Quantcast
Channel: Atlas Obscura: Articles
Viewing all 11432 articles
Browse latest View live

Researcher Says One Danger of Peace-Sign Photos Could Be Stolen Fingerprints

0
0

Have you ever posed for a photo with your index and middle fingers raised, indicating your desire for world peace? Probably, since the sign has become shorthand for the sentiment after Vietnam War activists popularized it in the 1960s.

But researchers in Japan warned this week that those flashing their exposed fingertips were at risk of fingerprint theft, which in turn could be used for any number of things, like unlocking your iPhone. 

Isao Echizen, a researcher at the National Institute of Informatics, said that he and his team were able to lift the fingerprints from someone's fingers from a photo taken about nine feet away, according to Phys.org.

The technology used to do this, Echizen says, was not very advanced, but as it so happens, the NII is developing a solution to this so-far-possibly-nonexistent-(?)-problem: a transparent film that would block thieves from decoding the tiny contours on your skin.

It won't be ready for public use for another couple of years, though. In the meantime, think long and hard about how strong your commitment to nonviolence is before, again, choosing to flash the V sign for cameras.


Spooky, Rare Ice Spikes Are Popping Up in Britain

0
0

Britain is gearing up for a chilly weekend, as forecasters predict a bad cold snap. Even the local birdbaths are at the ready: as The Sun reports, residents have reported a rash of ice spikes, sharply pointed frozen spears that only form under specific conditions.

A good ice spike requires three things: contained water, a slight breeze, and temperatures that are cold but not too cold (around 7 degrees Fahrenheit is best). As the outside layer of water freezes, it expands, forcing the excess, liquid water up through the top layer of ice.

This water freezes as it escapes, eventually forming the spike. The breeze, coupled with a particular type of initial crystallization, encourages movement upward and helps with the jaunty angle.

Dangerous conditions aren't necessary for ice spikes—they've been known to show up in household freezers, in the cube trays. But they are fairly rare, and certainly ominous—although they do make a good perch for thirsty, foiled birds.

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 First Observations of Sea Ice Came From 8th-Century Irish Monks in Iceland

0
0
article-image

One of the charts that the National Snow and Ice Data Center produces shows the area of the Earth’s surface that is covered in sea ice over the course of the year, and for the past few months, the line showing the current amount of sea ice area has dribbled far below the line for every other year since 1978. The extent of sea ice on this planet is at a record low, certainly for the past 38 years and possibly for more than a millennium.

Even before Greek and Roman geographers had evidence that sea ice existed, they guessed that the ocean to the north of Europe must be frozen. They understood enough about the shape of the world and the way it worked that they could guess—travel towards a pole, and the air would grow colder. The sea might freeze. One geographer traveled in 300 B.C. north of Britain for six days, until he reached what may have been a barrier of sea ice. He described it as "the sea-lung," where the earth and sky became one, and reported he could go no further.

The first known written record of sea ice doesn't come until hundreds of years later. The first observers of Arctic sea ice to have their discovery recorded for posterity were not sailors or explorers, but Gaelic monks who had sailed from their own Irish island out into the ocean.

Christianity came to Ireland early in the 5th century: records show that a man called Palladius was sent to the island in 431 to be bishop to the Irish people, and St. Patrick is supposed to have shown up around the same time. By the 600s, monasteries had become thriving centers of learning and art; the beautiful Book of Kells was made in one around 800.

But not all of these early Irish monks were content to stay cloistered in these increasingly powerful institutions. Some chose to live in more isolated places, like the monastery on Skellig Michael. They sought instead a wilderness, some sort of desert where they could seek God. From a lush island, the ocean was the most obvious place to go.

There’s not much evidence left of the journeys of these monastic explorers, but in later years Norse stories had a name from them, the papar. Gaelic monks settled on empty northern islands—Orkney, Shetland—but it’s also possible that they found their way to Iceland, where manmade caves, decorated with crosses, have convinced some archaeologists that there were settlers here before the Vikings.

An early Irish geographer, Dicuil, also writes of “priests who stayed on that island from the first of February to the first of August.” The year would have been 795, and Dicuil briefly notes a journey they took north. “These priests then sailed hence and, in day’s sail, did reach the frozen sea to the north.”

article-image

That brief mention is usually considered the first written record of Arctic sea ice. Iceland was settled more permanently in the 900s, and the people living there started keeping records of sea ice and icebergs that an Icelandic geographer later used to reconstruct sea ice records in the area going back to 1,000 A.D.

More systematic records of Arctic sea ice weren’t collected until about a millennium after Iceland was first settled. In the 1880s, the Danish Meteorological Institute started drawing up sea ice charts using reports from the shore and sea, from ships and scientific expeditions, as the National Snow & Ice Data Center explains, and by the turn of the century, the institute was regularly publishing a report on "The State of the Ice in the Arctic Seas” that covered the whole Arctic.

Those charts were one of the best sources of records about Arctic sea ice, until the 1950s, when more reliable and variable data became available from ships and satellites. The record for Antarctic sea ice is spotty; shipping records and the logs of Antarctic explorers are the best sources of information. In 1978, satellites started collecting data on sea ice to create a continuous record, and that’s the data that shows that this year is the worst of those 38 for sea ice. But those satellites are aging, and there’s no guarantee they’ll be replaced. Without those satellite data, scientists will only know how the sea ice is faring by collecting observations from ships and intrepid travelers, like the ancient Irish monks.

Found: The Owner of a Message-in-a-Bottle Sent in 1983

0
0
article-image

In 1983, the USS Coral Sea CV-43 Catapult One was cruising the Atlantic Ocean, and the engineering department discovered a small problem. The ship had an excess of small plastic bottles, meant to test oil. Someone in the department came up with a fun way to deal with the overstock: Let the crew use them to send out messages into the open ocean.

Ron Herbst was 19 and serving on the ship as a petty officer. He wrote two messages, put them in two bottles, and dropped them into the ocean.

Sometime that year, Gordon and Cindy Brevik found his message. And recently they finally found Herbst, reports the Pensacola News-Journal.

The Breviks were living in Palm Springs at the time time, and they had taken a boat out to dive in the Florida Keys. They found Herbst’s bottle and his simple message:

"I am sending this off of the USS Coral Sea CV-43 Catapult One! We are currently on a world cruise deployment.”

Not long after that, the Breviks moved to Mena, Arkansas, and for many years they pulled out that message-in-a-bottle as a curiosity to show Cindy Brevik’s students. Eventually, they forgot about it, but recently, getting ready to move again, they rediscovered the bottle and the message.

This time, they decided to track Herbst down.

The original message had included his name and address, so the Breviks had a few clues as to how to find him. They found a likely candidate on Facebook and sent him a message: "Were you by any chance on the USS Coral Sea in 1983?”

After he threw those bottles of the ship back in 1983, Herbst had forgotten about them. The other message was found that same year, by a woman in Virginia Beach, who contacted him to let him know she’d found it. The other disappeared from his memory, until he heard from the Brevik this past Christmas.

“I couldn’t believe they had held onto it for that long,” he told the News-Journal.

