What time period would you live in, and where, if you had to for one year?

[V.C. Brunswick]

Shanghai any time between 1918 and 1939

[video=youtube;6g8yjzPD5cs]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6g8yjzPD5cs[/video]

 

[Shangas]

Hey Vic! Wait for me!!! *grabs steamer-trunks*

Okay, I'm ready. You can call the taxi now.

 

[CONELRAD]

I'd have to say 1945-1950, mostly from 1947 to 1949, more specifically 1947, and in a big city. Like GoldenEraFan said, practically everything was great looking, the music was the best, and the Great Depression and wartime rationing were over and the economy was booming. I prefer the era directly after WWII before tract houses took over.

 

[Amy Jeanne]

1929-1930, right in my hometown in South Jersey. My life would not be anything amazing and I'd be working in a factory like all the rest of my family did, but I'd be movie-mad and I'd be diligently following this new thing called "The Talkies." Clara Bow and William Haines would have been my favourites. I'd be anxiously awaiting their voices over Garbo's!

 

[Dixon Cannon]

Liverpool, England c.1960. I love that Mersey Sound and would be playing drums with the likes of the Searchers, the Pacemakers, the Mojos and the Mersey Beats!

-dixon 'scouser' cannon

 

[jamespowers]

Gee, why am I not surprised? And I can see you in a 1958 Buick, Tom, with a mountain of chrome on it...

A 58 Buick?! Nice!

Even the station wagons looked decent.

 

[Widebrim]

If I couldn't be out fighting in the heart of the labor movement, I wouldn't mind being right here. This was a bustling town in the late thirties -- almost a third more population than it is now, the center of commerce for the whole mid-coast region of the state, with three theatres, a fine downtown department store, four drug stores, half a dozen good restaurants, three big hotels, a dozen gas stations, a burgeoning local manufacturing industry, excellent housing, railroad connections to the whole east coast, and no smirking irony of any kind. By any standard by which I myself would judge such things, it was a better place to live in 1937 than it is now.

It would be fascinating to go to one's home town, mine being Glendale, a suburb of Los Angeles. When speaking of how "things were better" in the past, it's true that we have to be careful in romanticizing, but at the same time, there is often much truth to that adage. Despite the problems Los Angeles had in the past, there's no doubt that it was a safer, cleaner, more accessible city 70 years ago than it is now, with a vibrant downtown frequented by all classes/ethnicities, and loaded with department stores, restaurants, drug stores, and operating movie theaters. And let's not forget the Bunker Hill district of L.A., then still in its decaying glory, an area featured in more Films Noirs than probably any other neighborhood in the country.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

It would be fascinating to go to one's home town, mine being Glendale, a suburb of Los Angeles. When speaking of how "things were better" in the past, it's true that we have to be careful in romanticizing, but at the same time, there is often much truth to that adage. Despite the problems Los Angeles had in the past, there's no doubt that it was a safer, cleaner, more accessible city 70 years ago than it is now, with a vibrant downtown frequented by all classes/ethnicities, and loaded with department stores, restaurants, drug stores, and operating movie theaters. And let's not forget the Bunker Hill district of L.A., then still in its decaying glory, an area featured in more Films Noirs than probably any other neighborhood in the country.

In The High Window Raymond Chandler paints a very vivid picture of Bunker Hill with this description:

"Bunker Hill is old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town. Once, very long ago, it was the choice residential district of the city, and there are still standing a few of the jigsaw Gothic mansions with wide porches and walls covered with round-end shingles and full corner bay windows with spindle turrets. They are all rooming houses now, their parquetry floors are scratched and worn through the once glossy finish and the wide sweeping staircases are dark with time and with cheap varnish laid on over generations of dirt. In the tall rooms haggard landladies bicker with shifty tenants. On the wide cool front porches, reaching their cracked shoes into the sun, and staring at nothing, sit the old men with faces like lost battles.

In and around the old houses there are flyblown restaurants and Italian fruit stands and cheap apartment houses and little candy stores where you can buy even nastier things than their candy. And there are ratty hotels where nobody except people named Smith and Jones sign the register and where the night clerk is half watchdog and half pander.

