It was incredibly interesting! Thank you rmichaelroman!
Repost: “Bombshell”
It was incredibly interesting! Thank you rmichaelroman!
Tag: us history
Visiting Lena: part 4
Lena is the best host ever, and one of the things she planned for two of us was biking at the crack of dawn on Sunday! We had to drive to the bike path, and Lena had to fit two bikes into her car, but the experience was totally worth it! She also researched the path in advance, so that we wouldn’t have to wonder where to go in the places when the path suddenly disappears.
Visiting Lena in Michigan – part 1
As always, we have a packed program, and as always, I feel so loved and taken care of!
Morning in Ann Arbor.
Wait, there are two!!! Three!!!
The Suffs
I saw this show on Wednesday, and it was absolutely perfect! Everything: the play, the music, the lyrics, the characters, the singers, political relevance… They said from the stage that all characters were realy people, and we caoul look them up.
And that’s what I am going to do – there are too many good stories that I want to know about!
Super-interesting Article About Biking In Chicago in the 1890s
Read how Chicago became the manufacturing hub of the nation’s bicycle industry — a city that produced a quarter of all U.S. bikes and claimed more than 200,000 riders at the height of the boom. It was also a place where women defied social expectations on two wheels, and where cycling clubs organized one of the country’s first powerful transportation lobbies.
How Single Women In Chicago Lived in 1900s
One of the recent WBEZ Curious City episodes was about women living independently in Chicago in the early 20th century. I didn’t know the term “women adrift,” and to be honest, I thought that women were not even supposed to live on their own back then, so all of this was incredibly interesting. Sharing here.
Continue reading “How Single Women In Chicago Lived in 1900s”The Atomic Cafe 1982
I finally watched The Atomic Cafe, which was on my watchlist for the past two months recommended by Michael Roman. As usual, when the movie is the one I want to pay close attention to, I watch it one small piece at a time.
To summarize my reaction in one sentence: what a horror story! I had no idea that that’s how the US propaganda worked, and I am not even sure I should use a past tense here. The scariest part for me was not even the actual propaganda films with “no worries, the hair will grow back” and “it’s safe to get out after an explosion,” but the background country songs jokingly mentioning an atomic bomb, punishing Japan and all things related. Gives you a new perspective on the “Oppenheimer” movie and life in general. It’s worth noting that there is no narration and no commentary, just interviews, tv shows, and propaganda movies clips.
Must-see. Open access at the link above. Enjoy….
Ford Piquette Avenue Plant Museum
Here’s more from my visit with Lena. After the Michigan Central tour, we were going to tour the Fisher Building. We still had some time left until that tour, and Lena suggested we go to another museum—Ford Piquette Avenue Plant. The museum looked rather small, so we thought we would check out everything in forty minutes and then go to our Art Deco tour.
However, we spent there two and a half hours, and we easily could have spent more.
Here you can learn more about an amazing story of the first Ford Plant building and how it was saved. We didn’t know any of that when we entered the building. We were told that the tour would start in 20 minutes, and we decided to wait, and meanwhile to walk around.
Michigan Central Restoration
Continuing from here. It is such an amazing, such an unbelievable, and such an American story! Between 1988 and 2018, the building was not only vandalized but also looted. When Ford Motors bought the building and started the restoration, they wanted to have as many pieces of the original station as possible, so they asked everybody who had taken something from the abandoned building to return these pieces, no questions asked. And people started to bring these things back! There is a whole exhibit on the station’s ground floor showing what was returned – it’s amazing! Not just small objects, but the pieces of staircases, parts of light fixtures, and even the big clock!
Michigan Central
This weekend, I am visiting Lena in Ann Arbor. As usual, I took a Wolverine train after work, and as usual, it was delayed, but not very bad – just over 20 minutes.
As usual, Lena planned a weekend full of activities, and today, we went to Detroit. Both attractions we visited were jaw-dropping, so I will try to write down everything I remember before the information spills away from my brain.
First, we went to the Michigan Central. This grand train station was opened in December 1913, marking a new era in the history of Detroit. We know what happened seventy-five years later: the cars and air travel diminished the role of the railroads in the USA, and little by little, the Michigan Central started to deteriorate, along with the whole city of Detroit.
In the days of glory (pictures from here)
There are some photos of the abandoned station from the 2000s (taken from here)
