Digging for Treasure (and Love) in New York City

Their’s is a love of strange and beautiful proportion. The kind measured in porcelain, peanut-sized dolls, and antiqued oysters as big as your face. “It’s hard to imagine a time when we’d stop digging,” says Belle, back-lit by a wall of technicolour glass bottles, “I mean it’s addictive. And when you have someone who gets…

How to Make an American Anti-Hero

They crusaded with horns sprouting from their heads, and rifles slung across their backs. Legend has it they decreed the virtues of the Holy Bible in one hand, and a torch in the other. They were known as the “Bald Knobbers,” and for a period of time in the lawless Ozark Mountains of a post-Civil…

Jesus and Kitsch: The Rise of the American Megachurch

They called him Big Butter Jesus – Sweet Cream Jesus. Sometimes, Touchdown Jesus. The nicknames for the massive statue outside Monroe, Ohio’s Solid Rock Church may have varied between dairy and football allusions, but its purpose was unflinching: bring in the people. With his arms outstretched to the heavens, conveniently off Ohio’s Interstate 75, the…

Wild Card Destination du Jour: Southern Indiana’s Failed Utopia

What put Southern Indiana on our radar? Mysterious utopian experiments and end-of-the-world 19th century religious cults of course! The beautiful historic town called New Harmony was once home to a esoteric doomsday group of German pioneers called the Harmonists, who had a taste for quirky architecture and kooky modern ideas like equal rights and free…

New York’s Real-Life Handmaid’s Tale

Revivalist sects, polyamorous communes and radical experiments in communal living – America was rife with it all in the mid 19th century – but not exactly where you might expect. Forget the Bible Belt. In western New York state, so many religious revival groups seemed to be popping up in and setting it afire with…

Greetings, from North America’s Uranium Ghost Towns

North America has its own Chernobyl(s). There are gold rush ghost towns, and then there are uranium ghosting towns; settlements which grew out of the “uranium fever” of the first part of the 20th century and testaments to an era when fear of nuclear war led to an unprecedented rush for a previously low-value mineral. But…

The Enchanted Cities Hiding Inside Theatres

For some lucky theatregoers, a trip to see the latest B-Movie at their local picture house also means a trip across space and time. It’s all thanks to the atmospheric movie palaces and theatres of the early 20th century, whose construction brought veritable mini-cities, from old Spanish streets to lost temples of Ancient Egypt, into…

Meet the President’s Daughter, a “Wild Animal That Had Been Put Into Good Clothes”

In a world rife with lifestyle influencers and “content houses,” where building one’s own notoriety is big business, it’s tempting to dismiss being famous for being famous as the most banal and basic kind of renown. But there was a time, with a burgeoning American press beginning to define itself and a brash and pithy…

The Vault

Found Photographs of Perfect American Road Trips, Fifty Years Too Late

Trailer parks just don’t look like this anymore! What I wouldn’t give to go back 50 years and re-do the American road trip just like I picture it in my mid-century kodachrome dreams. Today I found a fabulous Flickr account full of old slides and photographs found at estate sales and garage sales by a nostalgic…

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The Bittersweet Story of the World’s First Motel

It’s as American as Apple Pie in all its neon-lit glory, evoking our collective cultural memory of 1950s road-tripping, film noir fugitive hideouts and the golden age of kitsch. The motel is as much a part of the American open road as the gas station and the roadside diner, an indispensable amenity to the roving motorist; the…