to Walmart, but one Arkansas location recently added another reason to the list: a parking lot full of snakes!

According to KAIT, around 40 snakes were discovered Sunday slithering around at a Walmart in Paragould, in the northeastern part of the state. Witnesses initially identified them as copperheads or water moccasins, but when police arrived, they discovered they were in fact harmless garter snakes.

The police rounded up the critters, and with no suspects, are describing the incident as a “bad joke."

“They were either herding the snakes when they were frog gigging or something,” a detective told KAIT. “Either way, they were collecting them for this reason and I don’t think that was the best thing to do at all. Especially, those out there with a phobia.”

Please keep your snakes to yourselves.

A Photographer’s Quest to Find the Last of the Drive-In Theaters

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Photographer Lindsey Rickert was just seven or eight years old when she went to her first drive-in movie. Looking back now, what she remembers most is magic of the experience itself, “laughing and playing with my friends under the big screen as the cloak of darkness surrounded us and the screen above illuminated our playground.”

Those experiences came flooding back after she chanced upon the 99W Drive-In in Newberg, Oregon, a few years ago. First opened in 1953, the 99W still shows two features a night during the warmer months, and often sells out on weekends. But it has been more fortunate than almost all of America's other drive-ins. In June 2016, the United Drive-In Theatre Owners Association estimated there were just 324 drive-ins still in operation—down from more than 4,000 in the late 1950s.

Rickert’s chance encounter with the 99W sparked the idea to photograph drive-in theaters across the country. She spent a year planning the trip and raising money on Kickstarter before she hit the road: 12,022 miles across 32 states in 65 days. She hit 28 theaters in total—both abandoned and still in operation—and had encounters with former employees, braved bad weather, and learned why it's important to wear boots in the tall grass. We spoke to Rickert about her ambitious project and resulting book, Drive-In America.

How did you research the locations for your road trip?

Since operational theaters are easier to research and find, I based my initial search on abandoned ones. I spent countless hours doing Google searches. I found several drive-in enthusiast websites that gave large lists, but these were user-updated, so didn’t always have current or accurate information. I scoured Google Images and sites such as flickr, using keywords to find images of abandoned theaters that had visual appeal to me. I placed a large map on my wall, where I placed thumbtacks everywhere I found interesting locations, and the route started to form. Once the abandoned theaters were mapped out, I found operational ones along the same route, but research only took me so far. It gave me a rough idea where abandoned sites are, but rarely exact locations. There was always the possibility that the remnants had been demolished before I could get there—luckily that only happened once.

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Do you have a favorite theater that you photographed?

I have fond memories of each location. It was surreal to pull up, particularly to an abandoned theater. There was this overwhelming joy that I had found it and the beauty of seeing nature reclaiming these structures, followed by a deep sadness for the memories that were once shared there, and the abandoned hopes and dreams that must have accompanied its closing. If I had to pick one, I think it would be the abandoned Sage Crest Drive-In, located in Yerington, Nevada. This was the first abandoned drive-in of the trip and a huge storm was moving in as I searched for the site. Rain was pouring, the wind was blowing hard, and I was in the middle of the desert. I was unsure if I would ever find it, but as soon as I arrived, the rain suddenly stopped. As the sun began to set, a huge rainbow appeared over the screen. Before that, I was nervous about the magnitude of the project, but when I saw that rainbow over the dilapidated screen, my excitement took over and my nerves were put to rest.

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Did you have any strange experiences visiting the abandoned locations?

Ha, several! When I arrived at the abandoned Hilltop Drive-In, in Joliet, Illinois, there were several cop cars surrounding a car that was parked in front of the screen. As much as I wanted to just stop and take pictures of the crazy scene, I decided it was best to head into town with the model I had recruited and my assistant to grab some food while the scene calmed down. We headed back after lunch and the cops had cleared out and we started to explore. To this day, I have no idea what happened.

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Did you speak with anyone who used to work at a drive-in?

I had an amazing experience in Jacksboro, Texas. I had just wrapped up photographing the abandoned site, and as I packed up the car, a pickup truck pulled off the highway next to us. I’m not sure why, but I was convinced they were going to yell at me for being there. To my surprise, when I told the gentleman who stepped out about the project, he exclaimed, "My grandfather was the original owner of this place. I used to have to crawl up into the screen and pull rattlesnakes out." Mind you, I had just been running around in tall grass in a dress and sandals. After that, I made sure to wear boots and pay closer attention!

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Why do you think there is such nostalgia for drive-in theaters, even among people who never experienced them firsthand?

