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

The Harsh Reality of Food for “Little House" Pioneers

0
0

On the American frontier, dinner might be vinegar pie, bear meat, or nothing at all.

article-image

There is perhaps no better-known account of American pioneer life than the Little House series of children’s books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, which was subsequently adapted for the stage and big screen. Over the course of nine books, set between 1870 and 1894, Wilder recounts a fictionalized version of her childhood and adolescence as the Ingalls family moves west, variously living in Wisconsin, Kansas, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Missouri.

Nowadays, however, the books are divisive. Many readers see them as a racist relic worth removing from the children’s literature canon altogether. In June 2018, in fact, the American Library Association excised Wilder’s name from the Children’s Literature Legacy Award book prize due to these concerns. Yet there are still those who love the books, celebrating them in memoirs, blogs and listicles alike—often with a particular focus on the novels’ food.

Mealtime scenes are some of the most memorable in the books, laid out meticulously in calm, deliberate prose. A salted pig’s tail, sizzling over the flames, is so good that the main character, Laura, scarcely minds that she’s burnt her finger. Hard candy, made with boiled molasses and sugar, is made by drizzling the dark syrup “in little streams” onto “clean, white snow from outdoors.” A candy heart, printed with red letters, is “wrapped carefully in her handkerchief until [Laura] got home and could put it away to keep always. It was too pretty to eat.”

But even those celebrations of food show why these books need reconsideration. For the generations of readers who grew up with these stories, these romanticized accounts sometimes leave readers with a false impression of how good the Ingalls family had it.

article-image

“[The Little House books] are designed to codify the myth of the self-sufficient pioneers, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and living off the fat of the land,” writes Constance Grady for Vox. But “self-sufficiency” often actually meant periods of hardship and famine, with families struggling to survive long, difficult winters. Yet that doesn’t always come across. Instead, with the possible exception of The Long Winter, the books err towards what Grady characterizes as “an almost pornographic pleasure in describing butter churning and hog slaughtering and corn harvesting.”

Even the individual dishes, however lovingly described, may not stand up to scrutiny. Food writer and Atlas Obscura contributor Anne Ewbank remembers an account of homemade vanity cakes particularly acutely. This proto-donut still lingers in her imagination and, as a child, seemed to her “the most delicious thing in the world,” she says. “I haven’t read these books in more than a decade, but the memories are so vivid to me.” Yet modern reconstructions suggest that these treats, no more than unsweetened scraps of fried dough, are bland and unappealing.

Pioneer food was often stodgy, plain, or altogether absent. While Laura’s family is concerned throughout the book with packing away stores to make it through harsh winters, Wilder tends to gloss over the risk of famine or even death. In summertime, pioneers might feast on bear meat (Laura’s favorite), buffalo, venison, elk, and antelope, unconstrained by the big game laws of the Old World. But in winter, when nothing grew or could be hunted, pioneers were vulnerable.

Families like the Ingalls family had it especially tough. As historian Erin E. Pedigo observes, Pa’s “dreams of wide open space with few neighbors and accumulated wealth from working the land were far bigger than his abilities,” and his family paid the price. Out on the open frontier, or deep in the woods, there was no market economy or community to fall back on during difficult months. In On the Banks of Plum Creek, a plague of grasshoppers destroy the family’s wheat crops and force them to move. Later, in The Long Winter, Wilder describes a brutal 1880 winter in De Smet, South Dakota, that lasted from October to April.

article-image

Though a fictionalized account, this winter was one of the worst on record in the Dakotas. “The first blizzard, which raged for three days, came in early October,” writes Constance Potter. “By Christmas the trains had stopped running.” Wilder describes the isolated Ingalls family counting the days until food from the outside world could reach them, as they watched their own supplies dwindle. Laura, then a young teenager, does calculations in her head about their diminishing stores: “ … half a bushel of wheat that they could grind to make flour, and there were the few potatoes, but nothing more to eat until the train came. The wheat and the potatoes would never be enough.”

Eventually, Ma finds a way to turn their seed wheat into flour with a coffee grinder, and then bakes it as bread—though, as Pedigo notes, it’s crude, tasteless, and, however horrid, “weirdly perfect for this brutal winter.”

Yet when the famine breaks, and the spring comes, the difficulty of the past months seem suddenly a distant memory. In May, the family finally receives their Christmas package, replete with 15 pounds of frozen turkey in a mass of brown paper, and cranberries rolling about in the bottom of the barrel. As they sit to eat, Pa thanks the Lord “for all Thy bounty.” The long months in which people narrowly avoided starvation are written off as a long, hard winter, and part of the lottery of pioneer life. Pa begins to play his fiddle, and all is suddenly well.

What is not explored in the books, however, is whether their intrepid pioneer lifestyle merited the risks. Ma and Pa spend almost all their time simply trying to keep the family alive. For Ma, each day is taken up with menial upkeep of the home (washing, ironing, mending, churning, cleaning, baking), usually while pregnant. Meanwhile, Pa is out in the woods, hunting whatever he can find and avoiding the wrath of hungry bears. By contrast, salt-rising bread, sugar cakes, and maple syrup candy are perhaps prominently featured in the books precisely because they were such rare occurrences.

When there was food to be had, settlers’ actions had an environmental toll. Unrestricted fishing and hunting—one day, Pa returns home with a literal “wagonload of fish”—diminished the plentiful resources that drew settlers. By 1890, buffalo numbers were visibly reduced, for instance, while by 1900, the American passenger pigeon, which had been the most common bird in the country, was extinct. In the books, this devastation, and the consequences for Native Americans who were being pushed off their land by settlers, go unmentioned.

The references to Native Americans and other people of color in the books, in fact, are especially troubling. Ma expresses her hatred for the people they were dispossessing ("The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” she exclaims), while a description of a minstrel show concludes: “When the five darkies suddenly raced down the aisle and were gone, everyone was weak from excitement and laughing."

There may be things worth celebrating about the Little House books—the lucid account of a little girl tasting lemonade for the first time or a table groaning with vinegar pie and Swedish crackers. But the world they construct whitewashes much of the harshness of pioneer life, while ignoring the harm these settlers did to the people and environment around them. Like the vanity cakes, they sound great on the page, but may well be much less appetizing in real life.


The 800-Year-Old Fishpond That’s Still Feeding Hawai‘i

0
0

How an O‘ahu community came together to rebuild a fishpond, and revive a traditional farming practice.

article-image

During quiet moments in the day, after he’s checked the water quality, given tours, and pulled weeds, Keli‘i Kotubetey pauses to reflect on the hard work and creativity that enabled his ancestors to build the 88-acre He‘eia Fishpond 800 years ago. The word “fishpond” doesn’t do it justice. Hawaiians blocked off the Pacific Ocean by constructing a 1.3-mile long lava rock wall— by hand— then harnessed the unique reservoir for aquaculture.

“I think about how this took hundreds and hundreds of people to build this,” he says, gesturing to the calm waters of the fishpond. “Then a whole other crew of people made food for them each day, and others cared for the kids. That’s community. That’s ingenuity.”

For the past 17 years, Kotubetey has managed and helped rebuild this pond in He‘eia, a small town nestled against the emerald cliffs of the Ko‘olau mountains along O‘ahu’s eastern coast. In 2001, he co-founded Paepae o He‘eia (pronounced “pie-pie oh hay-ee-uh”), a nonprofit dedicated to restoring and preserving the local fishpond. He now serves as the organization's assistant executive director.

Traditional Hawaiian fishponds were engineered to feed entire communities. At its peak, He‘eia fishpond produced 150 to 300 pounds of fish per acre each year, says Kotubetey– nearly 10 tons from this pond alone. Fishponds also served as important communal gathering places. That community is what inspired Kotubetey and seven of his friends to start the nonprofit. Kotubetey, a Hawaiian born and raised on O‘ahu, says they wanted to share the story of the He‘eia fishpond and traditional Hawaiian aquaculture with others, and involve the community in restoring it, and eventually eating from it, just as their ancestors did.

“This place needed a lot of love,” says Kotubetey, “but it has the potential to feed us again, and not just our body, but our mind and soul.”

When the He‘eia Fishpond was built, such ponds were prevalent in Hawai‘i. Fishponds were usually built along shorelines with shallow reefs. Lava rock walls were assembled to form pools of different shapes and sizes in which fish from the ocean would be trapped, raised, and harvested. Limu (seaweed) was cultivated inside to feed the diverse marine life, including ‘ama‘ama (mullet), moi (pacific threadfin) awa (milkfish), palani (surgeonfish), crab, and more.

article-image

The nonprofit’s first task was a big one– 200 feet to be exact. In 1965, a flood destroyed a section of the wall, rendering the pond unusable. Efforts to restore the wall began in 1989, when an aquaculturist named Mary Brooks leased the fishpond and worked to mend the wall with the help of students at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Paepae o He‘eia formed to join the endeavor in 2001, but it took 14 years of securing permits, fundraising, and galvanizing locals to begin permanent reconstruction.

“We try to do as much as possible like our ancestors did,” says Kotubetey. For example, he says the rock wall was repaired by hand, including using rocks that were part of the original wall. The staff also conducts traditional ceremonies related to fishponds, and built traditional hale– thatched, open shelters– atop the 12- to 15-foot wide wall. The reconstruction finished in 2015, and they began raising and harvesting the same year.

While only a few traditional fishponds remain in Hawai‘i, there is growing interest across the islands to rebuild these sustainable aquaculture systems for the 21st century. It’s not just a matter of cultural significance; it’s a measure for survival.

Close to 90 percent of Hawai‘i’s food is imported, and it’s estimated that cut off from external supply, only ten days’ worth of fresh produce would be available across the islands. Dependent on imported food, Hawai‘i residents are geographically vulnerable to natural disasters and global events that might disrupt shipping to the area. On O‘ahu, Paepae o He‘eia is doing their part to improve conditions by promoting sustainability.

For the past three years, the nonprofit has focused on fish cultivation, learning the spawning and growth cycles of fish and ensuring the water quality of the fishpond. Paepae o He‘eia has partnered with the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa to conduct research on the pond.

article-image

Each year, approximately 10,000 to 12,000 people visit the fishpond, including school children, college students, vacationers, and local businesses on company retreats. “We want them to have a deep connection [with the fishpond],” says Kotubetey. “An appreciation and recognition that the Hawaiian art of farming is alive and well.”

