Our cities’ and buildings’ physical spaces, urban and rural landscapes, hold secrets to how people used to live, hold traces of previous eras. Embodied in outdated signage, beautiful antique craftsman, and remnants of outdated infrastructures, these mementos of a bygone world serve as are our physical connections to the past.
At first I thought this was a ghost sign, but after looking closer at what it says and later finding that there really is a store with that name now, I understood it was not. It’s a store that sells gifts, souvenirs, and postcards. I really like the sign nevertheless.
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From 1795-1803 Lublin was part of New Galicia, a short-lived administrative region of the Austrian Habsburg Monarchy. In 1803 it was merged with the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, but retained some autonomy. In 1809 Austria lost this territory, and in 1815 it became part of Congress Poland. A sampling of Lublin’s […]
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
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.
