“A man in this country receives a letter from a foreign city,” reads a New York Times trend story from 1898, about a “common” scam being carried out by mail. Titled “AN OLD SWINDLE REVIVED”, the story details how the "Spanish Prisoner" scam generally begins:
“The writer is always in jail because of some political offense. He always has some large sum of money hid, and is invariably anxious that it should be recovered and used to take care of his young and helpless daughter by some honest man. He knows of the prudence and good character of the recipient of the letter through a mutual friend, whom he does not mention for reasons of caution, and appeals to him in time of extremity for help.”
Postal shakedowns were a simple, and sometimes effective, way of illicitly separating rich people from their money in the 19th century. What was in it for the good Samaritan, just opening his mail on a boring day? Well, the sender of the letter “is willing to give one-third of the concealed fortune to the man who will recover it,” according to the Times.
What happens next is the ask: before the treasure can be recovered, the writer just needs some money sent to him first. (The treasure, of course, never materializes.)
Sound familiar? The so-called “Spanish Prisoner” scam is still around: just this week, a top Nigerian fraud artist was arrested for his part in carrying out similar swindles via email. And the 1898 Times description of the scam's broad outlines remains remarkably accurate, save for a few technological details.
The swindle came to be known as the “Spanish Prisoner” because, often, the letter-writer claimed to be holed up in a Spanish jail, for reasons arising from the Spanish-American War. “The letter is written on thin, blue, cross-lined paper, such as is used for foreign letters, and is written as fairly well-educated foreigners write English, with a word misspelled here and there, and an occasional foreign idiom,” the 118-year-old Times story notes.
Modern readers, though, are likely more familiar with its more modern variant: official-looking emails from Nigeria, which ask the recipient to send money—often thousands of dollars—to unlock a massive treasure, which has been tied up by government officials or otherwise encumbered in some abstruse way.
As in 1898, these entreaties at first blush might seem real but upon closer inspection hardly hold up. The English is a little broken, and the "official" seal of some Nigerian government agency doesn't seem quite right. There's an air of too much desperation.
And, yet, still, people fall for it, since the conceit of the scam isn't that it will work every time, or even one out of a hundred times. You only need a few suckers, in other words, to make millions. One victim in the U.S. lost $5.6 million to scammers. The recently arrested Nigerian spam-kingpin was said to have hauled in around $60 million in ill-gotten gains.
Eugène François Vidocq, the father of modern criminology. (Photo: Public domain)
But even in the days when you had to hand-write letters the scam was astonishingly successful. Eugène François Vidocq, who is called the father of criminology, documented in his memoirs a version of it perpetrated by prisoners in early 19th century France. This was well before the Spanish-American War, when the scheme was then known as "letters from Jerusalem."
"Sir,—You will doubtlessly be astonished at receiving a letter from a person unknown to you," one such letter began, according to Vidocq's recollection. The structure of this letter is savvy: before unleashing his tale of woe, the writer offers the carrot first: a casket containing 16,000 francs in gold as well as diamonds, which the writer says he and his master were forced to leave behind after they were detained while traveling. Having laid out the stakes, he continues, writing of his eventual supposed imprisonment, before, finally, the ask, which in this case is very subtle: "I beg to know if I cannot, through your aid, obtain the casket in question and get a portion of the money which it contains. I could then supply my immediate necessities and pay my counsel, who dictates this and assures me that by some presents, I could extricate myself from this affair."
Vidocq wrote that 20 percent of such letters received some kind of reply, and, in some cases, prisoners made hundreds of francs from the letters, which were tacitly allowed by jailers, who would also take a cut.
Fast forward nearly 200 years to the 1980s, when scammers in Nigeria began to send reams of paper letters to people across the world. By the 1990s, they used fax machines, and, by the late 1990s, had switched to email.
In the most recent case, a man known only as "Mike," was arrested, according to the BBC. Over the years, Mike oversaw dozens of people who sent an untold number of emails out across the world, from the U.S. to India to Romania, using the digital age to realize the full potential of the swindle.
Which means that, in 2116, when you receive a holographic message of doubtful provenance promising hidden riches in exchange for a few thousand dollars up front, don't do it. It's been tried before.
An artist's concept of a spacecraft landing on 101955 Bennu, with Earth in the distance. (Photo: Public domain)
There's no reason to be alarmed, but scientists say a 1,500-foot-wide asteroid might slam into Earth in 2175, potentially killing us all.
The asteroid, named 101955 Bennu, has been orbiting the Sun for some time now, completely circling it every six years. But scientists recently told CTV News that at its current trajectory, it would have a one-in-2,700 chance of hitting Earth in 2175, an impact that wouldn't be dissimilar to how the dinosaurs died 66 million years ago.
“These are what we call extinction-level objects,” Paul Delaney, an astrophysics and astronomy professor, told CTV. “If they were to come in contact with us, you’d have the same sort of scenario as the dinosaurs all over again.”
And even if one-in-2,700—or around a 0.04 percent chance—doesn't sound like much, Delaney says a lot can change between now and 2175, meaning that it could get much more likely to happen or, of course, chart a different path and skip us entirely.
And even if a collision course with Bennu does seem inevitable, by then we might have a way to stop it. NASA is launching a spacecraft headed towards Bennu in September, with the goal of landing on it, collecting samples, and returning that information to Earth. The more we know, scientists say, the better we can conceive ways to potentially halt it.
So don't fret just yet. Your descendants, in all likelihood, might be just fine.
As a staunch anti-communist, novelist Ayn Rand was no stranger to J Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Files recently released to Mike Best date back as early as 1947, where we find this rather charming review of Rand’s first literary hit.
In fact, Rand appears to have been in not infrequent correspondence with the Bureau, sending clippings concerning books she suspected of engendering communist beliefs …
…such as this bargain-basement knock-off of Animal Farm.
Also included were negative reviews of her own works, because as everyone knows, being anti-anti-communist is the same as being pro-communist.
However, after an article came out in the Saturday Evening Post in which Hoover described himself as an “objectivist,” Rand wanted to take her relationship with the Bureau to the next level. She wrote the Director, asking if this was a reference to her personal philosophy of Objectivism, and if they could meet to “discuss a personal political problem.”
An inquiry was immediately launched - what had Hoover actually said? What is objectivism, anyway? Should the Director meet with Rand?
In regards to the first question, a clipping of the article in question showed that the Director had described himself as “objectivist,” but he had simply meant it as a reference to his self-avowed apoliticism.
As for Objectivism, nobody at the Bureau had any clue - though they do note that the publisher Bennett Cerf, one of the founders of Random House, had given Hoover a (presumably unread) copy of Atlas Shrugged.
Though Rand disdained enough of the right people to pass the FBI’s sniff test, it was ultimately determined that she was insufficiently important for the Director to meet her.
Hoover wrote back to Rand, clarifying his views, and while he couldn’t commit to an appointment, he’d be happy to chat if she dropped by when he was around.
Rand, for her part, appeared to take the snub in stride, and a few years later sent Hoover an autographed copy of her latest.
Which promptly ended up in an evidence locker - also presumably unread.
One of Goldman's dieoramas of a desert crime scene. (Photo: Courtesy Hashimoto Contemporary)
Abigail Goldman makes miniscule murder scenes. She assembles them from model train sets, minus the actual train. The people—often dismembered, sometimes by a lawn mower or chainsaw—are about the height of a dime, arranged with the help of tweezers and a magnifying glass. The blood is cheap acrylic paint. Itsy-bitsy beat-up cars, dusty desert landscapes, graffiti-marred buildings and weatherworn trailers are backdrops to the tiny worlds of mayhem, where the carnage contrasts with the preciousness of the medium. It’s all contained in a Plexiglass box, and called, appropriately, a Dieorama.