Ultimately, Paepae o He‘eia’s goal is for the fishpond to feed the community as it once did. Currently, the nonprofit sells crab from the fishpond to local restaurants and offers seasonal public fishing days by permit. While this single pond can't solve the underlying issue of food security, its positive effects are multitude.

More than the number of sea creatures bred, the success of the He‘eia Fishpond boils down to the enrichment of the community that’s grown up around it– the nonprofit staff who work there daily to restore and preserve it, the children who learn about its history, and the neighbors who spend their free time volunteering in the area.

“We’re keeping this alive by living and breathing Hawaiian fishponds,” says Kotubetey. “These rocks were put in the fishpond wall 800 years ago and we’re touching them. We’re eating the fish. We’re sharing the fishpond with the community.”

Found: 3 Poisonous Books in a University Library

0
0

Their green covers meant danger.

article-image

The librarians at the University of Southern Denmark weren’t looking for poison. They just wanted to read the scraps of manuscript used to make the covers of three rare books from the 16th and 17th centuries.

When they put the books under X-ray analysis, though, they found they had a real danger in their hands, they write at The Conversation. The books’ covers were suffused with arsenic.

For years, in the 19th century, arsenic was considered dangerous to eat but safe enough to use in other ways, including as dye in postage stamps that were meant to be licked or in green dresses worn to fancy balls. It was regularly used as an ingredient in green paint, to help the color last longer. Now, though, we know that when arsenic is used in paint, it’s still very dangerous. It can form microscopic particles that can make their way into people’s lungs. In some circumstances, arsenic paint can even give off a poisonous gas.

article-image

One of the most dangerous books ever created was meant to warn against exactly this danger. In the 1870s, an American doctor tried to raise awareness of the hazards of arsenic-laced wallpaper by creating a book of potentially poisonous samples and sending it around to libraries. The intent was to help people identify dangerous wallpaper in their homes, not to poison librarians. Today, only four copies of that book still exist, and they’re treated very carefully.

The books at the University of Southern Denmark weren’t painted green for aesthetic reasons; the librarians think that someone was using the poison paint to protect the books from insects and vermin. But when their tests revealed the arsenic content of the paint, they couldn’t ignore it. The books are now kept in a ventilated cabinet and boxes marked with warnings. The librarians are also planning on digitizing the books to minimize the need to handle them. (That can be a complicated procedure all on its own, though.)

It just goes to show—books can be more dangerous than anyone realizes.

What's the Most Memorable Street Name You’ve Ever Encountered?

0
0

We've gone down some unusual roads—now we want to hear about your favorites.

article-image

From Holbrook, Arizona’s Bucket of Blood Street to Warp Drive in Sterling, Virginia, some of our favorite road names are creepy, funny, or just plain strange. We’re on the hunt for more of these oddly named streets and avenues all over the world, and we need your help.

Maybe it’s an unforgettable street name you encountered while traveling. Or it might be a lane you pass by every day that always makes you smile. So long as it’s evocative, hilarious, or out-of-the-ordinary, we want to hear about it.

Using the form below, tell us about the most unforgettable street name you’ve ever encountered. Also, we really want to see these names in action, so if you can, please email a picture of the street sign to eric@atlasobscura.com. Down the road, we plan to collect your submissions into a larger project that we'll eventually publish on the site. In the meantime, keep those amazing street names coming!

Why a Portion of the Arctic Ocean May Become Part of the Atlantic

0
0

Clue: It's related to climate change.

article-image

It's hard to know where one ocean starts and the next one begins. Though on maps we're happy to chop up our maritime world into parcels, the water doesn't really work that way, despite the occasional circulation of miscaptioned photographs that purport to show the dramatic meeting of two oceans. In fact, so far as the NOAA is concerned, there's only one ocean, with four, or possibly five, ocean basins.

When geographers talk about what distinguishes one ocean from another, however, they're interested in their geographical features and physical properties, such as salinity or temperature. What that means, too, is that ocean "boundaries" may shift with the features or properties of a given undersea area.

This is exactly what seems to be taking place in a region of the Arctic Ocean, northeast of Finland. In the Barents Sea, both salinity and ocean temperature are climbing at an alarming rate, according to a new study published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change. As sea ice vanishes, and fails to be replaced, the water is no longer being diluted as it once was, leading to this uptick in saltiness. All of this, the study says, means that the northern Barents is beginning to look much more like the Atlantic Ocean than the Arctic Ocean.

More than simply moving a line on a map, there are dramatic, and perhaps worrying, implications for the marine ecosystems of this region. As subzero Arctic water floods out of the Barents, and the seasonal sea ice disappears, the marine mammals, birds, and microorganisms that call it home may be displaced or die out altogether, to be replaced with Atlantic creatures who enjoy a balmier climate.

In earlier simulations, LiveScience notes, it seemed likely that the northern Barents Sea would eventually be indistinguishable from the Atlantic, though not before close to the end of the century. But the speed at which the zone is warming—2.7 degrees Fahrenheit since 2000—suggests that this may happen much, much sooner. "Unless the freshwater input should recover, the entire region could soon have a warm and well-mixed water column structure and be part of the Atlantic domain," according to the study. Such a transition would be a “historically rare moment,” the researchers add.

Why Garlic Brings Good Luck to This Spanish Soccer Team

0
0

It's thought to dispel evil.

article-image

In the sports world, a second can mean the difference between a loss and a win. Perhaps that’s why individual players and entire teams alike clutch good luck charms ahead of games. These charms range from the famous to the feline, such as Tiger Wood’s red shirts or the San Jose Shark’s lucky black cat, respectively. Sometimes they’re even fragrant, like that of the Spanish soccer team Deportivo de la Coruña: At their home stadium in Galicia, called Riazor, fans often line the pitch with whole garlic cloves.

The garlic is ostensibly there for good luck. But it’s also thought to banish sorcerers and evil spirits. In 2016, a fan site for the team attempted to explain the garlic. Fans toss it to ward off malicious bad luck caused by meigas, the Galician word for “witch.” In the past, that bad luck might have concerned withered crops. But soccer fans want to thwart the possibility of the opposing team scoring a goal, so they arm themselves with garlic. Some fans even draw Deportivo’s characteristic blue and white stripes on their cloves.

This old superstition involving witches has somehow persisted, though. A common Galician saying these days nods towards the incongruity of modern-day witches: “I don’t believe in meigas, but they exist.” So fans figure they might as well protect against any hexes, which is where the garlic comes in.

article-image

While most people are more familiar with garlic as vampire-be-gone, it’s long been considered to counter evil in general. The ancient Romans believed that garlic warded off witches. (And since what’s now known as Galicia was part of the Roman empire for centuries, it makes sense that this belief carried over). In many cultures, garlic is also considered a way to deflect the evil eye, or the gazes of jealousy that can cause bad luck.

For a time, the garlic charm might have even worked: From 1992 to 2010, Deportivo never lost a home game to powerhouse Real Madrid when cloves were on the field. (Fans of Real Madrid considered it a curse.) But Deportivo’s luck ran out when they lost to Madrid at Riazor in January 2010. Perhaps witches have come around to garlic these days.

Celebrating Ghana’s Amazing Handpainted Barbershop Signs

0
0

These vibrant artworks advertised the freshest styles and sleekest cuts.

article-image

Next to the Suame police station in Kumasi, Ghana, just near the roundabout, is Kwame Akoto’s art shop. It’s hard to miss. The storefront is decorated with French, American, and Ghanaian flags, and near the entrance there’s a picture of the American actor, Gordon Scott, best known for his role as Tarzan in the 1950s and 1960s. Inside you’ll find abstract art that explores dichotomies within Christianity like heaven and hell, God and Satan, life and death. Akoto’s shop goes by the name “Almighty God Art Works,” and his religious devotion is clearly expressed on the canvases. But if you look closely, you’ll also find hand-painted signs of people rocking fresh fades and tight cornrows.

Walk into a hair salon or a barbershop in Kumasi or Accra, Ghana, and you’ll see photo posters plastered on the walls showing women or men modeling different hairstyles. From cornrows, to micro braids, to fades, these posters present customers ready for a shape-up with a variety of options to select from. But before the advent of digital printers, these signs looked a little different.

article-image

From the 1930s to the late 1990s, self-taught artists painted hairstyles on wooden boards with acrylics, and it only took them a day or two. While some signs were mere 2-D portrayals, others contained rich brushwork in every follicle, to the point where the quarter head shots looked quite realistic. But unless you visit a tourist shop to find old ones lying around, it’s harder to find these signs and find out about the people who made them.

In Ghana, and West Africa more generally, the head and hair are canvases for expressing ideas about wealth, power, intelligence, status, and style. For example, starting in the 1600s, Akan queen mothers "shaved the hair around their nape and forehead to distinguish their regal stature,” write Philip M. Peek and Kwesi Yankah in their book African Folklore: An Encyclopedia.

Over the centuries, the symbolism of West African hair has evolved. With the “pan-African movement, prior and leading up to independence, you really begin to see the global emphasis on black pride, black fashion, black identity, and that hair could contribute to that identity,” says Dr. Christine Kreamer, Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. In the book Crowing Achievement Kreamer’s co-author Mary Jo Arnoldi writes that contemporary hairstyles “are created as social commentary, others celebrate topical events, others are inspired by popular music and other forms of media.”

article-image

As the notion of hair, and what it means, started to transform, so did the signage. Sign designs were influenced, adds Ashesi University Professor Joseph Oduro-Frimpong, from the Diaspora, African-Americans, and cultures outside Ghana. The afro was one of the popular hairstyles during the 1970s, and many customers wanted this look. To accommodate client demand, shop owners consulted with artists to paint signs that could both appeal to customers and demonstrate the owner’s ability to create the perfect fro.

Styles such as the high-top fade and box braids, rocked by African and African-American musicians and actors, emerged as defining looks in the 1980s. Painters began illustrating men and women sporting the same styles as ‘80s celebrities.

article-image

This evolving imagery “relates to how Ghanaians are in touch with the political and global trends,” Oduro-Frimpong continues, “from the ‘80s, [signs] dealt with political leaders from the U.S. and from other countries. You have celebrities on display and you also have hip-hop icons that feature prominently.” Throughout the ‘90s, barbershop signs with such titles as “Champion U.S.A. Hair Cut” featured celebrities like Will Smith, Tupac, or Ludacris with an American flag painted as a backdrop. In some cases, artists also made commentary about their environments.

