Let’s do a bit of sightseeing across the US with the aid of some Kodachromes. The images cover several sites, ranging from the touristy to the iconic. Some of these have remained practically the same, a few have changed a good deal, and others have disappeared altogether. Whatever the case, I hope they spark a few memories.
We open with Times Square in the lead pic, taken in 1964.
Royal St. New Orleans, 1955.
Chinatown, San Francisco, early ’50s.
Trinity Church, Boston, 1956.
Grand View Ship Hotel, Pennsylvania, 1953.
Fisherman’s Warf, Redondo Beach, August 1953.
TWA Flight Center, JFK Airport, 1963.
Daytona Beach, Florida, 1951.
Café Du Monde, New Orleans, 1953.
Colorado Springs, 1952.
Cliff House, San Francisco, 1954.
Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, 1966.
Corn Palace, South Dakota, 1955.
Santa’s Workshop, North Pole, NY 1957.
The images come from the ElectroSpark Flickr page, which does an amazing job retouching old Kodachromes.
Ah, fond memories from my childhood at the Corn Palace.
North Pole pic is at least 1957, I see a 57 Ford and a 57 Olds in the parking lot. However. Lovely pics, all.
Thanks for pointing that typo. It’s updated now.
Still exists;
https://www.northpoleny.com/
Not to be confused with Storytown USA in Lake George which formed the nucleus of what’s now Six Flags’ The Great Escape, Santa’s Village is on the approach to Whiteface Mountain.
That and North Pole’s status as a CDP led to it being listed as city of license for WPTZ-TV for years meaning they identified on-air as “WPTZ, Plattsburgh-North Pole-Burlington”. In later years they were able to change this with the FCC and switched to “Plattsburgh-Burlington-Montreal”.
Nice sightseeing bus in Boston. It looks rather like a Crown to me, but I can’t be totally certain.
Fort Lauderdale: Working hard on their sunburns.
The Corn Palace is wild! Looks more like Istanbul.
What is a corn palace? Amusement park? Thanks
The Corn Palace is a concert hall in Mitchell, S.D., and its claim to fame is that it’s redecorated every year with corn. The appearance of the building changes each year.
Oddly, the Corn Palace is the only place in this batch of photos that I’ve visited. We were there in 2021, and it was lots of fun. For no reason other than it’s just… fun. Even though it’s a concert hall, the place probably makes most of its revenue from people like us who just visit in order to look at the place (the main concert hall is corn-decorated as well). There’s no admission charge, but of course the gift shop is another matter…
It is the last of a common agricultural convention event. As the Northern Great Plains States developed, communities there would create a “palace” to showcase their agricultural prowess. Not all were corn. Communities often held fairs of this type, Leadville Colorado annually built an Ice Palace to show off their mining fortunes. This is kind of like a county agricultural fair, but more permanent.
The one in Mitchell South Dakota is probably the last of these convention sites. It survives by having expanded into South Dakota events, sporting as well as agriculutural. Every year, the tradition of redecorating the exterior with grain art continues. If you ever drive through South Dakota, stopping at Mitchell to see the latest grain design is a fun detour from the level and often treeless South Dakotan landscape.
As America turns to commercial farming, there are fewer of these events.
I’ve been to the Corn Palace LOL on one of my RV drives from NC to CA, it’s still there, Mitchell, SD:
https://cornpalace.com/
They needed Grandma to stand closer to the photographer, and still have her in front of the North Pole sign. I have a lot of photos with my parents in them, standing about as far away from the camera as possible, to be in the shot.
’55 and ’56 Plymouth in that shot of the North Pole, I believe.
Nice photos.
In Colorado Springs, there has been an Antlers Hotel for over a century. The photo above shows the hotel building that housed the hotel from 1901-1964. Today, the hotel still exists, but it is now a dull nondescript late 20th century building.
I know some photos have approx dates but the last photo cant be 1954 as there is a 57
Olds,57 Chevy, and 57 Mercury in the shot
I was going to note the Cliff House is still there, but I read it closed during the pandenmic. The building still stands awaiting another use.
They plan to reopen it late next year.
The Cliff House was remodeled a time or two since the 1954 photo – which must have been late 1954 because that’s a ’55 Ford. The Oldsmobile and Cadillac are ’54s.
The area became part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area in 1972 and later the NPS had a visitor center there, since moved up the hill. The Musee Mecanique was also there around that time but later moved to tourist magnet Fisherman’s Wharf. Playland-at-the-Beach would have still been in operation nearby for some after meal (maybe wait a while) fun.