At 34, Goldman, with her curly golden hair and wholesome countenance, has long been drawn to dark subjects, or, as she refers to it, “oddity and tragedy.” In her early teens, growing up in Northern California, she remembers coming across a worn-out book of vintage crime scene photos. She couldn’t resist it. “It was one of those books that absolutely everyone in the bookstore had flipped through many times, so the pages were weathered and torn and no one dared to buy it,” she says. “And I came forward and bought the one gross, manhandled copy.”
All of Goldman's miniature scenes are contained in a plexiglass box. (Photo: Courtesy Abigail Goldman)
This proclivity toward morbid matters continued in her career and personal life. Her wedding announcement, which ran in the New York Times in 2009, describes how she and her husband—both of whom used to be reporters in Las Vegas—encountered one another: first covering a double murder, next working at the scene of a suicide.
Following her reporting job, Goldman was hired as an investigator with the federal public defender’s office in Las Vegas, where her job revolved around digging up new information on old criminal cases—primarily sex offenses, murders and assaults—that were up for appeal.
A full-scale dieorama. (Photo: Courtesy Hashimoto Contemporary)
It was around that time, in 2011, that she remembers looking at a series of photos of elaborate, pleasant model railroad scenes, complete with whimsical figurines and lush landscaping, and thinking, “I could do that same thing, but just get rid of the trains and add murder.” She figured it would be a funny gift for friends, or to have around the house.
A cat-sitting gig gone awry prompted the first. When she got swatted by her friend’s cat—to which she was allergic—Goldman’s mind went back to the mini murder scenes. “Probably in some sort of sublimated rage, I decided I was going to make a diorama,” she says. The resulting tableau: a man on a park bench, sitting next to a human head. She left it on the friend’s coffee table, with no explanation, no note. “She loved it,” says Goldman.
Goldman's depiction of a clifftop crime scene. (Photo: Courtesy Abigail Goldman)
The hobby grew and in 2012 her husband posted photos of the scenes she’d made on Reddit. His “My wife makes dioramas” post quickly garnered more than 400 comments and 40,000 views (today it’s up to more than 900 comments and 4.7 million views), landing itself on the site’s home page.
Word got around, and a friend (the one with the cats) talked to a Las Vegas art gallery owner who approached Goldman to participate in a show. To Goldman’s shock, the 10 dioramas sold out within hours. That success led to more shows and art fairs in Las Vegas, New York and Miami.
An unsettling domestic scene. (Photo: Courtesy Hashimoto Contemporary)
In 2015, Goldman moved from Las Vegas to Bellingham, Washington, and wound up working in crime prevention, as the sex/kidnapping registration coordinator at the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office, where she monitors the whereabouts of sex offenders.
Goldman says her art hasn’t consciously changed as she’s moved from crime beat reporting to the world of criminal justice. In fact, she’s never portrayed real-life cases in her craft, which veers towards scenarios that she describes as more “fantasy” and “speculative” than gritty reality. “My dioramas have packs of marauding clowns with AK-47s. Or bodies in trunks and people making out next to the bodies,” she says.
A scene by a trailer. (Photo: Courtesy Hashimoto Contemporary)
What has changed since the early creations are her artistic abilities and attention to detail. She might spend hours pouring miniature cement onto a miniature driveway and making miniature cracks in that driveway, or painting a teeny car so it looks old and distressed, or building and painting an entire cityscape. Covering the Styrofoam base with dirt takes a matter of days, as she layers paint and fixative and solvent and lets it all set. She still gets the dirt from Las Vegas, sometimes transported by visiting friends, and then bakes it to kill any bugs. “Something about that fine, sun-baked dirt is the best,” she says.
Four years after the Reddit post went viral, Goldman is still surprised at the popularity of the Dieoramas. “This was something I had been doing for friends, I didn’t think anyone would ever see them,” she says. “And then the next thing I know, suddenly, it was almost a feeling of being exposed in a way. And I’m still getting used to it. I still feel weird about the whole thing.” In August, her work will be on display at Hashimoto Contemporary gallery in San Francisco.
A closer-in detail. (Photo: Courtesy Hashimoto Contemporary)
Last month, her husband posted photos on Reddit for the second time, and the response, again, was overwhelming. So far, there are nearly 100,000 views and over 130 comments, which vacillate between admiration (“Tell her to make more! I could look at these for hours!”) and horror (“Sleep with one eye open sir.” “Seek therapy and shelter.”).
Goldman has grown to expect the raised eyebrows. She says she compares the reaction to her work to our fascination with car wrecks—neck craning and all. Like it or not, she says, humans are perversely drawn to shock and awe and horror.
“The secret’s out,” she says. “Everyone’s creepy.”
The tunnel (not pictured) was built by "people who would rather avoid contact with law enforcement." (Photo: Daniel Mayer/CC BY-SA 3.0)
Along the Simpson Park Trail, in Albany, Oregon, there’s a series of tunnel-like caves. The caves, reports the Albany Democrat-Herald, are “elaborate and can accommodate multiple people.” They’re built under a maple tree and a fir tree, and reinforced with tarps and wood. They’re basically a dream hide-out, but they’re also not long for this world.
The local police department first found the tunnels in June. They are pretty impressive tunnels. (There are many pictures here.) But police found evidence people had been camping there, which isn’t allowed. And the tunnels are not exactly safe. The construction undermined and destabilized the root systems of the trees above. The police are also worried that they’re being used by “people who would rather avoid contact with law enforcement,” the Democrat-Herald says. Officers recently found a person napping there who had drugs and a weapon.
One of the people police encountered near the tunnel, Gabe Vergara, said he’d constructed them, according to the Democrat-Herald, but that he’d never slept there. People dig tunnels for all sorts of reasons; these are impressive but nowhere near as elaborate as some personal tunnels.
Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.
A recent semi crash left one Indiana roadway covered in white paint as the vehicle lost its shipment in a rollover. According to WNDU—which called the spill "shocking and unprecedented"—they’re used to the roads getting covered in white stuff, but usually it’s just snow.
The accident took place around 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday, when the semi drifted off the road for an unknown reason. When the driver tried to bring the truck back, the vehicle flipped, covering the toll road near mile marker 101 with 23,000 pounds of white latex paint. According to early responders at the scene, an entire stretch of the road was covered in a layer of paint over an inch thick, that was also seeping into the ground on both sides of the roadway. The driver survived, but was taken to the hospital because of injuries.
An environmental group came to the scene to handle the mess, noting that the paint that seeped into the ground would have to be excavated at a later time. To clean up the thick layer of paint on the road, the group used a classic clean-up trick, adding sand to the paint to turn it from a liquid to a solid, making it much easier to handle. The road was closed for six shours, causing a traffic jam that stretched on for miles.
But the hundreds of smashed paint cans—and most of the paint itself—were cleaned up by the end of the day, allowing the road to reopen, erasing a road that, for a while, had been just one white line.
Before she won two Nobel Prizes, Marie Curie attended the Flying University. (Photo: Tekniska museet/CC BY 2.0)
If you think getting a college education is tough today, try earning a degree in Russian-controlled Poland in the late 18th century. If you were a man, you couldn’t be taught anything at university outside of the state-sanctioned curriculum, which was bad enough, but if you were a woman, you weren’t allowed to attend at all.
That’s where the Flying University, which produced Marie Curie and thousands of other students, came in.