Maybe it's that general push/pull we have in our society as we move forward in a digital age. The decline of drive-in theaters is a direct and larger-than-life reflection of the power struggle between analog and digital. There is just something about them that feels like they are from another time, even when they happen to be updated and modernized. They are this beautiful piece of history that is hanging on and finding new ways to survive.

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The World Needs a Vagina Museum

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Florence Schechter is the sort of person who gets a good idea, starts a project, and sees if it its sticks. “I like just going for things and seeing if they work,” she says. “I get upset if I’ve got a good idea and I can’t actually put it into action.” This outlook is what led her, after realizing that the world lacks a museum dedicated to vaginas, to start planning to rectify that omission.

There is a chain of events that led to this particular good idea. Schechter studied biochemistry but realized she likes talking about science more than doing science. After college, she started a YouTube channel so she could keep talking about science. (She also has started a science film company, Collab Lab, and does science-themed stand-up comedy.) One of her videos is about animal penises—she’s interested in mating behavior in the animal world—and as a follow-up she wanted to make one about vaginas.

When she looked for information about animal vaginas, however, it was hard to find. A friend had recently visited the Icelandic Phallological Museum, and Schechter thought, well, if there’s a penis museum in the world, maybe there’s a vagina museum that could provide some information about animal vaginas.

“And there wasn’t,” she says. So she decided to start one.

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There are vagina-related collections and exhibits, such as the Great Wall of Vagina, for instance, the Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum, and a small museum focused on gynecological care. “But there is no physical space wholly dedicated to the vagina and the people who have them,” Schechter writes on the new Vagina Museum website.

In her vision, a full-scale vagina museum should have permanent galleries dedicated to science (in particular, the anatomy of the vagina and its companion organs) and health, to domestic violence and female-genital mutilation, and to the vagina as portrayed in art and other cultural media. It should host events—comedy nights, dance classes, confidence workshops, and plays—and it should have programs for community outreach, in addition to offering support for charities working on vagina-relevant issues. Ultimately, the idea is to have a physical space where people can come to learn about and talk about vaginas and an institution that can be a force for good for all things vagina-related.

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To start, Schechter is raising money and testing some of her initial concepts. In May, the Vagina Museum will present its first comedy night at a converted warehouse event space in London, and Schechter is starting work on what she hopes will be the museum’s first travelling exhibit, which will focus on basic anatomy and health. The Eve Appeal, a gynecological cancer research charity, conducted a survey of British women and found that only half of young British woman could locate a vagina on a diagram; the first job of the Vagina Museum may be simply to educate people with vaginas (regardless of gender identity) about their own bodies.

Creating a museum from scratch is a monumental task and can take years. The penis museum in Iceland began casually, as a collection of animal penises that grew over decades, until its owner decided to display his specimens more formally. Schechter has never worked in a museum, let alone started one. “I read loads of guides from the association of museums, and they basically said, if you’re thinking about starting a museum … don’t?” she says. “But it’s something I really want to do. It’s really difficult to dissuade me. I’m quite stubborn.” She has been soliciting advice from friends in the science communications community and plans to grow slowly, while learning more about what concepts work and don't work. To begin with, she imagines the audience for the museum will be young feminists, but thinks it could ultimately attract a wide audience. “The thing about vaginas,” she says, “is there’s just not a person in the world where it’s not relevant to them.”

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There are people who don’t yet see the need for a Vagina Museum—a small minority of feminists, for example, are angry that such an institution would define women by their vaginas (in fact, Schechter is dedicated to making the project gender-inclusive and not defining people by anatomy), and predictably more conservative-minded people have questioned the need to make vaginas more visible in any way.

But, for the most part, the response she has gotten has been positive. In one feminist Facebook group, someone tagged their friend on a post about the Vagina Museum and wrote,“she stole our idea!” Schechter figures they must have thought up the idea over drinks or while hanging one day, and just never acted on it. “It was so validating to know that other people have had this idea,” she says. However out-there it might sound to some, the world needs, wants, demands a museum dedicated to the vagina.

Found: Mystery Safe Unopened for 40 Years

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For two decades, the owner of the Bonanza Steakhouse ran a popular restaurant in Saskatoon, Canada, and in all that time he was never curious enough about the unopened safe hidden in his building to go to the effort of finding out what’s inside.

But recently, the building was a destroyed in a fire, and the safe was liberated. Previously, it had been hidden beneath the floor of the women’s washroom. Once, that room had been the building's office, and when it was converted to the bathroom the safe was basically abandoned. According to the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, the safe hasn’t been opened for about 40 years.

