Category: Certainties

Dodging about the archives again like a Saint Joseph’s monkey.  You notice a lot of trash in these Matthews street shots.  1942.   The first generation of street trash bins obviously hasn’t been born yet.

Not only is it a trashy city it’s all wires.  Forget “City of Glass”.  Wires.  It’s wired.  I wish I knew what I find so fascinating about these pictures.  It can’t just be because I lived in this neighbourhood many decades later.  So what is it with things that happened before I was born?  It’s okay.  It’s just something on the windshield.

Lillian Gish comes to town 1942.  Hollywood royalty.  I once rode in an elevator with Miss Gish.  I thought to ask her if her luggage had been found but I was an awful shy little boy.  The airline lost her luggage.  It was many decades after this picture was taken.  The mayor was with me that evening too.  And quite a few other people.  I believe Miss Gish was 88 at the time.  “Commandos Strike At Dawn” in which she starred with Paul Muni and Sir Cedric Hardwicke was released in 1942.

Barbara Stanwyck 1942.  Hollywood star.  War effort again.  “Back The Attack” war bonds drive.  It looks to have been a fine sunny day.  I can just hear that band.  Hit it!

Save these bud-lipped children.  Don’t they deserve a chance?  They’re looking up to you for help.  They’re a bit worried about the future, and everybody knows what that’s like.  Can’t you spare a few centavos?

There were also a vast number of large billboards around to go with all the trash in the streets but there was a war on, fortunately very far away.

Then there was “Trotsky” the Siberian bear.  He lived in that really old bear prison with the steel bars painted green they had in the park at the time, before they dug the pit and put the bears in there.  Not Trotsky though.  But the past is discontinued.

But it’s still City of Wires.

Who will pray for the streetcars?  Because streetcars have an essential spirit that can’t be extinguished.  It’s obvious.  You can rip out the tracks and burn up all the old streetcars but you will never extinguish what’s in our hearts.

Here’s to a safe and pleasant journey.  Thanks very much.

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Not even that old really. 25 years?  The whole thing’s been defunct for at least 5.  The ghosts of failed winemakers haunt it.  But it’s probably the greatest place to get free rosemary in town and there isn’t even a town around here.  Those green bushes there.

Grandiose schemes.  We’ve seen it before.  As I think Wolverton said, “They made a wasteland and called it bankruptcy”.  I may be misquoting.  This patch of ground could never make enough wine to make the place profitable.  Some say that was the plan. Rumours.

Those are all vines stretching way back there up the hill and the vineyard goes as far in the other direction all the way down to Thompson Park, as it’s called these days.  The whole thing used to be just one big cattle pasture.  Indeed.  Je me souviens.

The grapes still grow on the vines year after year but they just hang out turning into raisins in the sun.  Nobody tends them.  Pinot noir mostly.  I think they grew some riesling down here too.  The machinery’s all just sitting around in the yard getting old.

It’s not a wasteland of course.  It’s a fine, beautiful quiet place and there is nobody around. Comes complete with 10,000 square foot winemaking building in aluminum and steel, just sitting here like everything else.  You can drive down on a narrow, steep, slightly hairy piece of road that was built to get to the winery.  Before that, yes, in the old days, in former times, you had to take the trail down here or come in by water via the beach.

It’s the poetry of abandoned places.  The call of ruins.  The Auberge could be fixed up.  It needs paint and some of the siding’s falling off but it still has potential, but potential for what?  There’s nobody around.

I know.  An artist’s colony.  First ten million bucks takes, or whatever you got.  Get a bunch of artists down here being creative and getting drunk and arguing and fornicating and burning the place down and maybe producing some art, maybe not.  Great idea.

At one time you could get a glass of wine and something to eat at the Auberge but not any more.  The chairs are long since stacked and there’s been nobody behind that bar in many moons.  Sayonara.

 

Our net admin lit up the board earlier with the site has passed 100,000 subscribers, many of them living, breathing human beings who aren’t afraid of digging down.  You just never know what you’re going to find.  This is huge.  I’m starting to finally believe that people are finally starting to realize what I’ve been saying all along: I didn’t quit.  I was fired.  Thank u. It felt good, Mike.

That’s right.  Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

Circa 1930s.  Frank Smythe.  He was a  Britisher born in 1900.  He did a lot of climbing and stumping around in the Himalayas and this old tree held talismanic significance for him.  I felt that significant.  You never know where your ideas are going to come from.  It’s not the thing but what you invest into it.  Frank Smythe was a prolific writer too, a very good writer and some of his books were bestsellers in their time.  I read a couple of them in my wild days of armchair mountaineering.  Some things stay with you and you don’t even know why exactly. Exoticism.  Romanticism.  Talismans.  To the locals, such as there were, it was just some old tree.  Northern India.  Way up there.  The tree isn’t around these days but the mountains and valleys and passes are the same.  The glaciers have shrunk a little.