By the middle of the 1860s, Poland had been parceled up between Russian, Prussian, and Austrian powers. One of the first things the country’s new rulers did was set out to limit and control Polish education. Like so many colonizing powers before and since, they knew that the first step in stamping out that pesky nationalism was to take it out of the history books. The Germanization and Russification efforts (depending on what political power controlled the part of Poland where you lived) aimed at higher education made it nearly impossible for the citizenry to take part in a curriculum that wasn’t in some way working to erase Polish culture. Even the teaching of Catholicism among a largely-Catholic population was taboo.
In the 1860s and 1870s, more educational opportunities were being made available to women in Poland, but universities still staunchly refused to admit them. In 1863, the Ministry of Education had actually sent out a decree to every university council in the country explicitly banning women from enrolling (to be fair, most all universities across Europe had policies forbidding women at the time). Any effort to give a complete education to the complete population would have to happen in violation of the new laws.
In the 1800s, the gates of Warsaw University were closed to women. (Photo: Witia/CC BY-SA 3.0 PL)
The Flying University began in the Polish capital of Warsaw in 1882, when secret classes for women began taking place in private homes. The lectures and seminars were taught by Polish philosophers, professors, and historians. Here they could not only receive a proper higher education, but also one that celebrated Polish heritage, free from the influence of outside powers. Hosting and organizing the classes was illegal under government statute, so to avoid detection they often changed location, moving from private home to private home. The classes came to be known as the Uniwersytet Latający, the Flying (or Floating) University.
These unincorporated classes, organized by various pockets of pro-education rebels, went on in and around Warsaw for years, but they were not formally brought together under one umbrella until around 1885. One of the students of the clandestine courses, Jadwiga Szczawińska, who has been described as possessing “formidable organizational ability,” got the idea to join the disparate classes together as a single covert operation. As the organization came together, even began creating a secret library that was funded by the small tuitions, which were also used to compensate the teachers. As the university formed, the coursework became more formalized as well, establishing a curriculum that covered sciences, history, math, theory, and more. What had begun as an informal rebellion evolved into an actual secret school.
With the freedom to provide a more complete, and patriotic, education, the Flying University was able to employ some of the country’s finest academic minds, giving the school a reputation for providing a higher standard of education than any of the formal universities. As more male students heard of the university’s success, they also wanted to take part, and by the 1890s, the Flying University had near a thousand students from both sexes.
While the university couldn’t grant its students any sort of official degree, it did have graduates. Easily the most famous of the students who took part in the Flying University was Curie, the mother of radioactivity who would go on to win multiple Nobel Prizes for her work. Curie, a Warsaw native, joined the university with her sister, prior to earning her first official degrees in France.
The Flying University remained in operation until 1905 when changing attitudes in government allowed it to come out of hiding. Sensing the coming of World War I, the Russian and Germanic powers made moves that they hoped would make the Polish people warm to them, including loosening the restrictions on education. Once the university could operate legally, it established itself as the Society of Science Courses, and later as the Free Polish University.
A second incarnation of the Flying University appeared again in the mid-20th century in response to a post World War II effort by Communist Russia, who once again took control of Poland, to send the memory of previous Polish-Russian conflicts down a memory hole. Where the first Flying University seemed to have operated relatively without conflict with the government, the second incarnation was a more contentious, and outwardly political affair, with supporters of the institution often getting brutalized by Soviet thugs. The second university eventually disbanded at the end of the 1980s as Poland moved towards democracy.
Today there are over 500 colleges and universities across Poland, offering both women and men the opportunity for a balanced and comprehensive education. No flying needed.
In a few short weeks, bright-eyed college freshmen will be ambling onto campuses and into their first lectures. Which means a whole lot of newly minted undergrads are about to get freaked out by their on-campus libraries.
Library anxiety is real. The phenomenon, which involves feeling intimidated, embarrassed, and overwhelmed by libraries and librarians, was first identified by Constance A. Mellon in 1986. Her paper, "Library Anxiety: A Grounded Theory and Its Development," reported that college students in particular are prone to library anxiety because they believe their research skills are inadequate, which makes them feel ashamed and unwilling to talk to the very librarians who might be able to ease their worries.
Some students in Mellon's study did their best to avoid the library altogether. "I know that nothing in here will hurt me," wrote one freshman, "but it all seems so vast and overpowering." Another first-year student described the library as "a huge monster that gulps you up after you enter it."
Though it's been 30 years since library anxiety was identified, the fears are still present among college students. This presents a problem for libraries, especially as the increasing availability of digital resources from home has contributed to the image of libraries as fusty, inaccessible warehouses.
The Library of Columbia University is not the library of Columbia University. (Photo: Alex Proimos/CC BY 2.0)
In 2016, students are used to just using the internet at home, says Anice Mills, who has been a librarian at New York's Columbia University for 15 years. But that doesn't really work for academia. “As soon as you need to use scholarly resources, Wikipedia isn’t going to cut it," she says. That's when students make their first trek to the campus library, where, says Mills, many feel “overwhelmed, intimidated, and embarrassed.”
A major contributor to students' anxiety is in the design and architecture of the buildings. "It’s such a change from most high schools,” she says. “Columbia has 20 libraries, and they’re divided up by subject. That’s not obvious—you wouldn’t know that when you walk in, there’s no sign to tell you that.”
When there are signs, they can be misleading. For example, the stately building with "The Library of Columbia University" carved on its facade is not, in fact, the library of Columbia University. Well, not anymore—the Low Memorial Library, as it was dubbed when built in the 1860s, quickly proved too small to house the required information resources, and has been used as an administration building ever since. Confusion like this, says Mills, "adds a lot, at Columbia, to the general sense of ‘Oh my God, how am I ever going to figure this place out?’”
Columbia's lit-up Butler Library looms in the background. (Photo: Beraldo Leal/CC BY 2.0)
Even when students end up at the right place—for most, Butler Library, Columbia's main source of research resources—it's a "fairly intimidating." Butler's grand facade, built in the 1930s, is inscribed with the names of ancient Greek writers and philosophers (Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle) above the formidable columns that flank that main entrance. “You walk in and you’re in a large domed lobby, not a book in sight," says Mills. "There’s no people, there’s no one to ask, there’s no signage. You have to figure it out on your own—where are the books?”
Though Butler Library underwent extensive renovations in the early 2000s, it remained confusing. “The architect who designed the renovation did not want to put signage up in the lobby that said ‘This is where you go for this,’" says Mills. "He thought that would be too much like an airport.”
Once students make it past the lobby, it can be hard to locate a librarian. "The librarians are behind desks, they’re in offices," says Mills. To counteract the confusion and make students feel more welcome, she wears a Columbia lanyard, walks around the library, and introduces herself using her first name. “I try to be as accessible and empathetic as possible.”
While library anxiety is most pronounced in first-year undergrads, students in graduate programs can also feel intimidated by the research process. Some students in masters programs, says Allen Foresta, Senior Librarian at Columbia University's graduate Teachers College, “managed to get through undergraduate without really being required to use a library, which is kind of astonishing to me.” These students may need as much guidance as undergrads, especially if their previous studies have been more practical rather than research-based.
“To be a librarian it’s a whole psychological effort to try to understand, when someone comes to speak to you, what are they bringing with them?" says Mills, citing international students and older students as two groups who feel especially ill at ease in the library. "What kind of background or anxiety are they bringing with them when they sit down to talk to you?” Mills and Foresta visit classes to encourage students to ask librarians for assistance, and also work one-on-one with students to help them get the hang of research methods and databases.
At Teachers College, the latest feature aimed at making the library more accessible is a "Learning Theater"—a black-box space that incorporates pivoting glass dividers, immersive projection, and wirelessly controlled theatrical lighting. According to the designers, the Theater will serve as a "dynamic prototyping lab for developing and testing new ways of teaching and learning."
