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 […]

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 […]