Sometimes they drew cartoon figures to illustrate their thoughts on marriage, faith, and capitalism. On one barbershop sign from Aflao, Ghana, there’s a cartoon depiction of a man inserting a needle into a woman’s rear. The man’s dialogue balloon states, “you this woman you get AIDS so I help you.” Kreamer says this is a direct reference to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in West Africa and the phenomenon of misinformed doctors spreading it by reusing needles.

article-image

Starting in the 1970s, Americans and Europeans traveling through Ghana started to notice the skill and aesthetic appeal of barbershop signs. Collectors like David Spetka, Esger Duintjer, and Ernie Wolfe bought old signs for as low as $2 to $5 from shops that no longer wanted them. These collectors then sold them to buyers in Western art markets for anywhere from $50 to $150. It was quite the markup, but the signs didn’t fetch much compared to Ghana’s distinctively ostentatious hand-drawn movie posters, which could garner over $2,000.

Regardless of the number value, barbershop signs from Ghanaian painters, like the movie posters, left a lasting legacy in the art world. Though you won’t find the signs in barbershops any more, works from artists like Akoto and Daniel Anum (Jasper Painter) live on in private collections or institutions like the Fowler Museum of Cultural History in Los Angeles. To the painters, these signs were just part of a day’s work, but now thousands of miles away, their artistic value is far from ordinary.

Seattle's Mystery Soda Machine Has Gone Missing

0
0

Will it ever return?

article-image

For years, the Mystery Soda Machine has dispensed bubbly drinks outside a locksmith in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. No one knows who put it there. No one knows who stocks it. Originally, the machine had one “mystery” button that would yield a random soda, often a delightfully rare flavor sold only in some far-off place. Later, the machine was upgraded so that every button was a mystery button.

Now it’s gone.

The Capitol Hill Seattle Blog reports that over the weekend, likely on Friday night, the Mystery Soda Machine disappeared.

article-image

Where the machine once stood, there’s a note taped to a rail: “Went for a walk,” it says.

On the soda machine’s Facebook page, someone posted a video of the empty spot, with the message: "Going for a walk, need to find myself. Maybe take a shower even."

Some locals have speculated that machine’s caretakers are simply taking it to be cleaned. But, like so much about the Mystery Soda machine, this latest incident has no clear culprit or explanation.

We can only hope for the Mystery Soda Machine’s return.


How a Caribbean Chef is Unearthing the Hidden Stories of Martha's Vineyard

0
0

Deon Thomas's unique eatery showcases another side of the island.

article-image

The history and even current reality of Martha's Vineyard, a popular vacation spot off the coast of Massachusetts, is often overlooked or mischaracterized. Celebrities including David Letterman, Meg Ryan, and Jake Gyllenhaal flock to the 20-mile long island, with its idyllic beauty, serene beaches, and honor policy pay-as-you-go farm stands. Many also associate Martha’s Vineyard with the strong, fraught presence of the Kennedy family who helped it earn its badge as summer isle for white American royalty.

It's not surprising that successful restaurateurs, such as the Jamaican-born, Anguilla-formed, New York-trained Chef Deon Thomas, might set up their eateries on the island. But his current establishment, which is housed inside the Veterans of Foreign Wars Hall, contrasts with the mostly white-owned, farm-to-table restaurants across Martha’s Vineyard. Serving New American food with a Caribbean spin, his customers include African-American vacationers and luminaries (who have a history on the island longer than the Kennedy family) and veterans who live in town year-round. In many ways, Deon’s illuminates the true and often hidden stories of the heralded island.

article-image

Before opening Deon’s, Thomas, who is also an ordained minister, trained in elite New York kitchens, including a year as chef at 40/40, Jay-Z’s restaurant in New York City and Atlantic City. For a decade he worked as a summer chef in the Hamptons while owning and running multiple restaurants in Anguilla during the winter. He eventually bought and ran a high-end New American restaurant called The Cornerway in Chilmark, a wooded region of Martha’s Vineyard that fills with politicians, celebrities, writers, and lawyers each summer.

After The Cornerway, Thomas opened two other restaurants on Martha’s Vineyard: Deon’s in West Tisbury, which burned down, and Deon’s on Circuit Avenue, the main hub of the large town of Oak Bluffs. When that closed, he opened the current-day Deon’s at the VFW, where he rented the space for its enormous commercial kitchen, transitioning from full-time restaurateur (you can still eat there, on paper plates with plastic forks) to one of the island’s top summer caterers.

article-image

"I do big parties," Thomas says. “I am a premier chef for the African diaspora on the island … White, too, but more the black community, the bourgeoisie of America.” So in addition to the Clintons (“Hillary and Bill”), he says he’s cooked for the Obamas (“Barack and Michelle”) and many black intellectuals such as Henry Louis Gates Jr. (“Skip Gates and all the professors”).

To many outsiders, President Barack and Michelle Obama's arrival on Martha’s Vineyard, in 2009, might have seemed to signal a change on island, as if they were entering a largely wealthy white space, much as they had when they entered the White House. But the island has long been a popular vacation destination and year-round haven for African-Americans. “They have been here since the 1930s or longer,” says Thomas. “Since the black church brought them here. The underground railroad trail is here.”

article-image

Deon’s is located in Oak Bluffs, one of six island towns that was first inhabited by Native Americans from the Wampanoag tribe. When Europeans arrived from England and Portugal (specifically the Azores), enslaved West African laborers came with them. After emancipation, freed slaves came to work on the island, and a strong African-American community was built around Baptist Temple Park. In the 1930s, Oak Bluffs was the only town on the island that allowed black guests, and it developed into a premier African-American vacation destination.

The menu at Deon’s is hard to categorize, which is how Thomas likes it. He was born in Jamaica, came into his own as a chef in Anguilla, and was trained by international chefs in the United States. So calling it “Jamaican food” doesn’t quite capture the menu, which he calls "real eclectic Southern fare, from the Caribbean and the American South." He serves braised oxtail, conch stew, and curried goat, none of which he thinks are categorically Jamaican.

The jerk chicken, however, which is best ordered spicy, he refers to as distinctly Jamaican. “Hail,” he says, “to the jerk chicken.” He serves everything from chicken and waffles to blackened alligator, which he sources in North Carolina and cooks with caramelized onions. "I am always on the cutting edge when it comes to food," he says, recalling the diverse array of kitchens he trained in. "My menu stems from everywhere."

That includes local waters. For an array of his dishes, including conch soup and conch fritters, Thomas sources local channel welch conch from Menemsha, a storied fishing village across the island. "Mohawk gets it for me," Thomas says. "He is a conch man that fishes outside of Menemsha. He's a member of the Fisherman Preservation Trust." The chef's upcoming book, The Martha’s Vineyard Conch Cookery, edited by local West Tisbury Poet Laureate, Emma Young, is an effort to resurrect origin foods of the island. "No one here uses it," he says of the conch. "It's a traditional food of the region—part of the traditional diet of the Portuguese and the Tribe. They ate it and it was lost. So, I'm on a mission to get it back to the tables."

article-image

To enter Thomas’s restaurant, you drive through Oak Bluffs’ tree-lined back roads away from the harbor. Suddenly, as if out of thin air, there it is: Deon's, nesting inside, of all places, the Veterans of Foreign Wars Hall (VFW), one of just a few venues open year-round on island. On one side of the VFW clubhouse, the members-only bar (they make exceptions for everyone) is always full: with people and plastic-cupped alcohol, rock and roll and war medals. The clientele is mostly men and usually majority-white. Bandanas, hats, and tank tops are common; so are mullets and long mustaches. Many smoke and most have war records.

Martha’s Vineyard is renowned as a wealthy getaway, but that’s just one slice of the island. After the summer, mini-mansions are boarded up and the quiet resumes, leaving a population of roughly 17,000, a huge contrast to the 100,000 people on island during summer. The island is a lovely place to live in the off-season, but it also experiences poverty, opioid addiction, and an ongoing housing crisis. These aspects of the island are sometimes evident at the VFW bar.

article-image

Thomas knows that many black people have avoided the VFW and felt unwelcome there in the past—feelings I heard echoed from members of the African-American community on the island. Many grew up in Oak Bluffs, biked or walked past the VFW, but didn’t go inside or approach, often seeing the older vets as foreboding.

"So, you know, hey," Thomas shrugs, referring to his thriving, black-owned business in the traditionally conservative space, "we have evolved."

A door in the VFW bar leads to a silent wooden hallway, and through a second door lies another planet: Deon’s. There are burnt orange walls (painted by Thomas himself), fake flowers, and old-school reggae. But the influence of the VFW—American flags, giant plaques—is there too. "It's a military space," Thomas says.

article-image

When I visit, the restaurant is half-empty. A mix of veterans, local and visiting African-Americans, and homesick islanders from Jamaica, Barbados, and Antigua either here to work for the summer, or long-time residents who made this island their home, are eating quietly and contentedly. Drinks are purchased at the bar, and brought in plastic cups back to the restaurant through the doored hallway. The staid scene looks very different from the long, enthusiastic lines that form at the booth for Deon’s at the local Agricultural Society Fair come August.

Very few summer people know of the VFW bar—or that Deon’s is here. But Thomas is okay with its relative anonymity. He makes his name in catering now. And here, he gets to cook to order, joined, depending on the day, by his wife or his sous chefs, one from Anguilla, who leaves her family to come for the summer season. His nephew from Jamaica is also in the kitchen, and the food, served hot, the plantains divine, feels like home.

The Dangers of Train Yards, Through the Eyes of Railroad Employees

0
0

A collection of photos from the 1960s tried to show why locomotives need two people in the cab.

In 1960, looking west from the Texas and Pacific freight yard in El Paso, Texas, you’d see the lines of the rails curving off to the north, towards the city buildings and smokestacks in the distance. In the yard, after an engine gave a rail car a push on its way, workers might uncouple the car and let it roll under its own momentum down the way, or simply release a brake to start it in motion. During the day and the night, children from the neighboring houses would find their way into the yard, along with itinerant workers and drifters. Cars and trucks following Tornillo Street, a public road, across the dozen or so rails in the yard, might find heavy train cars traveling straight towards them or blocking their way.