The dramatically lit learning lab is a far cry from the hidden stacks and shushing of the old-model academic library. It even takes some cues from New York's avant-garde theater scene. As part of a "professional development activity," Foresta and other Columbia library staff attended Sleep No More, an immersive and unsettling interpretation of Macbeth that takes places over six floors of a haunted hotel.
“The idea was to try to get a sense of how space and sound and imagery could be used in our space," he says. "I think the thing that I liked most about it was the little bit of the scariness of it, the creepiness ... Maybe it’s a good thing to kind of embrace the anxiety.”
Last month, at the beginning of flooding season, an elephant from Northern India was separated from her herd. As the waters rose, it became harder and harder for her to return. Eventually, she ended up far away—past the Brahmaputra river, over the border, and in the neighboring country of Bangladesh, where she has been eking out a swampy, difficult existence, far from the hills she's used to.
Now, after weeks of worrying over the elephant, an international team of twenty veterinarians, forest officials, and technical support staff is gearing up to bring her home, reports Indian Express.
The elephant has become a popular new neighbor—many people have been following her around in boats, tailing her as she moves from one district to another.
At this point, she "looks tired and weak," said one forest official, Ashok Mollik. "It is finding limited items of food, like rice plants and sugarcane plants... yet it remained non-violent."
The team has tough work ahead of them. "There is no way we can tranquilize it in water, as it might be floated downstream," another forestry official, Shahab Uddin, told Agence France-Presse. Instead, they have to lure her up to higher ground, where they can care for her, tranquilize her, and figure out how to move her by truck.
If they can't, they'll try to acclimate her to her new home, said Bangladesh's forest chief: “India will take it back if possible, otherwise we will keep the elephant.”
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.
The Olympic flame will burn brightly in Rio de Janeiro tomorrow night to mark the start of the 2016 Games. Eighty years ago, the flame glowed in Berlin, during far darker times in Olympic history.
One hundred thousand people came to watch the opening ceremony of the 1936 Games. As this British Pathé video shows, Adolf Hitler arrived by motorcade, marched around the running track and greeted a little girl. Nazi flags adorned the circular stadium.
A packed-out crowd joined Hitler in salute before the teams paraded their national flags. The music was triumphant but most of the athletes wore solemn expressions. The Italians, dressed in black shirts, saluted Hitler as they passed.
The German team came out last, behind the Nazi emblem, hands uniformly extended in salute. Hitler declared the eleventh Olympiad officially open and the crowd respond with a chorus of what sounds like "Heil."
The now-essential tradition of lighting the Olympic flame started at the Berlin Games. The video ends with the raising of the Olympic flag and a blond German athlete who lights the flame, takes the Olympic oath, and ushers in the most unsettling two-week sporting event in modern memory.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Emailella@atlasobscura.com.
As Hollywood boomed in the early 1930s, moviegoers wanted to see more of the world, and the film industry had the means to show it to them. Films set in exotic locations grew popular for this reason, with South Seas-inspired stories becoming a particular draw.
Decades before South Pacific hit Broadway stages, films of the era featured white, male adventurers and native maidens grappling with magical island enchantment, shipwrecks, pirates, romance, and the like. They were a hit, and Polynesia became the de facto image of paradise in America's collective imagination.
Enter the tiki bar. At these tropical establishments, patrons could soak up the atmosphere and excitement of the South Pacific without even leaving their suburb. Of course, much of the ambience they were soaking up was not an accurate representation of life on a Pacific island.
Postcard advertising the Menehune Banquet Room at the Waldorf in Vancouver, c. 1950s (Photo: Rob/Flickr)
The palm trees were plastic, the food was Americanized Chinese, the decor was a messy blend of imitation Polynesian, Caribbean, and African indigenous art, and the hula dancers were usually Midwestern brunettes with spray tans. Midcentury Tiki culture fetishized island life, to be sure, and it largely faded out when its faux primitivism began to seem tacky.
But American tiki isn't quite done yet. A kitsch renaissance in the 1990s made way for a number of new tiki bars you can visit today, and a handful of the original vintage locales still exist.
Ernest Beaumont Gantt, a.k.a. Donn Beach, at the Beachcomber Cafe. (Photo: Hawaiian Beachcomber)
Ernest Beaumont Gantt made his way through the Depression as a bootlegger, but when prohibition ended he was out of a job. He worked a number of odd jobs, but having traveled in the Caribbean and Pacific, he found himself successful as a technical advisor on the numerous South Seas films Hollywood was churning out.
In 1934 he opened a bar in Los Angeles where he made rum drinks (it was the cheapest liquor he could get) and decorated it with Polynesian flair he had collected, along with buoys and nets he scrounged up from the waterfront. He named it the Beachcomber Café, and he put his all into making patrons feel as though they were in a little grass shack somewhere far off in the Pacific.
Gantt cast himself as the master of ceremonies and legally changed his name to Donn Beach. Celebrities and civilians alike flocked to the Beachcomber, and Donn knew how to keep them there: knowing customers were more likely to stay for another drink if the weather was inclement, he created his own tropical rainstorm via garden hose on the roof. Soft ukulele and "exotica" music was ever-present, both played live and piped in. Eventually there would be a myna bird trained to say, "Give me a beer, stupid."
Bob Hope learns to hula at Don the Beachcomber in Waikiki. (Photo: Hawaiian Beachcomber)
Despite the fact that he himself was drafted, World War II turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to Donn Beach and the tiki craze. First, thousands of American youth were shipped out to the Pacific, where many of them were seeing palm trees and beaches for the very first time. Military men brought back coconut shells and grass skirts to their new suburban homes. News of this paradise came back from overseas, and the idea of a tropical vacation began to grow in the American pop culture consciousness.
Second, while Donn was overseas, his wife Sunny managed Don the Beachcomber (the bar, not the man). She turned out to be twice as savvy as he, and expanded the establishment into a chain, and a popular one at that.
Various copycats ensued, including the highly successful Trader Vic's.
Spotting the burgeoning popularity of all things tropical, Victor Bergeron opened a bar across the street from his parents' grocery store in Oakland, California in 1934, around the same time Donn opened the Beachcomber.
If "Trader Vic's" sounds familiar, it's because the grocery chain Trader Joe's borrowed their name from Vic's, along with its trading post vibe. They've largely since moved their brand away from its tiki-inspired origins, though their employees do still wear Hawaiian shirts.
To be fair, the jury is out on who stole from whom. Both Donn Beach and Victor Bergeron (Trader Vic) laid claim to the invention of the Mai Tai cocktail (which translates to "good" in Tahitian), and both dressed their restaurants in the style that would become iconic to tiki bars.
They remained in friendly competition throughout their entire careers, but while Donn went for celebrity and spectacle, Vic sought quantity in his business. Part of what attracted folks to the tiki craze was the feeling of escapism. If you couldn't get to the Pacific, it was no matter — a temporary vacation was available to you at Trader Vic's. To capitalize on the desire for cheap, easy leisure, Vic opened dozens of his restaurants in domestic and international hotels.
While Donn and Vic expanded their chains around the world, clubs like the Tonga Room in San Francisco focused on exclusivity.
The Tonga Room was one of the first "high style" tiki bars. Rather than a dive bar in a wooden shack, the dining club was elegant and glamorous. It represented a new style coming into vogue.
As tiki fever caught on, its aesthetic was enveloped into high culture. Rather than being considered low class, "primitive" carvings and bamboo rattan furniture were modish and chic. Architects built A-frame houses in imitation of indigenous Pacific longhouses. Women began wearing hibiscus-printed barkcloth dresses. Exotica musicians like Les Baxter and Martin Denny fused American jazz with bongos, marimbas, vibraphones, and even bird calls in what would become quintessential lounge music.
