"...was one of a row on a quiet street, handsome relics from around 1910."
-Poul Anderson, "Star of the Sea" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 467-640 AT 2, p. 481.
It is fitting that, in 1986, a time traveller should live in a "relic" of a building dating from 1910. To the rest of us, 1910 is decades ago - more now - whereas a time traveller could, if she wanted, visit that building then. Even "1910" acquires a completely new meaning. We read about time travel without fully apprehending its implications. Jack Finney was one writer of time travel fiction who did try to convey what it would feel like to be somewhere - New York - in a past decade. (Finney was entirely focused on the past, indeed specifically on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, never on the future.) Poul Anderson writes like Finney when the reality of time travel hits Manse Everard in London in 1894 in "Time Patrol."
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I think that's the Flatiron Building in the second picture, which I've long thought a most curious and interesting looking structure.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Indeed. There is a graphic novel series in which a clandestine CIA group meets in that building.
Paul.
The Flatiron Building looks as tho a strong wind should knock it down.
Ad astra! Sean
There are a couple of buildings in Calgary with a similar shape to the flatiron building. Riverfront Ave is at an angle to the NS EW grid of downtown streets leaving a triangular lot.
If built in 1910, most Western, urban houses had running water and flush toilets and electrical wiring.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
My house was built in the 1880's, meaning such amenities had to be installed later.
Ad astra! Sean
Ah, the tail-end of the chamber pot era, so to speak...
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Ha, almost certainly! Well, there might have been piped running water to the house by the late 1880's. I also recall how, in my boyhood, some of the ceilings still had remnants of fittings for gas lighting. And the antiquated wood paneled bathroom (complete with a claw footed bathtub) was only modernized in 1966. Even that was long ago!
Ad astra! Sean
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