How to Make an Alien Planet on Earth

0
0
article-image

In Vila Nova de Famalicão, Portugal, just outside an unassuming house, sits a seemingly ordinary piece of land. A stand of mature eucalyptus trees towers over smaller, shrubby growth. Wild green plants blanket the ground. A grassy hill rises over a dry streambed, which winds its way through a cleared-out patch. 

Look closely, though, and you’ll see signs of a previous iteration of this area. Tufts of jet-black grass poke through the ground cover. The dirt is mixed with ashes. Diamond dust glitters in the streambed. For four days in 2011, the land here served as the backdrop of the artist Philippe Parreno’s short film C.H.Z. (Continuously Habitable Zones). Years later, it’s still recuperating from a massive costume change.

The set-dressing project, known as “Landscape for a planet with two dwarf suns,” was created by Bas Smets, a landscape designer from Brussels. According to the architectural historian Marc Treib's recent history of the project, Parreno and Smets met by chance, in a jazz bar sometime in the mid-2000s. What started as a conversation about the difference between "land" and "landscape" soon became a collaboration. In 2011, Parreno asked Smets for his help making a film about an alien planet, in which the "where" overtook the "who" or "what" and became the story’s main focus.

article-image

Parreno's film explores a planet in the Continually Habitable Zone, NASA's term for an area of a solar system where the existence of life is theoretically possible. Planets within such a zone are far enough from their nearest star to avoid blistering surface temperatures, but close enough to not be permanently frozen. Recent discoveries have shown that such conditions are possible not only for planets that orbit a single sun, but for those with two or even three central stars.

Many such binary stars are red dwarfs, smaller and cooler than our own, which is a yellow dwarf. Our sun's light appears white to us because it contains wavelengths of all different colors, from red to purple. Scientists think that plants on our planet appear green because bacteria snagged that wavelength early for their own photosynthetic endeavors. Plants then evolved to reflect the green section of the spectrum, and absorb the rest.

article-image

A red dwarf, or even two, would provide less light overall, and some researchers have speculated that plants on such planets would evolve to perform "hyperphotosynthesis," absorbing the entire visible spectrum. Instead of green, they would appear black. For his film, Parreno asked Smets to build a landscape inspired by this kind of alien realism.  

After considering a few different land parcels, Smets settled on a private garden in Vila Nova de Famalicao, which had been offered up by its owners, a couple of art collectors who wanted to see what he'd do with it. He then brainstormed and sketched potential extraterrestrial landscape elements—a "burnt hill," "black plants," trees with exposed roots—and went about constructing them with materials available on Earth. First, he and his team cleared a patch of land of much of its original vegetation. Then, as the local fire brigade watched, they burned what was left, until the ground itself was a smoked, tarry black.

article-image

Next came a streambed, carved sinuously through the middle of the land parcel, and left bone dry. Smets filled this with slabs of black slate, chunks of obsidian, and broken glass. For an intergalactic version of a grassy hill, he terraced a slope and replanted it with black mondo grass, a droopy, deep purple turf plant that grows dark, glossy berries. 

He covered other patches of ground with black hollyhocks, orchids, and bugleweed. In the middle of one forested spot, Smets dug a large hollow, and lined it with eucalyptus roots left over from earlier cuttings, as if a massive tree had recently been pulled out of the earth. When the cameras started rolling, Smets's crew added atmospheric elements—diamond dust blown over the creek bed, and smoke and foam released just above the charred ground.

article-image

You'd be hard-pressed to find an existing landscape with these elements. Still, Smets made sure that "the filmic landscape... represent[ed] its own coherent ecology," says Treib. In the film, with the help of editing, cinematography, lights, and special lenses, viewers see a complete space, almost like an extraterrestrial hiking destination. They're taken along a glittering "mineral river," the glass and diamond dust enhanced by floodlights overhead, and given a glimpse up over a black-grassed terrace, where one of two suns rises overhead.

The darkness is disconcerting "only when related to the earth of our own planet," Treib says. "Can we instead imagine a planet whose territory has always been black… its black stones and crystalline glass the norm rather than the product of some apocalypse?"

article-image

These days, the small apocalyptic actions of the film crew are quickly being reversed. "Nature, to a large degree, has had its way" with the site, says Treib, who visited in late 2014. Green plants dot the dry river, shooting up between the chunks of slate. Undergrowth has returned to the eucalyptus forest. The mondo grass, more at home in slightly cooler climates, has largely ceded its space to native vegetation. Despite the landscape's initial commitment to its role, its star turn is now barely apparent—unless, that is, you know to keep an eye out for the occasional black flower, or to watch for the sun's rays glinting off broken glass.

article-image

Sold, for $100: A Massive Pennsylvania Mall Once Valued at $190 Million

0
0
article-image

Back in 2005, the Galleria at Pittsburgh Mills opened 1.1 million square feet of retail space, welcoming Western Pennsylvania shoppers to what was then the largest mall in that part of the state.

At its peak, according to the Associated Press, the mall was valued at $190 million, which is a lot of money, anchored by JCPenney and, at first, a Kaufmann's, which later became Macy's.

But on Wednesday, the mall was sold for just $100 at auction—the conclusion of a long fall from grace. These days, the mall is just over half occupied, and its now-former owner, a company called Pittsburgh Mills Limited Partnership, recently defaulted on a $143 million bank loan.

This meant foreclosure, and, on Wednesday, an auction to sell the mall to the highest bidder. That turned out to be a trust known as MSCI 2007 HQ11, which hasn't commented on the purchase and got the mall on the cheap—likely because any new buyer would also have to assume operating expenses, tax payments, and other costs for the shopping center. In addition, the mall has suffered a steep decline in value, being appraised recently at just $11 million. 

The future, now, is uncertain, though according to KDKA, the mall never even fulfilled its original promise, which included plans for a water park and go-kart track.

One shopper told the station, simply: "It's very sad." 

The True History of the Gambia's Bizarre Origin Story

0
0
article-image

The Gambia, the tiniest country on the African mainland, is shaped unlike any other nation in the world. It is long and skinny, just 30 miles wide at its widest points; it looks like someone tried to stick their finger into Senegal, which surrounds the Gambia on three sides. The only bit of the country that doesn’t border Senegal is the Gambia's very short coastline.

On Thursday, troops from Senegal and allied West African nations crossed the border into the Gambia in support of the tiny country’s newly elected president, after the current leader refused to cede power. Senegal has an obvious interest in the country’s leadership; the fastest way to reach the southern part of Senegal from the north is to drive through the Gambia. As a geographical arrangement, it makes so little sense that the obvious question to ask is: Why does it exist?

article-image

There’s an apocryphal story, rooted in the colonial history of West Africa, that accounts for the Gambia’s unusual shape and location. Through the 18th and 19th centuries, French and British colonialists were vying for power and resources in this region, which was an economic center for the slave trade, among other industries. The British were also interested in finding an easy route inland, to Timbuktu and its fabled riches.

There are only a few rivers on the coast of West Africa that run inland towards the desert, and the French controlled the mouth of the more northerly one, the Senegal River. The Gambia River, further south, where the British had more control, runs parallel, and, as the story goes, a British warship simply navigated up the river, shooting cannonballs off either side and claiming the land that fell within cannon range. The result: A river-shaped country made up solely of the strips of land on either side of the water.