And of course, it would be a mistake to forget Elvis Presley's association with Hawaii, which went on to inspire the decor of his favorite room in Graceland.
Movie poster for Girls! Girls! Girls!, one of three films starring Elvis in Hawaii. (Photo: Paramount Pictures)
Tiki culture, Polynesian pop, the look of the South Seas—whatever you want to call it, it was fully a part of American pop culture by the 1950s. This was mirrored in the media, and who better to capitalize on America's tropical fascination than the King himself? Elvis signed a contract to film three musical movies in Hawaii, and out of these came some of his greatest hits, including "Love Me Tender" (from Blue Hawaii) and "Return to Sender" (from Girls! Girls! Girls!). He loved Hawaii, and returned there often, most notably for "Aloha from Hawaii Via Satellite", one of the first live televised concerts, which saw the debut of his famous white jumpsuit.
Elvis' connection to Hawaii was so intense that he wanted to recreate it at home, which he did in his Jungle Room in the Graceland Mansion. Complete with a bar and waterfall, it was the ultimate at-home tiki bar, a mark of fully realized American leisure.
In all three of the Hawaiian films Elvis played a version of the same character—a young man who, instead of performing his duties as a pilot/fisherman/heir to a pineapple plantation, only wants to surf and flirt. This symbolized a new epoch in youth culture, and the carefree, fun-loving ethos of tiki culture suited it perfectly. All around the United States, tiki bars, restaurants, and even amusement parks cropped up so that the new, young middle class could let loose and "go native", as so many of them put it.
Dancers and musicians at the Mai-Kai. (Photo: 1950sUnlimited / CC BY 2.0)
There were places like the Mai-Kai in Fort Lauderdale that used the Floridian landscape to recreate a Polynesian fantasy, complete with dancers and musicians. More than just a place to get a drink and eat semi-exotic food, the Mai-Kai was intended to be an experience. It featured eight dining rooms, each representing a distinct group of Polynesian islands, a lush tropical garden, and a floor show complete with fire eaters.
On the other coast of Florida, Indian Shores was home to Tiki Gardens, a Polynesian theme park. But of course, the good people of middle America wanted a tropical getaway in their neighborhood too, climate be damned.
The Kahiki Supper Club in Columbus, Ohio, became a destination for those near and far. It came closer to an amusement park than a restaurant, featuring massive, flaming tiki heads at its towering entrance, an indoor lagoon, and the pièce de résistance: the Mystery Girl.
Whenever a Mystery Drink—a punchbowl of rum cocktail with a smoking volcano in the middle—was ordered, a beautiful, unnamed dancer would deliver it to the customer with a fresh orchid lei, a kiss on the cheek, and a dramatic bow to a tiki head, and disappear with the bang of a gong. This schtick may have been stolen from the Mai-Kai in Florida; it can be hard to determine the source of the reproductions of tiki, which were all imitations of Polynesian affects anyhow.
Like any fad though, tiki eventually grew outdated. Air travel was easier than before, and with more access to the actual Pacific, tiki recreations began to seem gaudy and gauche. After the horrors of the Vietnam War were broadcast across the States, glamorizing the lives of indigenous peoples lost some of its escapist gleam.
Tiki establishments across the country snuffed out their torches and shuttered their doors. But a handful of original vintage tiki bars still exist. Most franchises of Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic's did not survive, but Montanta's Sip 'n Dip Lounge did. Los Angeles' Tiki Ti has stood the test of time as well, perhaps because its founder was the original bartender at Clark Gable's on-set bar during Mutiny on the Bounty, Christian's Hut.
A kitsch renaissance in the 1990s made way for a number of new tiki bars, and ever since then their numbers have steadily increased. New York has few, including Otto's Shrunken Head. Las Vegas has Frankie's Tiki Room; Vancouver hosts the Shameful Tiki Room. The most famous tiki room is Walt Disney's "enchanted" one, though it's also probably the only one that doesn't serve alcohol.
Today, few are under the illusion that a visit to a tiki bar is representative of any authentic Pacific culture. In fact, most tiki enthusiasts are not even referencing the actual Pacific when they don Hawaiian shirts and host backyard luaus.
Rather, they are engaging in a nostalgic fantasy for the novelty of a bygone era. Tiki culture is a romanticized copy of a copy of Polynesia, a plastic paradise native to nowhere. Next time you find yourself in a tiki bar, take a second to bask in the midcentury kitsch that gave us Mai Tais, the limbo, and dashboard hula girls.
Threshing, which is separating a grain from its plant, is an essential task of farming. These days, it's done by big machines, which work over the world's fields to harvest every grain they can get.
And at a farm in Canada, recently, dozens of farmers gathered to break what they said is a world record: 139 threshers, simultaneously threshing, according to Farms.com.
The threshers were mostly antiques. They gathered in a field in Austin, Manitoba, about 80 miles west of Winnipeg, and threshed 75 acres of wheat, which amounted to 30,000 sheaves. Funds raised during the event will go to charity.
The record isn't official yet because Guinness World Records has not certified it. But that isn't stopping the farmers from celebrating. The previous record for simultaneous threshing featured 111 threshers.
“This was a once-in-a-lifetime event,” Elliot Sims, an organizer, said, according to Farms.com. “You just don’t see stuff like this anymore.”
The picture above of two ballet dancers soaring across a simulated lunar crater comes from the set of Destination Moon, a 1950 space adventure film. But the dance is not in the film. The context of the photograph is unknown, and the identity of the dancers a mystery—one that William Higgins, a radiation safety physicist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, has been trying to solve since he first stumbled across the photo seven years ago.
“Finding the pictures came as a complete surprise to me and other people who are very familiar with the history of the production of Destination Moon,” says Higgins. "Even though I know a lot about the film, I never heard anybody mention ballet dancers."
The imageis one of approximately 86 mysterious LIFE magazine photographs taken by Allan Grant. The series of photos titled “Preparation ‘Moon Ballet’” shows an undocumented performance of three dancers— one man and two women—prancing, pirouetting, climbing, and flying in a fantastical lunar world created on the Eagle Lion Films Hollywood sound stages in 1949.
Destination Moon is regarded as one of the first feature films to attempt to accurately depict a trip to space. The producers brought on screenwriters, such as former engineer and science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein, consulted astronomers, and conducted background research on physics, rocketry, and astronomy. There were countless exchanges and some internal debates over discrepancies in the set design and costumes, the crew laboriously accounting for technical details while also understanding the limitations of their production budget.
“To the best of my knowledge, this is the first serious space picture that’s been made in the United States,” director Irving Pichel said in an on-set interview. “More than that it’s the first picture made about a trip to the moon in which they didn’t find pretty girls there.”
The plot is simple: a rocket carries four astronauts to the moon, where they must overcome the unexpected elements of outer space. “I think today, it’s not as solid a story as you like,” Higgins says. “But you get a whole sense of wonder from seeing a shiny rocket take off and four brave men try to keep from getting killed.”
Destination Moon director Irving Pichel brushed up on astronomy and the laws of gravity to give a realistic movie about space.
Higgins has done extensive research on Destination Moon’s production. He wrote a chapter on it in a book about Heinlein, for which he acquired and examined a box full of Heinlein’s letters archived by the University of California, Santa Cruz. He’s read different descriptions of the set, watched old interview segments with the crew, and pored over a 48-minute documentary of the making of the film. But nothing hinted at what Grant was up to while photographing Destination Moon.