For the men working on the trains, it felt like a dangerous situation. The photos shown here were taken by engineers and other rail workers on tracks across the country, in an effort to prove how hazardous these places could be and to show why cutting crews was a terrible idea.

article-image

Starting around the 1950s, the railroad business had started sliding into a decline, even as the engines had modernized from wood- and coal-burning to sleeker diesel machines. But both passenger and commercial business had fallen as cars and trucks became the dominant mode of transportation in the United States. Under President Eisenhower, the Interstate Highway System was authorized in 1956. Railroads saw the future and were trying to cut costs—which meant cutting crews—where they could.

Since the 1920s, safety regulations had helped determine the make-up of crews on the train. In the days of steam engines, every train had an engineer, who operated the train, and a fireman who’d keep the boiler running. By the 1950s, the fireman’s job had changed: The new engines didn’t need someone shoveling coal in. The industry wanted to start cutting these jobs, but the rail workers and their unions fought back. Without two people in the cab of the locomotive, they argued, the engineer and the rest of the train would be in danger.

article-image

For years, starting around 1956, the railroads and their workers fought over “crew consist” rules—how many people would make up a train crew. Finally, in 1960, when neither side could settle on new rules, they agreed to call for a federal commission to weigh in. In preparation for the commission, the union had more than 30 railroad employees take photos of their workplace in an effort to demonstrate the hazards firemen could help navigate around.

Thanks to a new effort at Cornell University’s Kheel Center, an archive focused on the history of labor relations, those photos—more than 1,655 in all—are now available digitally. To the untrained eye, they display a striking uniformity. Railroads would use the same architects and the same designs on their facilities across the country. When different rail lines interconnected, they’d also have standardized exchanges. A rail yard in Seattle might not look different from a rail yard in Texas or one in Boston.

article-image

But that’s not what the men taking these pictures saw. Each train yard had its own unique hazards and challenges. “A lot of them are showing curves in tracks,” explains Liz Parker, an archivist at the Kheel Center. “Depending on what direction a diesel engine is moving, you can only really see to one side of the cab and directly in front of you. The minute you start to turn, you can’t even see the tracks in front of you, let alone debris, people, or trucks.” Many of the photos show blocked lines of sight, along with foot and car traffic on the train tracks, in an attempt to show why a crew would benefit from having someone on either side of the cab sticking their head out to see where the train was headed.

article-image

Ultimately the photos didn’t do the trick. Diesel engines could be designed differently than older units, without a long boiler at the front of the train. “With the new technology, the crew cab could be placed right at the front of the unit, yielding dramatically improved visibility and nullifying some of the pro-fireman argument,” says Robert Lettenberger, Education Director at the National Railroad Museum.

The unions had other arguments—radio communication wasn’t reliable, and the fireman could help communicate with a brakeman when technology failed, for instance—but the railroads' need to cut cost and the push for modern efficiency won out. Today, these photos represent a lost world, perhaps the last moment when railroads were still some of the most important companies in America.

article-image
article-image
article-image
article-image

How Comparisons Help Us Understand the Universe

0
0

And ourselves.

article-image

The other night, a few minutes after 8:30 p.m., I went outside and lingered. The surroundings were familiar—the freshly flickering bodega signs, the clusters of people and dogs, the bricks blazing when the sun slants just so on its descent. The sky didn’t look especially alien, either—I often extend my walk home in order to glimpse the world washed the color of a muddy puddle, to stand inside the blue-black darkness just beginning to fall.

But on this particular evening, I wasn’t outside to bask in the bodega golden hour. I was trying to approximate the feeling of high noon on Pluto.

This goes without saying, but: Pluto is not Brooklyn. It is cold; it is dark; it is 4.67 billion miles away. Its differences are legion, and the starkest among them are hard to even imagine. No matter what image I squint to conjure—a body freckled with ice cubes, snow drifts pinning me down—the concept of a temperature sliding to -387 degrees Fahrenheit does not compute.

I’ve never been that cold. Neither have you. But we have both seen twilight, or the moments just after it, and that’s not a bad approximation of what Pluto looks like at its brightest. To help Earthlings imagine life there, NASA has created a website called “Pluto Time.” You plug in your address, and it spits out the exact moment, at that particular longitude and latitude, that the sky above you most resembles the one above Pluto. Any number of other, distinctly-Earthly sensations might jostle for your attention—you may hear wheezing buses or smell meat cooking on a street cart—but visually, you’ll have a proxy for our far-flung solar neighbor.

article-image

Space is vast and alien. That’s one basis of its romance, but it’s also a cognitive hurdle for anyone trying to wrap their head around its reaches. “The trouble we normally have with space is, if we try to understand something, we only have one example—our own planet,” says Colin Stuart, a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and the author of the forthcoming How to Live in Space: Everything You Need to Know for the Not-So-Distant Future.

A solipsistic view isn’t necessarily a bad thing, he says: Using Earth as a data point is often helpful—especially for science educators trying to connect with enthusiasts who aren’t fluent in astronomical jargon. “We always try to compare things to Earth when we can,” Stuart says. “If you’re starting with something they know about, you’re not starting from the beginning.” He stacks up volcanoes, valleys, and trenches in space against the Grand Canyon or Everest, “because people have that frame of reference,” even if the features are on vastly different scales. (Olympus Mons, the highest of Mars’s volcanic peaks, is 2.5 times taller than Everest, and roughly the width of France.)

“Unless you’re embedded in the science speak, I could be saying any kind of gobbledygook, but that might not make any sense to anyone,” says Michelle Nichols, the director of public observing at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium. Nichols often translates features of space that might otherwise be somewhat inscrutable into familiar scenarios or childhood games. She compares sun spots, as glimpsed through a telescope, to iron filings dancing under a magnet’s sway. “People remember doing that,” she says. “They go, ‘Right, now I see it.’”

article-image

To some extent, scientists lean on analogues in peer-reviewed papers, too. In a recent paper in Science, a team of researchers including Jani Radebaugh, a planetary scientist at Brigham Young University, and her collaborator Matt Telfer, a physical geographer at the University of Plymouth, reported on Pluto’s dunes, which look something like the ones on Earth’s deserts or beaches. A lay viewer glancing at the images captured by the New Horizons spacecraft might not have made the connection, but an analogue can turn on a lightbulb. “They may only see a whitish background with some squiggles,” Nichols says. “As soon as you say, ‘It’s like a sand dune,’ they say, ‘Oh, wait a minute! I’ve been to the Indiana dunes, I’ve seen pictures of the Sahara.’” Pluto’s drifts aren’t sand—they’re slopes of frozen methane—but the wind has sculpted them into similar shapes, and that knowledge may give laypeople a foothold.

The same goes for radar maps of Titan, one of Saturn's moons, says Stuart. The maps reveal a smattering of islands, archipelagos, and peninsulas, and Stuarts thinks “if you put a radar map of Titan next to a map of the Scottish coastline and you made them the same colors—no giveaways about what was blue and green—you’d struggle to tell them apart,” Stuart says. Canada would work, too, he adds, “anywhere there’s jagged coastlines with islands and inlets.” Analogues can collapse some of the psychic distance between Earth and space without making the latter seem any less fascinating.

article-image

Still, analogues aren’t always apt. “Many decades ago, we weren’t sure what the surface of Venus was like,” Nichols says. Through telescopes, the planet seemed completely shrouded in clouds, and since researchers didn’t know what was happening beneath them, some speculated that the landscape was steamy—maybe speckled with water or tangles of jungle. The first half of the 20th century gave rise to a smattering of sci-fi novels and comics that pictured Venus thick with carnivorous plants and crawling with swamp-loving lizards. “Turns out it was 100-percent incorrect,” Nichols says. “We learn more, we go, ‘Oh wait, that whole 870-degree surface temperature, that might not be so good for life there.’”

No harm done. The real trouble with analogues comes, Stuart says, when they overstate the case and then gain traction. Then, they run the risk of oversaturating people’s curiosity to the extent that, when a really striking comparison does arise, listeners are unimpressed. He thinks this is especially dangerous with exoplanets—those distant orbs that we haven’t yet seen up close. “There have been loads of headlines over the last few years about astronomers finding Earth-like planets in other solar systems,” Stuart says. The phrasing drums up enthusiasm and establishes the stakes; Stuart says press releases and articles about research sometimes “torque it up” to make the findings newsworthy and relevant to readers.

“The trouble is, we don’t know how Earth-like [those planets] are,” he adds. Researchers know that some planets are comparable in size to our own, and that they may have similar temperatures, such that if water was present there, it would likely be liquid. But that’s a big “if,” he adds, and the distinction is crucial. “The danger is, if we keep doing this ‘Earth-like planet’ thing, and we get to the place where we do find an Earth-like planet with liquid water and an atmosphere with oxygen, people aren’t necessarily going to care as much as they should,” he says. “They’ll be bored of it, I think.”

For some researchers and astronauts, analogues go far beyond language. A handful of research stations on our planet recreate the conditions of various environments in space. For the past few years, Earth-locked crews have set up dome camps on top of Mauna Loa, a volcano on the island of Hawaii whose ruddy soil looks something like the rugged terrain of Mars. In a program organized by the University of Hawaii and backed by NASA, the team strove to live like human Martians. They ate middling food, they slept and relieved themselves in cramped quarters, they were isolated from friends and family. Here, Earth was a dress rehearsal.

Last winter, one of the practice runs went wrong. After a medical emergency, the whole thing was suspended, pending investigation. “We’ve learned all the ways that you can kill yourself on Mars, and we’ve learned to prevent those things,” Bill Wiecking, one of the project’s support leads, told Marina Koren at The Atlantic. “So it’s been very, very valuable, because it’s way better to do it here, where you can drive up and go, oh gosh, a water valve opened up and now you don’t have any water. Instead of on Mars, where it’s like, you don’t have any water, you guys are gonna die in a couple of days.” Instead of highlighting the similarities between our worlds, the analogous experiment emphasized how much we still don’t know about how to function elsewhere.

article-image


Even as analogues give us a way to make sense of space, they also shed light on Earth. When we tell ourselves a story about the cosmos, we’re revealing something about what’s preoccupying our own planet at the time. That was especially obvious in the 19th century, when Percival Lowell and other astronomers, no doubt steeped in the “canal mania” that was churning around the Erie and Suez channels, suggested that Mars was shot through with artificial waterways carved out by intelligent life. “Given these developments, it’s perhaps not surprising that Lowell and many of his contemporaries were quite open to the idea…that canals might exist on the most Earth-like planet in the solar system,” writes Klaus Brasch, a professor emeritus of biology at California State University, in Sky & Telescope magazine. The view through the telescope reflected something about life here on the ground, because we couldn’t blink it away.