During the demolition of the damaged building, a contractor, Ryan Schwab, came across the safe, and he was possessed by the same instinct that most people confronted with an unopened mystery safe would have—he wanted to know what might be inside?

Schwab told CTVNews that he had a few leads on people who might be able to open it, although he does want to preserve it and install it in his own garage. Neither he nor the restaurant's owner is expecting to find anything dramatic inside, but Schwab told CTV “that if he doesn’t show up to work next week, it’ll be a hint that he discovered gold nuggets inside the safe.”

We’re just relieved that someone is going to open a mystery safe after 40 years. (Dictate 246 of the Atlas Obscura code instructs that you should never let a mystery safe go unopened.)

In Fast-Changing Seattle, an Effort Not to Forget the Past

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If anyone has been paying close attention to San Francisco's growing housing affordability crisis over the past few years, it's Seattle residents. The parallels between the two cities are hard to miss: Both are experiencing tech-fueled economic booms, and both grapple with physical limitations to growth thanks to their unique geographies along the Pacific Northwest coast. The rent in Belltown may not yet be quite as damn high as in Nob Hill, but it certainly seems to be on its way.

Amid reasonable fears about gentrification and genuine excitement over the influx of good-paying jobs, another topic has dominated the discourse in Seattle of late—a near-constant accounting of the various local businesses and gathering spots that are rapidly being replaced by rent pressures or new construction.

"A little more than two years ago, it felt like every conversation I had seemed to be about places that were disappearing," says Jaimee Garbacik, editor of Ghosts of Seattle Past, a new anthology of essays, interviews, photography, and graphic art dedicated to places in Seattle that no longer exist. "Every time I went on Facebook, every time I ran into friends, it was, 'Oh my god, did you hear that this place closed?'"

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The book is actually the culmination of years of effort. Ghosts got its start as a small art exhibit, evolved into a crowdsourced mapping project, and eventually became a much larger exhibit with related events, including a full-blown community Irish wake.

"It felt like there was no outlet for that conversation," says Garbacik of what spurred the concept initially. There was "no outlet for people to kind of grieve or process this change, and no one was doing anything productive with it, artistically, to preserve memories of what came before."

Ghosts of Seattle Past, both the book and the larger project, is ultimately an attempt to fill that void. Garbacik spoke with Atlas Obscura about what she learned along the way, and why what's happening in Seattle should matter to urban dwellers everywhere.

For readers who aren’t that familiar with Seattle, can you describe what it’s been like to live in the city over the past five or 10 years, in terms of how rapidly things have been changing?

Well, it’s the tech explosion, part two. That’s what’s going on in Seattle. Amazon’s been adding thousands and thousands of workers. The thing to understand is that Seattle is only 684,000 people. So, when one tech company moves 50,000 people into two neighborhoods... And there are a lot of tech companies coming in.

As this happens, developers are trying to add housing and infrastructure as fast as they can. There are cranes everywhere. And it’s a boom. The median income is going up. There’s lots of new jobs, there’s start-ups, there’s new retail every day. At the same time, Seattle’s history was kind of scrappy. It was a more blue-collar city, it was a back-alley arts city. There was a lot of character, and magic happening in warehouses.

On one hand we’re getting a lot of attention in our music scene, and businesses are exploding. On the other hand, the numbers of black people and black-owned businesses are declining really rapidly, the homeless death rate is very steep and climbing. Our queer neighborhood was this really dynamic space, second only to San Francisco's, and that neighborhood is now high-end furniture shops. And bias incidents and hate crimes are going up as well.

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You can say, "Oh, it's a growing city, it's figuring out its new identity." But Seattle has always been doing this. It's always been a boom-and-bust city, and it doesn't really look backward too much. It's all about innovation, it's all about the next big thing. And as a result, there's an awful lot of communities that have experienced displacement and erasure over time, and over and over again. Right now, it's happening so fast.

There was an Eritrean restaurant in the Central District where East African communities gathered to watch international news and catch up on the news from home. That disappeared. It's not just that a cool dive bar is gone. It's these gathering places, lynchpins of the community. And now, where do they go?

Tell me about putting a project like this together. How did you go about getting a diverse group of contributors?

