At the bus station behind the Stacy Trent Hotel in 1937, Trenton, New Jersey

It's 1937,  we're in Trenton, New Jersey, and we're going to take the bus to Philadelphia and back. The fare will be one dollar round trip.

I found this image on the Duke University site, which has a lot of cool old images, and its exact location puzzled me. Information about the location of the Hotel Stacy Trent was easy to find, but it took a bit of staring at this photo to figure out that we're on Front Street, looking west, towards Willow. And like so many of the photos there on the Duke site, it's rich with detail, and it made me want to walk into it. Come on!


Personally, I've never been anywhere near Trenton, but I have ridden buses, and I do like to leave the driving to someone else! There are two reasons for this, I love to sight-see, and I've always owned unreliable cars. In this imaginary adventure I'm leaving the Rolls-K'Nardly in Trenton, because I'm afraid that while it might make it there, it probably wouldn't make it back. I'll take the bus!

Let's see, there's hourly service. What time is it? Thank you, I think we have some time to kill, I'll just lean against this wall, hold up the Hotel Hildebrecht. I wonder if we should eat before we leave?


According to the sign painted on the wall, there are two dining rooms at the Stacy Trent. Maybe we could go to the coffee shop? A cup of coffee and piece of pie sounds good. How much money do you have?

Luckily, we're time-travelers from the 21st Century, and whatever the prices are we can get whatever we want. I wonder if I can get a hamburger? I'd gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today!

Here's the bus, time to go to Philly! Thanks for riding along with me in 1937!




If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. Your support makes it happen! Thank you!

Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more