There was going to be a series of these posts. I was going to include all of my favorite pictures, and make some kind of personal claim on the places in them, and make some reference to the overcrowding and other vulgar changes brought about in them by our modern age, if I could not quite join in on the lamenting of them. Now of course the crowds are gone from all of these places, perhaps never to return in the numbers that had become common in recent years, which of course would be a positive development, other that it may further decrease the chance of my ever going to any of them again. The photos in this group are from the second volume of the Catholic history survey, which covers the Western story from 1600 to about 1960, so the sites are more modern. They loaded from my phone somewhat out of order, but that does not matter enough that I am going to bother fixing it.
The scene around the Arch of Triumph doesn't look that different from the old days, at least from the air, though the Elysian Fields I guess has been effectively Times Square for at least forty years now. It's still too iconic a site to leave out of the post.
Brilon, Westphalia, Germany
I admit that I don't know anything about this place, but the old scene at least reminds me of the kind of town in the Czech Republic that we would ride into on our bicycles and drink beer and eat soup and wiener schnitzel in. Which I loved.
Church of St Peter and St Paul, St. Petersburg
Everything looks so clean and restored nowadays. So many experts and culture lovers swarming over and caring for everything. I think I miss the days when everything was neglected and run down and I could imagine I, and a few other earnest and sexy but not especially enterprising people, were the only ones who really cared about all of this stuff.
The view from the other side still has some trees in the picture, but all of the ones I've been able to find aren't allowing me to steal them.
Such a big deal was made of the U.N. in all of my childhood reference books, and it seems so comparatively passe and not a big part of where the world is going now, that I have always kind of wanted to go visit it, especially while it is still an active organization. However I haven't gotten around to doing it yet.
I should note here that this was the very last photograph in the book, the most up-to-date representation of Western Civilization as it appeared in 1962.
Wall Street, 1929. Probably more crowded then than now.
I can remember walking past Wall Street but I don't think I have ever been on it. It is one place I definitely don't belong anyway, but at the time (I was still in my 20s) I'm sure I felt like I couldn't go there, that somehow I would be exposing myself to existential danger (my upbringing to that point had instilled in me an idea that Wall Street was one of the vortexes of evil in all the world to a would-be artist or serious thinker).
Osnabruck. Another one of these German places from the Thirty Years' War that I do not know that much about but would probably be interested in
That's the place. It is one of my weaknesses, and probably the major real cause of my dissatisfaction thus far with the whole coronavirus episode, that there is all this fun to be had out there in the world that I have largely missed out on, or that I am constantly being prevented from taking part in, in which European and big city traveling plays an outsized part, especially now that I am too old to go partying in places like Ibiza or Thailand or the more decadent Greek Islands. While it is true, as my wife would argue, that spending all your afternoons and evenings lounging around drinking beer even in the most picturesque setting would be a waste of your life, it is also true that some of the happier memories of my life involved doing just this. And as it's been over 20 years now since I have been able to indulge myself in this way I do have a hankering to do it again (as I have a hankering to see a real classic or good adult movie in an actual cinema, or even an auditorium again, which I haven't done in 20 years either).
In 1990, on my first trip abroad, I did go up in the Eiffel Tower like a typical chump, however I did manage to strike up a conversation with a couple of really beautiful Israeli girls on this occasion. They were in truth such a leap up in glamor from anyone who had ever talked to me on a friendly basis up to that time that I unfortunately was not quite ready to follow through with laying out some appealing post-Eiffel Tower plans that might interest them, as I didn't haven't any, though they did give me an opening to bring the subject up. At the time I thought, well, I was caught off-guard this time, but the next time I find myself chatting up such babes at one of these tourist attractions, I'll be prepared. Of course I never would find myself chatting up any such babes at any tourist attraction or anywhere else ever again.
How it really is.
How we imagine it (below)
League of Nations Building, Geneva. The idea of international organizations, provided they were Western-dominated, had a hold on the imagination of leaders and educated men in the decades following World War II, even when they were epic failures.
This building still exists, and looks about the same as it did in past days. The inside of it looks to have something of an old European grandeur that the present U.N. lacks (though I also have a certain weakness, entirely rooted in nostalgia, for 1950s American modernism).
Admittedly, this place was built to hold crowds, and attract even the dregs of humanity (to some extent). I love it there, and the whole area around it. A lot of excitement.
Red Square, long view.
I know I have no place to be a snob, but Red Square isn't quite the same now that people who shop at Whole Foods can go there (and come back again to their office park jobs a few days later).
Modern cameras, or perhaps modernity itself, seems to have diminished the effect that many of these monuments have in these old photos.
Maison Lafitte, France
French castles are not one of my particular areas of expertise.
May Day Parade, Red Square Again!
These epic events did end after 1991 (there is still a military parade on May 9 every year to commemorate the end of World War II), but there was an (apparently?) one-time revival in 2014 that drew 10,000 people.
This Catholic history textbook I got all these pictures from unabashedly hated the International Communist Party and all that they stood for and didn't skip any opportunity to excoriate them in print.
Palace of Versailles
I haven't actually been here. When the crowd is this big, we're all tourist scum, unless maybe you are really good-looking. I hope there is some time of year when it isn't like this.
St Martin's-in-the-Fields, London.
This is the church that is right off Trafalgar Square, across the street from the National Gallery, so I have seen it, but I haven't visited it. Due to its location and the fortune of its not having been bombed out during World War II (which fate befell a great many of the 17th and 18th century London churches recognizable to students of English literature) it is one of the most prominent 18th century buildings remaining in the city.
Belvedere Palace, Vienna.
I have been to a number of the secondary palaces of the Hapsburg family, including Franz Ferdinand's cottage at Konopiste in Bohemia, and Franz Joseph's hunting lodge in Bad Ischl, but I have never made it to Vienna. The treeless, relatively unadorned approach to the gigantic Viennese palaces (Schonbrunn presents similarly in photos) has always struck me as strange, but perhaps the effect is different in person.
I don't know how to end these kinds of posts, so I'm just going to say "This is the end."
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