I've always been involved in the music scene in one way or another, and at that time I'd been volunteering at this all-ages music and arts space called the Vera Project. The thing about Seattle is, if you're involved in the music scene, you know everyone. And I mean everyone. You know everyone on the city council, you know everyone in the mayor's office, you know everybody who owns a restaurant, who owns a venue. If you're tapped into the arts scene in that way, and if you're tapped into the nonprofit scene that way, you know a really wide range of people. So the process, honestly, is making a lot of phone calls and emailing everyone I've ever interacted with and saying, "Hey, who has a great story? Who should we hear from? What am I missing?"

It also helps to host events where people can come interact with it, live. One thing I did was called a Resident's Podium for Seattle Legacy Spaces, at the Center for Architecture & Design. I called up a city council member who I know had a lot of concern about the places that are disappearing, and I said, "If you'll fill a room with developers and city officials, I will parade a bunch of residents and artists and community organizers in front of them." It was just, "Let's have this conversation, let's have it in public." Throwing events like that was very much the key to getting a broad swath.

I had some help from my publishers as well, and, lastly, my collaborators on the project, Josh [Powell] and Jon [Horn]. We made posters and wheat-pasted them all over the city. And we just said, "We want to hear from you." When you do it that way, and people know it's a DIY, scrappy endeavor, and that you really want to hear from them, and that you want their art, their memories, their stories, we'll come to your house, we'll sit down and talk to you for four hours—people really responded to that.

Were there stories included in the book that truly surprised you?

One is "3200 W Barton St," which is an interview with Janet Schuroll. Janet tagged something on our website, and it was this space, this bog, where her brother had drowned in West Seattle. And I was like, "Oh my god. I'm not quite sure how to approach this." Is this a lost place? It was certainly a compelling story. What she told me, when I asked her more about it, is that where that bog is, a large community of Japanese tenants had been taking care of this field, gardening it, and these were the gardeners who supplied Pike Place Market. During the internment, they were forced to abandon that space, and it turned into a bog that wasn't cared for. Janet's brother died in that bog.

So we have this really unexpected way of seeing how something that is very specifically a tragedy for the Japanese population of the city is also interwoven with the health and safety of everyone else.

How did you go about balancing the long view of Seattle history with what’s been happening in the last few years?

In a lot of respects the motivation for this project is about trying to capture this specific moment, in terms of the energy and the anger and hopefulness, before it becomes complacency. We’re watching this homogenization of the cultural landscape. I’m not antidevelopment, and I’m not anti-density, I just want to see it done in a way that doesn’t push out communities of color and queer people and artists. There’s definitely a way to create a more inclusive landscape than what’s being done.

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So there is a strong emphasis on what’s happening right now. That being said, the parameters I set were that someone has to remember the space that they’re talking about, they have to be alive to be able to tell the story of the space. In terms of how far back it goes, it goes back as far as the most elderly people we spoke to. For example, there’s a group of older gentlemen, mostly African-American men from the Central District who attended Garfield High School, who meet for breakfast. That’s probably the oldest story [in the book].

Having talked to so many different people, you're in an interesting position in terms of having a sense of the collective perspective of Seattle right now. How do you think the city feels about its place in the larger context of cities grappling with this kind of change?

I think people's sense of what's happening is that the city is losing its soul. As soon as you start seeing ampersand restaurants—you know what I mean ...

I do.

[Laughs] As soon as you see that in a town, it's like, "Oh, hell no. It's happening!"

But here's the thing. Seattle has a lot of different images of itself, depending on who you talk to. That makes it difficult to give you one unified answer to this. There are a lot of people who like thinking of it as an innovator hub that keeps reinventing itself, but those are the people who don't have as much to lose. They're more privileged and they don't have to worry about getting priced out. Other people think of it as this scrappy, arts-underbelly place where weird, unique things happen. And they are watching the scene disappear.

Let's be honest, San Francisco is dead. It's over. Nobody's going there for the arts. Seattle is just two steps behind. It's happening all over the country. I just heard an NPR story about the same shit in Nashville. It's definitely happening. Part of the problem is that each city thinks that this is a thing that's happening to them. That was a big part of the reason that I thought, "This is something that's larger than just Seattle's story."

You can take a walking tour inspired by Ghosts of Seattle Past, featuring authors from the book, on Obscura Day, May 6, 2017.

When Squirrels Were One of America's Most Popular Pets

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In 1722, a pet squirrel named Mungo passed away. It was a tragedy: Mungo escaped its confines and met its fate at the teeth of a dog. Benjamin Franklin, friend of the owner, immortalized the squirrel with a tribute.

“Few squirrels were better accomplished, for he had a good education, had traveled far, and seen much of the world.” Franklin wrote, adding, “Thou art fallen by the fangs of wanton, cruel Ranger!”