Around December 1949, LIFE magazine sent Grant to capture the impressive moon dreamscape. Grant took hundreds of behind-the-scenes photos of the actors, the moon set, the space ship, and the film crew, which enriched the several vivid written accounts of the production. Richard W. MacCarthy, an officer of the Pacific Rocket Society, visited the set and noted its beauty and odd amount of Earth-bound objects lying on the moon’s surface:
“To a visitor fortunate enough to see the set for the first time under the right lighting conditions may come for an instant the nightmare feeling of having made the big trip. For an instant only, because the crater floor is littered with cigarette butts and a terrestrial stepladder lurks behind a lava crag.”
Of the rolls of film Grant shot, only a handful of photos were featured in an article in the April 24, 1950 issue of LIFE. Then, in February 2009, Google digitally archived Grant’s 200-odd photos from the Destination Moon shoot. Higgins was looking through the images when he stumbled upon two peculiar photos. The set was recognizable, but the dancers in ballet attire were not. After a few weeks of digging, Higgins uncovered 86 of the Moon Ballet photos.
Higgins presented the photos to other fans and film researchers of Destination Moon, and all were just as baffled as he was. At first, he thought that the photos were of a deleted scene, a kind of dance dream sequence that must have been cut from a film that was all about depicting space accurately. Higgins noted that the dancers do not look posed and seem to be in a choreographed performance. The sound stage and set are completely lit. The male dancer is even rigged to suspended wires, and in some photos can be seen wearing the goggles and prop magnetic boots that the astronauts wear to walk in simulated weightlessness. There are even pictures of one of the dancers posed next to producer, George Pal.
Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, deemed the "dean of science fiction writers." [Photo: Dd-b/CC BY-SA 3.0]
Higgins evaluated whether the photos were from a cut scene with the late William Patterson, who wrote a two-volume biography on Robert Heinlein. Patterson had read every draft of Destination Moon’s script and all of Heinlein’s papers, including correspondence on the progress of the production and story suggestions, but he couldn’t recall any evidence to support the theory. “In no draft of the script is there ever a dance or a ballet, so the idea that it’s a deleted part of the movie doesn’t hold up,” says Higgins. “If [Patterson] says there’s no ballet, I believe there’s no ballet.”
Another theory is that the Moon Ballet was an independently staged, avant-garde performance. Higgins proposed on his blog that the ballet was most likely filmed using the same cameras, lighting, and crew around the time after Destination Moon wrapped in early December of 1949. There are accounts that the set was kept for a few weeks after filming, the producers continuing to bring visitors and throwing a giant Christmas party. The timeline aligns with when Grant supposedly took the photos, which are stamped January 1, 1950.
To this day, no one can confirm the story behind the bizarre Moon Ballet photos. Higgins is still trying to find the missing links. Tracking down someone who worked in the production or who can identify the dancers will help bring him closer to solving the mystery. But even if he never finds out the full story behind the Moon Ballet, he remains amazed by Grant’s photos.
“It’s just what you’d hope a ballet on the moon would be: Dancers are soaring over this fantastic landscape,” he says. “If we never learn anything about these people and what they were up to, and we never find the lost film we think they might have been shooting, those pictures all by themselves are entertaining and stir your imagination.”
Mermaids at Brighton swim behind their bathing machines in this engraving by William Heath, c. 1829. (Photo: Public Domain)
Over the course of the 19th century, as seaside holidays became more popular in Europe, North America, and Australia, beachgoers began to understand why previous humans had spent thousands of years avoiding the ocean. New swimmers grew wary of the dangers they knew were waiting for them while suspended over deep waters, particularly the most obvious one: drowning.
So industrious Victorian inventors set to work, and imagined some interesting life-preserving solutions to the problem at hand. Many of their efforts were as complex as they were perplexing.
Although life-jackets are ubiquitous today, the materials they use had not been invented yet, so swimmers and sailors had to strap on preservers that were far more elaborate.
G.B. Shepherd's 1897 patent for a life-preserver, which "will be non-collapsible and will contain enough air to give it sufficient buoyancy". (Photo: Google Patents US 616439 A)
Consider, for example, the life-preserver as envisioned by George B Shepherd in 1897. The construction is fairly baffling, with “a series of hoops...preferably four in number, and connected to each other by a series of folding and locking braces” joined by leather. This clever device also sports a breathing tube, and the person using it can sit comfortably while waiting for help, theoretically.
Materials in the 1800s were under-qualified for the task of creating a light, portable device a that would keep a grown human afloat; there were rubbers and fabrics, but no airtight plastic as we have today. Victorian inventors had to get creative.
Cork was a popular choice, though many cork-based life savers were larger than we’d consider wearing today, like P. Plant’s Cork Swimming Suit from 1882, which was described as “an improved swimming suit or jacket, made to fit and cover the body.” Diving dresses, the precursor to modern diving suits, got more ambitious in the Victorian era than they’d ever been before, adding metal rings, vests, and breathing tubes, as with one patent from 1837.
Many life-preserving inventions were made for fisherman and other seafarers, whose occupations had long been considered high-risk, even deadly. In the 1849 book Echoes from the Backwoods: Or, Scenes of Transatlantic Life, Sir Richard George Augustus Levinge writes:
“It happened one evening that the conversation turned upon the best thing to be done in case of a man’s falling overboard. “Nearly all the party had witnessed such accidents; each had seen a different remedy tried...every sort of patent anti-drowning contrivance discussed—but, as usual, no two agreed. On one point, however, they all did agree, which was, how rarely a man is ever saved.”
A "swimming apparatus" patent from 1881, "having between the pockets for the limbs a web portion, which acts like wings or fins, which, from the movement of the legs and arms, effect a propulsion through the water." (Photo: Google Patents US 243834 A)
Inventors, however, carried on. William Beesom’s swimming device came as a detachable suit with wings, which let the swimmer glide effortlessly across the water and avoid drowning in the waves. An issue of Practical Magazine from 1875 admits “It is not generally known how little [buoyancy] is needed to keep a person afloat in sea water,” but goes on to describe several cork-vests and belts, including one invention by Lieutenant Kisbee, “introduced under the curious name of jfietlicoat breeches.”
His device was to be used with a “life rocket,” that would fling passengers off of a sinking ship like a slingshot. It included “a pair of canvas breeches kept open at the top by a circular life-buoy or ring of cork. It is hauled over from the shore to the ship. A man gets into it, his legs hanging below the breeches, and his arm-pits resting on the buoy.”
A drawing of "swimming stockings" in action. (Photo: Public Domain)
The swimming stocking, an earlier invention from 1851, was“Light, portable, easy of application” according to Mechanic’s Magazine,but “resembles, in fact, a small umbrella around the leg.” The idea is that you could wear a pair of stockings, which were made of wood, fabric and rope, under your clothes like socks and use them “in the moment of need.”
To use swimming stockings most effectively, the wearer had to make sure to swim on their back and kick each leg alternately straight out; then, “the leg ought to be held steady for an instant after being drawn up” in order to take advantage of its use. The magazine article then recommends swimming 50 to 60 strokes per minute. There were limits, though: “With a pair of these stockings a person may swim in summer weather a mile for pleasure, and several miles if for his life.”
Designs for the Wearable Lifeboat, meanwhile, resembled nothing so much as a bucket-shaped diaper, that humans were meant to waddle around in, along with goods they wanted to keep dry.
Patented in 1837 by John Macintosh, it was intended “for the conveyance of troops, baggage, and other articles across rivers” and of course for life-preserving itself. The design uses canvas coated in rubber for the body of the personal lifeboat, and attached booties for the user to wear. “Air chambers” would keep a would-be swimmer afloat, while “Oars, or paddles, may be used to give a direction to such vessels.”
