Cheap and Easy Dreams: Spadrom Estates and Herbert Heftler
Located in Anaheim, California, Spradrom Estates was a $7.5 million development of 486 homes that broke ground in 1956. It’s still there. […]
Category: ApexUSA
ApexUSA is a stab into the darkness, an attempt via ad images to locate the exact point in the 20th century when America reached its cultural peak.
Is a LIFE ad for Pullman coaches really indicative of what was going on in America in 1937? Isn’t that a distorted view? Yes. But a serious, tight-lipped historical account would be equally distorted. Pick your distortion.
This is not a yearning for the past. As time goes by, you gain some things, lose others. There are no answers here. Only evidence.
No Down Payment (1957)
No Down Payment begins peppy and optimistic as the two central characters, a couple, move to Sunrise Hills, a Southern California suburb. […]
Helen Dzo Dzo Kaptur: Pure Palm Springs Attitude
Getting invited by friend Nelda Linsk to her home in 1970 for a casual photo shoot immortalized Helen Dzo Dzo Kaptur.
Haverhill’s and Its Whacked-Out Ads
Haverhill’s: a weird stuff-emporium of the 1960s and 1970s, with goofy ads in big magazines like LIFE. Let’s start with the name, […]
Fake Americana With a Topping of Grit: 4 Aces Movie Ranch, Palmdale
4 Aces, located in Palmdale, California, is every Highway Patrol with Broderick Crawford and B-Minus-film noir from 1949 to 1960 wrapped up […]
Bell Telephone Company Pittsburgh Office Snack Bar, 1960
June, 1960: The world is alive. From Architectural Forum, we hear of a snack bar. The 1,600 employees in the Bell Telephone […]
How Waiting in Line Is the Purest Form of Democracy
Nobody likes waiting in line. You’re waiting in line at the DMV, for concert tickets, movie tickets, at the theme park. In […]
Hong Kong Bank of China as Giant Protest Sign
As some of us sit around in the burgs and hamlets of the United States, knitting our fingers and wondering about the […]
Switchboard Receptionist School: Never Again
File this one in the annals of things that will never again exist: switchboard operator school. This ad from the June 1, […]
Hi, 1587 35th Avenue, San Francisco, Meet the JFK Assassination
The Belasco Theater in New York at 111 West 44th Street was built over a century ago for Broadway theater impresario David Belasco. […]