As bizarre and improbable as this story seems, there are nuggets of truth to it: the British did claim rights to the Gambia River, and the country’s strange shape emerged from conflict between the two colonizing powers. There may even have been cannonballs involved.

article-image

The first European power to lay some claim to the Gambia River was Portugal; the country’s modern name comes from the Portuguese word cambio, trade. The British first started traveling to the river in the late 16th century; throughout the 17th century, British, Dutch, and French trading companies were all trying to establish a presence on what’s now the coast of Senegal and the Gambia, sometimes clashing with each other over the control of islands at the riverine mouths. The Gambia River and the islands at its mouth were important for Britain to control, strategically; they were the empire’s main outpost on this part of the coast and a connection to its settlements and trading posts along the Gold Coast, in Sierra Leone and Ghana.

The amount of land that any of these colonial powers controlled, though, was very small, usually just an island that allowed them to travel and trade further inland and to store goods headed back to Europe. Even if Britain controlled the Gambia River, it didn’t control most of the land on the riverbanks, outside of a few small settlements and, after 1826, a one-mile strip of land on the northern bank, ceded by the king who ruled the area.

But in the 19th century, France changed its strategy and started trying control more inland area, moving from its more northern settlements south towards the Gambia River. In 1888, in order to establish a formal claim to its Gambian outposts, Britain made the Gambia a protectorate. Since the French did recognize the British claim to control of the river and its area, the two colonial superpowers opened negotiations about where exactly the boundary between the two would lie. An early negotiation put the boundary at six miles north and south of the river and east to Yarbutenda, the furthest navigable point on the river.

article-image

That was supposed to just be a starting point, with a joint Anglo-French Boundary Commission dispatched to map the actual border. But when the commission arrived in 1891, it encountered resistance from local rulers, whose land was being divided up, sometimes right in the middle of their kingdom. The Boundary Commission had back up, though, from British ships patrolling the river.

At one point, men and guns from three warships landed on the riverbanks “as a hint of what the resisters had to expect in the event of any continued resistance,” according to The Gambia Colony and Protectorate: An Official Handbook, first published in 1906. Another account, though, says that the British ships bombarded the town Kansala in order to intimidate the resistors. It's possible that, in this more conventional way, cannonballs were key to establishing the border. 

There’s no evidence that the British ever fired cannonballs off the sides of their ships to establish the borders of the Gambia in the middle of French territory. But it’s not a bad shorthand for what actually did happen: two colonial powers using force to divide up part of a world according to a bizarre logic of colonial power, only marginally concerned with the people who would have to live there.

Watch These Joyous Strangers in London Roll a Massive Snowball Down a Hill

0
0

In February 2009, a glorious triumph occurred on Parliament Hill in London's Hampstead Heath park: a gigantic snowball (weighing about half a ton) tumbled down the white slopes.   

The video above, appropriately titled "The Story of the Giant Snowball," documents the "birth and death" of the massive boulder of snow. A group of volunteers began building the snowball near the historic Kenwood House, located on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Covered and stuffed with leaves and gravel, the snowball reached chest height. The team worked together to push the completed snowball up the hill.

At the 42-second mark, the grand moment occurs. A large, roaring crowd cheers as dozens of people roll the ginormous creation down the slope. As the snowball gains momentum, people chase it down the hill. One particularly brave individual jumps on top of the ball at the 50-second mark for a short ride before toppling to the ground and narrowly avoiding getting squashed. 

The success of the great roll of the giant snowball was the result of "a huge group effort by random strangers," wrote a witness in the post of a separate clip

Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.


Found: The Bones of a Giant Otter

0
0
article-image

The otter S. melilutra would have weighed 110 pounds—about the size of a large dog or a small woman. It had the teeth of a badger and could smash or pry open even the most resistant clams and other shellfish with its brute strength. It’s not the sort of creature you’d want to run into the swampy places where it lived.

Lucky for us humans, it lived 6.2 million years ago.

article-image

The newly described species of otter was discovered after a nearly complete skull was found in southwestern China. The skull was crushed in a “pancake-like shape,” LiveScience reports, but by using CT scans, a team of researchers was able to reconstruct it. Teeth, jawbones, and limb bones from the same species were also found at the site.

This ancient species of otter would have been larger than any living otter, and scientists are trying to understand why it was so giant, how it swam, and how it moved on the ground, LiveScience reports.

We have one additional question: Was it cute, like modern-day otters? Or, at this size, did it switch over to straight-up terrifying?

Rethinking the Origins of the Damsel on the Railroad Tracks

0
0
article-image

Most people are familiar with that most clichéd of old cinema tropes: the damsel-in-distress, tied to the railroad tracks by a dastardly villain, only to be saved at the last moment by the dashing hero. 

As a method of murder, this seems so melodramatic and old-timey that it must have originated back in the days of the silent film. But that scene rarely ever occurred, and probably not in the way you think it did.

“It's really a tricky subject because people have this incredibly specific trope in mind (villain in top hat and mustache, screaming female victim, said villain tying or chaining said victim to tracks),” says Fritzi Kramer, creator of the silent film blog, Movies Silently. “But then when they are told that it was not actually common in silent film, they quickly grab for something, anything to prove that it happened.”

article-image

On her site Kramer identifies the first occurrence of this type of scene in an 1867 Victorian  stage melodrama called Under The Gaslight. The play's stage directions call for one of the characters (named Snorkey) to be tied to the train tracks by the villain. It's close to the scene we're familiar with save for the fact that the person on the tracks is a man, and he's saved by the leading lady.

This sort of train-based peril became a regular element of the melodramas as a cheap and easy way to create suspense. Moving into the early-20th century, and the silent film era, many films took their cues from those same 19th-century stage dramas. One of the more famous examples of this type of story was the serial The Perils of Pauline, which saw the titular heroine encounter all kinds of scoundrels and villains each week, who would put her in life-threatening danger—although it is important to note that she was never tied to the railroad tracks. This sort of overblown adventure tale became a well-known story type in its time, but that melodramatic style also inspired some comedies, which spoofed some of the more overused elements of the genre.

At the time, trains were a major form of transportation, and consequently showed up as set pieces in many silent films. There were often instances wherein a character would end up on the train tracks, either from falling or being knocked out, such as in the movie, The Fatal Ring. In many cases, like with that first instance, it would be the male hero who would end up on the tracks, having to be saved by the woman.

article-image

Many of the elements of the trope most people are familiar with are there, but the mustachioed villain cackling while they tied a helpless woman to the tracks was just not something that happened in dramatic silent films. Not that that has stopped people from assuming that it did.

“This is an incredibly specific trope but people trying to prove it was a common event in silent films will use comedies and any railroad peril to try to prove their point," says Kramer. As trains were the form of public transit during the silent era, it's hardly surprising they were included in the action. But since the trope has such specific ingredients, I think it is reasonable to demand that all those ingredients be present.”

The specific scene as we know it didn’t come into its own until after the heyday of the melodrama, once the genre became less popular and people started to spoof the overblown stories. Some of the most oft-cited examples of the woman-tied-to-the-tracks trope are from a pair of silent comedies Barney Oldfield's Race for a Life and Teddy at the Throttle. Both of these films were send-ups of the cartoonish lack of subtlety presented in melodramas, and featured scenes in which damsels were tied (or chained) to the tracks.