Curiosity aside, most of us don’t need to know exactly what Pluto, Mars, or the Moon are like—we don’t need to practice skills to survive on the ground there, because we’ll probably never need to. If our jobs or lives don’t depend on understanding the features of a far-off world, the equivalences between Earth and a distant planet may seem like nothing but nuggets of trivia. They’re more than that, though: Thinking about another world helps us find hidden reserves of wonder in our own. Analogues remind us that space “is a weird place,” Stuart says. But “it’s not that weird, because it’s also eerily familiar.”

Mary Roach, the science writer and author of Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, was animated when she told me about reporting on Devon Island, another physical analogue that scientists use to simulate off-world missions. She was bouncing along the Canadian island’s rugged, remote terrain on an ATV, tagging along as crews rehearsed for a two-vehicle expedition. The environs were mesmerizing—vast and monochromatic, flecked with a few tiny flowers and a single bumblebee. “I was like ‘Yeehaw!’” Roach says. “It was fun to be tooling around on an ATV in this landscape, and going around thinking ‘I could be on the moon.’ It was kind of exhilarating and fun and starkly beautiful.” Simultaneously familiar and appealingly, wondrously, comfortably strange.

The Crab Migration That the Colombian Army is Dispatched to Protect

0
0

The crustaceans, native to Providencia, have seen declining numbers.

article-image

The minuscule Caribbean island of Providencia, which is part of Colombia, is almost untouched by development, rarely visited by tourists, and inhabited by around 6,000 people. But once a year, the Colombian military descends upon the luminous island, with its crystalline water and swaying palm trees. The military’s task is to protect an army of black crabs—a species endemic to the island—during their brief migration period.

This particular species, known as Gercarcinus ruricola, typically lives on land. But they head to the sea annually for breeding purposes. The crabs, which have a black shell with red legs and yellow markings, lay their eggs near the sea, incubate them for around two weeks, and then enter the ocean for the larvae to hatch. Once they’ve hatched, the larvae develop in the sea for almost three weeks, and those that survive make their way back to shore to live inland in the dry forests, beneath logs and rocks, or underground.

The crabs’ migration has recently become a well-known phenomenon within Colombia, although they have been around since before islanders even settled in Providencia. But the crabs represent more than just a photo opportunity. For hundreds of years, black land crab has been a traditional delicacy for the islanders. “The black crab means a lot for our people,” explains Winston Arenas Jay, a 38-year-old tour guide who grew up in Providencia. “They are part of who we are, part of our identity, part of our tradition, our culture.”

article-image

He says that every child growing up on the island remembers a first encounter with the crabs. “If your parents want you to do something and you don’t, they’ll say ‘the crabs will get you’, and then you’ll obey [them] immediately,” he says. “But pretty soon you understand they’re not aggressive and you start to admire them.” Jay recalls learning how to catch the crabs as a child with his hands without getting hurt, and having to remove them from his home by the bucketful. “There are just millions and millions of newborn crabs everywhere,” he adds. “They can be as small as a mosquito.”

People trap the crustaceans at night, and by hand, when they come out in search of food (usually fruits, mushrooms and other organic matter from the forests). Hunters go into the forests with lanterns, catch the crabs alive, then keep them in boxes with high sides to stop them making a getaway.

The crabs are killed the next day, mostly by women working with small knives and handmade tools in their homes. The crustaceans are boiled, and both their shells and meat are removed. They’re then sold or kept for future meals. “We call this ‘picking’—when you separate the useful part of the crab from the unuseful part, which is a very difficult job,” Jay says. “It’s a very popular food on the island, we love to eat black crab.” Traditionally, the crabs are boiled or stewed. They’re served either with rice in a local dish called rondón, in empanadas, or in a popular soup that’s cooked with herbs, coconut milk, garlic, yams and dumplings.

article-image

Hunting crabs used to be a largely sustainable practice, due to the small numbers of residents living in Providencia. However, in recent years, tourism has increased exponentially. In 2008, the number of tourists, both domestic and international, to the Archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina—a third, unpopulated island—rose to 340,333 people. In 2017, the number of visitors numbered 960,846.

These days, the majority of crabs caught in Providencia are destined for neighboring San Andrés. “It is a very overpopulated place,” Jay notes. “The places selling black crab in San Andrés offer higher and higher prices, making it very attractive for crab hunters here to send their produce over there, and try to catch more and more.” To satisfy the increased demand for the crab meat, locals have intensified crab fishing. This, coupled with an increase in road traffic—which often unfortunately results in crabs being run over—and an increase in dry forests being replaced with agricultural land, has led to a decline in the crab population.

Although there are no statistics on the number of crabs on the island, many local fishermen say they now struggle to catch the same number of crabs they used to. “Crab fishing is part of our life,” says 52-year-old Juan Restrepo, who is currently out of work now that the seasonal ban—implemented to manage the crabs’ decline—is in place. (Catching, consuming, and selling black crabs is banned from 1 April to 31 July). “But more people have moved here to experience our way of life, and more people are fishing, and so there are not as many crabs as before.”

article-image

In recent years, the decline in the crab’s population has become a great threat. Over the past 10 years, the Colombian government has shipped the army to Providencia guard the crabs, during the time of year when they migrate in tens of thousands.

Military checkpoints are set up across the island and officers from the “crab watch division” are dispatched, equipped with automatic rifles, to guard sections of the road that have been closed to traffic. The only way to get through is by foot, meaning locals often have to travel around the full stretch of the island if they wish to get to the other side of the closed road. “I feel I am doing an important job,” says David Castillo, a 22-year-old from Bogotá who has been posted to Providencia by the army. “Some people think it is strange, that the army comes here. But it is a nice job to do.” He says that some people don’t understand why they’re there, and some fishermen are salty about the fact that they can neither kill nor sell crabs for a long stretch of time.

During the four month ban period, locals adopt a practice they’ve dubbed “crab swerving.” It’s a necessary skill in ensuring the precious crabs don’t end up as roadkill. Since most of the transport on the island is by moped, the skill involves a last-minute swerve left or right to avoid a crustacean scuttling across the road.

article-image

The thousands of pregnant crabs sidestepping their way to the ocean is a spectacle to behold. The exact date of their migration varies by year, although it’s always between April and July. But even once the mothers have made their way down to the sea, the army’s job is far from over. At that point, they’re tasked with protecting the baby crabs returning from the sea and scurrying their way inland, where they will then develop into adults.

These protective measures are reinforced by a local stature known as the The Coralina Resolution, which recognizes the threats to crab populations from habitat destruction due to construction activities, roadkill during the migration period, and overexploitation. It also notes the ecological importance of the black land crab, including its role in nutrient cycling in the soil, and its importance as food and source of income.

“It is good to have more tourists to San Andrés [a neighboring island where much of the crab meat is sold], because then we have more people to sell to, but it is worrying,” adds Restrepo.“I do not know what it will be like in 20 years’ time—whether there will be any crab left to fish. I do not think my son will be able to be a crab fisher like me.”

article-image

Maria Alexandra, a spokeswoman for the Environment Ministry, stresses that the black crab’s existence is in peril. “It is very important it survives because there are businesses on the island that earn money solely from the crab,” she says. “Not only that, but it’s an identity symbol of the native community.” Alexandra adds the government has no specific program in place to protect the crabs other than dispatching the army. But it’s provided support to the mayor and local government nonetheless. “The most important thing is that the Providencia Community educates and raises awareness about the crabs and safeguarding the species, she adds.”

Some Providencia locals, such as Jay, feels even the help of the army is not enough. “We must protect the crabs and not use our cars at all during migration season—some years no newborn crabs survive at all,” he says. “Everyone on the island has a motorcycle or a scooter, and if these are used instead of cars a lot of crabs would be saved—many are still killed on the roads.” He also wants to see the local government create a law to prohibit crabs being removed from the island and sold to San Andrés. “This would preserve the future of this species and guarantee that our children and grandchildren can enjoy this important part of our culture, tradition and gastronomy,” he says.

How Vegetarian Food Fueled the British Suffragette Movement

0
0

Some even started a cafe.

article-image

In 1918, certain British women— those who were aged 30 or older, owned property, and university graduates—won the right to vote and stand for Parliament. It was a victory, of sorts. Yet British suffragettes, some of whom had been imprisoned, force-fed, or fined while forcibly agitating for rights, weren't satisfied. They wanted equal voting rights for all, not just the older and wealthy. (Women of color were largely overlooked during the British women's suffrage movement). So they started campaigning once more. This time, their headquarters was centered at a club with a vegetarian café, which was owned and run by suffragettes.

article-image

The Minerva Café, which opened in 1916, was part of a larger facility of meeting rooms and lodging, all under the banner of the Women's Freedom League. A surprising number of British suffragettes were vegetarians, and had been even before campaigning for the vote, writes historian Leah Leneman. While fighting for the right to vote, many passionately argued against vivisection, wearing fur coats and stuffed-bird hats, and eating meat.

At the time, home cooking was considered to be almost exclusively a feminine task. So some suffragettes thought that cooking the likes of beans and grains, instead of meat, would make it less time-consuming. Others empathized with the subservient roles of animals in human society. One suffragette speaker, quoted by Leneman, argued that feminism and vegetarianism were entwined: so much so, that if a woman was unable to help the movement outside the home, even cooking vegetarian food for her family was a step towards empowerment: "Vegetarianism aims so directly, as we women aim, at the abolition of the unregenerate doctrine of physical force," she said.

article-image

Many members of the Women's Freedom League had formerly belonged to the Women’s Social and Political Union, but left due to disagreements with leadership and violent tactics, such as arson. It went on to become one of the largest British suffragette organizations, gaining a membership of 4,000 soon after its founding in 1907. While the WFL wasn’t violent, it was militant: Led by vegetarian Charlotte Despard, members refused to pay taxes, citing lack of representation. In one particularly dramatic demonstration in 1908, WFL members chained themselves to a grille in the House of Commons (the entire grille had to be removed to take the women out of the House.)

