If you could spend one day/night in the Roaring 20's/Golden Era what would you do?

[Sarge]

I'd go back to Detroit during its heyday in the late 20's earlyu 30's. Catch a Tigers game, hear live big band music at the Graystone, and stay the night at the Book-Cadillac Hotel. That would be a real treat!

As far as Detroit goes I'd love to have seen The Michigan Theater back in its heyday. I have seen it several times in its modern, gutted, parking garage state which still somehow has an eerie beauty to it. I can only imagine how grand that place must have been back in the 20's and 30's.

The Michigan Theater
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ-dw5izGVQ

Also, it is really great that Westin managed save the old Book-Cadillac. After $200-million in renovations she is really a sight to see.:eusa_clap

 

[chanteuseCarey]

It would be the ultimate Mommy and Daddy get away overnighter! I'd want to take the hubby along and leave the children with a babysitter!

I'd want us to live like happily rich and very married Nick and Nora for a day, complete with our own Asta! We'd have two sets of amazing vintage luggage, a valet for Chuck and a ladies maid to help me. Both of us would wear vintage real 30s clothes, hats, shoes and accessories to die for!

We'd stay in 30s Art Deco luxurious hotel suite. Wake up (late) and order a nice breakfast with champagne from room service. Take a long bubble bath, have my maid help me dress, then DH and I would head out to do some shopping at the best furrier in NYC or Chicago. We'd drive a fabulous vintage car! Stop by to visit friends on Long Island, swim in their black painted deco swimming pool. Have a little lunch on the terrace overlooking the expansive well kept garden, take a little nap on soft, well broken-in pure linen sheets at their estate.

I'd order my clothes (and hats) for the next two seasons in Paris. We'd spend part of the afternoon tea dancing in London, and then order the latest in 30s men's clothing for my husband from Saville Row. See a Gershwin play on Broadway. Late dinner out and dancing in glorious evening clothes at the Avalon Ballroom on Catalina Island. Back to the hotel to get a good night's sleep and then fly home again to the present in the morning.

Kiss our dear children when I got home. Reenter 2009 renewed and refreshed, bringing the luggage and clothes home with us! We'd have the vintage car shipped here to us in SJ.

I'd make certain to take lots of photographs with a vintage camera and post them here to share when we returned!

 

[TimNRA757]

Have a cigar at a lounge while enjoying the music from the era .

 

[HadleyH]

Have a cigar at a lounge while enjoying the music from the era .

You can do that now! Who is stopping you?

 

[Diamondback]

One more thing: "sanitize" Grandpa's medical records to eliminate all evidence of the long-healed shoulder injury that kept him out of flight-school.

If I'm back for a month or more: stalk the battlefields of the Western Front outside any official chain-of-command, with the sole objective of providing overwatch on my great-uncle's scout platoon. (If necessary, revealing my presence and taking point myself. OTOH, the "see ya in... about 35 years" thing could be awkward...)

 

[Fletch]

New York, 1932

Eat at the Automat, of course.

Maybe Lüchow's, if I'm feeling particularly spendy.

Bum a ride out to Curtiss Airport, North Beach, L.I. (today considered Queens), and take a tour of the great Do X in drydock, waiting for her engines to be overhauled.

Purchase a Jenkins Radiovisor, on the easy payment plan, down on Cortlandt St.

Deliver it to the lobby of Lizzie's hotel, where I would ask for the loan of her all-wave superhet. Amidst bemused onlookers, aided by a bellboy, I would hook up the apparatus and give a demonstration, trolling the dial for the several experiment stations then sending pictures over the metropolis.

Later that night...Roseland!

 

[ThesFlishThngs]

All of the above, plus Coney Island.

 

[Grant Fan]

I would go to a USO dance with my sailor probably. Or a great swing type club. I think that would be fabulous

 

[Carlisle Blues]

I would be traveling to the Cotton Club

The Duke Ellington Band at the Cotton Club, New York City, c. 1929.

After taking a ride on an Hansom Cab through Central Park.

After lunch at the 21 Club, of course!