It is comedies like this that most often get referenced when people look into the history of damsels on the tracks. “This is like taking the Saturday Night Fever spoof scene from Madagascar and using it to 'prove' that disco was the number-one music of the 2000s,” says Kramer.

Despite being a sort of half-remembered tribute to a scene that had never actually existed, the damsel on the tracks quickly became the kind of recurring trope that everyone is familiar with, even if they’re not sure where they first saw it. When The Perils of Pauline was remade with sound in 1947, sure enough, Pauline ended up tied to the tracks.

Tying women to the train tracks pretty much became the signature move of the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon character Snidely Whiplash, a caricature of a scheming melodrama villain. And in the modern day, the scene has morphed into a kind of visual shorthand for cartoonish villainy, even if it isn’t found in nearly as many films and TV shows as it once was.

article-image

Kramer attributes the continued connection of the trope to the history of silent film to a number of factors including the gulf of time that exists between the era of the silent film and the modern age, and the relative accessibility of silent comedies that featured the trope as opposed to the dramas they were inspired by. The much more prominent peril in silent films was the threat of sexual assault—having someone tied to the tracks was a much less offensive threat in later representations and homages to the old silent films.

Correct or not, the image of the damsel on the tracks seems like it’s here to stay, and in Kramer’s experience people don’t want to know the truth. “A pretty decent chunk of the population is convinced that screaming damsels were constantly lashed to tracks by mustachioed villains," she says. "The fact that this trope was incredibly rare even in serials does not dissuade them.”

A Tram Thief Took a Short Joyride in Austria

0
0
article-image

Around 8 a.m. this past Saturday, a tram driver on the 60 line in Vienna stopped in Rodaun for a bathroom break. He locked up his tram, and went off to take care of business. But when he returned shortly after, he was surprised to find an empty set of tracks: While relieving himself, the driver had also been relieved of his tram.

The culprit? A 36-year-old former tram driver who really, really missed his job, the Local reports. The man had been let go several years earlier, and had supposedly turned in his activation key. Police are still investigating how he managed to get into the driver's seat and get the tram started.

When they heard what had happened, tram company Wiener Linien quickly shut off power to the tracks, stranding the tram thief, who quickly ran off again. But before that, he drove the tram several stops, announcing each time that no passengers should get on board, "as the tram was not part of the normal service," the Local reports.

He was arrested this morning, and is being charged with "theft of a public vehicle." The tram probably misses him already.

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.

11 Secret Spaces Hiding in Famous Places

0
0

When planning a trip, it's easy to feel torn between wanting to experience a city's must-see iconic landmarks and discovering something unknown to the most passersby. As it happens, there's a third category that checks off both of these things at once: unknown spaces hiding in extremely well-known places.

These secret gems can add an extra layer of exploration to checklist destinations like Times Square or the Eiffel Tower—if you know where to find them. We combed through the Atlas to pull out 11 of the least obvious spaces lurking in the most obvious places. 

The Tiny Police Station in Trafalgar Square

LONDON, ENGLAND

article-image

You can find London’s smallest police station tucked away in the southeast corner of Trafalgar Square. But you can also be forgiven for missing it: It looks more like a neoclassical TARDIS than a police station, and there won’t be a crowd of tourists gathered around it, merrily snapping away on their cameras. The Lilliputian Police Station was built in the 1930s to serve as a watch-post, an eye on Trafalgar Square, which is a magnet for London’s protesters, rioters, marchers, and pigeons. Inside, there is only room for a single person.

Gustave Eiffel's Secret Apartment

PARIS, FRANCE

article-image

When the Eiffel Tower opened in 1889 to universal wonder and acclaim, designer Gustave Eiffel soaked up the praise. If that wasn’t enough, it was soon revealed that he had built himself a small apartment near the top of the world wonder, garnering him the envy of the Paris elite in addition to his new fame.

Eiffel’s private apartment was not large, but it was cozy. In contrast to the steely industrial girders of the rest of the tower, the apartment was “furnished in the simple style dear to scientists,” according to reporter Henri Girard. The walls were covered in warm wallpaper and the furniture included soft chintzes, wooden cabinets, and even a grand piano, creating a comfortable atmosphere perched nearly 1,000 feet in the air.  

Vanderbilt Tennis Club at Grand Central Terminal

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

article-image

Little known to the throngs of commuters that pass through Grand Central Terminal each day, there have been posh, exclusive tennis courts hidden on the upper levels of train station since the 1960s.

The Vanderbilt Tennis Club is the current purveyor of the courts, which are located behind the the top portion of the terminal’s famous facade window. So next time you look at that iconic architectural spot, remember that someone up there is getting a few rounds in.

Royal Pavilion at Stazione Centrale

MILAN, ITALY

article-image

Every day over 300,000 people pass through the Stazione Centrale, Milan’s main railway station. Most have no idea that the series of closed doors they are walking past give access to the most luxurious and exclusive room in the building, the Padiglione Reale, or Royal Pavilion, an exclusive waiting room built for Italy’s royal family in the 1920s. 

Even though the monarchy was dismantled in Italy right after World War II, the royal waiting room is still there. The ground level has a couple of bare rooms and serves as an anteroom to the upper level. A sumptuous room is on the first floor, at the same level as the railway tracks. There are marble interiors in different architectural styles, sculptures of the royal emblems, elegant furnitures provided by the best interior designers of the time, and a balcony with a view on the public square below.

Secret Compartment in Leonardo da Vinci Statue

FIUMICINO, ITALY

article-image

Unveiled on August 19, 1960, the giant statue of Leonardo da Vinci at Rome’s Fiumicino-Leonardo da Vinci Airport has greeted visitors ever since. Millions of people have passed it over the decades, but it was not until 2006 that a secret hidden inside the statue was discovered.

That year, the statue underwent renovation, and one of the workers made a strange discovery: a small hatch, located at a height of about 30 feet, approximately in the middle of the statue. The hatch was carefully opened and inside were found two parchments, still in perfect condition. Even if the secret of the statue is not widely known, sometimes people can be seen looking the statue up and down with binoculars, much to the amusement of passersby.

Radio City Music Hall's Secret Apartment

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

article-image

Radio City Music Hall is one of the jewels in New York’s Art Deco crown. Since it opened in 1932, over 300 million visitors to the “show place of the nation” have marveled at its breathtaking elegance. According to legend, to show their appreciation for his talents, the architects of the great performance space decided to give a present to the theatre's impresario, Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel. High up inside Radio City, they built him an apartment, as lavishly detailed in the art deco style as the theatre downstairs.

After Roxy died in 1936 the apartment lay unused and forgotten, hidden away far above the audiences he used to entertain. No one lives there now, but it remains in pristine condition.

Flinders Street Station Abandoned Ballroom

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

article-image

Flinders Street Station, the busiest railway hub in all of Australia, is home to a decaying beauty of a ballroom, an abandoned leftover from the bygone era of railroad romance. While the station serves nearly 100,000 travelers a day, the old third-floor ballroom, closed off from the public since 1985, rarely opens it doors to visitors. Viewing the space has been so coveted in recent years that, for the Open House Melbourne weekend in 2015, special entry was granted by a “Golden Ticket” tucked into a lucky few visitors’ programs.