Vegetarianism was a part of British suffragism from the very beginning. To celebrate when women first got the vote in 1918, the Women's Freedom League held a pescatarian dinner. The French-inflected menu included a shredded vegetable soup (consomme julienne), turbot with new potatoes, and, as a pièce de résistance, lentil cutlets with tomato sauce. "With unflagging zeal we press on towards greater freedom," the menu read.

article-image

The Minerva Club became a hotbed for progressive and radical politics. Anarchists, Communists, and campaigners for the vote for Indian women alike used the facilities. And many people ate at the Café, which was generally considered a delightful place to have lunch. There, dishes were vegetarian and cooked without animal fat, and even the china was political. The cups and plates were emblazoned with either the WFL shield, reading “Votes for Women,” or a warlike bust of Minerva. Shining in gold, green, and white, the plates sometimes displayed the WFL's motto, too: "Dare to be Free."

article-image

The Club, open to both men and women, served vegetarian fare for years. But by the late 1930's, the facilities and the food were no longer quite up to snuff due to financing issues (even though famed author E.M. Forster continued eating there.) The Club formally vacated their Holborn, London premises in 1959. Soon after, the site housed a Brutalist concrete building. But these days, a plaque dedicated to the Women's Freedom League is set into the side, commemorating the suffragettes and vegetarians who once campaigned there.

Tell Us Everything About Your Favorite Local Ice Cream Shop

0
0

Pretty please, with a cherry on top.

article-image

Here in New York, it's too hot not to be eating ice cream. Whether you go in for the traditional variety, you're more of a gelato fan, or you prefer a non-dairy alternative like sorbet (raises hand), you probably have a favorite place to pick some up. And with National Ice Cream Day just around the corner on July 15, it's as good a time as any to talk about ice cream parlors.

While there's nothing wrong with a Baskin-Robbins, it's the independent ice cream shops of the world that really make the ritual of indulging in a cold sweet on a hot day something to remember. In every country on the planet there are small shops and stands that are putting their own unique spin on everyone's favorite summertime staple. Near the Atlas Obscura offices here in Brooklyn, we rely on Davey’s Ice Cream and its locally made flavors. In Bay Harbor, Maine, Ben and Bill’s Chocolate Emporium serves ice cream infused with real bits of lobster. And in Savannah, Georgia, Leopold's has been dishing out perfect scoops for just shy of 100 years. Whatever it is that makes it special, we want to hear about the independent ice cream parlor that consistently calls to you on those sweaty summer days.

Fill out the form below to tell us about your favorite independent ice cream shop, and we’ll share a selection of your responses in an upcoming article. We’d also love to see pictures of the shop, or its best flavors—email those, with the subject line "Independent Ice Cream," to eric@atlasobscura.com.

I'll just be over here, finishing this tub of strawberry sorbet. Or as I like to call it this time of year, "dinner."

The American History of Protestors Climbing Monuments

0
0

When politicians go low, activists go high.

article-image

On the afternoon of Independence Day, Therese Okoumou started climbing up the base of the Statue of Liberty and perched by Lady Liberty’s green feet. From a short distance away, on the Staten Island ferry, she looked like a person-sized speck at the bottom of the massive statue. The island was evacuated, and for hours, she refused to come down, until police scaled the monument and removed her.

Okoumou had earlier taken part in a protest organized by the group Rise and Resist against the Trump administration’s immigration policies, and while on the statue, she mentioned the children who have been separated from their families in Texas. Her climb appears to have been a continuation of her protest against these policies, separate from what Rise and Resist had planned.

Climbing national monuments is a civil crime: Okoumou will be charged with trespassing and obstruction of government administration in federal court. It’s become a tactic of civil disobedience, used by activists to draw attention to their causes in dramatic fashion. Here’s a short history of American activists climbing monuments for a cause.

Statue of Liberty

Okoumou is not the first protestor to scale Lady Liberty: On May 10, 1980, two others, Edwin Drummond and Steven Rutherford, chose the same tactic. They aimed to speak out against the imprisonment of Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt, a member of the Black Panther Party who had been charged with murder. Many, including Drummond and Rutherford, believed Pratt had been framed due to his political views.

Drummond was a seasoned protest climber: He had already ascended Nelson’s Column in London to challenge apartheid, and San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, also in support of Pratt. Rutherford was a little less experienced: Most of his brushes with height came from his day job as a house painter. According to the New York Daily News, the two took a tour ship to Liberty Island and an elevator to the statue’s base. They then attached “special mountain-climbing suction cups” to their boots and headed upwards.

The climbers clambered over Lady Liberty’s feet and the bottom of her vestments. By the early afternoon, they had reached the statue’s posterior, where they put up a banner that read “LIBERTY WAS FRAMED. FREE GERONIMO PRATT.” The two stayed on the statue overnight, sleeping in “a fold of the statue’s toga,” the New York Times reported. They were originally charged with criminal trespass and property damage, but the charge was downgraded to a misdemeanor. In 1997, Pratt’s conviction was vacated, and he was freed.

article-image

Mount Rushmore

In August 1970, 23 activists with the group United Native Americans climbed to the top of Mount Rushmore, unfurled a sign that read “Sioux Indian Power,” and set up camp. They were protesting the U.S. government’s failure to uphold an 1868 treaty. As more protestors flocked to the site, it was occupied for months, until the cold weather of November forced them to leave. The next year, 40 activists with the American Indian Movement climbed the monument again; this time they were removed after 12 hours, with 20 of them arrested.

Mount Rushmore has remained an icon for protestors: In 2009, 11 members of Greenpeace made it up the monument and hung a banner by Abraham Lincoln’s face urging leaders to act to stop climate change.

article-image

Gateway Arch

When St. Louis's Gateway Arch was first built, the company in charge of its construction didn't hire any African-American workers or contractors. So in July 1964, two activists, a black aerospace manufacturer named Percy Green and a white college student named Richard Daly, snuck into the construction site and climbed an emergency ladder that led up the north leg of the Arch.

At that point, the giant parabola was about halfway completed, and each side jutted 300 feet into the air. From their perch, Green and Daly "used binoculars to exchange stares with police officers on the ground 100 feet below," the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote. At the base, 15 picketers marched with signs demanding skilled jobs for black workers. Above them, the construction workers continued to build.

Green and Daly descended later that day, around 5:30, and were promptly arrested. Green was later fired from his aerospace manufacturing job and sued the company for racial discrimination, a case that eventually made its way to the Supreme Court (he won). As of 2011, there was a photograph of Green hanging in a historical exhibit inside the arch.

article-image

Lincoln Memorial

In 2007, two members of the U.K. organization "Fathers 4 Justice" climbed up the Lincoln Memorial, stood on Abe's knees, and held a banner that read "For the Fathers Of the Nation." One of them was dressed as Captain America, the other as Batman. They were arrested by a SWAT team.

Washington Monument

One iconic American monument has so far eluded protest climbs, or climbs of any sort: the Washington Monument. In 1912, the famous stuntman Rodman Law, otherwise known as the "Human Fly," promised to scale the obelisk. As Law had recently parachuted off the Statue of Liberty, many took him at his word. The New York Times reported that "5,000 normal citizens of Washington went clamoring down to the Washington Monument" and that "every roof that commenced a view… was jammed."

The spectators were thrilled to spot a dark shape that appeared to be slowly advancing up the tower. But eventually—after Congressmen and police had sped over to the tower—the dark shape was identified: It was a water stain. Some climbs are just too good to be true.


Why the U.S. Navy Once Had a Concrete Ice Cream Barge

0
0

The portable parlor sustained sailors on the high seas.

article-image

The United States’ Prohibition years, which lasted from 1920 to 1933, didn’t just give the bootleg liquor and pharmaceutical industries a boost. They also transformed ice cream from a sweet treat into a bonafide craze, since people began to socialize at soda fountains instead of bars. Yet Prohibition may have turned the U. S. Navy into ice cream’s biggest fans—to the point where they once bought an enormous, million-dollar floating ice cream parlor made solely to accommodate demand.

During Prohibition, breweries including Pennsylvania’s Yuengling and Michigan’s Stroh’s turned to making ice cream instead of beer to stay in business. It worked: From 1916 to 1925, ice cream consumption skyrocketed by 55 percent in the United States, according to Mental Floss. The fervor for frozen treats is said to have spawned a well-known ice cream flavor when the stock market crashed at the end of the decade, too. The story goes that William Dreyer and Joseph Edy, the storied ice cream and candy maker, respectively, created the mashup of marshmallows and chocolate ice cream known as Rocky Road, with the name as a metaphor for the tough times.

But Navy sailors had felt the sting of forced teetotaling years before Prohibition became official: Alcohol was banned on ships as of July 1, 1914. Ice cream, which was becoming more widespread thanks to advancements in freezing refrigeration technology, became a way to take the edge off. To get a sense of how deep the craze went, consider that in 1942, right before the crew of the USS Lexington abandoned ship, they tucked into the ship’s locked freezer, and drained every single ice cream container dry—as the vessel was sinking from torpedoes.

It’s not a coincidence that the government saw ice cream as an edible means for propaganda and morale-boosting during the first half of the 20th century. Even amidst rationing during the Second World War, people could still eat ice cream. As Mark Kurlansky notes in his book Milk!, it helped that two huge dairy lobbies convinced the government to include ice cream on a list of crucial foods, in spite of cuts being made to milk, sugar, and other staples. And ice cream was on the Army’s list of items (along with tobacco and chewing gum) that were necessities to help bring cheer during the dark time.

When it wasn’t around, soldiers and sailors could, and often did, make ice cream themselves with whatever they had around them. This ranged from mixing snow and melted chocolate to, as some U.S. fliers did while stationed in Britain in 1943, attaching a tub of prepared ice cream mixture to a rear gunner’s compartment, and letting the high altitudes take it from there. During the war, the Quartermaster Corps, the branch of the Army responsible for supplying food, clothing, and other necessities, also provided the ingredients so that soldiers could make 80 million gallons yearly. Later, they set up small ice cream factories so that soldiers on the front lines (and people in foxholes, too) could have a taste.

