Majestic Monday - The Majestic Hotel St Anne's on Sea.

In one of my previous posts, I mentioned that quite a few places called The Majestic seem to have been demolished so I thought I might try to make a feature of it and so I am launching Majestic Monday's where I will feature one such card.
Like other places featured before, The Majestic Hotel in St Anne's on Sea in Lancashire was once the largest of its kind, that being English seaside hotels. St Anne's on Sea was created in 1875 as an alternative holiday destination to nearby Blackpool. It was always considered a bit more upmarket than its neighbour so It is not surprising that it wanted accommodation to reflect that.
The hotel was built in 1909/1910 and was initially called The Imperial. It retained this name for 10 years before being renamed The Majestic in 1920. In its heyday it was a symbol of the town , dominating the seafront, and a classic example of Edwardian architecture. It attracted many famous guests such as Winston Churchill and The Marc Brothers.
It remained popular throughout the 40s and 50s, but, as we have seen on this blog before, it could not compete with increasingly cheaper overseas travel and by the early 1970s bookings had seriously declined.

It was finally closed and then demolished in 1975. Apartment blocks stand there now.

The postcard was published by Valentine's and is not dated.

Courtaulds Chimney.

It is strange that so many of the structures featured here were once the superlative of their kind.

So is the case with today's subject matter.

Courtaulds was a British company which manufactured artificial fibres, chemicals and clothing. Founded in 1794 by George Courtauld and his cousin Peter Taylor , it continued production until 1990. If the name sounds familiar, that's because his great nephew Samuel Courtauld founded the Courtauld Institute of Art who have made some appearances on University Challenge recently.




The company had many production sites throughout the UK. The card below shows the chimney at the Foleshill Road Works site in Coventry At the time it was built in 1924 it was believed to be Britain's biggest chimney, standing at 365 ft tall it dominated the surrounding houses. It was also immortalised in the local ditty below.




Now, Courtaulds built a chimney, it was not built for smoke. It took the stink from Foleshill, & dropped it over Stoke




The factory closed in 2007 and the chimney demolished on 10th March 2010. Once again I seem to have accidentally blogged something close to an anniversary.

Spreepark - The Socialist Disneyland

As I am sure you are aware, Saturday marks thirty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. I don't have any cards of that structure, but I do have something many East Berliners will recognise.

There is definitely something about abandoned theme parks which capture the imagination and they are always popular posts on websites detailing abandoned locations. The Pripyat amusement park is probably the most famous example with the Ferris wheel in particular becoming an iconic image.
Spreepark, otherwise known as Kulturpark Plänterwald Berlin is less well known but has been the subject of some fascinating features on sites such as Atlas Obscura and World Abandoned. The swan rides are especially evocative of that eerie atmosphere and, to borrow a phrase, 'morbid charisma' empty and abandoned amusement parks create.
My card is bright and colourful but the history of the park after abandonment proves that bright and colourful does not equal happy and joyful. 
VEB Kulturpark Berlin was opened on the 4th  October 1969 . It was conceived as a Socialist Disney Land and as the GDR's only permanent theme park it proved very popular with visitors attracting 1.5m visitors a year. I wonder how many of them knew that the rides were imported from the west?
There isn't much information about the park pre-Wende, but an upgraded version of the Ferris Wheel was unveiled in October  1989 to mark the 40th anniversary of the GDR, appropriately this new version stood 40 metres high and had 40 cabins.
As mentioned earlier, the Berlin Wall fell in November that year and with more freedom of movement, the uniqueness of Kulturpark Berlin was no longer a selling point and visitor numbers fell by a third. After that, things only got worse.
In 1991 it was sold to a Norbert Witte who had previously been convicted of manslaughter after a carousel malfunction killed seven at a carnival in Hamburg. It's not clear how he was able to buy it  but it's believed he did so in his wife's name.
While he did add new  attractions  which saw visitor numbers rise again, by 1999 they had fallen once more and the park faced  debts of eleven million Euros .Two years later, the company was insolvent. Earlier the next year  Witte moved to Lima taking a number of the attractions and several colleagues with him, while he claimed that the attractions were being sent for repair he actually wanted to set u a similar park there .  The park closed later that year and has not reopened as a theme park but has been used a film location and guided tours were given until 2014, two fires that same year caused major damage to the remaining attractions and it is uncertain what will become of this relic of the GDR .   
If you wondering what happened to Herr Witte failing in this endeavour  to build another version of Kulturark in Lima ,he and his son tried drug smuggling instead, they were caught and  Witte Jr is serving a lengthy gaol term.
So there have been no fairy-tale endings for the so called Socialist Disneyland.