One Times Square

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

article-image

Despite its location in one of the most expensive and photographed places in the world, the building at One Times Square is nearly completely empty. Walgreens occupies the first floor, and leases everything up through the 21st floor, but has chosen to leave the building vacant because the advertising on its sides brings in enough money to sustain it.

The building does have one other tenant, however, and that is Jeff Straus, who runs the famous New Year's Eve celebration from his 22nd-floor office. Above him is the New Year's ball itself, located year-round on a metal roof deck, waiting for its annual moment of glory.

The Buried Remains of Little Compton Street

LONDON, ENGLAND

article-image

An anonymous-looking traffic island in the middle of London’s busy Charing Cross Road holds a mysterious secret. It's a forgotten remnant of the old London, hidden beneath one of its busiest streets.

If you look down at the metal grate covering the island you will see two tiled, Victorian street names set into the wall below ground level. Bearing the faded name of Little Compton Street, it is a beguiling glimpse into a long lost road buried underneath the modern day streets of London. Today all traces of this secret London street have long gone, apart from two perfectly preserved road signs. 

Secret Apartments in the New York Public Library

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

article-image

When New York City’s branch libraries were first built, about a century ago, they needed people to take care of them. Andrew Carnegie had given New York $5.2 million to create a city-wide system of library branches, and these buildings were heated by coal. Each had a custodian, who was tasked with keeping those fires burning and who lived in the library, often with their family.

But since the ’70s and ’80s, when the coal furnaces started being upgraded and library custodians began retiring, those apartments have been emptying out, and the idyll of living in a library has disappeared. Today there are just 13 library apartments left in the New York Public Library system. Some have spent decades empty and neglected.

Hidden Art Deco Tunnel Underneath the New Yorker Hotel

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

article-image

The New Yorker hotel’s giant red sign is often photographed as a city landmark, mostly on account of its name. Yet the history of the building is largely unknown. The New Yorker is filled with untold secrets and forgotten stories, including (though by no means limited to) the beautiful Art Deco tunnel that ran from the lobby to Penn Station, which is still hidden underneath 34th Street. Thousands of tourists and New Yorkers walk by the bustling corner of Eighth Avenue and 34 Street not knowing this remarkable tunnels runs underneath the historic hotel, filled with excess old hotel fittings, chairs, carpets, and beautiful Art Deco tiling.

When Networks Aired Their Failed TV Pilots in the Middle of the Summer

0
0

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

The idea that there should be limits on the quality of what ends up on or TV screens is a common one that’s been around for ages.

Heck, that’s why one of the defining shows of the 1980s is called You Can’t Do That On Television. Which is why, in a weird way, it kind of makes sense that many of the new shows actually getting on the air in 2017 are actually revivals of successful ones—including, as was just announced, Will and Grace.

Nothing against that show or its now-richer stars, but on a purely creative level, more ideas are thrown out in the television world than perhaps in any other industry.

That’s because most new shows don’t make it past the pilot, and television pilots are, at their core, just giant, costly bets.

And I’m not kidding when I say costly: The average major network spends roughly $100 million a year on development, according to the Los Angeles Times, with a big chunk of this being made up of unsold pilots.

The problem is that creating pilots is really expensive, because you basically need to put together all of the elements for the show, from plot, to script, to cast, all for the benefit of a handful of executives.

Which means that the cost of a pilot—estimated at $8 million in the case of dramas—is four times the cost of a regular episode. The issues with the process have led networks in recent years to order shows that go directly to series.

(This Priceonomics article breaks down why the system is set up this way.)

That means that there are often winners and losers—along with a great desire to recoup some form of investment from the lost bet.

A good example of this aired on July 3, 1987—a Friday night, the day before the Fourth of July. It was a new show created by Jim Henson, and it debuted on CBS.

Considering Henson’s track record at the time—having played a direct role in creating at least threelegitimatelyclassic television shows by this point, and while he was coming off the commercial failure of the cult classic Labyrinth, he was still doing very bankable stuff—it was a weird way to treat a major star.

But Puppetman, which can be seen here in full, didn’t make it past the pilot stage, so it was dumped into the CBS rotation as part of its anthology series CBS Summer Playhouse. It’s where pilots go to die.

The idea behind Puppetman was slightly ahead of its time—essentially a comedy about a puppet show, breaking the fourth wall in a way slightly closer to NewsRadio than The Muppet Show—but it wasn’t picked up, and CBS Summer Playhouse was something of a last ditch effort to see if audiences would really care. (Alas, audiences weren’t won over by puppeteer Richard Hunt’s considerable charms as a human actor.)

Another show of this vein, a small-screen adaptation of Coming to America, showed up on CBS Summer Playhouse in 1989. The passage of time hasn’t made the show any better as an idea.

“The pilot didn’t sell, and for good reason: It is bad. The movie is to the television show as McDonald’s is to McDowell’s,” recalled Fusion’s Molly Fitzpatrick, in a critique of the TV adaptation of Eddie Murphy’s career pinnacle.

The show, which featured In Living Color actor Tommy Davidson doing his best Prince Tariq impression, flopped hard, in part because (according to Fitzpatrick) it “mostly functions as a disjointed vehicle for Davidson’s Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson impressions.”

(A year later, CBS actually went to series with a similarly not-great idea for a movie-turned show, Uncle Buck.)

It makes sense that a show like CBS Summer Playhouse existed. During the early years of television, there was a long legacy of anthology shows like Love, American Style airing segments that were intended as backdoor pilots, a strategy that gave us a lot of junk, but also one of the most popular TV shows of all time, Happy Days.

But CBS Summer Playhouse, and equivalent shows for ABC (Vacation Playhouse, which aired between 1963 and 1967) and NBC (under various names during the late 1970s, including Comedy Theatre, Comedy Time, and Comedy Theater) were essentially created to fill up space during a time of the year when people would rather be outside than watching TV.

(As Television Obscurities notes, many attempts were made to repackage these pilots during the first 30 years or so of television’s mainstream success.)

It was a little less obvious at first, because anthology series were common in the ‘70s. But by the 1980s, cable had taken the wind out the concept.

This phenomenon was eventually seen for what it was—filler—but it nonetheless brought some interesting ideas for shows to the small screen. In CBS’s case, it was relatively transparent about the purpose of its anthology show: The network was clearly litmus testing. It gave viewers the opportunity to call into one of two 1-900 numbers—1-900-220-2311 if they liked the show, 1-900-220-2322 if they didn’t.

As it turns out, having people vote on failed pilots creates two problems: First, people who vote like everything—the pilots, on average, received 90 percent approval ratings from people who willingly dialed a pay number and told CBS their opinion on a TV show.

Second, the conceit of the show eventually made the idea untenable.

“I think this’ll probably be the last year of Summer Playhouse,” then-CBS President Howard Stringer told Gannett News Service in 1989. “The audience has got the word that these are failed or busted pilots. [That] worked really well for a time, but now the word was out.”

And they never did it again. CBS Summer Playhouse was the last time that a major network blatantly aired unaired pilots in weekly series form.


Of course, the thing about pilots is this: The layer of television executive meddling only goes so far.

Quite often, really terrible stuff gets to air anyway. And good shows die on the vine before they even hit the air. (Fortunately, so do bad shows. Usually.)

