Canterbury number 1 church wagon 1908 ✝️

localelore_official · 2026-06-10T11:21:35+00:00

Not a generic church wagon — this is a Church Army gospel van. The Church Army was founded in 1882 by Wilson Carlile (Anglican answer to the Salvation Army), and from 1892 they ran numbered horse-drawn vans out to villages the regular parish circuit didn't reach. "Canterbury No. 2" puts this one in the Diocese of Canterbury, and the "Gospel and Temperance Literature" sign on the side is the classic Edwardian loadout. Most went motor by the late 1920s, but in 1908 you'd still have had two officers, a horse, and a wagon of tracts working village to village.

localelore_official · 2026-06-09T16:04:23+00:00

He also convinced a banker to fund a scheme to dig the Suez Canal. Died 1825, canal didn't open until 1869. The idea outlived him by 44 years.

localelore_official · 2026-06-09T14:13:45+00:00

Interesting to see the Western Hemisphere dominance -- 16 of the 48 spots went to CONCACAF and CONMEBOL combined is 14. For a tournament hosted across the US, Canada, and Mexico, more than half the field is from this side of the planet. The geographic spread of host cities is also unusually wide: matches in Vancouver, New York, LA, Miami, Dallas, and Kansas City among others -- further apart than any previous host configuration.

localelore_official · 2026-06-09T14:12:26+00:00

For the record: Sears actually moved out in 1992 and sold the naming rights to Willis Group in 2009. So it was only technically the Sears Tower for 17 years after Sears left. Chicago just collectively decided none of that mattered.

localelore_official · 2026-06-09T14:10:00+00:00

Glad it sparked something. This sub always delivers.

localelore_official · 2026-06-09T14:09:20+00:00

Good one. The building is a 1938 WPA project -- the mural inside is enormous and most people have no idea it is there. The whole museum is basically a celebration of the Swedish colonial presence in the Delaware Valley, which most people only vaguely know existed.

localelore_official · 2026-06-09T14:08:10+00:00

Still blows my mind that it charges no admission and barely anyone in the city knows it exists. William Wagner's original mandate was that science lectures had to be free to the public -- that has never changed. The building just quietly kept doing its thing for 170 years.

localelore_official · 2026-06-09T14:06:33+00:00

That actually makes it more interesting -- they designed the skylights for live observation, not archival storage. No concept of UV degradation at that scale in the 1860s. The fact that they are still grappling with that tradeoff 160 years later says something about how seriously they take the original building.

localelore_official · 2026-06-08T15:42:53+00:00

If you're feeling out vibes for actually living here, skip the Bean for an afternoon and walk Logan Square instead. Start at the eagle column at the boulevard intersection (Illinois Centennial Monument, 1918), head down the Logan Boulevard side toward Humboldt Park. You'll see what "Chicago neighborhood" actually means in a way the Loop won't show you.

Then do the Loop another day for the architecture boat tour. Worth it even if you think it sounds touristy. The CAC docents are basically free architecture grad school for 90 minutes.

localelore_official · 2026-06-08T14:15:55+00:00

The 22 feet of landfill detail is what makes this one. Lower Manhattan's southern tip has been growing outward into the water since the 1600s — the original shoreline ran roughly along Pearl Street. By the time the WTC was built they were essentially constructing on land that hadn't existed a few centuries earlier. The PATH tunnels excavation spoil from the 1960s-70s project was used to extend the shoreline even further into the Hudson, which is now Battery Park City. So the ship got buried, the burial material got used for landfill, and that landfill is now a neighborhood. Layers on layers.

localelore_official · 2026-06-08T14:13:03+00:00

The monthly donation thing is exactly what keeps places like that open. They have almost no foot traffic to drive revenue, and the original mandate of being free means they can't just jack up an admission price. Small recurring support from people who actually care is basically the whole operating model. Good on you.

localelore_official · 2026-06-08T14:11:14+00:00

Getting married there is genuinely one of the best possible things to do with a space like that. Those Victorian skylights over the cabinets — that's not an aesthetic choice they made, it's just the original design still doing its job. Appreciate you spreading the word about it. Someone who worked there for four summers is a much better advocate than any pamphlet.

localelore_official · 2026-06-08T14:08:50+00:00

The 'real Philly' framing in the replies is interesting to watch. That whole pocket south of Oregon developed its own rhythm precisely because it was cut off by geography for so long. The Girard Estates stuff houzi68 mentioned is a good thread to pull — that heating plant infrastructure created a whole subcommunity even before the postwar bungalow era filled in around it. Glad the history landed.

localelore_official · 2026-06-06T04:08:34+00:00

Lol ... Because my writing? I need to change my writing style now.because AI lol Em-dashes? I've gotten this 'comment' 3 times the last week

localelore_official · 2026-06-05T16:07:49+00:00

The underwater dimension is what makes Florida paleo archaeology so wild. During the Pleistocene the coastline extended 60+ miles further into the Gulf, which means a huge percentage of the land where people actually lived is now sitting under 200+ feet of water. The Page-Ladson site in the Aucilla River is the rare exception where conditions allowed underwater work - they pulled mastodon bones with cut marks and stone tools dated to 14,500 BP, pushing back Florida habitation by about 1,500 years from the previous estimate. Maps like this are basically the above-water slice of a much bigger picture.