Manchester Memories

By the nature of this blog, many of the places featured here I am unable to visit but others are all too familiar to me. Today's post is the latter.
I was a student a Manchester University in the mid 1990s. If you're  expecting tales of drugged fuelled nights at the Hacienda then I'm sorry to disappoint you, I never went and I never did drugs either. I did get thrown out of the Paradise Factory though for following some friends through a side door as I didn't realise they were trying to sneak in without paying, oh and I once saw Dawn Acton in Jilly's Rockworld but perhaps those stories are better for if I ever cards of those particular nightspots.
I digress, today's subject matters were seen nearly every day by me for three years.  The first card is the Manchester Mathematics tower. I never had lectures here ( I studied languages) but I do remember taking a couple of exams here and finding the room labelling rather confusing. There was an urban legend that the tower had accidentally been built upside down and I can almost believe it. Like most students I tended to use the maths tower as a landmark, especially in the early days when I was new to the city. Its instantly recognisable shape probably aided many a poor student to navigate the city. I know if I saw the tower I knew I was nearly home.
The Mathematics Tower was constructed in 1968 in a modernist-brutalist style by local architecture firm Scherrer and Hicks. It was in use until merger of UMIST and The Victoria University of Manchester in 2004. It was deemed unfit for purpose and demolished the following year.  It was replaced by the Alan Turing Building in 2007. The postcard isn't dated but I've seen a similar picture in the University archive and that is from 1972 which seems accurate for the card.

The next card is of Moberly Tower and the Refectory, now I never stepped foot in Moberly Tower but I did use the refectory quite a bit and enjoyed their fish and chips and hot chocolate.  The Tower was built in 1963 and named after Walter Moberly who was Vice-Chancellor of The University between 1926 and 1934. I don't know if the refectory was built at the same time. It outlasted the Mathematics Tower by 5 years being demolished in 2010 and replaced  by the Alan Gilbert Learning Commons.  The card was sent in 1966.

Regarding the structures, now I'm the kind of person who can see beauty in most buildings but even I struggle to call The Mathematics Tower and especially Moberly Tower attractive , but I do think a refirb would have been preferable to total destruction. The towers were symbolic, and evocative for those of us of a certain age and instantly bring to mind more carefree and idealistic days .  The Maths Tower can even be seen in my graduation photographs. I visited Manchester University a few years ago as part of an alumni event and I shocked to see so few buildings I recognised (my halls of residence have also been destroyed). A lot of my memories are tied up in the look and feel of the place and I found it quite disorientating being among a mixture of the familiar and new. I almost felt as if my memories had never been real or had also been destroyed.
For those who want to see the destruction of the tower, pictures can be viewed here. As you'll see not everyone is as sentimental about the place as I am.
https://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=254283

First there was a Mountain..

This blog has been free from controversy for  while but that might change with today's post.
You're probably wondering what could be controversial about a mountain, it's not the mountain itself which is the issue, but  our old friend geographical renaming.
The McKinley/Denali naming dispute is quite complicated but I'll try my best to write about it.
For some reason I always believed that Mt McKinley was given that name as a mark of respect after President McKinley was assassinated in but that is not the case.
It actually got the name unofficially in 1896 when McKinley was only a presidential candidate, not becoming president until a year later. It became the official name in 1917 ,16 years after McKinley died. The was also the year that the National Park of the same name was established. 
Prior to 1896, the mountain had a number of names locally. To the Kuyokon people it was known as Denali, to the Dena'ina people it was  Dghelay Ka'a and during the Russian ownership of Alaska it was Bolshaya Gora, these translate to "The tall one" and "the big mountain" respectively, appropriate names as Denali is the highest mountain peak in North America.  It was also briefly named local Densmore's Peak after a gold prospector who praised the mountain fulsomely.
There were always renewed efforts to rename the mountain to Denali which was the name commonly used by Alaskans and Mountaineers. The national park was unofficially renamed Denali in 1975 but people would have to wait another 40 years until the mountain followed suit.  The renaming to Denali was officially announced on 6th September 2015 by President Obama during a climate-change focussed visit.
This caused a lot of controversy with people believing it was an insult to McKinley and his native state of Ohio, incidentally McKinley never visited Alaska. Not surprisingly, Donald Trump was one of those opposed to the name change and vowed to revert back to McKinley if he got elected. However, when he became president, the two Alaskan senators , one of whom, Dan Sullivan is married to an Athabaskan (the language group to which Koyukon belongs)   stated they did not wish this and so the mountain remains Denali.
Strangely, postcards with the mountain labelled Mt McKinley seem to be easier to find than those with Denali but that may soon change.
The particular postcard is not dated though the back mentioned that it is was on the newer national parks. It is quite difficult to date scenic postcards but at a guess I'd say 1930s.

