Shire: Place of Enchantment

[ellenkushner]

Guy Kay just sent me this link, that devil! If anyone was thinking of buying me a lovely vacation home in Oregon, I think the Swordsmen Cottage would be appropriate, don't you?

--Actually, it's weird that they're doing this, because I keep walking past a little housing complex on W. 95-94th St. called Pomander Walk, which has a very similar history: Built ca. 1920, it was copied from the stage set of a hit play, ''Pomander Walk'' -- a romantic comedy set on a small street in Georgian London - and I've been wondering when someone was going to try something like that, and what the modern-day equivalent would be . . . !

Plus ca change . . . .

Comments

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

Short version:

My momma was a widow woman with four kids (teenagers or nearly) to feed, so was usually at work (waitress or retail clerk). We kids would have our friends over all the time; and momma (a good Christian) was not above giving temporary shelter to an occasional runaway/streetkid in desperate straits. The city of Opa-Locka, in those days, was lower-middle-class Anglo white, trying frantically to keep from "turning over" to black & Cuban; and some of our friends were the wrong color, or too lower-class, for the fine upstanding burghers of Opa-Locka. When you wake up one morning to a cop with his gun at your nose because the police claim to have received anonymous reports of drug deals and/or pre-teen sex in the back yard, you kinda get the message after a while. We fled to our native West Tennessee, and never returned.