Lublin, Poland, still has some intact horse hitching rings. They are attached to the front of several buildings in downtown Lublin. These iron rings would have been used to tie up horses by people doing errands downtown. They probably started to fall out of use in the 1920s. I also […]

Some traces of the infrastructure for transporting and using coal still remain in Lviv. One such remnant is wagon tracks that carried coal through a building’s carriage entrance to the courtyard. In some courtyards there would have been elevators to lift the coal to upper levels. This was a much […]

It makes me very happy when new stores, bars, and restaurants use the old method of advertising what products they have for sale, that is, painting the name of their establishment and their products directly on the store’s facade. There are several examples of such places in Lviv. They are […]

This is a unique find for me. There are about 8 of these antique locks still attached to a building in Rzeszów, Poland. They were made by a company L. Russ in Drohobycz. The city of Drohobycz is presently in Ukraine, but both Drohobycz and Rzeszów were historically part of Galicia […]

I found a few antique Vienna- and Rzeszów-made roller shutters and locks in Rzeszów, a city in Galicia that is now in Poland. Alfred Woltär Wien Probably the same A. Woltär that made shutters, which can still be found in Vienna. Rzeszów-made locks and shutters

St Andrews, a historic town a few hours away from Edinburgh, has its share of boot scrapers – including some rather unique ones. Finding other uses for these cavities — a sign that boot scrapers are obsolete.

Starting in 1676, water from several springs near Edinburgh was piped into a reservoir at Castle Hill, from where it was conveyed to a total of 14 cisterns on High Street and the nearby area. In about 1820 these public wells went out of use with the introduction of additional […]

British police boxes (telephone kiosks or callboxes used by the police or by the public to contact the police) first appeared in Glasgow in the 1891. Edinburgh’s rectangular boxes were designed c. 1937 by an architect inspired by the city’s neoclassical architecture. At their peak, 86 police boxes were in […]

I expected to find more ghost signs in Scotland, but nevertheless I found some interesting ones in Edinburgh. I’m not sure about the dates of these – unlike in Ukraine, the language of the signage doesn’t help to date the sign. But by what is being advertized and font it seems like […]

Edinburgh is awash with boot scrapers, especially in the New Town (built between 1765 and 1850), where just about every building’s front door or front stairway is flanked by boot scrapers. The boot scrapers come in various designs. Some are attached to the railings of the balconies, but most are […]