In August of 1992, BBC2 decided to make that point in a totally hilarious way, by airing a dedicated theme night to terrible television in the BBC archives they called “TV Hell.”

The night, hosted by Angus Deayton and Paul Merton—with Deayton playing the role of The Devil—is effectively like watching the BBC run roughshod across British television’s long legacy of horrible music performances, bad ideas for shows, and terrible interviews. Of which there were a bunch of all three.

They went after everything—including station logos, Eurovision, the horrible track records of competing networks, and even the production process of TV itself.

While the concept borrowed somewhat liberally from Mystery Science Theater 3000, it can be said that the endeavor predicted a lot of American trends that hit cable television soon after—including VH1’s nostalgia trip and the controlled mayhem of the Adult Swim block. For a one-time event, its legacy is fairly long.

A lot of weird stuff aired that night—definitely check out famed radio DJ John Peel’s compilation of horrible music featured on the BBC—and fortunately a YouTuber had the good sense to create a playlist of BBC2’s big event, with content listed roughly in order. (Side note: Did you know the BBC archives listings for all of the television and radio programs it’s ever aired between 1923 and 2009? TV Guide probably doesn’t do that.)

But the most interesting/disturbing program of the night was a pilot that hadn’t seen light in BBC’s archives in more than 25 years. Mainly for Men, as the unaired pilot was called, appeared to be an attempt to create a TV-show version of a “lad mag.”

“As the title implies, this is a program, fellas, just for you,” host Don Moss states at the start of the program, before analyzing the attractiveness of the Venus de Milo statue.

Everything about the idea (viewable here, though NSFW) was plainly questionable—featuring some nudity, a whole bunch of casual sexism, some apparent shark fishing, and a song about “the ideal woman” playing over scenes of a woman doing housework and dancing around.

(The pilot also spent time talking cars, which emphasizes the vague parallels the show has with the modern-day Top Gear. When Jeremy Clarkson was infamously booted from that show, the Mirrorfirmed up the comparison between the two shows, because of course they did.)

Mainly for Men was relegated to the graveyard slot for an entire night about terrible programming, so you can tell BBC was just looking to get it out of the archive so they could burn it. (Considering that the U.K. actually brought us a quickly cancelled series called Heil Honey I’m Home!, things certainly could have been worse.)

On the plus side, Mainly for Men probably didn’t cost $8 million to produce.


The modern TV pilot game has shifted quite a bit in recent years, due to all the additional options for watching content. With Netflix basically giving money to anyone with a halfway-decent idea, networks seem to be obsessed with either sure things or minimizing the risks of their giant investments.

That means that it’s rare for an unsold pilot to make it to the airwaves in the 21st century, though it still happens. The Munsters has been the subject of multiple failed TV pilots over the years, including before its initial pickup in the 1960s, when a pilot for the show, titled “My Fair Munster,” was created (notably, the unaired pilot, which uses some of the same actors, was in color, though the show it inspired was black-and-white).

But more recently, NBC aired a remake of the show developed by Bryan Fuller, Mockingbird Lane, as a one-hour special. It wasn’t picked up, but is one of the few recent examples of a pilot making it to air.

It’s understandable why the pilot process is in decline. Beyond being costly, the pilot process often—especially in the case of failures—turns out to not be so great for viewers.

But sometimes, the process is the best thing for everyone involved. Two notable examples of this, both of which are somewhat famous:

Lookwell, the Adam West vehicle that played off of the Batman star’s public image to hilarious effect, didn’t get picked up by NBC despite being amazing. However, it’s a good thing it didn’t, because the series’ two creators—Conan O’Brien and Robert Smigel—would go on to create some amazing late-night comedy together.

The Jake Effect, a Jason Bateman vehicle that nearly went to air in 2002, is said to be a pretty good show, and was picked up by Bravo as part of its “Brilliant But Cancelled” series. But because NBC decided to drop the show after seven episodes were shot, Bateman was made a free agent, allowing him to redefine both his career and comedy in general with the immortal Arrested Development.

Maybe it’s the luck of the draw. What if these shows actually went to series? Would we see Jason Bateman as a dependable comedic actor, or still trying to shake off his teen image? Would Conan O’Brien still be writing for The Simpsons? It’s hard to tell.

But it makes me wonder about the actors, writers, and producers who didn’t get quite so lucky in the pilot lottery.

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

article-image

Airships: The Most Villainous Form of Transport

0
0
article-image

Two hours into the 1985 James Bond classic A View to a Kill, antagonist Maximilian Zorin has already pulled out most of the bad-guy stops. He's pushed one of his henchmen through a razor-sharp ventilation fan. He's gunned down hundreds of his own employees with an Uzi. He's plotted to flood Silicon Valley, killing millions and destroying the U.S. economy.

But as the plot crescendos and his plans fall to pieces around him, Zorin has one more trick up his sleeve. Sitting in what appears to be an ordinary shed, facing a control panel, he pushes a button marked "inflate," and the whole room begins to rise off the ground. The camera pans out to show a giant airship, puffy and portentous and emblazoned with "Zorin Industries." He's a supervillain—of course he's got a blimp.

Across decades, genres, and media—from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang's Baron Bomburst to Batman's Colonel Blimp —if you've got an over-the-top bad guy on the move, odds are good that he's motoring along in an airship. By choosing to have their villains soar through the sky, writers, illustrators and designers aren't just leaning on a stereotype. They're choosing a powerfully inflated symbol, held aloft by decades of historical, aesthetic, and instinctive associations. 

"The heart of this association lies in the first World War," says Dr. Giles Camplin, airship historian and editor of the magazine Dirigible. During World War I, the Germany army outfitted Zeppelins with bombs and machine guns and sent them over Great Britain. Although they were supposed to target military sites, the pilots often got lost, and ended up bombing small villages.

"They were flying at night, and navigation was primitive in those days," says Camplin. "There's a lot of evidence that they simply threw their bombs out because the didn't know where the heck they were." Airship raids on Britain caused 557 deaths, and thousands more injuries.

For most people, this was a brand-new war horror. "Until the first World War, civilians were not involved," says Camplin. "It was a thing that the professional soldiers did on the battlefield. And the dastardly Germans produced those Zeppelins, and then they just bombed civilians."

Soon, the sight of an airship struck terror into the hearts of British citizens, who called them "baby-killers." In a letter to a friend, poet D.H. Lawrence wrote that standing under an attack was akin to watching the birth of "a new order, a new heaven above us," with the Zeppelin "having taken over the sky." They were effective enough enemies that the government began putting them on recruitment posters.

article-image

In later decades, Nazis were easy cinematic villains, and films like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade saw American heroes commandeering various German transport blimps in order to fight them. As other countries vaulted to the forefront of American villainy, they were afforded their own fictional fleets. Maximilian Zorin’s blond German countenance and collusion with the KGB allowed A View to a Kill to mine residual anti-German and burgeoning anti-Communist sentiment simultaneously, while Baron Bomburst hailed from a thinly disguised analogue of the formerly socialist Bulgaria, called Vulgaria.

Blimps, lacking a crew and filled with hot air, were fitting transport for the inflated aspirations of many of these villains. Their buoyant frames, able to rock to and fro, be pierced or punctured, or deflate, afforded many possibilities for onscreen drama, especially post-war and post-Hindenberg, when they were already seen as inherently dangerous.

