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]

I used to live in a suburb of Miami called Opa-Locka* which was similarly constructed in the 1920s after the success of Doug Fairbanks Sr. in his 1924 The Thief of Baghdad (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0015400/), with street names out of the 1001 Nights and a city hall equipped with minarets and domes.

Its population is now mostly black.


*(until my family was run out of town)

[nohwhere-man.livejournal.com]

Mmmm, not too bad... minus points for using fake thatch, the real stuff is soooo nice.

There's a small township (Glen Echo, MD) outside of Washington DC that started out as a Chautauqua Assembly, all of the streets in the township are named for colleges/universities. One of the builders' lived in the house in the upper corner (http://www.nps.gov/archive/glec/history/EdwardBaltzeyHouseinGEHeights1892-96ge013.jpg). All kinds of Turrety Goodness.

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

Bend, Oregon, is east of the Cascades and thus in the rain shadow of the mountains; therefore not lush and green except via irrigation. Not Shire-like at all (imho). So I find this rather amusing.

Bend, Oregon

[ladyjestocost.livejournal.com]

My sister-in-law lives in Eastern Oregon. Very conservative place, she says. I'm kind of surprised they're doing something like this there, except, of course, that it's in Bend, which is a sort of resort destination.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Hmmm.

Could give pastiche a bad name, this.

[kenazfiction.livejournal.com]

How odd! 94th between what and what? It reminds me a little of that odd little street/alley tucked away off 6th ave near the Jefferson Market library... from the street, there's just a little gate, but peep through and it's this hidden little world.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

You'll have to tell me that story some day!

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Yum!

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Heh!

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

It's in the middle of the block bounded by B'way/West End Ave., between 94/95th.

The place in the Village you're referring to is Patchin Place - many poets & writers have lived there, including e.e.cummings, Edna St Vincent Millay, and our own Charles Platt. Here it is, and more such:

http://www.forgotten-ny.com/Alleys/GREENWICH%20VILLAGE/green.html

[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.

I was just there!

[sararyan.livejournal.com]

And I took some pictures...