A patent for a life-vest that could be conveniently stored in a coat pocket. (Photo: Google Patents US 650976 A)
But what if you were strolling by the water, fell in, and suddenly found yourself in dire circumstances without your large, cork-filed suit or wearable boat? In 1840, Samuel W. White had a fashionable solution: just put your life preserver in your hat. In his patent document he announces“new and useful Improvements in Preventing Persons from Being Drowned.”
When drawn out with a ribbon or cord, the hat’s waterproof lining creates an air pocket that can hold its unfortunate wearer above the water. Others, like Henry O. Lavery in 1899, committed to safe seaside fashion using hidden life-vests that could be activated when needed, and otherwise neatly stored away in a coat pocket.
Of course, people all over the world in the 1800s were aware of the ridiculous nature of some swimming products. For one reason or another, many of these patents did not become widely used devices, though perhaps they should have—during WWI some recruits apparently wore mattresses, at least once, as cumbersome life preservers. In 1928, the inflatable life preserver was invented, changing the game of swimming safety.
Swimming grew in popularity, as did modern life vests, making more intricate inventions a bit less necessary, though we’re still looking for cuter, newer ways to avoid drowning. Next time you take a swim in your own, less-cumbersome swimsuit, or use a life-jacket, remember the efforts of those early safety pioneers, and all their zany, ingenious methods of keeping people afloat.
Some people drinking beer at a block party there recently had an idea about how to improve the vibe: What if they filled a dumpster—which is usually filled with filthy garbage—with water and used it as a swimming pool? What if? The possibilities were endless.
You may have guessed at this point that this makeshift pool wasn't exactly "legal." But this year's Cedar Street Block Party, which also featured a Beer Olympics and a slip 'n' slide, definitely would not have been as special without it.
Not all men are capable of big ideas. Some only have small ideas. Some have ambitious ideas, but lack the means or audacity to make them a reality. Others, like Justyn Myers, possess that rare combination of ambition and skill, capable of discerning, for example, that having just a kiddie pool at your block party, is, indeed, child's play.
So, as Billy Penn reports, Myers and his buddies got to work, renting the dumpster you see above for $250, and filling it with water from a nearby fire hydrant, to the delight of dozens of fully-grown humans, who happily exchanged their long- and short-term health on Saturday for a little chill.
City authorities weren't as pleased, saying Wednesday that they would not be issuing any more block party permits to the dumpster pool's block, after outlining some sensible reasons why you shouldn't make a habit of swimming in large garbage receptacles.
"We are not screwing around, Philly," a city official said.
Not all pioneers are recognized in their own time: this, most of us can grow to accept, if not appreciate.
A statue of workers inside the Palace of Culture Ilyich. (All Photos: Lucas Vogt)
This monumental symbol of proletarian culture has fallen into disrepair in Ukraine's third largest city, Dnipropetrovsk, a city currently distancing itself from its Soviet past.
The Palace of Ilyich opened its doors in 1932 and functioned as the cultural heart of Dnipropetrovsk until the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, the building was privatized, and its valuable belongings were liquidated. Finally, in 2000, it was locked up and left to deteriorate.
These days the only visitors it attracts are scrap metal scavengers or urban explorers.
The exterior of the Palace of Ilyich.
Architect Alexander Krasnoselskiy's design of the building was heavily influenced by constructivism, a style associated with Communist aesthetics of the 1920s and early 1930s. The massive complex comes equipped with several halls for concerts, sports, theater productions, and over 20 children's classrooms.
Hundreds of workers and their families would gather at the palace to pursue hobbies, to celebrate holidays, or simply for entertainment. The youngest were enrolled as Little Octobrists and would later join the Young Pioneers, an organization similar to Scouts but with a socialist twist.
Every town, kolkhoz (collective farm), and sovkhoz (state-owned farm) in the Soviet Union was equipped with a Palace of Culture—one centralized hub accommodating an impressive variety of government-endorsed leisure activities. Soviet ideology declared religion a scam, accusing it of luring society's most vulnerable citizens into addictive and deceptive mind tricks. It could be argued that the Palace of Culture concept was devised as a replacement for the moral guidance and sense of community which the church had provided.
A statue of Lenin in the ruins of the building's library.
As a result of the Euromaidan protests in 2013, the dramatic ousting of president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, and the ongoing war with Russia, the majority of Ukrainians have grown ever more eager to move on from their Soviet past. Last year the government outlawed Soviet symbols and support for Communism. This led to a wave of nation-wide de-Communization, with more than 1,000 Lenin monuments torn down since 2013. In fact, only a few months ago, the city of Dnipropetrovsk changed its name to Dnipro, since its namesake Petrovsky was a commie.
Meanwhile, the cost of renovating the ruined Palace of Culture in the middle of Dnipro is estimated at $20 million, but even without the initial financial hurdle, a reluctance toward resurrecting the Soviet hub is understandable amid the current political climate. However, there are no immediate plans to raze it to the ground either, and most citizens would still prefer to see the building back in use.
There are two guards situated in a room to the left of the entrance, close to the Metrobudivnykiv metro station. For those interested in visiting the palace, try knocking on their window and befriending them, perhaps with a small gift. If you're lucky they'll give you a tour and maybe even present the Soviet memorabilia they've collected from the building.
Another way to get in is to attend one of the cultural events that occasionally take place in the palace, like the annual new media art festival Construction Fest. Or just sneak in.
The entrance to the theater.
Inside the theater.
What remains of the stage.
Theater props bearing Soviet symbols.
The staircase.
A vandalized Lenin statue in a corridor.
Inside the library.
An old poster in the library.
Torn remnants of books.
Curtains still hang from some of the library windows.
Every day our community of travelers and writers unearths fascinating places from the hidden corners of the world and adds them to the Atlas, helping to build our collaborative database of over 9,000 hidden wonders. And while each and every place is worth a wander off the beaten path, some stand above the fray as particularly extraordinary. These seven unusual locales are some of the most curious and enticing places we came across this week.
In the center of Kazakhstan, 16 miles of desert away from the nearest road, lies a giant, black monument that only a small handful of people have ever laid their eyes on. This is the Soyuz 11 Memorial, dedicated to the only men to die in outer space: the crew of the Soyuz 11, a Russian rocket which launched in June of 1971. Soyuz 11 was the only manned mission to ever board the world's first space station, before tragically crashing on the trip back to Earth.
To honor the crew’s memory, the Russian government built a large black monument at the exact location that the Soyuz 11 landed in the desert. The memorial has hardly ever been visited due to its remote location, but it pays due respect to those who lost their lives for the Space Race. Unfortunately, the monument only stayed intact for 39 years. In 2012, a group of visitors found it had been vandalized. Only metal bars and scattered ruins remain.
High-def satellite image of third order island. (Photo: NASA/Public Domain)
The Canadian Arctic Archipelago is home to world's largest third order island. Discovered by Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings, this nameless isle within Victoria Island is a sub-sub-sub island. That is: an island inside a lake, which is completely surrounded by another island, which is completely surrounded by another lake, which itself located on Victoria Island, which is located in the Arctic Ocean. And is it is quite possible that this small island has never been visited.
The ornate and cobblestoned Leadenhall Market is one of the oldest markets in London, but more recently gained another kind of fame. The marketplace is featured in the beloved Harry Potter films. It's used as the original exterior shots of Diagon Alley, the shopping hub of the wizarding world, and the entrance to the Leaky Cauldron, through which wizards and witches can enter Diagon Alley from Muggle London.