Out of the apartment houses come women who should be young but have faces like stale beer; men with pulled-down hats and quick eyes that look the street over behind the cupped hand that shields the match flame; worn intellectuals with cigarette coughs and no money in the bank; fly cops with granite faces and unwavering eyes; cokies and coke peddlers; people who look like nothing in particular and know it, and once in a while even men that actually go to work. But they come out early, when the wide cracked sidewalks are empty and still have dew on them"

 

[Widebrim]

^^Great quote, V.C. One of the reasons I love Chandler's work so much...If you want to see a glimpse of what Bunker Hill looked like, architecturally-wise, check out Court Street just outside of downtown.

 

[LocktownDog]

The turn of the century I suppose, if we have to adhere to the dates in the poll. But honestly ... I've always felt like I was born in 1769, rather than 1969.

 

[jamespowers]

I'd have to say 1945-1950, mostly from 1947 to 1949, more specifically 1947, and in a big city. Like GoldenEraFan said, practically everything was great looking, the music was the best, and the Great Depression and wartime rationing were over and the economy was booming. I prefer the era directly after WWII before tract houses took over.

Tract homes were built here during the war for the burgeoning war workforce that came here to work in the shipyards etc. They are still around today and I have lived in two of them. Not exactly a tract home of the post war period though.
I would probably choose the same time period you did. There was a lot to be done and a lot to get going again. I could stay right where I am and bask in a time when the city I live in was nearly crime free and clean with a small town atmosphere. I would love it.

 

[Widebrim]

I could stay right where I am and bask in a time when the city I live in was nearly crime free and clean with a small town atmosphere. I would love it.

You mean no hippies...

 

[jamespowers]

You mean no hippies...

NOW you have soemthing there! San Franfreako even still had a veneer of respectability too. I might even go over there to look around and see how far it has fallen in 60 years or so. Alcatraz was still open. That has got to say something.

 

[GoldenEraFan]

Apparently time travel has been possible for over 40 years.
http://www.unsolvedrealm.com/2011/0...gram-montauk-and-the-philadelphia-experiment/

 

[Widebrim]

^^Okay...Where was I when they were "looking" for volunteers?

 

[jamespowers]

Apparently time travel has been possible for over 40 years.
http://www.unsolvedrealm.com/2011/0...gram-montauk-and-the-philadelphia-experiment/

Ok, I'll cop to it. I have been through all time periods and have pictures of me with every famous person throughout history. I stood by as the Magna Carta was signed with a sword ready to end the King. I walked the decks of the Titanic for days before she sank (I even took some momentos). John Jay, Thomas Jefferson and I published the Federalist Papers. Don't tell them I wrote a few articles for the Anti-Federalists too. I watched John Hancock sing the Declaration of Independence and I cannot repeat what he said about the King. Lincoln and I built a log cabin. I have pictures. He really hated the nickname Monkey. lol lol lol Churchill and I smoked cigars and had drinks together as we talked about the War. I told Stalin he was a moron and that Hitler was going to stab him in the back. He later thanked me. JFK and I had some wild times. No one could party like him.......

 

[LizzieMaine]

I also have a confession.

[/IMG]

In the fall of 1940 I attended a League of Women Voters meeting -- that's me in the front row, as seen in a photo published in Life magazine -- and while driving home from that meeting encountered a mysterious fog. When the fog lifted, it was 2005. Shortly after, I joined the Lounge, hoping someone could show me how to get home. This new evidence proves it's possible, and I shall immediately begin agitating for full disclosure of the truth.

 

[jamespowers]

I also have a confession.

[/IMG]

In the fall of 1940 I attended a League of Women Voters meeting -- that's me in the front row, as seen in a photo published in Life magazine -- and while driving home from that meeting encountered a mysterious fog. When the fog lifted, it was 2005. Shortly after, I joined the Lounge, hoping someone could show me how to get home. This new evidence proves it's possible, and I shall immediately begin agitating for full disclosure of the truth.

Darn! That stunk.

 

[GoldenEraFan]

^^Okay...Where was I when they were "looking" for volunteers?

Andrew Basiago explains in this 2009 radio interview.
[video=youtube;yxDmOJ3sePA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxDmOJ3sePA[/video]

 

[Widebrim]

Bump.