A very short history of Mount Lowe Railway.

Mount Lowe Railway was a 7 mile long touristic railway on Mount Lowe in California.
It was opened in 1893 and was idea of  Thaddeus S. Lowe  who wanted to make the mountains and beautiful scenery available for all. As well as the scenic railway the area also included  a hotel, astronomical observayory, casino and menagerie. It did prove to be popular with tourists attracting visitors from all over the world.
However throughout its short existence it was beset with tragedy. A fire destroyed the hotel in 1900 and one five years later destroyed the casino. There were also floods,gales and storms and a further fire in 1936.
It was decided not to rebuild and the Railway was out of business. It was finally closed in 1938 and not much of the Railway exists today though its ruins are considered a historical landmark.

I have two cards. This first one was posted in 1924 and depicts the Great Incline which inclined around 3000ft and was one of the main draws for the railway enthusiasts.

The second card is undated and shows a packed cable car.

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Wish list

Slight change of remit today as I list a few places I would like cards of but do not have.
The Futurist Cinema in Liverpool -
A beautiful Georgian style building and instantly recognisable ton to Liverpudlians/Merseysiders. It was demolished in 2016

The Curzon Cinema, Old Swan in Liverpool - Gorgeous Art Deck building in its heyday. I used to see it on the bus into town though it had seen better days by then. It was demolished in 2015

Grosvenor Place Hall of residence - My old student digs. Happy memories of the place. I don't think cards of it exist though they do for other university buildings. It would be nice if they did though.
Kolmanskop - a famous abandoned town in Namibia. I have seen cards of it when it was still populated but they have always been slightly out of my price range and they sell quickly. Maybe someday.
Any card from The Titanic - These exist but they cost at least a month's salary so they will always be a dream.

Groes Village - Reduced to Rubble

In a bit of a twist from the usual subject matter for this blog, the building still exists, but the village it is part of does not.
Groes village, near Port Talbot in South Wales was a planned village designed by renowned architect Edward Haycock and built in the 1830s.
The village contained houses, a school and the Beulah Calvanistic Methodist Chapel also known as The Round Chapel or Capel y Groes in Welsh.
Photographs of the village itself show a picturesque little place which wouldn't have looked out of place in an Avengerland style ITC production.
Unfortunately for Groes the construction of the M4 motorway commenced in 1961 and in 1974 despite protests , a fight with The Welsh Office and the local council's suggestion of an alternative route, the government decided that Groes would be demolished.
21 families were rehoused, homes and the school destroyed and the village was all but obliterated. It was eventually demolished in 1976 and all that remains now is a section of grass with the village's name stamped on it.
Well that is not quite all that remains. As I stated at the top of this post, the chapel still exists. The Grade II listed building and the only surviving octagonal chapel in Wales was dismantled in 1975/6 and relocated to nearby Tollgate Park where I'm remains to this day.
The below card is published by Frith in 1938 and shows the building in its original location.

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.
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