This town really needed a movie theater in 1907

[layla]

This picture totally cracks me up. It's basically the entire population of Fairbanks, circa 1907, standing on the banks of the river watching the ice go out. Yes: in 1907, ice floes were a popular spectator sport! XD

... I guess the paint drying championships must have been next week.

(Possibly-interesting note for non-Fairbanksans: The building at top left, on the far bank of the river, that says "Machinery" and "Samson" is Samson's Hardware, which is still there and still in business. About a block behind it, in the away-from-river direction, is where the present-day News-Miner building is located, where I work.)

Comments

[24thecomicstrip.livejournal.com]

Oh awesommme! I love old buildings that still exist. I found a picture of the corner down the block from where I used to live in NYC, circa 192X. The building had changed (as had the neighborhood), but the whole shape of it was still there. Another town near where I grew up still looks (architecturally speaking) exactly as it did 50 years ago in one particular spot, which I thought was astounding.

[laylalawlor.livejournal.com]

I'm tremendously interested in history, in old buildings and old places. Fairbanks is, on the one hand, kind of frustrating because its history is so short -- there's only really been a town here for a little over a century; but on the other hand, our history is so recent and fresh, and we were practically a Wild West frontier town within the living memory of people who still live in town. The woods behind our house have old telegraph poles and railroad bridges and abandoned cabins and things. It's just *fun*.

[naye]

Oh, old pictures! They're fascinating - especially when some of those places are still there. Cool. And your explanation of what was going on cracked me up!

[laylalawlor.livejournal.com]

Hee! It's so obviously that they were *desperate* for entertainment! I was actually looking up pictures of the Fairbanks flood ... in 1967 the whole town flooded and drove everybody into the hills for a couple of weeks. (Luckily there are floodworks in place now that are supposed to stop it from happening again, and our house is far enough out of town that it wouldn't have been affected in any case, but it's still kind of freaky to look at the pictures.)

[acoustic-rob.livejournal.com]

I love old history as well. (Not that Houston's got any of it, *grump*.) I remember seeing an old map of Urbana back when I lived there...did you know that Green Street was once called High Street? Explains why the next road south of it is called Dry Street....

[laylalawlor.livejournal.com]

*snort* After living there, I can also see why "dry" would be a distinctive enough condition to name a street after it...

I love that stuff. One year for a Christmas present for my grandmother, I bought a photographic history of Champaign-Urbana and then went around town taking pictures of all the places in the book that I could find. It was actually really fun -- it was neat to see what was still there, and what had become shopping malls or parking lots, and I had some very interesting conversations with the proprietors of some of the remaining businesses when I explained what I was doing and asked if I could wander around their business taking pictures.