One of the markers commemorating the events in October 1981. (Photo: hrnick/Atlas Obscura)
On October 27, 1981, the Swedish government was served some Whiskey on the rocks. A Soviet submarine, possibly carrying nuclear warheads, ran aground in the southern archipelago of Karlskrona. The submarine was Soviet, of a class in the West called “Whiskey.”
The Soviet Union and the West were still in the throes of the Cold War, and Soviet submarines in Swedish territorial waters were not entirely unknown. But one running aground so close to a major naval base was something different. The big question, and ultimately the urgency, was about whether there were nuclear weapons onboard. A 10-day standoff ensued.
A mural depicting Polynesian islanders in the style of Paul Gauguin at Don the Beachcomber. (Photo: Sam Howzit/CC BY 2.0)
In 1934, Ernest Beaumont Gantt (he later legally changed his name to Donn Beach) opened a bar in Los Angeles. There he made rum drinks—it was the cheapest liquor he could get—and decorated with Polynesian props he had collected while working on the numerous South Seas films Hollywood was churning out, along with buoys and nets he scrounged up from the waterfront. He named it the Beachcomber Café, and he put his all into making patrons feel as though they were in a little grass shack somewhere far off in the Pacific.
The bar known as Don the Beachcomber in Huntington Beach, though not the Hollywood original, is about as close as you can get to that bar, physically and aesthetically. It still serves up classic Donn Beach—rattan furniture, sugary tropical drinks, and midcentury Polynesian pop nostalgia straight from the originator himself.
Hundreds of machines are setup for the tournaments. (Photo: PAPA.org)
In many ways, the future of pinball lives under this roof. Twice a year the doors open and the greatest pinball players in the world stream into the Professional and Amateur Pinball Association (aka PAPA) World Headquarters. Here in the massive 100-year-old warehouse space the best of the best pinball players go head to head to see who is the most talented, most determined, and luckiest pinball player in the world. It is here where the one and only "World Pinball Champion” is crowned.
Though it has been proven to be an imitation of the legendary table around which King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table congregated, this table hanging in the Great Hall of Winchester Castle was made in the 13th century.
The artwork you see on the table today dates to the reign of Henry VIII who had the table painted with the Tudor Rose at its center. The outer design is thought to portray Henry as King Arthur on his throne, surrounded by 24 places, each bearing the name of one of the legendary Knights of the Round Table.
Back in December, Hangzhou Zoo lost three red pandas. On a snowy day, the weight of the snow broke a tree branch, providing a route out of their cage, and the pandas hightailed it out of there, leaving behind their less opportunistic brethren.
Two of the pandas were caught quickly. But one very clever panda managed to live life on the lam, until now.
Finally, deep into the summer months, the panda was spotted in a tree. Zoo workers rushed to the scene, the South China Morning Post reports, and climbed the tree to try to capture the missing panda. Others set up a net below. They tried to be nice. They offered the panda apples. The panda was not interested.
So, they shot it with a tranquilizer gun. “The panda staggered for about three minutes then fell from the tree into the net,” the Morning Post reports.
Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.
When Lawrence Brown, an assistant professor at Morgan State University, watched the reaction to the shooting of Freddie Gray, in the West Baltimore neighborhood Sandtown-Winchester, he couldn’t help thinking about what role the place played in Gray’s death.
Gray and William Porter, the police officer who shot him, were born in the same year and grew up in the same neighborhood; Porter’s family left when he was still young. The neighborhood in which Gray was killed was considered a high-crime area. How did that contribute to the behavior of the police officers?
“People aren’t living their lives outside a spatial context,” Brown says. “We’re part of the environments in which we live, play, work and pray.”
As he became active in Baltimore’s movement to address police brutality, Brown formulated a way of talking about how place can contribute to the danger to black lives. He put it this way at a recent community hearing on a controversial development project: "As we say black lives matter, we also have to say black neighborhoods matter.”Segregation and police violence, he says, “are interrelated."
"Black lives can only be contextualized by understanding the places in which people live.”
He’s not alone in making that connection. Academics, activists and advocates are looking at how disinvestment in black neighborhoods exacerbates the dangers identified by the Black Lives Matter movement and others fighting police violence. Or, to put it another way: What about the neighborhoods in which police violence takes place might contribute to the danger to black lives?
For decades now, in major metropolitan areas across the country, many of those places have been characterized by what two sociologists termed“hypersegregation,” with black and white people distributed unevenly among neighborhoods and African Americans very likely to live in predominantly black neighborhoods, clustered together in space.
Last year, weighing those factors along with two other key indices, Douglas Massey, one of the sociologists who originally coined the term, and his colleague Jonathan Tannen identified hypersegregated cities in America from the 1970s to 2010. Overall, the number of hypersegregated places has decreased since the 1970s. But Massey and Tannen still identified 21 metro areas where hypersegregation was evident, based on 2010 census data.
The most strongly hypersegregated cities were Baltimore, Birmingham, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Flint, Milwaukee, St. Louis. In their paper, Massey and Tannen argued that “it is perhaps no coincidence” that people in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, staged dramatic protests after the death of Michael Brown and the National Guard took over the area. “We can continue to expect a disproportionate share of the nation’s racial conflicts and disturbances to occur within these intensely segregated landscapes,” the sociologists wrote.
In Baltimore, for instance, most police officers are white, and many live outside the city. “The underbelly of it all, in many ways, is the assumptions that police are making about the type of people that live in certain neighborhoods,” say Brown. “I don’t think you can fix policing without fixing these more endemic factors.”
Despite the decrease in hypersegregation, though, there are still systemic factors limiting investment and mobility in black neighborhoods. In a couple of recent studies, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, which promotes economic justice and the flow of capital to underserved communities, looked at home mortgage lending in Baltimore, St. Louis and a couple of other cities. Within Baltimore and St. Louis, race was a determining factor for who received mortgages—lenders were less likely to originate mortgages for properties in black neighborhoods.
Here’s what the map of Baltimore lending looks like:
The green indicates the black percentage of the population in each area: darker green neighborhoods have a higher percentage of black people. The purple bubbles indicate home buying activities from 2011 to 2013.
There’s a clear disparity between the lending going on in predominantly black neighborhood and predominantly white neighborhoods, and while income plays a role, NCRC analysis found the race also helped determine where banks made loans. In black neighborhoods, the organization found, there were not as many bank branches to begin with—there’s no place where you can even talk to someone about getting a mortgage. But even if there were, the chance someone living in a predominantly black neighborhood would receive a mortgage is significantly less than in a working class white neighborhood.
This type of discrimination compounds economic and social disparities, and contributes to the hypersegregation of cities, by limiting mobility for people living in black neighborhoods. It also limits the creation of wealth in these neighborhoods: homeownership and the creation of small businesses depend on access to credit. These trends look segregation in place and contribute to tensions between the people who live in black neighborhoods and police.
“The segregated environment is a recipe for this sort problem,” says Bruce Mitchell, NCRC’s senior research analyst. “Both the grinding poverty and the resentment that breeds over the long term—those are historical factors that I don’t think we’ve come to terms with.”
And this type of disparity among neighborhoods is what activists like Brown are trying to call attention to and change. “When I say black neighborhoods matter, one thing I mean is: let’s address disinvestment,” says Brown.
The Movement for Black Lives platform, a collaboratively written series of policy proposals released this week, addresses some of these issues in its Economic Justice section. It calls for a reauthorization of affordable housing funding at the federal level, as well as a realignment of federal development incentives for housing and other infrastructure towards fair development. The platform also calls for state governments to end discriminatory credit policies, like the ones identified by NCRC.
In this formulation, increasing investment and fair development in black neighborhoods is just one plank in the platform. But it is possible that it’s the keystone to tranforming the relationship between people in black neighborhoods and the police.