"You mention a modern airship, and the media brings up the Hindenberg, which everyone has seen crashing in flames," says Camplin. This even though, as he points out, two-thirds of those involved in the Hindenburg accident survived, as opposed to other accidents like the Concorde which took the lives of all onboard. It's unfair, he says: "If you've got a new ship, they don't show pictures of the Titanic." 

article-image

If airships have been typecast, it helps that they often look the part. As with all once-new technologies, the airship has been through many incarnations on the way to its current form, giving designers a number of shapes to choose from. Camplin, who helped build Baron Bomburst's pointy-ended airship for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, says it was based on a real blimp made by the Lebaudy Brothers. "The art director saw a picture, and he said 'I must have that shape,'" remembers Camplin. The movie blimp was plagued by steering problems—"we couldn't get the damn thing to come down again," he says—but its sinister appearance was just right.

Modern-day blimps are generally used for advertising, another visual association easily mined by supervillains, who are often obsessed with their own brands. Ratigan's blimp, from 1986's The Great Mouse Detective, is outfitted in the rodent's signature purple and boasts a golden "R." In the 2019 Blade Runner envisions, a blimp appears momentarily, trying to entice passerby into participating in its society’s plan for space domination: “A new life awaits you in the Off-World colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure. New climate, recreational facilities.....absolutely free.”

article-image

Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz, the over-the-top antagonist of popular animated TV show Phineas and Ferb, has an airship emblazoned with his company name, "Doofenshmirtz Evil Inc." Every time it comes onscreen, a sunny jingle blares: "Doofenshmirtz Evil Dirigible!" This tendency has real-life analogues: Shady entrepreneur and boy-band-manager Lou Pearlman got his start at Ponzi-scheming with a fraudulent IPO for a business called Airship International which, as Billboard once noted, used the stock exchange ticker abbreviation “BLMP.”

Leaving aside these historical and current associations, a huge thing overhead is just unnerving, says Camplin, who remembers a hot air balloon safari he took in the 1970s. "The animals behaved really strangely," he says. "They were frightened of this shape in the sky." For mammals, a shadow passing overhead might mean a storm, or worse, a predator. Vervet monkeys even have a specific alarm call that means "here comes an eagle," which spurs their peers to look straight up and then take cover.

When Camplin helped to pilot a large "flying sculpture" over the United States 15 years later, humans behaved similarly. "We went out without any pre-publicity," he says. "And everybody went nuts because it looked like aliens were coming. It caused a huge sensation." The response struck him as primal: "It's going right back to the monkey heritage."

Today, those like Camplin who see a bright future for the airship have to overcome all of these associations, both instinctual and learned. Airship enthusiasts believe the technology has the potential to transform everything from sea patrolling to low-fuel, long-distance transport—but when laypeople think of dirigibles, they usually picture them aflame, or looming scarily overhead, piloted by a movie rogue. "It's really difficult, because when you start talking to people seriously about the future use of airships, you've got to unpack all that," he says. "You've got a toxic brand."

The sandbags of the past make it hard for good-guy blimps to get taken seriously. But some modern-day airships have bypassed public doubt by embracing their heritage—Hendrick's Gin, for instance, flies a mean-looking blimp every summer, and Amazon recently won a patent for an "airborne fulfillment center," filled with a warehouse's worth of products and aided by thousands of "delivery drones." As the future approaches, our airship overlords at the vanguard, it may be time for Lawrence's "new order" after all.

Lost: 38,000 Pounds of a Trucker's Marbles

0
0
article-image

A trucker making his way through Indianapolis on Saturday was driving along Interstate 465 when his trailer became unhitched, spilling 38,000 pounds of marbles on the roadway. Indiana State Police Sergeant John Perrine tweeted a taller version of the above photo, and it's since spread across the internet, as these things tend to do

As for the driver, neither he nor anyone else was injured in the incident. An inevitable lane closure, however, no doubt inconvenienced many motorists who may or may not have been aware that they were driving by an almost completely perfect dad joke. 


A Tour of Al Capone's 'Killer' Cadillac, Which Once Terrorized Chicago Streets

0
0

In the world of organized crime, Al Capone had few equals. For seven years in the 1920s, as the boss of the Chicago Mafia during Prohibition, Capone shocked the city with bombings, heists, gambling, prostitution, and other sundry criminal activities.

One of his greatest methods of escaping was via a "killer" car—an armored, bullet-proof vehicle weighing over three-and-a-half-tons, and capable of speeding off at 110 mph. In the 1933 film above, archived by British Pathé, a small group gathers as a man shows the many inconspicuous features of Capone's car that enabled him a quick get-away in dicey situations.  

The 1928 Cadillac Model 341A Town Sedan was equipped with a regulation police siren to fool other drivers. It also had bullet-proof glass installed throughout, causing the doors to weigh a hefty 10 stone (or approximately 140 pounds). The thick glass even required special strings and gears to raise and lower the windows. In order to see if the coast was clear, Capone could also snoop in on police activity with the "first regulation police pick-up radio" that had ever been installed on an automobile. 

Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

A 1927 Map Reveals the Hide-Outs of Chicago's Most Notorious Gangsters

0
0

In the 1920s, the streets of Chicago were home to hundreds of secret clubhouses and hideouts—home bases to thieving, violent gangsters. Between 1923 and 1926, one sociologist at the University of Chicago endeavored to track down and map the favorite haunts and hang-outs of more than 1,300 gangs for the project Chicago’s Gangland.

“No less than 1,313 gangs have been discovered in Chicago and its environs!” Frederic Thrasher wrote at the time.“Their distribution as shown on the accompanying map makes it possible to visualize the typical areas of gangland and to indicate their place in the life and organization of Chicago.”

Published in 1927, Chicago’s Gangland is tucked into the back of Thrasher’s seminal book on urban crime and ethnography, The Gang, a Study of 1313 Gangs in Chicago. Chock-full of gray and red demarcations, the hand-drawn, multi-layered map provides detailed insider knowledge of Chicago’s gang activity. Gangs are not only tied to their environment, but play a significant role in a city’s social distribution and structure, according to Thrasher. The map shows where certain gangs rule within the Gangland “empire,” which he explains isn’t just based on geography, but on “fissures and breaks in the structure of social organization.”

article-image

Thrasher’s map is extremely detailed. He depicted parks, boulevards, cemeteries, and railroads in different shades of gray, and even showed if hang-outs had clubrooms by marking them in red triangles and circles. He also inscribed important locations and gang territories, such as “No Man’s,” “Gang Camp” and “Death Corner.” The gangs each had their own distinct characteristics, creating a mosaic of regions.

“No two gangs are just alike,” Thrasher wrote. “Some are good; some are bad; and each has to be considered to its own merits.”

During the years between World War I and the Great Depression, many cities in the United States experienced a boom in both population and industrial production. As immigrants flooded to these urban centers, major shifts in social and spatial organization gave birth to gangs. Thrasher estimated (conservatively) that there were 25,000 boys and young men in gangs in Chicago. His work focused not on the likes of Al Capone’s mob, but rather the gangs of second-generation immigrant youths who were thrown into the “seediest aspects of American culture,” writes Greg Dimitriadis in the journal Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies.

