Not that long ago a person’s love for technology required substantial physical strength. Nowadays anyone can show up on a date carrying a laptop or an iPod. Here is what it would have looked like about 25 years ago.
I don’t suppose many of you are browsing Russian blogs, so I thought I’d link some interesting pictures. The source is here and here is a Google translation. I also added some related links in case you are wasting time at work.
Swimming Pool “Moscow”. This pool was build instead of planned Palace of Soviets which was supposed to replace the demolished Cathedral of Christ the Saviour,presently restored on the same spot.
House of Friendship with the Peoples of foreign countries
Christmas is a very nostalgic holiday, probably more so than any other. It’s the time when people realize that another year is left behind, kids have grown older and now want an iPhone instead of a barbie, and everyone else is sporting more and more gray hairs. People remember their own childhoods, old presents, relatives who are now gone, and the time when Christmas dinner meant killing your own goose.
Soviet ideologists once had a hard time accepting the fact that mental illness, which Communist theory blamed on capitalistic class exploitation, didn’t disappear in the new classless society. Even today, Russian psychiatry is anchored to a search for physical rather than psychic cures to mental disturbances. Practically speaking, Freud and his disciples, with their emphasis on long-range individual therapy, can have no real place in a health system devoted to fast, mass treatment. Instead, Ivan Pavlov, the Russian physiologist who pioneered the theory of the conditioned reflex, remains the accepted master, and psychiatric care depends heavily on a variety of machines and physio-therapeutic devices. Electricity is a popular treatment for everything from schizophrenia to insomnia.
Unsurprisingly, the primary therapy is work. All but the most severely ill are given some simple task to do at their bedsides. Those less afflicted are put to work at repetitive jobs such as making shoes or artificial flowers. A patient close to recovery might get employment in a special section of an ordinary factory outside, from which he would be expected to work his way back into society.
Today’s feature may be called “Back to the future” or “Forward to the past” because it goes back to the time when this metro area had a commuter rail which some of us so desperately want now.
The description of this image reads: Black and white film negative of two trolley cars on the Strang Line between Pflumm & Haskins on Walnut. The car at the left is an open car. Text on the left end: “SANTA FE TRAIL ROUTE.” Text along the side of the car roof: “MISSOURI & KANSAS INTERURBAN RAILWAY.” The car has a number of seated passengers and two children stand in the end of the car. Several of the women passengers wear hats. The right car is an enclosed car. An oval on the side of the car, in which the name of the car is may read “OGERITA.” The building at the far right is the Lenexa mill. A portion of a railroad stations appears to be visible behind the cars. Several utility poles run along the track. A portion of a house is visible at the extreme left. Bare dirt in the railroad right-of-way is in the foreground.
You can find a brief history of the Strang Line on the the JoCoHistory website. Strang Line (officially named Missouri and Kansas Interurban Railway) was developed by William B. Strang Jr and existed between 1906 and 1940 providing a link between Olathe and Kansas City and further on to St.Joseph. A book by Monroe Dodd (recently laid off from the Star so buy the book!) A Splendid Ride: The Streetcars of Kansas City, 1870-1957 has more details and a better quality picture of the same or similar train. A website by Ed Gentry is dedicated to the Interurban linking Kansas City and St. Joseph.
The site of the old picture still has rails but they belong to the real railroad.
In the end it’s always the real people who make the old pictures come alive. Someone named Bob Blackwell commented on the museum photo in October 2006: “The picture is looking to the Northeast so the dirt road is probably at the front of the old Trails End Hotel. I have fond memories of the Strang Line although I do not remember any open cars. I do remember the Obregon car. My mother Francis Blackwell used to take me to Kansas City on the Strang Line so she could shop. I rode the Strang Line to Olathe to high school in 1938 until it closed down.”
Maybe some day we will be able to ride “the highest, coolest and most beautiful ride out of Kansas City” and create our own fond memories.
This look at the past was brought to you by the Kansas City Lunch Spots : Where Lunches and Spots Meet In The Open. Also sponsored by: My Job: Three-day weekends – plenty of time to waste Additional financing by: Light Rail: Dream on.
Previous posts here.
Manezhnaya Square. Hotel “Moscow”
Central Lenin Museum. State Historical Museum
The old building of Moscow State University
Mayakovsky Square and monument to VV Mayakovsky
Building Museum Battle of Borodino panorama
Swimming Pool “Moscow”. This pool was build instead of planned Palace of Soviets which was supposed to replace the demolished Cathedral of Christ the Saviour,presently restored on the same spot.
House of Friendship with the Peoples of foreign countries
V.I.Lenin State Library of the USSR
Karl Marx Prospect with the monument to Karl Marx
Sverdlov Square. Bolshoi Theater.
Gorky Central Park of Culture and Recreation
Andrei Rublev Museum(formerly Andronikov Monastery)
Planetarium
Chkalov Street
Komsomolskaya Square
Monument to the worker and a farmer woman. She is holding a sickle and he has a hammer. Hammer and sickle-get it?
Monument in honor of the Space Development
Dzerzhinsky Square
Moscow City’s Palace of Pioneers and schoolchildren
Student dormitories Patrice Lumumba University.
South-West Suburbs
Lomonosov Prospect
Leninsky Prospect.Public is greeting Cosmonauts returning from space.
Leninsky Prospect. Department store “Moscow”
Church of the Ascension in Kolomenskoye (XVI century)
Highway Circling around the city.