 

[Drew B]

it appears wealth is not an issue in our time travelling escapades

I'd really just see as much as i could and try to smuggle what I could home.

Cheers,
Drew.

 

[Carlisle Blues]

it appears wealth is not an issue in our time travelling escapades

I'd really just see as much as i could and try to smuggle what I could home.

Cheers,
Drew.

You've got to love New York. There is much to see and do with a small budget.

 

[Diamondback]

And, as previously noted, sufficient knowledge of things to come and how to use that knowledge could make one very wealthy indeed...

 

[Drew B]

You've got to love New York. There is much to see and do with a small budget.

I'm moving to New York!

Cheers,
Drew.

 

[BinkieBaumont]

"I have been stalking this building since 1984, when you could buy an Apartment for 200K it was an old Hotel that Trump "Sympathetically" redeveloped"

an image from the sumptuous brochure I was sent here in the swan river colony, although it does look like an Architects "Mock Up"

When I Purchase a scanning machine, will post floor plans of the penthouse, (wrap around terrace!!!!!)

 

[Carlisle Blues]

You can do that now! Who is stopping you?

The only time a person is stopped is when they stop themselves!!!!

Life is to be lived to the fullest!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Edward]

There are a bnuch of things I'd like to do, I think. As most, it would definitely involve some element of shopping trip... when it comes to places, though, hmmnn...

I'd like to see Berlin in 1931, before the Nazis took over.... I'd be tempted to drop into the Kit Kat Club, but I think I'd be better giving it a miss - I'd hate to be confronted with the reality that it was just a nasty sex-club dive, as it is now (and I believe always was). Much better to keep my illusions of Sally and Clifford, Bobby and the MC.... lol

I'd love to see London in those days, and of course a trip to Saville Row would be an essential - Saville Row, and Jermyn Street for some off the peg accoutrements, shoes and shirts too.

Belfast would be a really interesting place to see then as well, the city at probably the height of its shipbuilding years in the 30s and early 40s. See what it really was like politically in those days, back when partition was still a very new thing.

Looking back earlier, I'd also love to see Dublin during 1916 - 1923, bang on my specialist period of Irish history. The Easter Rising, the Tans, the War of Independence, the Treaty negotiations and the Civil War.... I'd love to have the chance to meet people like Michael Collins and deValera, Paddy Pearse too - see what they were really like as human beings as opposed to the historical myths and legends they have become.

Were I to interfere with history, the one single event I would be tempted to prevent would be the UVF gunrunning in March 1914, the one evnt which, I think it fair to say, brought the gun into Irish politics (where it stayed for the guts of a century) on a scale hitherto never seen. The Nationalist organisations, inspired by this, staged their own arms acquisitions, and on it went....

Of course, that might be a counterproductive move - it is a sad fact that every major advance in Irish history has been in response to the use, or at least the threat of violence. Where would be be without it? I'm also unsure as to how that event ould have been stopped anyhow, given the degree of collusion on the part of the local RIC. [huh]

I would attend one of Adolf Hitlers first meeting in a bierhalle in Munich.
And kill him.

Wasn't there a film years ago where somebody did that? If i remember rightly, it opened up all sorts of intersting plotlines, mainly to the effect that negative unforeseen consequences always happened, no matter what they tried to do. I think ,among other things, they depicted the holocaust, or something of that nature, still happening - obviously grounded in the fact that Hitler fed off a pre-existing anti-semitism that was rife in Europe at the time (even Churchill was a touch anti-Semitic, I gather!), as opposed to creating the idea of the Jewish people as a scapegoat for social ills. Interesting concept.

You can do that now. (oh wait, Mike in Seattle already responded to this.) I would smuggle back a Sports Almanac a la Marty McFly in Back to the Future. Also I would have liked to have met and hung out with Langston Hughes.

Doesn't that only work if it's from the future, not the past? I think they key would be to go forward first and do that, then use it to fund the trip backwards....

 

[Gingerella72]

It would be a toss up for me between stalking Ginger Rogers and trying to wrangle a way to meet her, and attending the 1939 Atlanta premiere of Gone With The Wind....