In 1945, the armed forces’ love for ice cream went a step further when they got a monument to their favorite sweet treat: a barge that they borrowed from the Army Transportation Corps, which they then refurbished into a portable ice-cream factory and parlor. The Navy spent $1 million on the vessel, so that it could dole out the dessert to other smaller barges, known as ice cream ships, throughout Western Pacific outposts.

The ships were fully decked out with storage rooms and plants, all in the service of ice cream. “And it’s worth every penny of that to lonely American boys who are fed up with alphabet rations, however nutritious,” boasted an ad. The Navy was especially proud of the fact that the barge could hold a whopping 2,000 gallons of ice cream at once. It worked quickly, too, with the ability to churn out roughly 10 gallons every 7 minutes.

For all of its amenities, though, it wasn’t the most practical thing: The ship couldn’t move, as it had no engine, and had to be pulled by the likes of tugs to make its way through water.

It’s unclear what happened to the barge (though it’s possible that it lies somewhere in a bay, as a number of other concrete ships from the era do now). Still, it lives on as a relic from when ice cream combatted homesickness and a lack of booze alike on the high seas.

Why a Volcano Is Crucial to This Azorean Chef's Homestyle Stew

0
0

While male chefs make cozido gourmet, Teresa Casada sticks to tradition.

article-image

When Teresa Casada was growing up on São Miguel, an island in the Azorean archipelago midway between America and Portugal, she'd visit friends on weekends in the misty, hot-spring-fed parish of Furnas and be amazed. Families there would tuck a pot of meat and vegetables in a hole in the ground. Six hours later, without them doing anything more, the food would come out cooked in a flavorful stew with a sulfuric tang. This was cozido das Furnas, a twist on traditional Portuguese cozido stew that’s cooked by Furnas’s natural volcanic heat.

The nine mountainous islands of the Azores, which are lush with grass, palms, pines, and wildflowers, are newborns by land-mass standards. They’re located on a ridge where the North American, African, and Eurasian tectonic plates collide; volcanoes formed some of their islands as little as 300,000 years ago. (In contrast, Pangea started breaking up into the current continents some 200 million years ago.) The Azores still hiss with geothermal activity, especially around Furnas, where a volcanic crater formed an impressive caldeira lake.

Azoreans take advantage of their hot springs for soaking, and they use their fumaroles—hissing natural steam vents where volcanic gas billows from underground—for cooking. This steaming-by-volcano method is rare. Cooking over lava goes on in Hawaii, a restaurant on the Spanish island of Lanzarote built a volcano-heated grill, and in Iceland, bakers deposit boxes of dough to create a dense bread. But burying pots of stew in pits like this is unique to the Azores.

article-image

In mainland Portugal, the tradition of villages making cozido dates back hundreds of years, and the history of cozido das Furnas is said to go nearly as long. (Archaeologists have found hints of a human presence in the Azores thousands of years ago, but the Portuguese found the islands uninhabited around 1427.) Families long enjoyed the local cozido—which usually included pigs' ears, pork belly, chicken, taro root, carrots, cabbage, and garlic, along with a blood sausage called morcela—as a festive weekend dish.

Since 2007, Teresa Casada has been chef and owner of a cozy snack bar-restaurant called Vale das Furnas. She keeps those celebratory old traditions in mind as she makes her stew. At her restaurant, she wears a tidy plaid vest of the same bright blue seen on Portuguese azulejos, the traditional glazed tile signs found on streets and buildings all over the Azores.

"[Azoreans] prepared cozido not only because it was cheap, but because it was special cooking and tasted different for when the family got together," she tells me through a translator, sitting down at my table after dinner service one spring night at the restaurant. "They used what they wanted in the pot—potatoes, carrots, their own pigs from the backyard."

article-image

These days, Casada explains, up to 60 restaurants (and a handful of home cooks) place pots of cozido in the ground along Furnas’ caldeira lake between 4 and 6 a.m. every morning, as mist rises from around the shore. Each restaurant claims its own regular cooking hole among the moonscape of pits, Vale das Furnas among them.

The night before, Casada rubs the meat with garlic, salt, and pimenta da terra, a popular regional red chili known as “pepper of the earth.” She layers root vegetables at the bottom of the pot, meat next, and green cabbage on top. Not a drop of liquid is added—the steam will bring out the inner juices of the ingredients, creating a natural sauce. Her husband, Juan Antonio, places the pot one meter into the earth and goes on with his day. Casada will hit the restaurant kitchen several hours later.

Having cooked for 28 years now, Casada describes herself as “old-school.” She came to Furnas as a teenager, in part because she needed the work, as she says her family was poor. Most of the cooking in Furnas is done by women, but since approximately 1989—when tourism began picking up on the islands, and cozido first started appearing on local restaurant menus—she's seen male chefs trained on the European continent experiment more with the stew. They present it gourmet-style, in grand platings, at some of the village’s upscale hotels. They tie bundles in muslin to cook, and describe it as having been prepared sous vide.

article-image

Casada keeps it homestyle. She worked at Vale das Furnas as a cook for years, then had the chance to co-own the place when the previous owner sold it. She and her sister Ana Oliveira, co-owner of another local restaurant, are now proud to be the only female cooks in town making traditional cozido for the public. She says she’s not intimidated by the often culinary-schooled male chefs. “Of course with the new chefs and with new techniques they have learned to make their dishes very tasty,” she says. “But I have the school of life with 28 years of cooking.”

Over the years, Casada has added beef brisket, yam, and kale to her dishes. The ingredients were less common when she started out, but are considered part of the tradition now. She uses a basic 40-liter aluminum pot, which she believes distributes the heat more evenly than stainless steel, and covers it with cloth.

Her timing is relaxed. If it cooks six hours, that’s enough; if it extends to eight, she says, that doesn’t hurt the stew, either. Her presentation is simple: She piles the results all together on a metal plate, on a table set with lime-green paper napkins flaring from wine glasses. The Azores are becoming known for their tropical, mineral-rich volcanic wines, grown on vines surrounded by black basalt rock rather than earth. But tonight I choose Kima, a tart local soda made from maracujá, or passionfruit.

article-image

I pull a mess of tender sausage, beef, and veggies off the platter. On top I pile a fatty, soft pig ear, which makes pork belly seem as light and healthy as tofu, and the decadent, no-limits sense of feasting immediately sets in. The blood sausage is relatively sweet—Azoreans are particular about adding cinnamon to it. There’s a definite earthiness to the stew, and I swear I can taste the ineffable bite of sulfur.

Later, I ask Casada if she would ever change anything else about the cooking technique, ingredients, or any other aspects of the cozido. The three ingredients she’d conceded to add over the years seem to have stretched tradition enough—her eyes widen at the thought of doing anything differently with this special volcanic cooking. "Place to place, people have their own traditional things to do," she says. "This is ours."

The Mystery Man Who Spent 20 Years Photographing North American Buildings

0
0

His name was Barry Gfeller, and he left behind an astonishing 50,000 previously unseen images.

In May of 1982, Barry Gfeller left his home in Camus, Washington, got into his car, and began to drive.

His plan was similar to eight previous road trips he’d already taken, and 14 more he would embark on in the years to come: to photograph the streets and buildings of towns across the United States and Canada. For nearly two decades, Gfeller would periodically hit the road to continue what became a mammoth photographic survey. In May 1982 alone, he photographed over 200 towns, traveling as far north as Edmonton and as far east as Milwaukee. When Gfeller died in 1999, his collection—which he arranged alphabetically, stored in long wooden boxes—consisted of 50,000 prints and negatives.

“Ultimately, Gfeller drove over 100,000 miles across 44 states and six Canadian provinces between 1977 and 1996," says Mike O’Neill, a political strategist who first learned about Gfeller in 2016. After Gfeller died, the collection made its way from his estate to a Canadian charity. Sixteen years later, the charity asked O’Neill to help find a buyer who could donate the work to a museum. They didn’t have to look far. Fascinated, O’Neill purchased the collection himself in 2017. He's now begun to digitize the prints, and is searching for a long-term home for Gfeller’s archive.

article-image

In contrast to the volume of material he left behind, details about Gfeller himself are sparse. He was born in 1933, and lived his entire life in Camus, a town outside of Portland, Washington. “He was a smart, shy young man who dropped out of college because he did not want to be around strangers and crowds,” says O’Neill. (What we do know about Gfeller is largely from a short biography by the photo historian Ken Appollo, written after Gfeller died). Gfeller worked in the local paper mill. As a child, he collected labels and packaging, and as an adult, he collected magazines and paperbacks. He was in his 40s when he began his photographic expeditions. “After a couple of weekend outings to nearby communities, he launched himself into two decades of epic, obsessive photography road trips, singularly focused on shooting buildings to the exclusion of all other subject matter,” says O’Neill.

The website that O'Neill built for Gfeller’s work includes interactive maps of each road trip, demonstrating the full scale and ambition of Gfeller's journeys. “Gfeller photographed cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and tiny hamlets in rural Montana and South Dakota with seven residents,” says O’Neill. “He returned most often to photograph San Francisco, and visited far-flung New York State and Banff, Alberta, several times."

Taken together, the images are a snapshot of late 20th-century North America. "We see storefronts, signs for family businesses, gas stations and garages, churches and civic buildings... and then boarded-up storefronts during two recessions, single weathered houses, and occasional silos and industrial buildings," says O'Neill. The focus is almost exclusively architectural—"rarely a person, and not a single animal."

article-image

If the details about Gfeller’s life are scant, we know even less about his motivation to photograph buildings and streets across North America. “The why of Gfeller’s work will always be a mystery,” says O’Neill. “His parents and siblings are gone. He may never have talked to any surviving person about the photographs.”

