I highly recommend the short story Taming the Bicycle. It is Mark Twain’s humurous account of learning to ride the high-wheel bicycle, which is also called the ordinary or the penny-farthing. I decided to include it in my blog because it is about a type of bicycle that is now […]

In Chernivtsi I found manhole covers from Austrian (pre-WWI) and Romanian (interwar) times. I saw both German-language and Romanian-language ones. The Austrian-era ones use the German name for the city, Czernowitz. The ones made by Pittel & Brausewetter company include Wien (Vienna). This company was founded in 1870 in Bratislava […]

In the 1800s and early 1900s (and probably earlier), many of my ancestors lived in Brody, including some Polish and German ancestors. However, since Brody was severely destroyed during the wars of the last century and because many of my relatives were forced to flee, very few traces of their […]

Chernivtsi has quite a few boot scrapers. This last one is located right in front of a guard stone

In Chernivtsi I saw a few tiles with the inscription “Leon Schrenzel Czernowitz.”  Overall, I saw the name of only one company that manufactured tiles. Leon Schrenzel’s building materials company was founded in 1887 – a time when Chernivtsi would have been part of the Austrian Empire.

It’s very sad to see ghost signs defaced. Graffiti is just one of the many threats to these old signs. Recently I noticed that an interesting Polish-language sign in Lviv had been vandalized. Then shortly later, the West Ham tag was painted over with pink paint to better reveal the letters […]

In Krakow I found an old metal roller shutter made by a company from Lviv—Bielicki (several shutters by this company still remain in Lviv). In this instance, however, it seems as though the company was partnered with a company called Wietzen. And actually I recently found the same exact plate […]

Chernivtsi has quite a few Austrian- and Romanian-era metal roller shutters. Like in Lviv, some inscriptions include the company’s address (i.e., J. Engel Cernauţi Strada Wilson 7, which is Romanian for J. Engel Chernivtsi 7 Wilson Street). Lviv has this same Prague-made shutter

Something that I haven’t noticed in Lviv and Europe in general is iron fire escapes on the sides of buildings. I read that the reason such fire escapes are a rarity in Europe is because European cities have a long history of fire prevention and safety and were always ahead […]

I’ve come across three old hitching posts in two northern suburbs of Chicago, including in the village of Winnetka. I assume they have been in the same locations near the curbs since the time horses were still used as modes of transport here. I also assume there used to be […]