Mourning a squirrel’s death wasn’t as uncommon as you might think when Franklin wrote Mungo’s eulogy; in the 18th- and 19th centuries, squirrels were fixtures in American homes, especially for children. While colonial Americans kept many types of wild animals as pets, squirrels “were the most popular,” according to Katherine Grier’s Pets in America, being relatively easy to keep.

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By the 1700s, a golden era of squirrel ownership was in full swing. Squirrels were sold in markets and found in the homes of wealthy urban families, and portraits of well-to-do children holding a reserved, polite upper-class squirrel attached to a gold chain leash were proudly displayed (some of which are currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Most pet squirrels were American Grey Squirrels, though Red Squirrels and Flying Squirrels also were around, enchanting the country with their devil-may-care attitudes and fluffy bodies.

By the 19th century, a canon of squirrel-care literature emerged for the enthusiast. In the 1851 book Domestic pets: their habits and management, Jane Loudon writes more about squirrels as pets than rabbits, and devotes an entire chapter to the “beautiful little creature, very agile and graceful in its movements.” Squirrels “may be taught to jump from one hand to the other to search for a hidden nut, and it soon knows its name, and the persons who feed it.” Loudin also waxes on their habits, like jumping around a room and peeping out from wooden eaves, writing that “an instance is recorded of no less than seventeen lumps of sugar being found in the cornice of a drawing-room in which a squirrel had been kept, besides innumerable nuts, pieces of biscuit.” Loudon’s advice: when your squirrel is not running around the room, provide it with a tin-lined cage that has a running wheel.

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Leisure Hour Monthly, meanwhile, in 1859, advised to feed it “a fig or a date now and then,” and that you should start your squirrel-raising adventure with those procured “directly from the nest, when possible.” The unnamed author’s own pet squirrels, Dick and Peter, had the freedom of his bedroom and plenty of nuts to store away. “Let your pet squirrels crack their own nuts, my young squirrel fanciers,” the author wrote.

While many people captured their pet squirrels from the wild in the 1800s, squirrels were also sold in pet shops, a then-burgeoning industry that today constitutes a $70 billion business. One home manual from 1883, for example, explained that any squirrel could be bought from your local bird breeder. But not unlike some shops today, these pet stores could have dark side; Grier writes that shop owners "faced the possibility that they sold animals to customers who would neglect or abuse them, or that their trade in a particular species could endanger its future in the wild."

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Keeping pet squirrels has a downside for humans too, which eventually became clear: despite their owners’ best attempts at taming them, they’re still wild animals. As time wore on, squirrels were increasingly viewed as pests; by the 1910s squirrels became so despised in California that the state issued a widespread public attack on the once-adored creatures. From the 1920s through the 1970s many states slowly adopted wildlife conservation and exotic pet laws, which prohibited keeping squirrels at home. Today, experts and enthusiasts alike warn that squirrels don’t always make ideal pets, mainly because of their finicky diet, space requirements, and scratchy claws.

None of this, of course, will deter the most determined squirrel owner. Fans of Bob Ross might remember his pet squirrel named Peapod, and some squirrels owners are rekindling the obsession by making their pets Instagram-famous. Still, wild squirrels surely agree—it’s probably best we’re now mostly leaving them to the forest.

The Religious Feud in England Over Asparagus

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This past Sunday, April 23rd, churchgoers at England's Worcester Cathedral were treated to an unusually fragrant and spiky service. To kick off the annual Asparagus Festival, the church decided to dedicate a few minutes of mass to a ceremonial blessing of this unique vegetable.

During the ceremony, a man in a suit and tie carried a bundle of the vegetable to the front of the church, the Telegraph reports. He was followed by Gus the Asparagus Man—a man costumed as a spear of asparagus, and a frequent sight at Asparagus Festival events—and someone dressed up as St. George, shield and all. The cathedral's Precentor then blessed the crop.

Not everyone was happy. "This is an absurd pantomime-type scene that makes a mockery of Christian worship," the leader of one lobbyist group told the Telegraph. A popular religious blogger took the trend to what he said was its natural conclusion: "Where's the sprout liturgy, or equality for mushrooms? Would the Dean really permit a walking fungus to participate in an act of divine worship?"

The festival's co-founder, Angela Tidmarsh, was pleased, though. 'We had the asparagus blessed by the vicar of Bretforton and then we took it to the cathedral," she told the Telegraph. "So it's twice-blessed asparagus."

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

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