The mini-societies that sprung up around gang life led to what Thrasher refers to as “interstitial” areas of Chicago—a gangland of deteriorating neighborhoods, shifting populations, and impoverished and disorganized slums. 

article-image

Thrasher’s cartographic representation constructs “a stage on which the scenes that are actually of sociological interest unfold,” writes Rolf Lindner in The Reportage of Urban Culture. Other sociology studies of the 1930s contain maps, but Thrasher’s Chicago’s Gangland is considered one of the first thematic maps that surveyed organized criminal activity. His investigation gives a rare glimpse of what gang life was like in 1920s Chicago.

“Gangland is a phenomenon of human ecology,” Thrasher concludes. “The gang develops as one manifestation of the economic, moral, and cultural frontier which makes the interstice.” 

Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.

Found: A Man Buried With a Stone in Place of His Tongue

0
0
article-image

In the 3rd or 4th century A.D., in a farming community near the river Nene, in what’s now Stanwick, England, a man was buried in an unusual fashion—face down, with a stone in his mouth where his tongue should be.

He was probably in his thirties and probably was considered some sort of threat to the community. When people were buried face down in Roman Britain, it often meant they were unusual in some way. But the stone replacing his tongue was even more unusual: Archaeologists have never before seen an example of this burial practice in this part of the world, at this time, TheGuardian reports.

article-image

The skeleton was first excavated in 1991, from a burial ground in Northamptonshire, about a two-hour drive north of London. Only recently did a team of archaeologists have the chance to examine the skeleton systematically, though, and they discovered the stone tongue.

They believe that the man’s own tongue may have been amputated. There are other examples from Roman Britain of severed body parts being replaced by objects during burial; most commonly, says The Guardian, pots or stones have been found in the place where the person’s head should be. The team also found evidence of infection on the skeleton, consistent with an amputated tongue, which often leads to infection.

The harder question to answer is why the man’s tongue was missing. Did he perhaps bite or cut it off himself, during a seizure or because of other mental health issues? Was it cut out as punishment? What was so dangerous about him that he needed to be buried face down? All archaeologists can say for sure right now is that there was something strange enough about him that the people who lived here found it necessary to bury him in this unusual way.

The True History of the Umbrella Gun, a Surprisingly Serious Weapon

0
0
article-image

In 1978, Georgi Markov was on his way to work at the BBC in London when he felt a sharp sting on his thigh. Behind him, he saw a man picking up an umbrella. The man, who spoke with a foreign accent, apologized and hurried into a cab that whisked him away.

That night Markov came down with a fever; four days later he was dead from ricin poisoning. A medical examiner found a tiny pellet, less than 2 millimeters in diameter, in his leg. Markov, a dissident novelist who had defected from Bulgaria, had been assassinated. Based on the details he remembered before he died, investigators developed a theory of how he had been shot.

That umbrella, they thought, was not a normal umbrella, but one that had been transformed into a gun.

Umbrella guns are by no means the only type of disguised weapon. “Man has attempted to disguise firearms into just about everything you can possibly imagine,” says David H. Fink, a collector in Georgia who has written about disguised guns for the American Society of Arms Collectors. Guns have been hidden in pillboxes, a scribe’s casing, a flute, a pencil, a Pepsi can. There have been pocket-watch guns, ring guns, bike-pump guns, and lipstick guns.

But perhaps no other type of disguised gun has caught the imagination of spies, writers, and conspiracy theorists as the umbrella gun. As a weapon, it is both a little bit ridiculous and deviously clever, and since its use in Markov’s assassination, it had taken its place in the villainous weapon hall of fame.

The umbrella gun was invented in the 19th century, as a variant of the more popular cane gun. First patented in 1823, cane guns were relatively simple weapons, disguised to look like walking canes—a gentleman’s weapon. The umbrella gun took the same idea and applied it to another personal item.

The earliest extant example of an umbrella gun may be one in Fink’s collection, dated to 1860. The umbrella was made in London and marked “Armstrong reg. British Make.” The handle has its own marking: “Richard Grinell 1860.” (Grinnell was probably the owner.) The shaft of the umbrella is actually a rifle.

Fink also has a different type of umbrella gun in his collection, from 1892. In this design, the umbrella shaft itself isn’t a gun. Instead, it contains a small revolver that slides in. To fire it, you pull the gun out of the umbrella’s top.

“These two are the only two honest umbrella guns I’ve seen, and I’ve been collecting for over 50 years,” Fink says. “The survival rate of these things is not very good. The guns may survive, but the umbrellas fall apart.”

article-image

In the first part of the 20th century, umbrella guns got little play: in 1917 Popular Sciencedescribed a “toy gun for the pacifists,” that would shoot an umbrella instead of a bullet, and in 1928 Popular Mechanics described how to turn an old umbrella into a spring gun. The most famous user of the umbrella gun, up until the 1970s, was the Penguin, the portly, besuited supervillain of the Batman comics.

In his first appearance, in 1941, the Penguin carried an umbrella with a hollow shaft, which he used to steal art, and Batman soon discovers that his enemy has a giant collection of inventive umbrellas, including one that fires poison gas. Over the many reinventions of the Batman universe, the Penguin has hidden all manner of weapons in his umbrellas, including a flame-thrower and a machine gun.

In the 1960s, though, American intelligence agencies were developing real-life versions of the Penguin’s sneaky weapons. The CIA reportedly created a stun-gun umbrella that would shoot poison darts from its tip, similar to the umbrella used to assassinate Markov.

That umbrella, sometimes called the “Bulgarian umbrella,” may not have technically been a gun: it didn’t work by setting off gunpowder. The tiny pellet that killed Markov might have been stabbed into his leg using compressed air, a hypodermic needle, or another injecting device. The gun itself was likely designed by the KGB for Bulgaria’s secret service.

After the “umbrella murder” became famous, the umbrella gun enjoyed a bit of a renaissance in the popular imagination. One theory about President John F. Kennedy’s assassination centered on an umbrella gun. In 1985, a company called J. Wilson built a very classy model. On television and in film, the umbrella gun became a more common murder weapon and spy tool; most recently, Colin Firth was equipped with a multifunctional umbrella gun in the 2015 movie Kingsman: The Secret Service.

Outside of fiction, though, umbrella guns are still relatively rare, although in 2014 a man in Seattle was charged with using a rifle “stuffed into the sleeve of a Nike golf umbrella,” reports SeattlePIAt this point in the history of the umbrella gun, it's more of a cliché than a clever trick: if anyone suspicious points the tip of an umbrella at you, you know to watch out.

Watch This Irresponsible Raven Eat a Parking Ticket

0
0

Ravens like to hang out in the parking lots of Yellowknife, in Canada's Northwest Territories, perching on cars and foraging for snacks. Last Thursday, one of them made its opinions on government bureaucracy known: it took a parking ticket in its beak and shredded it.

Annemieke Mulders, a local raven fan, caught the event on video and shared it with the CBC. "I watched the little monster take the ticket from under the windshield wiper and shred it, and (I think) eat some of it," she told the outlet.

In the end, it's unclear whose side the raven is on—according to the Yellowknife director of public safety, the driver still has to pay the ticket.

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.

Viewing all 11432 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images