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Category / Lost & Found

Ode to the Lost Blue Train, an Iconic NYC Rooftop Restaurant

Bloomingdale’s flagship store on 59th street is one of Manhattan’s most iconic destinations for glitzy shopping. It was also, until a year ago, home to one of the city’s more peculiar, yet glamorous restaurants. Semi-hidden on the roof, and hardly known to the thousands of daily visitors to the department store, was an opulent train…

Discovering the Real African Queen

Key Largo! For lovers of all things nostalgic, the name of this small, charming island off the coast of Florida, brings to mind hard-boiled, 1940s film noir……Bogart and Bacall. Whilst on a recent trip exploring the Keys, your stateside correspondent came across something quite remarkable – and entirely suited to the golden age of Hollywood.…

The Last House of Fans, Paris

There was once a secret language used by women for centuries to communicate unspoken sentiments across the room. It was the code of duchesses and ladies-in-waiting; women who made bi-weekly trips to the opera armed with an exquisite accessory that with a simple flick of her wrist, could declare her true feelings for a gentleman sat across…

Where America’s Lost Luggage Ends Up

Every traveler has experienced it at some point: that sinking feeling of watching all the other suitcases reunited with their weary owners at baggage claim but not seeing your own slide down the conveyor belt. While you stand there forlornly, wondering where your luggage has gone without you (and how many pairs of underwear you…

A Strange Abandoned Hiking Lodge No One Knew was Designed by Gaudi Himself

The world’s greatest artists aren’t supposed to have their work overlooked or unattributed, but it happens more than you might think. In museums, private collections, and public spaces, there is a myriad of artworks that remain unidentified. It took years for a total of nine Van Gogh ‘fakes’ painted during the last four years of…

Let’s Raise a Glass to America’s Black Wall Street

Something else they forgot to tell us about in history class: Black Wall Street. Why is it that our textbooks neglected to tell us about the African Americans who opened their own banks, did business with the Rockefellers and prospered as entrepreneurs decades before the Civil Rights Movement? Yes indeed, long before desegregation, America had…

The Rare Jewels Salvaged from America’s Old Auto Factories

What’s more finite and limited than diamonds? Surely not something found on the skids of an old car factory? Well get this: in the 1940s, the American automobile industry started painting cars with a hand-spraying technique that would accumulate overspray, which would build up and be baked repeatedly in ovens to cure the paint on…

Berlin’s Curious 1920s Polar Bear Craze

Once upon a meme, Germany had its own precursor to the internet’s LOLcat – in the form of a life-sized fake polar bear. As the story goes, some time in the early 1920s, two (actual) polar bears arrived at the Berlin Zoo and became the talk of the town. Families came from all over the…

Found Snapshots of a Secret 1960s Drag Resort in the Catskills

If you were to journey to Jewett, NY today, you would find yet another semi-abandoned white hamlet, deep in the hillside, ramshackle and in need of a facelift. Nothing out of the ordinary to the naked eye, but delve further into this particular dwelling’s history and you’ll discover that it was here, almost 60 years…

These Fabulous Vintage Japanese Slot Machines are a Collector’s Dream

I‘ve just recently discovered the world of vintage Pachinko machines and my new interest is dangerously close to turning into something “I absolutely have to start collecting right now”. For those that, like me just a few days ago, had never heard of “pachinko” before, prepare to be dazzled by a far more fabulous, Japanese version of the…

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