The Big Hat

 

The message scrawled on the front of the card says:

Awful sorry I could not get down last night but was at Delhi yesterday and was so tired I could scarcely dance to bed. Heard you had a big time. Am as tired and lazy today as if I had danced all night.


I assume that Molly sent the card. She appears to have lived in Lake Delaware, New York, which is just outside of Delhi, in an area of upstate NY between Binghamton and Albany.

Note: This card was sent to Elizabeth Mable, who later married Tracy Graham.

Sacré-Cœur!

This Paris postcard shows a very early view of La Place de la Concorde. It's murky, but there's definitely something missing. What is it? Here's another view from 1912:

What is that thing in the background on the right? Why, it's Sacré-Cœur, located at the summit of the Butte Montmartre in Paris, the highest point in the city! Construction of the basilica began in 1875, but wasn't completed until 1914.

Here's another in-between view, where the basilica appears to be not quite complete. As a side note, the obelisk in the center of the square was a gift from Egypt back in 1833. It was placed in the square in the exact location where the guillotine had stood, the same guillotine that killed Queen Marie Antoinette, Princess Élisabeth of France, Charlotte Corday, Madame du Barry, Georges Danton, Maximilien Robespierre, and thousands of others.

Streetcar Sunday - The Cherrelyn Horse Car

 The famous Cherrelyn streetcar started service in 1892 in the Denver, Colorado area, providing service between Englewood and Littleton. The horse would pull the car uphill, and on the return trip the horse was loaded onto the back of the car and the car proceeded down the hill powered by gravity. The fare was 5 cents. The Cherrelyn horse car ran until 1910 when it was replaced by electric cars, but the old one is still on display in Englewood.

There is a story (probably apocryphal) that the retired horses from the Cherrelyn  horse car were sold to farmers, who had no trouble getting the horses to pull a plow uphill, but a lot of trouble convincing them to pull it downhill.

The Cherrelyn horse car became an early tourist attraction and sold a lot of postcards.