Leipzig's Alte Messe.

I hadn't planned on blogging today but I was looking through some old photographs and noticed that it was exactly 20 years ago that I took these of the Soviet Pavilion in Leipzig.

This was  my first experience of urban exploration and it happened by accident. I'd been in Leipzig a couple of weeks by this stage and I'd noticed the shiny gold tower red star in the sky-line and was intrigued to go and visit.  I was initially quite disappointed to see that the buildings were in an abandoned state but soon enjoyed wondering around and taking photographs.
Leipzig has featured in this blog before, with the Paulinekirche being an example of cultural heritage destroyed by the GDR, this time it's the symbols of communism which are shown in a forlorn state.

Leipzig has been famous for its trade fair since the Middle Ages and continues to be so today. The old trade fair complex (Alte Messe) was built in 1913, the Soviet Pavilion being added 12 years later though it didn't get its distinctive look until 1950 taking inspiration from 1930s Moscow architecture. The Pavilion, otherwise known as Halle 12 (Exhibition hall 12) was just one part of the trade fair centre. The card below showing the full extent of the complex.

The next card dates from the mid 1950s and shows people visiting a Sports and Gymnastics exhibition. I don't have any cards depicting the inside but there are photos around on the web if you wish to look.

I don't know when the next postcard is from but I like that it acts as a contrast to my photo, showing construction rather than destruction.

The trade fair moved location in 1996 and the old complex was largely abandoned, though I seem to remember that one of the neighbouring exhibition halls was being used as a supermarket when I was there.
 The steps to exhibition hall 12 are still cordoned off but as it's a protected building it has not, in fact it cannot, be destroyed. I believe that the building is currently being sanitised and plans are afoot for the city archives to be moved there next year. I will update you on that when I know more, but in the time the gold tower and red star remain a symbol of a particular chapter in Leipzig's fascinating history.

A Tale of Two City's Ferris Wheels.

I was reading recently about Linda Ducharme, an American lady who married a Ferris Wheel and while I wouldn't go that far I do think they make an attractive subject for postcards. Also they're not hard to find so it's relatively easy  to build up a collection.
Fortunately for me, there are a fair few famous former Ferris wheels for fantastic future features.

Today I'm just going to look at two of them. The Grande Route de Paris (Great Wheel of Paris) and London's Great Wheel.

There was a period of just 7 years  (1900 -1907)when the two of them existed at the same time. The Great Wheel was built first, being constructed in 1894 and opening a year later for the Empire of India Exhibition in Earls Court.
The 308ft by207 ft. structure had 40 cars which held about 40 passengers each and a revolution took about 20 minutes, apart from for some poor passengers in 1896 who got stuck there for 4 and 1/2 hours when the drive mechanism broke. This doesn't seem to have put people off as the wheel remained in service until 1906, by which time around   2.5 million passengers had enjoyed the ride. It was dismantled a year later and nearby trains were stopped especially for passengers to witness the event which took about 6 hours in total.
This particular card was sent in 1905, so towards the end of The Great Wheel's life.

I don't normally post the back, but the phrases "have written to M" and "Dear 7" caught my eye. Could a proto James Bond have written this? Perhaps not as they would be unlikely to be so blatant as to which train they are getting. Unless it's a double bluff.

The Grande Route de Paris was built in 1900, also for an exhibition, the Exposition Universalle. At the time of opening it was, at 328ft tall, the largest Ferris Wheel in the world, a record in held until 1989 when the Cosmo Clock 21 was opened.
In 1920, the decision was made to dismantle the wheel. A far cry from the hustle, bustle and  optimism the Exposition Universalle which had 50 million visitors, the cars were used to house French families made homeless by WWI and the rest was sold for scrap. A few remnants remained until 1937 before also being sold for scrap.
It was  a popular postcard for American soldiers stationed in France to send home, but my card is postally unused.