The Cliff House now standing and about to reopen in San Francisco dates from 1909 with several remodelings in the interim. It replaced a much larger and more opulent Cliff House built by mogul Adolf Sutro in 1896 to resemble a French chateau. Unfortunately it burned down, the current building described as a “giant gray shoebox of concrete and steel” in comparison.
The location of the Grand View Ship Hotel looked familiar, and sure enough my guess was correct. My wife and I had come across Lookout Point on the Lincoln Highway (US Route 30) in Bedford County, PA in 2007 after a fruitless search for the site of the 9/11 Flight 93 plane crash in neighboring Somerset County. This was of course before ground had been broken on the current memorial
A little Googling showed that the hotel burned to the ground in October 2001 only about a month after the September 11 attacks. Here’s our photo from the hotel’s location, marred by the spindly dead trees in the foreground.
I was there in “1975ish”. Flash forward to “2017”; drove past the site. Did so again in “2021, 2022”.
Was kind a wet, overcast, when I was actually in the building, on the deck.
Place was really showing age, view ((even with the overcast)) was quite extensive.
There was a “mid 60’s Chevy wagon” in the parking lot when I was there.
Is it just me or did the Interstate System ruin alot of America’s character? I think Charles Kerault said about the interstates. “You cab travel across the country and not see a damn thing.”
My opinion: No, it is not just you.
The quote when 1-40 was finally completed in 1990 was “Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything”…and he’s not completely wrong.
When crunched for time, interstates come in handy. But if you can, venture off the interstates onto US or state highways it is much more scenic. We try to do that when on vacation, and it has lead us across roadside attractions we never would have seen had we stayed on the shortest route.
Great photos! Great comments. As best as I know, The North Pole is the oldest theme park in America, having been opened in 1949. We visited there many a time because we vacationed in The Adirondack Mountains. The original bumper identifiers that you visited The North Pole were made of stiff resilient paper. They were fastened to your bumper with wires because bumpers in those days allowed for such fasteners. They were applied by employees while you were enjoying the park! Each time that we go on a road trip, we avoid Interstates except to arrive at our first destination. Then, we follow the scenic routes to see America and Canada, to taste the food of the local people, to buy things that we do not need, eat homemade ice cream, and to learn history. Charles Keuralt was correct as was Dinah Shore, albeit that we do not travel in a Chevrolet. Here’s a photo from Nova Scotia from 2022 that is definitely not a sight to see from an expressway.
Like that “Nash Metro” @ the “Cliff house”!! The bus , in Boston, is a version I’ve never seen. Would not be too nice in hot, sunny, place. Still would be curious to see out from inside one though.
Love these pictures. The one of Trinity Church in Boston is notable for showing what was replaced by the John Hancock building (which took the place of the kind of crummy-looking apartment building there on the right). Other than that, the buildings in the picture look pretty much the same today (a bit cleaner…but everything is nowadays in Boston). Also the Cafe Du Monde in New Orleans looks very similar overall. The sign is unfortunately gone and the terrace under the awning has been expanded.
In both of those pictures (and perhaps in others where I’m just not so familiar with the locations), it’s notable how in the 1950s cars and vehicles were allowed so close to buildings. People who criticize our current culture/urban landscape as being too car-centric need to look at something like buses parked in front of Trinity Church (it’s now a pedestrian plaza and park and all of the parking is underground and in high-rise garages) and cars right up next to Cafe Du Monde (where there are now street musicians on a plaza). I’m not saying that we still can’t do better, but we’ve actually done a lot to separate cars from people in current urban design.
Here’s a view as of 2016.
I was in Boston studying design at the time of the falling glass fiasco.
On the night of January 20, 1973, 75 mph winds widened microscopic cracks in the brittle upper-floor windows, beginning a two-year-long cascade of glass onto the streets below. No one was hurt, thanks to the watchful eyes of binocular-equipped lookouts in Copley Square (who were paid $4.05 an hour for their service). Ultimately, only 65 windows fell, but all of the building’s 10,344 windows had to be replaced, to the tune of $7 million. In the meantime, the gaps were covered with plywood, from which the nickname “Plywood Palace” (one of the project’s nicer monikers) stemmed.
At the time our design department was planning a design conference. We changed our invitations to include a piece of the broken glass in each piece of mail, thus changing the marketing to “A piece of Boston for you. Come join us for more.”
” Falling Glass” – sounds like something by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Ah, the Cafe du Monde in New Orleans. I feel sorry for those who never experienced the culinary pleasure of eating a half dozen or so of their warm, mouth watering beignets washed down with chicory coffee.