But photographs can be revealing about the person behind the lens—what they chose to focus on, and what they chose to omit. “He was clearly fascinated with buildings and signs. This singular focus emerges as you study the collection. His travels took him to the Grand Canyon, the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, the Great Lakes, the Rocky Mountains, and across the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, but he did not take a single image of any of those wonders,” says O’Neill. “Gfeller’s style does not change over the 20-year course of the project. He documents communities without commentary. Many of the photographs seem not to be composed at all, so we see the adjacent buildings at the edges."

article-image

Another factor is the sheer scale of his trips. Gfeller shot an average of five rolls of film a day, which must have required some speedy shutter work. O’Neill surmises that Gfeller jotted down each location as he went. “After the images were printed, he wrote on the back of each the name of the town, the state, the month, and the year. He sometimes made a note of the name of the building.” He was also particular about when he photographed. “Gfeller avoided people. There are clues that he shot mainly in the early morning and evening—empty streets, long shadows, and the occasional glimpse of a clock or a thermometer,” says O’Neill. “One person who reviewed the collection thought that some of the images were shot seated from inside a car. I discovered one image with the reflection of the vehicle registration sticker in the windshield. Sometimes he stood in one place and turned to take successive images, sometimes he moved along a street and shot each building in succession, straight-on.”

We may never know Gfeller’s motivation, but he left behind something remarkable: a vast record of the streetscapes of the U.S. and Canada in the late 20th century. “Gfeller’s obituary stated, ‘He liked to take photographs of old buildings,’” says O’Neill. “A monumental understatement.”

Atlas Obscura has a selection of Gfeller's work; more can be viewed on the Gfeller Collection website.

article-image
article-image
article-image
article-image
article-image
article-image
article-image
article-image
article-image
article-image

Why Are There Palm Trees in Los Angeles?

0
0

Turns out it's an image thing.

Let’s go back in time, to Los Angeles in 1875. Here’s what you see: basically nothing. The town—and “town” is even sort of grand for what it was—has about 8,000 people in it. But here’s something weirder: there are no palm trees. As a matter of fact, there aren’t really any trees at all. This area is just sort of a scrubland desert.

Over the next 50 years, palm trees would become a major transformative force in the development of Los Angeles. This is despite the fact that they don’t really do anything. The trees of urban Los Angeles do not provide shade or fruit or wood. They are lousy at preventing erosion. What they do, and what they did, is stranger: they became symbols.

article-image

There is a single species of palm native to the entire state of California, the California fan palm, which is a big one with what looks like a fuzzy beard of brown leaves underneath its green fronds. It’s naturally found around desert oases in the Colorado Desert. (The Colorado Desert is not in Colorado, but is named for the river. Joshua Tree National Park is there.) The native people of that area, the Cahuilla, used it pretty liberally; palm fronds are incredibly strong and heavy, which makes them good for building. But compared with the East Coast palms—there are 12 species native to Florida—the West Coast was, until very recently, basically barren of these trees. Plants. Tall grass things. Wait, what are palms, exactly?

One first weird thing in a very long list of weird things about palms is that they are not really trees. The word “tree” is not a horticultural term—it’s sort of like “vegetable,” in that you can kind of call anything a vegetable—but palms are not at all like the other plants commonly referred to as trees. They don’t have wood, for one thing; the interior of a palm is made up of basically thousands of fibrous straws, which gives them the tensile strength to bend with hard tropical windstorms without snapping. They are monocots, which is a category of plant in which the seed contains only one embryonic leaf; as monocots, they have more in common with grasses like corn and bamboo than they do with an oak or pine tree.

Southern California might not have been rich with trees, but it was rich with money and rich with sunshine. Once the railroads came to Los Angeles, in the 1880s, speculators realized this huge empty sunny place would be a great opportunity to sell land. But how to get people to move way out to the desert? One way was incredibly cheap train tickets; the railroads sold tickets from the Midwest for as little as one dollar. But, as with California ever since, the place had to be marketed.

article-image

There are only two palm species native to Europe; one is a little shrub, and the other is restricted to a few Mediterranean islands. Because they were not common, palms have for centuries had a strange pull for people who didn’t grow up around them. “In the Western imagination, palms for a very very long time were associated with that part of the world that, depending on your point of view and your time in history could be called the Orient, or the Far East, or the Middle East, or the Levant, or the Holy Land, or the Ottoman world, or the Turkish world,” says Jared Farmer, the author of the definitive book on California foliage, Trees in Paradise.

Palms grow freely in the Middle East, and this part of the world always had major religious associations for Westerners, most of whom, for a long time, followed Christianity, Judaism, or Islam—all of which have their holiest sites there. Palms themselves are used in those religions: Jews use them during Sukkot for waving rituals, Christians during Palm Sunday often folded into crosses. The Prophet Mohammed talks about date palms a lot, even if the plant doesn’t have as prominent a role in the rituals of Islam.

The original reason that palms were planted in the New World was for use during Palm Sunday; Catholic missionaries in Florida and California, finding themselves in a place with a hospitable climate for palms, planted them around their missions. But the missionaries are not responsible for the mass of palms in Los Angeles.

article-image

Up until the mid- to late-19th century, the French Riviera was sparsely populated. But popular writers began traveling there, and found it was pretty nice. That, coupled with a trendy new health fad in which time in a dry warm climate is supposed to have good effects on the body, increased its popularity. Immediately developers moved there and began building it up. Palms, already a symbol of warmth from the Middle East, were ideal for this kind of rapid development.

Remember how palms aren’t like other trees? One way is that they’re outrageously easy to move around: they don’t have elaborate root systems like oak trees, but instead a dense yet small root ball. This can be pretty easily dug up and transported, then planted, and palms are not particular about where they are, as long as they have sun and water. To make things easier for developers, palms, being more like grasses than trees, don’t demonstrate all that much difference between individuals; one Mexican fan palm is pretty much like the next. And if you’re a developer, consistency and ease of transportation is a fantastic combination: you can line the streets with them, or plant one on each side of an entrance! And it’s cheap and easy and looks festive. Plus, it has this preexisting association in the minds of your customers (who, in the case of the early French Riviera, were mostly British) with warmth and exoticism.

Palms, though they weren’t native to the Riviera, became indelibly associated with it. And the American developers eyeing Southern California got some ideas. Hey, they thought. This big chunk of desert-y scrubland we own is not that dissimilar from the Mediterranean sites of the Riviera. What if we took a page from their book, and started branding Los Angeles?

article-image

Los Angeles, for what it’s worth, wasn’t the only place to try copying the French Riviera. The British tried it too, in a place called Torbay, although even in the far south of England it’s just not warm enough for palms to really thrive. They did their best, though, with a palm called the New Zealand cabbage palm, planted all over the area. It’s basically a shrub.

Anyway, palms took off as a symbol of wealth, luxury, nice weather, vacation. The ease of growing them in containers meant that palms were found on luxury ships like the Titanic and Lusitania. Robber barons, fancy hotels, and magnates in San Francisco—a much older city than Los Angeles—planted them in “palm courts,” a sort of atrium/ballroom featuring lots of palms and probably a string quartet.

“What LA adds to that, which no city, no people had ever thought to do before, and maybe for good reason, is to plant palms systematically as street trees,” says Farmer. The young city, wanting to attract people to a world of sunshine and cars, planted tens of thousands of palm trees. And they weren’t just on big boulevards: Los Angeles planted them everywhere. Tiny residential streets, parks, anywhere. Places designed for tourists—boardwalks, beaches, wealthy hills, even sports arenas like Staples Center, where the Lakers and Clippers basketball teams play—were especially tended to. And they made sure the palms were watered.

article-image

Palm trees were the only non-natives that the early planners of Los Angeles planted. They also planted lots of citrus trees, pepper trees, and eucalyptus, all of which were supposed to evoke this Mediterranean feel. But it was the palms that really took off.

This experiment yielded some very strange results. The palms thrived in Los Angeles—Farmer described seeing them growing in cracks in the asphalt in abandoned lots—and one species in particular, the Mexican fan palm, grew enormous. The Mexican fan palm is native to Northern Mexico; it’s that incredibly tall skinny one with the little fronds high up above. “Nobody knew they would grow so tall; they grow taller in LA than they would in the wild. They're the tallest palms in the history of the world, at least that we know of,” says Farmer.

They are, in fact, taller than most buildings in Los Angeles. The city has always been a sprawling, low-slung city, with few buildings over two stories tall. It spread horizontally rather than vertically, partially due to the cheap abundant land and partially because Los Angeles was always an automotive city. Unlike in other cities, the great skyscrapers of Los Angeles are not huge buildings: they’re trees.

article-image

Once the palms were firmly ensconced in Los Angeles, the movie and TV industry popularized them. The palms, despite not being native to LA and in fact only having recently arrived there, became the most iconic image of the city. Every awards show, every red carpet, every movie and show shot in Southern California included palm trees. The city expanded like crazy; the population went from 11,000 in 1880 to over 1.2 million only 50 years later.

Urban trees do actually have jobs, besides just looking nice: they provide shade, reduce heat, clean the air, some prevent erosion, and some produce an edible or useful material. Palms in Los Angeles do not do any of this. Their job was not to be good urban trees; it was to create an image of a new kind of city and convince people from elsewhere to come to Los Angeles. They succeeded at that! But with the first batch of trees now dying out due to old age and an array of pests and diseases, Los Angeles is making some changes. Replacement palms are more likely to be more drought-tolerant and provide more shade, like the Chilean palm. But, says Farmer, Los Angeles is not likely to ever let palms completely vanish.

Send Us the Greatest Note You've Found Written in an Old Book

0
0

Whether it's funny, mysterious, or just plain astute, we want to see it.

article-image

Personally, I'm always excited when I open a used book and find the previous owner's thoughts and underlines. It's like a window into a stranger's literary journey that I'm about to relive with them as I read along. A friend once gave me her personal copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, complete with underlined passages and little thoughts about certain lines that she found especially important. Her notes gave me insight into how she read Whitman's masterwork, and what it meant to her.

Of course, some people think that writing in books is sacrilege—that it amounts to graffiti, or that it makes a book all the more "used." Whichever side of that debate you fall, there's no arguing that marginalia can turn books into singular artifacts. No longer just one copy of many, they become transformed into unique objects that, like any artifact of real value, can be lost or forgotten, only to be rediscovered later by someone else.

We want to see the best note, doodle, or scribble you’ve ever found in a used or borrowed book. Short or long, hilarious or meaningful, fill out the form below to tell us about what made your marginalia discovery unforgettable. We’d also love to see a picture—email those to eric@atlasobscura.com with the subject line "Writing In Books." We can’t wait to see your discoveries, and relive those personal journeys all over again!

Viewing all 11432 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images