Invisible Themepark

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.

  • Bell Telephone Company Pittsburgh Office Snack Bar, 1960

    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 Company’s brand new Pittsburgh office building can point with pride to their new lounge and snack bar. It’s truly one of the interior “showplaces.” Two Natco products were used extensively to help create this modern center of color, texture and design: (1) Natco roman brick with Wave-Tex finish, and (2) Natco ceramic glazed Vitritile. But modernity is only one of the important qualities of Natco structural clay tile building products. They’re also the most functional building products available. Take Vitritile, for example. Ceramic glazed Vitritile comes in a variety of pleasing, non-fading colors. It’s easy to install and maintain. It’s fireproof, sanitary and will never lose its “brand new” look…

    Today, this building, at 201 Stanwix St. Pittsburgh PA, 2020, is an apartment building:

    Polished, classic space to make your urban home! With sleek stainless steel appliances, granite countertops, and hardwood floors, among other high-end touches throughout, we’ve laid a modern framework for you to impart your unique, personal style.

    201 Stanwix St. Pittsburgh PA, 2020

  • 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 non-First World societies or in First World societies that experience temporary collapse, waiting in line takes the form of breadlines, food lines, lines for assistance.

    Yet the alternative is worse: a mob rush for resources in which the strongest get the most, the less-strong get less, and the weakest end up with nothing.

    Brussels Breadline Post World War II

    Waiting in line is pure democracy. You don’t have to be strong or aggressive or violent. You don’t need smarts or savvy. You don’t need connections to powerful people.

    You can buy into this form of democracy by doing only one thing: showing up. You can gain an advantage in only one legitimate way: showing up earlier than the person in front of you.

    Bill Gates in Line at Dick’s Drive-In, Seattle

    In a conversation with Dave Rubin, Heather MacDonald says that

    the rule of law is the essence of a civilization we lose that and you get third world anarchy with everybody trying to game the system. You know, queueing is a thing of beauty. We take it for granted but for people to be able to quietly wait in line and wait their place, as opposed to trying to, you know, get to the top and just muscle everybody else out

  • 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 shape that China’s “invasion” of the U.S. will take, need we look any further than Hong Kong? In 1997, Hong Kong’s sovereignty was transferred to China, and the “one country, two systems” principle that helped everyone feel better about the hand-off has been diminishing ever since. While Hong Kong is still a freer type of China than Mainland China, those freedoms are winnowing away.

    Bank of China Hong Kong Branch, February 2020

    Changes subtlely happen. Nick Frisch writes in The New Yorker that

    interference and intimidation have become more common. Phone calls from Beijing operatives to Hong Kong officials and journalists are now routine. Chinese security agents have disappeared dissidents from the city’s streets. In 2015, several men who published salacious books about the Party leadership were kidnapped, and later…[confessed] to subversion.

    Three decades before the hand-off, the Hong Kong branch of the Bank of China, at no.2A Des Voeux Road Central, Central, Hong Kong, became a giant protest sign. In true globo form, we find three countries’ cultures jammed together into one view: the U.S. Hilton hotel corporation, the Bank of China, and English cricket (in the other image) being played

    Explains LIFE magazine, October 13, 1967:

    Possibly Red China’s proudest monument outside its borders is the Hong Kong branch of the Bank of China, which towers over the neighboring British Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank (right). Last week, to celebrate the 18th anniversary of the Communist take-over, the Chinese bank got a festoon of posters with the predictable slogans: “Long life to the Chinese People’s Republic,” and “Raise the Red flag of Mao’s thought and march forward courageously.” On the same day, however, the Communists once again began supplying water to the British colony, the Hong Kong stock market hit a two-year high and a cricket game proceeded in leisurely fashion opposite the Red bank.

  • 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, 1948 Los Angeles Times hit the zeitgeist of the times perfectly well, though. Picture: it’s 1948, the war has just ended, L.A. is booming, phones are still run through switchboards (though not for long).

    The location of The Florence Utt Switchboard School was 742 South Hill Street, Los Angeles; translated, it’s downtown, near Pershing Square and The Biltmore Hotel. Not much found on Florence Utt, but she appears to have been born in 1885 and died in Carmel, California in 1986, a very ripe 101 years old.

    Florence Utt ran with the times. In 1957, Florence Utt Switchboard Schools, Inc. was incorporated in New York State, then altered four years later to Florence Utt Business Schools, Inc., to teach students IBM keyboard punch systems.

    Unbelievably, Florence Utt Business Schools, Inc. is still an active corporation and name (if not an actual operating business), as registered with the New York Department of State.

     

  • 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. The Belasco is still there and thriving. Anyone who loves Broadway theater has undoubtedly been to the Belasco Theater at one point or another.

    The Belasco name would, strangely enough, surface during the John F. Kennedy assassination via Jack Ruby, the killer of Lee Harvey Oswald.

    David Belasco was born in San Francisco. He eventually left San Francisco but other Belascos remained, and in the 1930s, a grand-daughter named Virginia Marian Belasco was living in what is now called the Rousseaus’ Boulevard Tract Landmark District.

    Encompassing about two-blocks in the Sunset District, Rousseaus’ today is a block of 93 Storybook-style single-family homes constructed by the Marian Realty Company (one of the brothers was named Oliver Marian Rousseau), most of which are still in prime condition.

    In 1936, a young Virginia Belasco met a young Jacob Rubenstein at a dance at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center. It’s not clear if they had any romantic attachment, but they certainly did maintain a friendship. In a 1963 psychiatric evaluation of Rubenstein, Rubenstein’s sister said, “There was a sort of crazy admiration for years between them.” Belasco was said to be “wealthy” and she never married.

    On December 2, 1963, Virginia Belasco was interviewed at her 1587 35th Avenue, San Francisco residence by FBI agents. The subject? The assassination of John F. Kennedy, just a couple of weeks prior.

    The subject: Jacob Rubenstein, aka Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald.

     

     

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