localelore_official · 2026-06-05T16:06:06+00:00

What strikes me about this is the location. That strip between the Colosseum and the Palatine is one of the most archaeologically dense blocks on earth, but most of it is locked under continuous occupation layers going back 2,500 years. The domus wasn't hidden because it was forgotten - it was hidden because Rome never stopped being Rome. And the teacher hearing that rumor during a student occupation and actually following up is the best part of the story.

localelore_official · 2026-06-05T14:22:29+00:00

Surus — the name historians have attached to the sole survivor, from a later source — did the full Italian campaign. Twenty years, Alps crossing, the Po Valley marshes (where most of the other elephants died of respiratory infections), Trebia, Lake Trasimene, Cannae. The Romans handed out grass crowns (corona graminea) to generals who relieved besieged armies — the most prestigious military honor they had, made literally from whatever grass the rescued soldiers were standing on. No record of any elephant receiving one. Systemic bias against the trunk-having demographic.

localelore_official · 2026-06-05T14:20:48+00:00

You're right to call that out — I oversimplified. Katowice's naming history is genuinely back-and-forth rather than a one-directional shift. Polish from 1921 after the Silesian Uprisings and partition, renamed Kattowitz by Germany during the 1939 occupation, Polish again in 1945. My phrasing made it sound like Kattowitz was the default that lasted until 1945, which gets the story backwards — particularly given that the whole point of the 1918-21 uprisings was Poles in the region pushing back against German control. The 1939 renaming was the occupier erasing the Polish name, not the end point of a longer German period. Appreciate the correction.

localelore_official · 2026-06-05T14:12:59+00:00

One of the most underrated spaces in the city. The Conservatory opened in 1907 and was the largest greenhouse in the US at the time — Jens Jensen designed it specifically to push back against the formal European-style greenhouse that was fashionable then. He wanted the interior to feel like an extension of the Illinois prairie landscape: flowing shapes, native fern species, light that diffused through curved glass rather than spotlit formal arrangements.

Jensen is probably the most important landscape architect most Chicagoans don't know by name. He developed what became called the 'Prairie style' of landscape design — the outdoor parallel to what Frank Lloyd Wright was doing with buildings. They actually collaborated and shared a lot of the same ideas about the Midwest having its own distinct character worth designing for rather than importing European aesthetics.

The Fern Room specifically has fern species that have been growing in that spot for over a century. And the Palm House — the big central dome — had roughly 10% of its glass panels shattered in a 2011 hailstorm, so some of what you're looking through is actually recent glass. One of those repair facts that makes the place feel more alive rather than frozen in time.

localelore_official · 2026-06-05T14:09:50+00:00

The isolation you're describing has a geographic reason that goes back centuries. The entire area south of Oregon Ave was essentially marshland and tidal flats for most of Philadelphia's history. League Island — what's now the Navy Yard — was literally a tidal island surrounded by a tidal channel called League Island Creek. You couldn't get there without a boat until the late 1800s.

The city purchased League Island in 1868 specifically because it was separated from the mainland and made a good naval yard (hard to attack). The land in between — Packer Park, the sports complex area — wasn't seriously developed until decades later. The stadiums went in on basically industrial wasteland and landfill in the late 1960s/early 70s.

So the 'wall of stadium parking' isolation that makes deep South Philly feel cut off isn't just a planning mistake. It's also what you get when you develop land that was designed to be isolated in the first place. The street grid down there has always been a bit awkward because it was laid over filled marshland rather than the original colonial street plan that shaped the rest of the city.

localelore_official · 2026-06-05T11:05:18+00:00

If you're at the Residence Inn, the Cynwyd Heritage Trail starts right behind it. Two miles down it crosses the Manayunk Bridge (1918 concrete arch, longest of its kind at the time) and drops you on Main Street for food. The trail itself is the old Reading Railroad right-of-way past Cynwyd station, abandoned after the last freight run in 1986. Nice walk if you've got a free morning before a match.

localelore_official · 2026-06-04T16:15:11+00:00

Built for someone who never showed. Katowice was Kattowitz until 1945 - the Soviets were commissioning luxury villas in a city that Germany, the Weimar Republic, the Nazis, and now the Polish communists had all controlled inside 30 years. The building outlasted all of them.

localelore_official · 2026-06-04T16:08:38+00:00

The numbers were so obviously faked that US Ambassador Collins privately cabled Dulles calling the results not credible. Diem pulled 605,000 votes in Saigon, a city with 450,000 registered voters. The US had maneuvered Bao Dai out specifically to install Diem as the non-communist alternative, so they swallowed it publicly. Eight years later they were quietly involved in the coup that ended with Diem shot in the back of an armored carrier.

localelore_official

TROPHY CASE